The Jubilee of the Year 2000 was an extraordinary meeting of the Pope with two million young people on the Vergata track. It was his pilgrimage along the paths of salvation history. It was a true revolution of the spirit that showed the vitality and richness of the Christian people, carrying out with great force the program of renewal of the Second Vatican Council.
John Paul II made the content of the Jubilee celebrations the guiding principle of the Apostolic Letter Novo Millennio Ineunte, in which he showed the Church more focused on the word of God, on the proclamation of the Gospel. A Church that is “the home and school of communion”. In the letter, he encouraged us, using all his great missionary passion, to reject laziness, fears, anxiety and to live the virtue of hope in a Christian way day after day. He wrote: “We must go out into the deep.”
In dedicating the last three years preceding the arrival of the new millennium to the Trinity, the Holy Father gave the Jubilee itself a Trinitarian character. He returned to the project of the Church, which he presented in the first three encyclicals, and drew conclusions, outlining a new program of the Church’s life and mission, placing at its center the mystery of God.
Karol Wojtyła was just like that: he never looked back, he always looked forward. When the Jubilee ended happily, it was necessary to thank God for it, and at the same time to think about the future, about setting new pastoral and missionary paths.
Naturally, his physical strength and perhaps his enthusiasm were no longer what he had been twenty years ago, but his vision of history and of the Church, of his pontificate and of apostolic activity, and especially of the work of salvation that had been accomplished in those years, remained the same. He always set himself very clear goals, even though it may happen that in the Curia or in the local Churches they were not always implemented in the way indicated by him.
