Final pilgrims of the 2025 Holy Year passed through the Holy Door of St. Peter’s Basilica late Monday, as the Vatican said it had achieved its goal for the rare Jubilee that was opened by one pope and scheduled to be closed by another.
Pope Leo XIV will officially close out the Holy Year on Tuesday by shutting the basilica’s Holy Door, capping a year of special audiences, Masses and meetings that the Vatican said shaped his first months as pope.
The Vatican described the Holy Year as a centuries-old tradition: every 25 years, the faithful travel to Rome to visit the tombs of Saints Peter and Paul and receive indulgences for the forgiveness of their sins if they pass through the Holy Door.
In the Vatican’s accounting, the Jubilee has also been a vehicle for Rome to use public money to pursue long-delayed projects. The Vatican said the city sought to bring parts of Rome up to modern European standards during the influx of visitors.
Among the last pilgrims to pass through St. Peter’s was Natalie Turner, a public defender from Birmingham, England, who was pushed in a wheelchair along the pilgrim route by her son, Philip. Turner, who said she has severe arthritis, told the Associated Press she was thrilled to make it through “at the last minute” and believed the journey would give her and her son “special graces and blessings.”
Turner also said her first trip to the Vatican was “a great way of grounding me, and helping me to realize that as bad as those things are that I see, God has it. He is in control, and I cannot take it all, I can only do as much as I can do.” As she passed through, she added, “Wonderful. Unique. Something I will never experience again, probably.”
The Vatican announced that 33,475,369 pilgrims participated, and said Italy, the U.S. and Spain were the top nationalities represented. But at a press conference, the Vatican’s Holy Year organizer, Archbishop Rino Fisichella, acknowledged that the figure was only an estimate and could include double counting, and said there was no breakdown between Holy Year pilgrims and Rome’s broader tourism.
Fisichella said the Vatican arrived at the number by combining the count of people who officially registered for Jubilee events, volunteer crowd counters at Rome-area basilicas and closed-circuit television cameras at St. Peter’s Basilica, where the Vatican said cameras recorded around 25,000 to 30,000 people a day crossing the Holy Door threshold. The Vatican said that estimate exceeded a 31.7 million forecast that a study by Roma Tre University had produced.
The Vatican said participation grew steadily after Pope Francis died in April and after the election of Leo, noting that the transition between popes made this Holy Year only the second in history to be opened and closed by different popes. Fisichella and Vatican officials compared it to the 1700 Jubilee opened by Pope Innocent XII and closed by Pope Clement XI after Innocent’s death.
In Rome, the Holy Year’s public works were also largely completed, Mayor Roberto Gualtieri said, citing that 110 of 117 projects initially associated with the Jubilee had been finished. He said one of the biggest changes involved Piazza Pia, a pedestrian square at the end of the Via della Conciliazione boulevard opposite St. Peter’s Basilica, which required rerouting traffic to an underground tunnel.
The AP reported that the biggest point of disagreement between Fisichella and Gualtieri involved two round fountains that frame the view along Via della Conciliazione toward the basilica. Fisichella said Gualtieri liked the fountains while Fisichella did not, and that he ultimately had to accept them because the piazza is on Italian soil, describing the situation as one of the few disagreements they had to manage “laughing and smiling.”
Fisichella said contemporary stone fountains did not suit the piazza’s perspective toward St. Peter’s Basilica and the nearby Via della Conciliazione, which was created in the 1950 Jubilee by razing a neighborhood. One year later, he said he had gotten used to the fountains but still did not prefer them, saying, “I always thought they looked like foot baths.”