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Vatican Launches Global Contest to Design 2025 Jubilee Year Logo

Pope Francis before the Holy Door of St. Peter's Basilica during the convocation of the Jubilee of Mercy, April 11, 2015
Hannah Brockhaus

By Hannah Brockhaus

Vatican City, 22 February, 2022 / 4:00 pm (ACI Africa).

The Vatican is holding a worldwide competition to choose the official logo for the Catholic Church’s 2025 Jubilee Year.

A Jubilee is a special Holy Year of grace and pilgrimage in the Catholic Church, which typically takes place every 25 years.

As preparations for the Jubilee year get underway in Rome, the Vatican’s evangelization office has opened up a contest to decide the year’s official logo.

The competition was announced on Feb. 22, and submissions can be uploaded to the website from April 1 to May 20.

Both teams and individuals can enter, and the winning submission will be chosen by a panel of judges from the Pontifical Council for the Promoting the New Evangelization.

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The motto for the 2025 Jubilee, approved by Pope Francis, is “Pilgrims of Hope.”

“The logo must portray the essence of the Jubilee event, with particular attention given to the motto,” according to the submission guidelines.

The 2025 Jubilee will be the Church’s first ordinary jubilee since St. John Paul II led the Great Jubilee of 2000. The Jubilee of Mercy opened by Pope Francis in 2015 was an extraordinary jubilee.

Other required features for the Holy Year’s official logo are that it be original and unpublished, distinctive, adaptable to printing on different materials, and usable in both color and black and white.

The logo should also include the Latin phrases “Iubilaeum A.D. MMXXV,” which means “Jubilee 2025,” and “Peregrinantes in spem,” which means “Pilgrims of Hope.”

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The Vatican’s evangelization office said that the competition was “open to all” and “anyone can participate, subject to acceptance of the rules and regulations.”

The pontifical council recalled that the winner of the logo contest for the Holy Year of 2000 was a 22-year-old woman studying at an art institute.

Her entry “has become part of history,” it said.

“The Jubilee’s logo symbolically conveys a message in an immediate and fitting way, and is an expression both of the universality of the Church’s message and of the particular spiritual needs of our contemporaries, who find comfort in this message, inspired by the theme of hope,” the evangelization council said.

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In a letter published earlier this month, Pope Francis called for a “great symphony of prayer” ahead of the Jubilee Year in 2025.

The pope made the appeal in a Feb. 11 letter to Archbishop Rino Fisichella, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting the New Evangelization.

“As is customary, the Bull of Indiction, to be issued in due course, will contain the necessary guidelines for celebrating the Jubilee of 2025,” he wrote.

“In this time of preparation, I would greatly desire that we devote 2024, the year preceding the Jubilee event, to a great ‘symphony’ of prayer.”

Jubilees have biblical roots, with the Hebrew Bible describing how jubilee years were held every 50 years for the freeing of slaves and forgiveness of debts as manifestations of God’s mercy.

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The practice was re-established in 1300 by Boniface VIII. Pilgrims to Rome were granted a plenary indulgence. Between 1300 and 2000, 29 jubilee years were held in Rome.

Hannah Brockhaus

Hannah Brockhaus is Catholic News Agency's senior Rome correspondent. She grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, and has a degree in English from Truman State University in Missouri.