2025 Jubilee Year Closing – Regional Bishops Issue Call For Hope And Conversion

By Klysha Best

The words, solemn and resonant, were not his own, but Fr Matthew D’Hereaux, Vicar of the Southern Vicariate, delivered them as a shepherd conveying a crucial message to his flock.

Fr Matthew D’Hereaux

Standing at the ambo in the Minor Basilica of the Immaculate Conception, Port of Spain, during Holy Mass for the ceremonial closing of the Jubilee Year 2025 on December 28, Fr D’Hereaux gave voice to a pastoral letter from the Antilles Episcopal Conference.

The letter marked the close of the special year with a call that was both unflinchingly honest and anchored in hope.

“The journey continues,” he began, reading from the text. “Walking together in faith and struggle… The Jubilee theme, Hope Does Not Disappoint, has not been merely a motto but a lived experience within our dioceses.”

Addressed to “the people of God in the Church in the Antilles,” the letter framed the year not as a concluded event but as a moment to “pause in gratitude to reflect on the fruits and graces that have quietly taken root amongst us.” It acknowledged a world of “uncertainty, fragmentation, and rapid change,” positioning Christian hope as “not a denial of suffering, but trust in God’s faithful love that accompanies history and transforms it from within.”

Fr D’Hereaux’s reading then took a strikingly Caribbean turn, using the region’s own creative genesis as a metaphor for ecclesial renewal. “Like the steelpan born from painful struggles and oil drums, or reggae or calypso born from poverty and resistance, or revival music born from pain sung into hope,” he read, “our brokenness can become places where grace enters and beauty is revealed.”

This, the letter insisted, was central to the synodal path: “Synodality cannot grow where darkness is denied.”

Through the letter, Fr D’Hereaux invited the Church to follow the example of the disciples on the road to Emmaus, who “first spoke of their disappointment before recognising the Risen Lord,” learning that “Christ meets us precisely on the road of struggle.”

What followed was a call to deep and demanding conversion. “This conversion invites us to let go of habits and assumptions that do not serve the Gospel,” Fr D’Hereaux read — a conversion that “will make demands on us, but it leads us from fear to freedom.” He emphasised that this required a move “from self-centredness towards community discernment, from solitary decision-making to communion.”