The Holy Door of St. Peter's

Of the five doors to St. Peter's Basilica, the last on the right is the Holy Door. A Holy Door is the door of a basilica that is only opened on the occasion of a Jubilee and has a very precise meaning: it symbolises the transition that every christian must make from sin to grace, remembering the words of Jesus , who says: “I am the gate”. The most famous Holy Door is that of St. Peter's, but there are several others. The three major basilicas of Rome (Saint John Lateran, Saint Paul Outside The Walls and Saint Mary Major) each have one, and there are others as the pope can decide to designate holy doors in any church in the world. Until 1975, the Holy Door of St. Peter's was walled up at the end of each Jubilee and the wall was then demolished at the beginning of the next one, with the pope performing the rite of giving the first three hammer blows. Since the Jubilee of 2000, however, Pope John Paul II decided to change the ritual. Nowadays, the wall sealing the Holy Door of St. Peter's is demolished in the days leading up to the opening, the key to open the door is taken out of a box, and the Pope symbolically pushes the doors open. From that moment on, the door remains open throughout the Jubilee year for the passage of pilgrims. 

The present-day Holy Door is the work of the sculptor Vico Consorti (1902–1979), who won the competition for the creation of the Door for the 1949 Jubilee. Completed in 11 months, it was inaugurated on Christmas Eve 1949. It is adorned with 16 panels depicting the history of mankind, from "Sin and the Expulsion from the Earthly Paradise" to the "appearances of the risen Christ to Thomas and to all the Disciples". The last panel depicts the image of Christ as the door of salvation. At the top left can be seen the original inscription, with the bull of indiction of the first jubilee proclaimed by Boniface VIII in 1300.