Page:Pastoral Letter Promulgating the Jubilee - Spalding.djvu/30

Rh The Christian Jubilee was originally estabished, with a view to its taking place every hundred years, at the commencement of the century. The Bull of Pope Boniface VIII., issued in 1300, appears to he the first authentic record of the Jubilee in its present form. The number of pious pilgrims, who, in that year, flocked to Rome to gain the Indulgence, appears almost incredible, in our cold, calculating age of Mammon-worship. During no part of that year, was the number of such pilgrims estimated at less than two hundred thousand.

To gratify the fervent piety of the faithful, the period was subsequently reduced to fifty years, in imitation of the Jewish Jubilee, by Pope Clement VI., towards the middle of the fourteenth century. This discipline continued for about a century—till the year 1450—the last occasion on which the fifty years' Jubilee was celebrated. Pope Paul II., stimulated by the ever-increasing devotion of the faithful, in a Bull issued in 1470, reduced the period to twenty-five years, a practice which has been maintained to the present day. In addition, however, to the stated Jubilees recurring every quarter of a century, subsequent Pontiffs have adopted the custom of publishing an extraordinary Jubilee on their accession to the chair of Peter, and on occasions of great public calamities, or of special exigencies of the times, which, in their judgment seemed to call for this union of prayers among the faithful throughout Christendom.

It is not without significance, Venerable and Beloved Brethren, that the Encyclical Letters of the Holy Father were dated on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin, and on the tenth anniversary of the solemn definition of this great privilege, which the pious belief of ages had awarded to Mary. Every believer in the divinity of Jesus, as God in the Flesh, and every one who loves Jesus, and dearly prizes the high honor of claiming Him as a Brother, must necessarily feel a tender filial reverence for His Mother, who, by the very fact of the Incarnation, be-