The Jubilee has come to an end, and the pilgrims of hope have set off on the road back home, back to ordinary life. Yet they are no longer ordinary, because the experience of the pilgrimage has strengthened them in hope: in trust in Jesus, Hope with a capital H, our one and only hope.

The journey home is not always easy, because it brings back to mind what you gradually left behind along the way and freed yourself from, so as to arrive freer and lighter at the sanctuary, at the destination of the pilgrimage. In some ways it resembles the experience of soldiers who, at the end of a war, leave the trenches and set out on the road back home—a road that takes them past the places where they fought their battles, the bodies of those who fell on the battlefield, the places they themselves may even have destroyed.

Although you return to the same life, you never return home the same, and nothing remains the same, because you begin to see everything through the lens of the intimate and transformative experience of the encounter with the Holy One towards whom you journeyed. Nothing remains the same because in your heart you carry the marks of that encounter and of the struggle that led up to it. Nothing remains the same because, if you were truly a pilgrim—and a pilgrim of Hope—you are no longer who you once were, but have yourself become a sign of hope—a reflection of the great Hope—that shines even in the darkest of places.

But do not lose heart, for in this you are not alone. As soon as the Holy Year came to an end with the closing of the Holy Door of St Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican, Pope Leo XIV did not take long to announce another special year dedicated to St Francis, on the occasion of the 800th anniversary of his death on 3 October 1226, just a few metres from the chapel of the Porziuncola, which today lies within the Basilica of St Mary of the Angels, in the shadow of the city of Assisi on Mount Subasio.

To this end, in the coming weeks, we shall allow this saint, his prayer, and experiences connected with him to accompany us, as we continue the journey of our lives as pilgrims of Hope.