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The holy year is a year in which Roman Catholics are invited to make a special pilgrimage to Rome, for which the pope grants a special jubilee indulgence. The practice began in 1300, and since 1400 a holy year has been proclaimed every 25 years, with special proclamations in 1933 and 1983 commemorating the 1,900th and 1,950th anniversaries of Christ’s act of redemption. The special indulgence is hardly the attraction for pilgrims when so many others are available; rather, it is the chance of gai…

1. Religious 1.1. Term Deriving from Lat. initium, the term “initiation” denotes the ceremony of joining a mystery fellowship. Initium means “entry”; its use in the plural became linked with the concept of the sacred or holy (Sacred and Profane), which had much the same sense as “mysteries” had in late antiquity. At the same time, in a play on words, the Greek teletē for initiation into the mysteries came to be associated with teleutaō (finish, die). In an extension of usage the term then denoted v…

1. Development Beginning with the work of the Innsbruck patrologist Hugo Rahner (1900–1968), 20th-century research has shown that in the High Middle Ages expressed devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus began on the broad basis of Johannine-inspired patristic meditation on the pierced side of the crucified Jesus as the source of sacramental life (John 19:34). The initiators of express devotion to the Sacred Heart belonged to the early Middle Ages (Anselm, Bernard of Clairvaux), and it was further developed in the 13th century by the German Benedictin…