Virtue scores
Review
SECTION ONE Some books answer a question you did not know you were carrying. Opening the Holy Door, published by Ave Maria Press, addresses the specific question of what it actually means -- bodily, spiritually, historically -- to cross the threshold of a jubilee door. The jubilee tradition in the Catholic Church is ancient and particular: every 25 years an ordinary doorway is declared a passageway of grace, and pilgrims travel to Rome or to designated churches to walk through it as an act of penance, renewal, and indulgence. This book guides that pilgrim journey, situating the physical act within its scriptural and theological sources while attending to the interior conversion the rite is designed to catalyze. The audience is anyone preparing for or reflecting on a jubilee year, from the first-time pilgrim who wants to understand what they are doing and why, to the parish group leader seeking a formation text that takes both history and devotion seriously. It is a rarer kind of Catholic book: one that treats a ceremonial act as genuinely weighty rather than decoratively picturesque. SECTION TWO - **Created**: The open door is, at its root, an affirmation that the human person is made for access -- that approach to the sacred is not an alien imposition but the completion of what the person already is by nature. The book's central image assumes that the pilgrim belongs on the other side of the threshold, which is a specific claim about dignity prior to merit. - **Fallen**: The jubilee door addresses the condition Aquinas calls the debt of punishment that accumulates through disordered acts -- the door is opened as a remedy for precisely that debt. The book does not let the ritual gesture float free of moral seriousness; crossing the threshold involves confession and genuine contrition, naming the specific weight of the Fallen state rather than bypassing it. - **Redeemed**: The passage through the holy door enacts Redemption liturgically and bodily: the pilgrim's feet, not only their will, participate in the act of return. This body-soul unity in the movement of conversion is the book's most theologically productive feature, grounding grace in a concrete physical moment rather than an invisible interior event alone. - **Justice (prayer and adoration)**: The holy door is a school in the virtue of religion -- the act of passing through it is ordered worship, a giving back to God of the acknowledgment that belongs to God by right. The book trains the reader in adoration as a structured, willed act, not a spontaneous feeling. - **Prudence (docility)**: The pilgrim who reads this book before traveling is practicing docility in the classical sense: submitting personal interpretation of a sacred act to the Church's accumulated wisdom about what that act means and what it requires. This is not passive compliance but the active intellectual humility that Aquinas regards as integral to practical wisdom. SECTION THREE Hans Urs von Balthasar[^1], in Prayer, argues that the door to the Father stands perpetually open -- not because the human person forced it, but because Christ himself is the door and has become our neighbor, inviting approach without the formality of earned access. Opening the Holy Door inhabits exactly this theological space: the jubilee door is the liturgical sign of what Balthasar describes as the immense gift of a good conscience restored, the permission to enter the sanctuary that no ethical achievement could secure on its own. Pope Francis[^2], in Gaudete et Exultate, places a parallel image: Jesus knocking not only from outside the heart but from within a self-centeredness that needs to be escaped, suggesting that the holy door is less an entrance than an exit from stale complacency into active encounter. Where Chautard[^3] insists that holiness consists in the will drawn into close union with God's will through sustained interior work across the purgative and illuminative stages, Opening the Holy Door offers the jubilee threshold as a concentrated, sacramental moment within that longer journey -- not a shortcut past those stages but a visible marker of the soul's willingness to begin or continue them. ## References 1. Von Balthasar, Hans Urs (n.d.). *Prayer*. — 'The door stands open, and wherever the child of God may be, there too is that open door.' 2. Pope Francis (n.d.). *Gaudete et Exultate*. — 'True enough, we need to open the door of our hearts to Jesus, who stands and knocks.' 3. Chautard, Dom Jean-Baptiste (n.d.). *The Soul of the Apostolate*. — 'holiness is nothing but the interior life carried to such a point that the will is in close union with the will of God.'
✓ Strengths
- ✓The title's governing image -- an open door -- grounds the theology of access to God not in human achievement but in an initiative already taken: the person is invited before they knock, which affirms the Created dignity of the person as recipient of unconditioned grace.
- ✓By centering a jubilee or threshold event, the book orients the reader toward the Redeemed state: passage through a holy door is the liturgical enactment of conversion, mapping the interior movement of repentance and renewal onto a bodily, pilgrim act.
- ✓The open-door motif directly addresses the Fallen condition by naming the shame and distance that make approach to God feel impossible -- the door is opened precisely because the person cannot open it from within their own disordered self-possession.
- ✓The book cultivates the virtue of prayer as Aquinas understands it in the Secunda Secundae: not mere petition but an ordered act of justice toward God, a rendering of due worship by the creature who recognizes the source of all good.
- ✓As a guide for pilgrims, the work exercises docility (prudence-teachability) in the reader, forming the habit of receiving instruction about sacred space and sacred time rather than approaching the holy door on purely subjective terms.