By Elizabeth Lev.

I rediscovered my faith during Jubilee Year 2000. I spent the bulk of that Holy Year living far away from the Catholic faith. I led groups to the Holy Door, explaining art, history, and indulgences before sending people through the door while I stayed behind. Those open doors, however, beckoned constantly, even luring secular clients curious about these mysterious graces. For all the crowds and chaos, the silent invitation of the doors, always open, always expectant, finally wore down my resistance, and by the end of the year, I too crossed that threshold of hope and joyfully returned to the fold of my faith. The 2025 Jubilee, however, may keep others from finding theirs.

Having personally experienced the great graces of a Jubilee and witnessed the amazing conversions of other holy years, I have been eagerly awaiting the 27th Jubilee, the Year of Hope. And yes, there have been many graces already in 2025, but the beacon of the Year of Hope has been dimmed by hasty policy changes at St Peter's Basilica.

This is due to what, one presumes, the basilica administrators considered a clever plan to combat Vatican deficits by drawing a line between tourists and "pilgrims," soaking money from the former while preserving free worship for the latter. Card-carrying Pilgrims continue to access the basilica from the magnificent Via della Conciliazione, but mere "tourists" are routed out of the Piazza San Pietro and lined up along the road leading to the Sant'Anna entrance to Vatican City.

Well-heeled tourists, however, may also skip the line by paying 7 euros for a fast pass into the basilica. Bernini's colonnade, designed to resemble the open arms of a church for the whole world, ready to welcome one and all, has been turned into a web of barriers to enforce the new system, and while the desperate financial straits of the Holy See are common knowledge, it could be that exploiting the pope's basilica will turn out to be robbing Paul to pay Peter. After all, the Holy Year is supposed to be about saving time in Purgatory, not saving time in line.

The new pray-or-pay scheme extends even to the Vatican Museums, where visitors who want to pass from the Sistine Chapel directly into the basilica must now pay 7 euros for the privilege. This passage, traditionally free for those who had paid for the museum ticket, also served as a necessary valve to keep from overcrowding the chapel. But as of March 3, visitors must negotiate a Byzantine system of QR codes, vouchers, and 48-hour wait times to purchase the pass for the 5-minute trip down the Scala Regia to the basilica.

The results have been disastrous. After a year of experiments with how to manage the expected crowds, the Director of the Vatican Museums, Barbara Jatta, and her administration found a workable system for the Holy Year. But that system depended on allowing the 15,000 (out of 30,000) visitors a day to the Sistine Chapel to exit via the Scala Regia. Many tourist agencies have refused to pay the basilica tax, increasing the massive overcrowding and confusion in the museum. Some additional restrictions, moreover, have led to absurd results. For example, the rules of the Vatican Museums allow groups of 20, but St. Peter's door tax only accommodates groups up to 15, requiring that 5 people be left behind.

While it's true that most non-religious tourist attractions have a fast-pass option, the basilica's arrangement has created two castes of visitors, the tourist and the pilgrim, under which system the tourist is seen more as a cash cow than a human in need of salvation. In 2024, the Dicastery of Communication thought so highly of the salvific potential of these visits that it devised a pre-Jubilee campaign called "From Tourist to Pilgrim." After my own experience, I was honored to take part in that project, which highlighted how the beautiful art of Rome is indeed a call to conversion.

At present, tourists are channeled through a baffling labyrinth of lanes around the ...