On December 4, the Don Bosco Library inaugurated the Advent 2024 exhibition The Jubilee in the documents of the Don Bosco Library between the 19th and 20th century. After a greeting from the director Marcello Sardelli, the Magnificent Rector fr. Andrea Bozzolo addressed the event, welcoming it as the first in a series of initiatives that will lead the academic community to experience the Holy Year 2025. This was followed by an intervention by prof. Angelo Dibisceglia, a Church History professor at the Faculty of Theology, who offered an interesting excursus on the Jubilee as an expression of the times the Church has experienced from 1300 to the present day.
An ideal journey through the complex interplay of historical-political events and cultural revolutions to which the Church has always given a concrete response. The exhibition in the Library aims to show visitors traces in history, through print, of the Church's concern for the salvation of souls. A testament to the first Jubilee in history, that of 1300 convened by Boniface VIII, is the reproduction of the Bull of Indiction "Antiquorum Habet Fida Relatio," kindly provided by fr. Mauro Mantovani, Prefect of the Vatican Apostolic Library, which holds the original. Visitors are then taken to the 19th century through Don Bosco's writings on the Jubilee he experienced in the Holy Year 1875, along with other bibliographic testimonies from the Don Bosco Study Center collection.
The history of the Holy Years of the 20th century is finally brought to life in the chronicles of the newspapers of the time. The front pages of the main Catholic newspapers guide visitors through the Christmas nights of the opening of the Holy Years of the 1900s. This material, along with the bibliographic review displayed on the Jubilee theme, is part of the heritage of the Don Bosco Library.