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News of the opening of the Holy Door of the Great Jubilee

“In the stupor of the holy night”

Guido Bossa

A simple gesture, a daily one, like the one of opening a door. Four simple words, pronounced in Latin with a strong voice and an intense expression. “Aperite mihi portas justitiae”. Everything as planned, everything as imagined; and yet those words and that gesture truly mark, beyond any rhetoric, the passing of an era. A gesture and words with respect to which one will be able to say that there was a before and an after; a gesture and four words which summarise the expectations of an amazed humanity, nearly entranced, as the Pope just said, “in the stupor of the Holy Night”.

In just a few minutes, at 11.25 p.m. on Christmas Eve, the solemn liturgy of the opening of the Holy Door – gestures and words experimented for centuries and significantly renewed on occasion of the Great Jubilee of the Year 2000, accompanied us towards the aurora of a day of salvation, in which, according to the words of the Monition read by the Holy Father at the beginning of the celebration in the atrium of the Vatican Basilica, “hope blossoms again, the swords are shaped in ploughshares, the spears in sickles; weak hands are strengthened and vacillating knees made stable”. An entire people, renewed by redemption, advance towards the new millennium anchored to the Word that saves. Eight thousand people filled Saint Peter’s Basilica, which remained immersed in the darkness of the night until the moment in which the Holy Father opened the Holy Door. A warm applause greeted the light suddenly lit when the figure of the Pope, wrapped in a multi-colour cope and accompanied by two masters of ceremonies, was projected on the open door, stopping for some seconds, his look fixed in front, an absorbed expression on his face. Grasping his pastoral as if he feared vacillating; and yet firm and steadfast in his decision to continue to the much-desired goal. An apparently weak figure, but at the same time a strong guide for the Church, which has finally reached the historic passage of an era, thus realising the prophesy of Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski who on 16 October 1978, at the end of the Conclave, had said to him: “If God chose you, it’s to lead the Church into the third millennium”. Outside, in the cold of the Roman night, forty thousand people sitting at the foot of the parvis and thousands more standing around the nativity scene set up in Saint Peter’s Square, applauded with strength, nearly suffocating the festive sound of the bells. More than one billion people in the world were watching the ceremony via the link-ups with 58 television stations, including, for the first time, Cuban television. The waving of flags in the square returned a vivid image of the universality of the Church; the costumes, the colours and the languages of the faithful gathered in the square allowed picking up on an important aspect for the future, in which, decentralisation, multi-culture and geographic dislocation will naturally conjugate with the tension towards Rome, in a concentric movement of which the pilgrimage to the tombs of the Apostles, which remains at the centre of the Jubilee year, is the symbol and realization. Even the liturgy of the Holy Year, opportunely renewed and enriched by significant symbols, has made evident the universality of salvation of the mission of the Church which in Rome and throughout the world celebrates the Jubilee. The notes of the “Koto”, a sort of horizontal Japanese harp played by two performers, and the sound of three African horns, accompanied the opening of the holy door; which was then adorned with flowers and scented with oriental essences by men and women from Asia and Oceania, who wore their respective traditional costumes. During the celebration, the most exotic languages accompanied Latin, Greek Italian and traditional European languages: Filipino, Swahili, Samoan and Quechua, in addition to Russian and French, for the prayer of the faithful, which covered the themes of the respective post-synod documents. The children, from Burkina Faso, India, the Philippines, Colombia, Poland, Japan and Korea, who presented the offers to the Holy Father, were received with a smile, a blessing and a sign of the cross on the forehead. Pope John Paul II concelebrated the holy Mass with 38 Cardinals, including Secretary of State Cardinal Angelo Sodano and the President of the Central Committee for the Great Jubilee of 2000 Roger Etchegaray. Among the bishops, in choral vestments, who took part in the opening ceremony of the Holy Door in the atrium of the Basilica, there was also Monsignor Crescenzio Sepe. Secretary General of the Great Jubilee. And then civil authorities, the Italian President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi with his wife, the diplomatic corps, three hundred guests; but, above all, in Saint Peter’s and in the square, a significant representation of the whole of humanity, which had come to celebrate the centrality of Christ, Word of the living God, in the history of the world; and desirous to cross, through the Holy Door, from sin to grace. And the Holy Father, who began the Jubilee with the cry: “Open, rather open wide the doors to Christ”, repeated the “joyous announcement” of the Church to the whole of humanity. “Here is the truth that in this night the Church wants to transmit to the third millennium. And you all, who will come after us, welcome this truth, which totally changed history. From the night of Bethlehem, humanity is aware that God became Man: he became Man to make man aware of his divine nature”.

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