The winning logo for the 2025 Jubilee Year, selected following a global competition, was unveiled by the Vatican’s director of evangelization on Tuesday.
At a press conference on June 28, Archbishop Rino Fisichella, pro-prefect of the Dicastery for Evangelization, unveiled the logo and discussed the preparations for the Catholic Church’s upcoming holy year.
In the Catholic Church, a jubilee is a Holy Year of grace and pilgrimage that typically happens once every 25 years. The 2025 Jubilee’s motto is “Pilgrims of Hope” or, in Latin, “Peregrinantes in Spem.”
Fisichella said there were 294 entries from 48 countries entered in the logo competition. Participants ranged in age from six to 83 years old.
“In fact, many were hand-made drawings by children from all over the world, and it was truly moving to review these drawings that were the fruit of imagination and simple faith,” the archbishop said.
A panel narrowed the selection to three projects, which were presented to Pope Francis, who chose the logo designed by Italian Giacomo Travisani.
A Vatican press release described the logo as “four stylized figures to indicate all of humanity from the four corners of the earth.”
“They are each embracing another, indicating the solidarity and brotherhood that must unite peoples,” it continued. “It should be noted that the first figure is clinging to the cross. The underlying waves are choppy to indicate that the pilgrimage of life is not always on calm waters.”
“Oftentimes personal circumstances and world events call for a greater sense of hope. This is why the lower part of the cross is elongated, turning into an anchor, which dominates the movement of the waves. As is well known, the anchor has often been used as a metaphor for hope,” it said.
Bishops’ conferences and Catholic organizations are free to use the logo for pastoral purposes, according to Fisichella, but commercial use is prohibited by a copyright upheld and managed by the Dicastery for Evangelization.
After the summer, according to Fisichella, the official website for the 2025 Jubilee Year will go live.
The last Great Jubilee of the Catholic Church took place in 2000 under the theme “Christ Yesterday, Today, Forever.”
Pope Francis requested a special Jubilee and a Holy Year of Mercy in 2015.
The year prior to the Jubilee, 2024, will be devoted to prayer in preparation for the Holy Year, according to Archbishop Fisichella, while 2023 will be concentrated on promoting the key documents of the Second Vatican Council.
“The year 2023 will be devoted to revisiting the fundamental topics of the four Council Constitutions so that the Church can breathe anew the profound and timely teaching produced by Vatican II, whose 60th anniversary will be celebrated on October 11,” the evangelization chief said.
“For this reason,” he added, “a series of user-friendly resources, written in appealing language, are being produced to arouse curiosity in those who have no memory of the event and to help them enter into the essence of the Council in order to discover the innovative longing that enabled the Church to consciously enter the third millennium of its history.”