From 24 December 2024, when the Pope inaugurated the Holy Year, to 07 January 2025, the Vatican said, 545,532 people from around the world have made the journey along the lengthy boulevard leading to St Peter’s Square and crossed through the basilica’s Holy Door.

The celebration of a Holy Year every 25 years is an acknowledgment that “the Christian life is a journey calling for moments of greater intensity to encourage and sustain hope as the constant companion that guides our steps toward the goal of our encounter with the Lord Jesus.”

The celebration of a Holy Year every 25 years is an acknowledgment that “the Christian life is a journey calling for moments of greater intensity to encourage and sustain hope as the constant companion that guides our steps toward the goal of our encounter with the Lord Jesus.”

“Those who destroy people, who make wars, what will their faces look like when they come before the Lord? ‘Why did you make that war? Why did you kill?’” God will ask, ” the Holy Father said on 24 November, the feast of Christ the King.

The Holy Father will canonise Blessed Acutis on 27 April, during the Jubilee for Adolescents in Rome to be held from 25 to 27 April and Blessed Frassati during the Jubilee of Young People in Rome to be held from 28 July to 3 August.

Reflecting on her term, Ms Porro described her role in the Eternal City as a “great privilege,” highlighting her efforts to address critical global issues such as climate change, women’s empowerment, and equality.

In his homily, the Holy Father called on the church not to remain in a state of “blindness” to the issues in the church and the world, a blindness that can take the form of embracing worldliness, placing a premium on comfort or having a closed heart.

Christian prayer is not a person at one end of the telephone, speaking to God on the other; no, it is God who prays in us! We pray to God through God,” Pope Francis has said.

In his latest encyclical Dilexit Nos (He Loved Us) the Holy Father emphasised how only a deep and abiding love in the Lord can inspire and fuel Catholics to share the Gospel and God’s love with the world.

Members voted on each of the 155 paragraphs of the document, which made suggestions and requests to Pope Francis that included long-term projects, such as the hope that more lay people would be involved in the selection of bishops.