JUBILEE YEAR, in the Roman Catholic Church, is observed every twenty-fifth year, from Christmas to Christmas. During its continuance plenary indulgence is obtainable by all Catholics, on condition of their penitently confessing their sins and visiting certain churches a stated number of times, or doing an equivalent amount of meritorious work. The institution does not go farther back than to the time of Boniface VIII., whose bull is dated April 22, 1300. The circumstances in which it was promulgated are related by a contemporary authority, Jacobus Cajetanus, according to whose account (“Relatio de centesimo s. jubilaeo anno” in the Bibliotheca Patrum) it had its origin in a wide-spread popular belief then prevalent, which had taken practical shape in an enormous influx of pilgrims to Rome from the 1st of January onwards. The advance upon the recently formulated doctrine of indulgences (see Indulgence) was indeed a natural one. Originally the churches of St Peter and St Paul in Rome were the only jubilee churches, but the privilege was afterwards extended to the Lateran Church and that of Sta Maria Maggiore, and it is now shared also for the year immediately following that of the Roman jubilee by a number of specified provincial churches. At the request of the Roman people, Clement VI. appointed that the jubilee should recur every fifty years instead of every hundred years as had been originally contemplated in the constitution of Boniface; Urban VI. reduced the interval still further to thirty-three years (the supposed duration of the earthly life of Christ); and by Paul II. it was finally fixed at twenty-five years. According to the special ritual prepared by Alexander VI. in 1500, the pope on the Christmas eve with which the jubilee commences goes in solemn ...