As the Jubilee of 2025 begins, the legacy of two great millennial Churchmen has prepared the Church for the “Greater Jubilee of 2033,” now on the horizon. The millennial primate, Blessed Stefan Wyszyński, and millennial pope, St. John Paul the Great, brought to the universal Church the Polish sense of Providence in history.
Jubilee 2025 is an “ordinary” jubilee year, held every 25 years. Yet it falls in between, as it were, the millennial jubilees of the year 2000, when John Paul put anniversary-marking at the heart of the New Evangelization, and 2033, two millennia since the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
From time to time, “extraordinary” jubilee years are called by the reigning pontiff. The last one was the 2015-2016 Jubilee of Mercy, called by Pope Francis. Before that, there were extraordinary jubilees in 1933 and 1983, called to mark the 1,900th and the 1,950th anniversaries of the Redemption.
Those extraordinary jubilees set the precedent for the “Greater Jubilee of 2033,” as I call it. Just as in history the Redemption followed the Incarnation, so too the Greater Jubilee 2033 would fittingly follow the Great Jubilee 2000. The Incarnation served the purpose of the Redemption; Christmas is fulfilled at Easter.
While the Vatican is occupied with the current jubilee year, it has already indicated that something grand should be done to mark 2033. It can be confidently predicted that it will be a jubilee year, though whether my term “Greater Jubilee” is adopted remains to be seen.
St. John Paul declared a special Marian year in 1987-1988 as a preparation for the Great Jubilee 2000, timed roughly to coincide with the 2,000th anniversary of when Mary herself would have been born. Likewise, it would be unimaginable if 2031 were not declared a Marian year — but not strictly a jubilee — to mark 500 years since the apparitions at Guadalupe. From Jubilee 2025 to Marian Year 2031 to Greater Jubilee 2033, the Church will mark nearly a decade-long span of extraordinary commemorative events.
More broadly, the Church has been living a millennial moment for 45 years, as John Paul fixed attention on the Great Jubilee from the early days of his pontificate. He taught the Church about jubilees, drawing upon his experience in Poland.
The opening words of his first encyclical in 1979 already referred to it, stating, “Jesus Christ is the center of the universe and of history” and that “this time … is already very close to the year 2000.”
When John Paul wrote that, it was 21 years to the year 2000. But he already knew that he would lead the Church into the third Christian millennium. How did he know that? Because he was told as much by an immensely trustworthy figure.
During the October conclave of 1978, as the voting moved in the direction of Cardinal Karol Wojtyła of Kraków, the elder Polish cardinal and primate of Poland, Warsaw Archbishop Stefan Wyszyński, spoke with his brother Polish cardinal. In 1994, John Paul revealed, “Cardinal Wyszyński said to me: ‘If the Lord has called you, you must take the Church into the third millennium!’”
To understand why those words, that prophecy, resounded in the very depths of Cardinal Wojtyła’s Polish and Catholic soul, it is necessary to know the figure of Cardinal Wyszyński. Poland gave us the two greatest Catholic Churchmen of the 20th century: Pope John Paul in the first place and Cardinal Wyszyński in the second.
Until 1978, Cardinal Wojtyła was the junior figure to the heroic cardinal. At the conclaves of 1978, the media was fascinated by the cardinal from Kraków who went skiing.
Cardinal Wojtyła responded to their questions about whether it was unbecoming for a cardinal to ski: “It’s not unusual in Poland. In Poland, 40% of the cardinals ski.” When reporters pointed out that there were only two cardinals in Poland, Wojtyła explained. “In Poland, Wyszyński counts for 60%.”
Cardinal Wyszyński, beatified in 2021, counted for a very great deal during the great battle against atheistic communism. The world knows of the great partnership of Karol Wojtyła and Joseph Ratzinger. More should be known about the great partnership before that, of Wyszyński and Wojtyła.
Cardinal Wyszyński was archbishop of Warsaw and primate of Poland from 1948 to 1981 — 33 years of daily battle with the evil empire of the Soviet Union. In 1953, the Polish communist regime arrested Wyszyński on trumped-up charges and held him under house arrest for three years.
In 1956, Wyszyński was freed. He had put his incarceration to good use. Upon release, he announced an ambitious decade-long program for the millennium of 1966, the 1,000th anniversary of Poland’s Christian faith, the baptism in 966 of Prince Mieszko I of the Piast dynasty.
Wyszyński proposed a “Great Novena”: nine years of evangelization, catechesis and formation to prepare for 1966, when all of Poland would recommit to its baptismal vows. The message was clear: Poland was a Christian country, no matter the atheism of the incumbent regime. Its Catholic faith would be renewed during the Great Novena; cultural resistance would be the Church’s defense of the Polish people against the Soviet-imposed regime.
In 1966, Wyszyński celebrated the great millennium before an immense gathering at Częstochowa, with Archbishop Wojtyła of Kraków at his side. Wyszyński had invited Pope Paul VI to attend the millennium celebrations of 1966; the regime blocked the invitation.
When Pope John Paul II first arrived in Poland in June 1979, he opened the homily that ended the Soviet Empire with a reference to the 1966 millennium. He explained that he was now doing what St. Paul VI had been prevented from doing. The Polish millennium was complete.
In March 1979, in his first encyclical, John Paul II looked ahead to the bi-millennium of 2000. In June 1979, he set his first pilgrimage to Poland in the context of the 1966 millennium.
So momentous were the 1966 celebrations that Cardinal Wyszyński came to be known simply as the “Primate of the Millennium.” At the conclave of October 1978, the primate of the Polish millennium passed the torch to the pope of the third millennium.
“Preparing for the Year 2000 has become as it were a hermeneutical key of my Pontificate,” John Paul would write in 1994.
What, then, would have happened if John Paul had been killed 19 years short of the Great Jubilee of the Year 2000?
While John Paul lay in the hospital recovering from his wounds after the assassination attempt on May 13, 1981, Cardinal Wyszyński lay in a Warsaw hospital, dying of abdominal cancer. The two great Polish prelates spoke by phone from their respective beds. The primate, gasping for breath, asked for the Holy Father’s blessing. No doubt both wondered about whether Wyszyński’s millennial prophecy would be fulfilled. Wyszyński would die on May 28, now his feast day.
John Paul recovered, attributing his survival to the intercession of Our Lady of Fatima, on whose feast day the shooting took place. Then, in the midst of the Great Jubilee, he returned to Fatima. The ostensible purpose of the Fatima trip was the beatification of two of the shepherd children, Jacinta and Francisco.
The deeper reason became evident when he arrived at the shrine and knelt before the statue and presented a gift, a small box, to the image of Our Lady of Fatima. It was a ring. Not the ring he wore every day, but a special ring given him by the Primate of the Millennium upon his election as pope. In symbolically giving the ring to the shrine at Fatima, John Paul was declaring that the mission had been accomplished. Blessed Stefan Wyszyński had given him a mission, and that mission was mortally threatened on May 13, 1981. His miraculous recovery made the completion of the mission possible. That recovery was Mary’s doing, as John Paul put it: “One hand fired the bullet; another hand guided it.”
The guiding hand of Providence in history is the purpose of jubilee years, to recall that all things, including the gift of time itself, are gifts from God — above all, his Son Jesus Christ.
At midnight on New Year’s Eve 1999, John Paul appeared at his window overlooking St. Peter’s Square and spoke these words in the first moment of the new millennium, words suitable for every jubilee: “Let us enter the Year 2000 with our eyes fixed on the mystery of the Incarnation. Christ, yesterday, today and forever. To him belong time and the ages. To him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen!”
Those words are taken from the Easter vigil blessing of the Paschal candle and so direct attention even now toward the Greater Jubilee 2033.
