FROM SARAJEVO TO RIO DE JANEIRO: A GREAT JUBILEE ITINERARY

Sergio Sebastiani

The visit to Rio de Janeiro for the world meeting with families has perhaps ended the most intense and important year in the long and extraordinary geography of the Holy Father's pilgrimages in every part of the world. Sarajevo, Beirut, the Czech Republic, Poland, Paris, Bologna: the Pope's steps lead to the centre of every great event that occurs not only in the Church's history of the millennium that is ending.

In these days the Holy Father has just begun the twentieth year of his pontificate. And before such a happy and auspicious occasion it is almost difficult to speak of such an intense sequence of places and emotions in the past tense, since the images and emotions of what seems more and more a single, uninterrupted pilgrimage towards the Holy Door of the Year 2000 are still vivid in our minds and hearts. And in the background of the Great Jubilee this journey - which continues to enchant crowds and amaze hearts - makes the horizon of the new millennium increasingly clearer, thus offering a dynamic dimension also to what is behind us. In a word, our gaze is directed to the future.

Courage, optimism, hope and trust in humanity and in the resources of every individual come from the very footprints on this path which, two thousand years ago, experienced a new beginning through the ineffable mystery of the Incarnation of Christ. In his missionary anxiety John Paul II travels again emblematically and brings together times and places of a history of faith which now leads the People of God to share with the whole of humanity the experience of the transition to a millennium.

Peaceful coexistence among peoples, the active and life-giving memory of the beginnings, the powerful resource of young people's hope, the centrality of the Eucharist, the family's vital role in the Church and in an ever more confused society: through geographical places, from Sarajevo to Rio de Janeiro, these were the great themes which humanity saw reproposed prominently by the force of the witness of a Pope who continues to give himself incessantly for the cause of Christ. In preparation for the Jubilee of the Year 2000, John Paul II has suggested that «the Church should become more fully conscious of the sinfulness of her children, recalling all those times in history when they departed from the spirit of Christ and his Gospel» (TMA 33).

Up to now, there has been no lack of signs and initiatives that bear concrete witness that there is a sincere desire to examine ways of behaviour held in the past, also by men of the Church. It is an attitude which is demanded by the nature and the very essence of the Jubilee. In this sense the interecclesial Symposium on The Roots of Anti-Judaism in the Christian Milieu is an occasion for more intense and mature reflection. The great value of a pilgrimage also plays a significant part in this event. It was the shortest of all, from St Peter's to the Synagogue in Rome, but certainly the longest and most extraordinary of every other journey, if seen through the distances imposed by history.

Tertium Millennium devotes a long dossier to the Symposium, to be held on 30 October and 1 November, with the intervention of scholars and experts, some of whom will be among the protagonists of this same symposium. Above all the dossier intends to offer a sure informative basis and to show in the right light an interecclesial event which, as such, must be considered as an act of common reflection capable of studying in-depth the complex elements of a delicate issue. The very fact that we have become aware of this need helps to bring us into the right atmosphere and attitude so that we may live the Great Jubilee of the Year 2000 to the full.