MEMORANDUM
To: His Holiness, Pope Leo XIV
From: Bill Schmitt | “Phronesis in Pieces”
Re: Proposal for a new Holy Year
Date: June 30, 2025
This memo proposes that you declare 2026 a “Holy Year of Communion and Communication” for the Catholic Church. The goal is to help meet the world’s urgent need for providential renewal in societal structures of fellowship. Institutions of human flourishing now face moments of crisis. Our connections to natural law, the Holy Spirit’s gifts and fruits, and Jesus Christ as “way, truth, and life” are clogged with static, portending a detachment which is spiritual and secular, individual and collective.
A new Holy Year to address this will be a coherent, efficacious extension of the ongoing 2025 Holy Year, which bears Pope Francis’s theme, “Pilgrims of Hope.” The Church, as a communion or communio, is in the vanguard of unity for the human journey; as witnesses to hope, we must build stronger bridges of wholeness and holiness amid the diversity, keeping personal and civic life strong.
Here is a three-part assessment of “communion and communication” as essentials in the bridge-building process: First, a look at today’s threats to connectedness as recently reported in our mass media. Second, a few considerations of how the Church might assist Catholics and all people in responding to the threats. Third, more detailed proposals for a new Holy Year as a hope-filled initiative.
Most Holy Father, we need to reassert the Church’s perennial presence as a secure vessel for today’s pilgrims of hope, helping them navigate toward an eternity of divine love. The whole “family of God” shares a “communion of goods”—holy things and holy persons—which bear fruit for all in “faith, hope, and charity.”
The communion of goods contains immense archives of writing and other artistry from dedicated seekers of truth; such material, from Church sages and many other sources, must be kept intact so it can be available to nourish minds and hearts, perhaps as a response or antidote for destructive lies.
Just as churches, in Pope Francis’s words, should be “field hospitals” for wounded souls, we can provide a lifeboat for wayfarers and whole cultures, with their various religions and roots, who fear they’re losing their moorings of reason and faith. (Catechism of the Catholic Church, paras. 946-962)
Post-modern culture can persuade people that their lives have minimal purpose or agency. It gives them little reason to believe that looking beyond themselves is the key to identity, knowledge, love, or happiness. The Church should help communicate to isolated souls the “transcendentals” of Aristotle and Plato—ultimate truth, beauty, and goodness—which speak of a loving home, a north star, and nurturing our souls.
Catholics believe exploration of history and mystery frees people to seek wisdom together, transcending the clutter of data. Your papal motto affirms St. Augustine’s zeal for communication, which discerns: “In the One, we are one.” We see our pilgrimage yielding the fullness of solidarity through a sacramental life of Reconciliation and Holy Communion, but our Eucharistic sacrifice “intercedes for all men” in the family of creation. (CCC, para. 1368)
Spiritual wisdom is taught and learned in experiential, analog ways. Machines that do not distinguish between true and false, good and bad, can help us in wonderful ways, but they cannot be wise if they lack wonder. Nor can they imitate the human mind’s ability to share in God’s creativity, sparking imagination and joy. AI’s supposed potential for consciousness is likely to be a pretense, a half-step, or a disaster.
The pre-requisites for our human communication, such as truth and trust, authenticity and dignity, and accountability to generate justice and compassion, have been presumed—but also debased—by new technologies and styles of interaction.
Societies that have become more polarized, mean-spirited, and self-centered through the misuse of communication tools need evangelization with the Good News.
Participants in the misuse also need forgiveness—personal conversion and reconciliation, which we can spread to others. This source of renewal disappears when media messengers prefer “cancellation” of offenders, either because empathy demands too much of a relationship or because the “facts” behind disputes are exposed as flimsy.
It seems necessary to redouble the Church’s efforts to guide people, products, and practices toward more fruitful communication in the secular sphere. Pope Francis provided inspiration for this by his own initiatives and through his simple statement in a World Communications Day message: “Love always communicates.” In other messages, he added that we must communicate the truth gently, with charity.
This mix of compassion and candor is the Church’s persistent work, trusting in the inspirations and initiatives of holy years and all its ministries.
Holy Father, if you choose to declare a Holy Year of Communion and Communication, the concerns discussed above can carry weight, but you will want to structure specific prayers and conversations in alignment with your priorities.
As part of the structure, dioceses around the world can become instruments for synodality in a mission-driven context. We have much to talk about at the local community levels, where neighbors witness what binds or divides. Local faith leaders will make friends—and make news—as authentic authorities supporting dialogues residents really care about and which secular leaders might distort or dismiss.
Your concern about developments in artificial intelligence, which are profit- and power-driven—not “person-centered” as Pope Francis frequently urged—is a prime subject deserving short-term and long-term planning. Officials and experts working in the AI fields will benefit from hearing the Church’s insights, including moral conscience checks and cautionary notes, which tech optimists often ignore.
You have spoken about the need for more rigorous formation of people in the media audience. In particular, Christians must develop both their faith and reason for critical thinking and careful assessment; we should subject our ravenous content consumption to a sober cost-benefit analysis and a healthy dose of skepticism toward excesses and extremes.
This skepticism starts with an abiding passion to take reality seriously and to honor the dignity of persons by telling them full truths which will “set them free.” In light of Francis’s World Communications Day messages, people should also embrace the value of authentic, instructive stories—learning first from Scripture and Church teaching, then sharing their own experiences in imitation of Jesus, the great storyteller.
We must not close our minds, but there is a danger in passive open-mindedness—consuming endless information but never coming to conclusions which entail earthly and spiritual accountability. As famed author G.K. Chesterton said, “The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.”
The “Holy Year of Communion and Communication” is intended as a time to accept our responsibilities. It allows people to seek and receive divine guidance, with all the spiritual priorities and sacramental practices grounded in Church tradition.
As you know, the origin of Christian Jubilees, or Holy Years, traces back to the Bible, Vatican documents tell us a Catholic holy year is “a great religious event” to “encourage holiness of life,” marked by calls to reconciliation between adversaries, as well as “solidarity, hope, justice, commitment to serve God with joy and. . . peace with our brothers and sisters.”
Popes have proclaimed such events since 1300, and initial plans called for a jubilee every one hundred years. That has shifted to every twenty-five years.
A jubilee is called “ordinary” if it falls “after the set period of years.” The current holy year of hope keeps this pattern. But popes also proclaim “extraordinary” jubilees, as Pope Francis did in 2016 when he declared a holy year of mercy.
Holy Father, given your special affinity with Pope Leo XIII, you know that he issued an encyclical declaring an “extraordinary jubilee” in 1886. According to this papal champion for faith and justice in the Industrial Revolution’s swiftly evolving economies, “the spirit of the age” required a holy year to propagate the Church’s “treasures of heavenly gifts.”
Leo XIII was a prolific writer and teacher to elites and the grassroots populace, reminding everyone “how important it is” that societies conform as closely as possible to truth and the Christian ideal.”
If you proclaim a holy year in 2026, this “extraordinary” period will occur 140 years after the former Pope Leo’s special year of jubilee. One might say those prayers bore great fruit, including the landmark encyclical, Rerum Novarum, which Leo issued in 1891. It presented a resounding explication of Catholic Social Thought, prescribing just relations between capital and labor as a bulwark against economic “progress” gone astray.
The new jubilee will be a powerful answer to the dangers of our current secularized age, when warp-speed “progress” is creating dilemmas of justice, prudence, and much more. Today’s revolutions in technologies, economies, warfare, and cultures have much to answer for, given humanity’s cravings for the sharing of communio and meaningful communication.
A holy year in 2026 would appear to be the first time that jubilees were proclaimed in two consecutive years. However, one is “ordinary” and one is “extraordinary,” and there is flexibility in the “where” and “when” of special declarations.
Holy Father, one can draw a through-line connecting Pope Francis’s 2025 summons for “pilgrims of hope” to the event proposed here. Years of follow-through will traverse serious, even existential, crossroads where travelers must be organized and diligent.
As wayfarers seeking to fulfill the divine potential of personhood, we must “up our game” as human beings competing against deception and debasement—forces growing along the very pathways on which we’re sprinting.
Many religious and secular people alike say candidly they believe today’s cultural wounds need healing via a decisive return to God. We can say “Amen” with confidence and no reliance on AI.
Hope is here. You know of the recent evolution in Catholic seminary formation for priestly discernment; you have seen that many young men now report great blessings from their first year of preparation. This “propadeutic year,” with its rigorous but liberating structure, has revealed a noteworthy blessing.
An initiative that should inspire the secular world is the seminarians’ “media fast,” when cell phones and casual internet use are largely precluded for weeks, months, or a full year. This quietude often boosts a person’s ability for authentic friendships, reflection, community, and communication with God and with others. One can imagine an imminent future when diverse people prize priests’ guidance more than ever because of their clarity of mind and heart, free of technology addiction.
You have also lived many years with the people of Peru, where the U.S. immersion in electronic distractions and entertainment binges does not dominate culture. This fresher air is obviously no guarantee against societal turmoil, but it must have heartened you to see Peruvians better able to find hope and joy in Christ and community.
Like Leo XIII, you can help illuminate “the way” toward life-changing, divine perspectives that unmask secular utopias of unerring social progress.
For all the reasons above, please see the “Holy Year of Communion and Communication” as a long-term gift you are well-suited to give. It will put hope into action during a moment of truth for all God’s people.
In one sense, “moment of truth” points to a crisis. The Lord’s graces and the Church’s spirit of unity are invaluable to pursue globally a just equilibrium in this era of disconnection and inequality.
In another sense, “moment of truth” points to an opportunity. This ongoing mission to unwrap and protect God’s unique gifts to every person is a celebration of reality. It will remind us why and how to keep transcendent, healing, powerful truthfulness in motion.
We can reassure our brothers and sisters that man’s plans, aligned with God’s will, can reshape difficult realities even as we ask for the grace to transcend them.
The People of God await an extraordinary period in 2026 and beyond for following Jesus into a spiritual battle against artificiality and division, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be. This is a mission to communicate peace through better formation and information, advancing the safekeeping of our connectedness and communion.