PASTORAL LETTER OF BISHOP CORMAC MURPHY-O'CONNOR
To be read at all Masses
on the weekend of 4/5 December
My dear Brothers and Sisters in Jesus Christ,
This Advent takes on a special significance as we prepare for the Holy Year to celebrate two thousand years since the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ. The Holy Year, which is also known as a Jubilee Year, begins on Christmas Eve this year and lasts until the Feast of the Epiphany 2001. In union with Pope John Paul, I will be blessing and opening the West door in the Cathedral which, like the holy door in Saint Peters in Rome, will be a focus for our celebration of a special year of grace and mercy. The door represents our pilgrimage to the Fathers house but also the mercy of God open to us.
There are the two great themes of the Jubilee Year our pilgrimage and God's mercy. Pilgrimage is an ancient tradition and many Christians will be travelling to Rome and the Holy Land in this coming year. I am inviting every Deanery to make a pilgrimage to the Cathedral at Arundel, where there will be a celebration of Gods mercy and an opportunity to renew our commitment to the Christian pilgrimage of our lives and to the community of the Church in the Diocese as we prepare for our Synod.
The Jubilee Year pilgrimage is a reminder that we are indeed a pilgrim people, on a journey towards the Father, drawing closer to His Son in the power of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Father, in his writings on the celebration of the Jubilee Year, has stressed the need to walk as closely as we can with all those who share our common humanity and our Christian faith. It is important that some celebrations in the Diocese will have an ecumenical dimension and provide an opportunity for common witness to our faith. The growth in unity between Christians must be high on the agenda for the third Christian Millennium. We repent of past hurts and divisions as we continue our pilgrimage through history to the house of the Father.
On this pilgrimage, in communion with the Lord, we are helped by the prayers and good works of others who have made the journey before us. The Church sometimes sees all the prayers and good works of the saints as a "treasury". Because we are all united in Christ, His healing power and forgiveness reaches us through others. The good of the whole helps each individual member on their pilgrimage and is used by the Lord, Who alone can forgive sin, to heal the effects of sin, our attachment to it and the damage it does to us. This is, in essence, what is meant by 'indulgence', a word which means pardon. It is an application of the healing of the Lord to the damage caused by sin in our hearts and minds. The Jubilee Indulgence proclaimed by the Church is offering us an occasion to cooperate with God in His healing of the wounds of sin.
So this Jubilee Year is a time for pardon and amnesty, for the confession of sin and a positive attempt to put right its effects. We should make use of the sacrament of reconciliation during this year, perhaps especially during the season of Lent. We might consider making a special effort to repair damaged relationships in families or among friends. A pardoning of debts of all kinds would be in the spirit of the Jubilee Year as celebrated in the Old Testament. We can, at least, lend our voice to the call for a cancellation, total or partial, of the debts of poorer nations.
The year 2000 will truly be "a year of the Lords favour". May it be a step on our pilgrimage that will bring us closer to each other as fellow pilgrims on this planet, as fellow-Christians, as the Church in Arundel and Brighton. Forgiven and healed of the obstacles of sin, may we go into the next century and Millennium ready to play our part in the shaping of the Church to come.
May God bless you all, and with an assurance of my prayers and kind wishes, Yours devotedly in Christ, ![[Unknown]](/NR/rdonlyres/A48AF666-CBFE-4BFD-96FF-AA87210CA0EB/0/bish_sig.gif)
Rt. Rev. Cormac Murphy-O'Connor Bishop of Arundel and Brighton.
Sea also the Notes on the Jubilee Indulgence
