Father Simon Gore looks back on how the Animate Youth Ministries team spent the Jubilee Year of 2025.

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To paraphrase John Lennon in his “Happy Xmas (War is Over)” song – “The Jubilee Year is over and what have you done? … I hope you had fun.”

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Well, I don’t know about fun, but we have had an interesting year here in Lowe House. It does not seem like a year ago that we were at the start of the Jubilee Year, and now here we are at the end, looking back on it all.

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We had two plans for the year – one was work-related and one was more personal/community-related.

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On the work side, we wanted to offer new and different things from what we might do in a “normal” year, while also not changing things too radically and ending up not doing what we already had up and running and working quite successfully.

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One thing we kept coming back to was that the Jubilee Year was partly about debt reduction, so we wanted to offer some retreats to people and schools that might not usually be able to come along.

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So we created two specific retreats, one for young people interested in ‘Servant Leadership’ and one for those older young people thinking more deeply about their call to ‘Discipleship’ as they leave school or enter a new stage in their life. We offered each retreat twice during the Jubilee Year and anyone could sign up free of charge.

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As mentioned a few times in the Pic, we also started our new archdiocesan Music Ministry Group. We are pleased with how the group are working together and we hope it will continue to grow and be a blessing to the arch diocese as the years pass.

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In a break with convention, we offered primary schools the opportunity to come here on retreats for Year 5 pupils. A large number of schools had asked for this over the years, but we had always kept to a minimum age of Year 6. However, we thought the Jubilee Year might be the time to offer something new and different.

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Maybe just as important as what we did in work was the time we gave ourselves to think more about the Jubilee Year. I have vague memories of the Jubilee in 2000, but for Lauren and Ellie this has been the first one they remember, so we wanted to do a few things as a community to mark the occasion. Arguably the highlight was a few days in Rome in the early part of the year (before the crowds became too big!).

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We did some research before and downloaded the special Jubilee app and pre-booked all our entrances through the Holy Doors. And we had a special moment walking down the Via della Conciliazione with pilgrims from other parts of the world, all saying the Jubilee prayers together. We also got over to Assisi for a day to say hello to Saints Francis and Clare, and to see Blessed (as he was at the time) Carlo Acutis.

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I remember in the lead-up being at meetings and sitting in the house asking what makes the difference in a Jubilee Year. Why is it a different year? I suppose I never got a defined and specific answer in the way my brain would have liked to have it.

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But maybe that is the point. I suppose the year might be more about what you make of it. It is there for us, and we are given guidelines for how to use it. But then, as with so much in life and faith, it is up to us what we do and how we use the time we have.

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To go back to the question the song asks – “And what have you done?” – I just hope that the Jubilee Year was a blessed one for you, whatever you did.