Pope Francis ends Holy Year with celebration of diversity

On a bright, sunny Sunday morning in Rome, Pope Francis officially ended the Catholic Church's Holy Year of Mercy when he closed the Holy Door in the facade of the Basilica of St Peter's. More than 10,000 holy doors all around the world were closed last week but the end of the Holy Year was formally marked yesterday by the closure of arguably the most famous of all those doors.

In keeping with the overall thrust of his pontificate, Pope Francis decided that this Holy Year should not be Vatican-based but rather should be seen as a real presence in the “periphery”. Thus it was that holy doors (doors you walk through to receive an indulgence) were opened worldwide from Banqui in the Central African Republic to the canteen in Rome’s Termini train station. In this same spirit, the pope began the Holy Year not in Rome but rather in Banqui where he opened the first Holy Door.

The closing of the Holy Door rounded off another busy Vatican weekend, marked by Saturday's solemn yet spectacular Red Hat ceremony, when Pope Francis "created" 17 new cardinals. In this his third "consistory", Francis has followed a very "Francis" line, naming cardinals from the periphery, including the Central African Republic, Mauritius, Lesotho, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Papua New Guinea, Mexico, Venezuela and Brazil.

Dublin-born

Among the new cardinals was 69-year-old Irishman Kevin Farrell, the former Bishop of Dallas, Texas. Dublin-born Farrell, who left Ireland as a 19-year-old, has spent most of the past 50 years in church service in the US, first in Washington DC and then in Dallas.

In his homily, the pope underlined the different cultural traditions of the new cardinals, contrasting those with our own “age of grave problems and issues” related to migration. “We come from distant lands; we have different traditions, skin colour, languages and social backgrounds; we think differently and we celebrate our faith in a variety of rites. None of this makes us enemies; instead it is one of our greatest riches.”

In contrast, said the pope, the modern world is one in which exclusion and polarisation are on the increase:

“We live in a time in which polarisation and exclusion are burgeoning and considered the only way to resolve conflicts. We see, for example, how quickly those among us with the status of a stranger, an immigrant, or a refugee become a threat, take on the status of an enemy.”

Immigration

This issue of immigration was further underlined by the fact that the ceremony opened with an address from one of the newly-appointed cardinals, Mario Zenari, the papal nuncio in war-torn Syria. Cardinal Zenari told the pope: “Holy Father, some of us come from places where many millions are hapless, unfortunate adults and children, left dead or half-dead on the streets of their villages or city zones, or buried beneath the rubble of their own houses and schools, because of the mindless violence of bloody, inhuman and endless conflicts.”

In a break from tradition, the consistory ended with the pope and all the new cardinals climbing into a minibus and making their way up into the Vatican gardens where they visited the pope emeritus, Benedict XVI. Since his shock resignation in February 2013, Pope Benedict has lived in a converted convent in the Vatican gardens just 600 metres up the hill from the Domus Santa Marta, the Vatican “bed and breakfast” that is home to Pope Francis.