The Vatican's Holy Door, closed until the next Holy Year

Plenty of people still arrive at St Peter’s hoping to walk through the Holy Door, because during 2025 it was all anyone talked about. In 2026 the short answer is that it’s shut. Here’s since when, why, what you can see of it today and when it’s reasonable to expect it to open again, without passing off dates that nobody has set.

Shut since 6 January 2026

The bull with which Pope Francis called the Jubilee, Spes non confundit, fixed both dates. The Holy Door of St Peter’s would open on 24 December 2024, and the Holy Year would end with its closing on 6 January 2026, the Epiphany. That’s how it went. Francis opened it on Christmas Eve, one of the big dates of Christmas at the Vatican, by knocking twice on the bronze doors, and Vatican News reported some 25,000 people following from the square and another 6,000 inside the basilica.

It was a different pope who closed it. Francis died in April 2025, and it fell to Leo XIV to end the Jubilee on 6 January 2026. In his homily that day he said as much, that the Holy Door of this basilica had been the last to close. Those at St Mary Major, St John Lateran and St Paul Outside the Walls had shut in December 2025.

According to the Italian press, since 1975 the rite no longer includes bricking up the door in public. The pope closes the two leaves, and some days later the sampietrini, the basilica’s own craftsmen, build a brick wall on the inside, sealing in a metal box with the record of the closing, coins minted during the Jubilee year and the keys. I haven’t found the exact date of the 2026 walling-up in an official source, so I’ll leave it there.

When will the Holy Door open again?

When the next Holy Year begins, and that’s the pope’s call. The 2024 bull itself recalls that, by ancient tradition, a Jubilee is called every twenty-five years. On that count, the next ordinary one would fall in 2050. That’s my own arithmetic from the tradition, not an announced date.

There could be one sooner. The official history of the Jubilees lists several extraordinary ones, in 1933 for 1,900 years since the death of Jesus, in 1983 for 1,950 years since his death and resurrection, and the Jubilee of Mercy, which opened this same door on 8 December 2015. Francis’s bull also points out that 2033 marks two thousand years since the Redemption. Given the precedents, an extraordinary Jubilee that year wouldn’t surprise me, but as of 25 September 2026 I haven’t found any bull calling one, and I’m not going to sell it to you as a certainty.

What it is, and why it only opens in Holy Years

The Fabbrica di San Pietro puts it in a line. The door only opens in Jubilees, and walking through it symbolises an act of penance and the plenary indulgence. The official Jubilee website adds the link to John’s Gospel, ‘I am the door’, and explains that at first there was only one, at St John Lateran, the cathedral of the Bishop of Rome. The other papal basilicas later followed suit.

The history is worth a moment. The first Jubilee was in 1300, under Boniface VIII, and Martin V opened the first Holy Door at the Lateran in 1425. The twenty-five-year rhythm came in under Paul II, and the first Jubilee on that cycle was 1475, under Sixtus IV. If you want those popes in context, they’re laid out in the history of the Vatican.

What you can see today

The door is in the portico of Maderno’s façade, which has five entrances into the atrium, and that’s where the 2024 opening rite took place. Closed, what you see are the bronze doors with their panels telling the story of salvation. There’s no ticket or booking involved, because the portico is part of the way into St Peter’s Basilica, which costs nothing after the security check under the right-hand colonnade.

I’d treat it as a one-minute stop on arrival, not the reason for the trip. Just inside, in the first chapel on the right, is Michelangelo’s Pietà, and further down the nave you reach Bernini’s baldachin. If what you’re after is a moment of faith with the Pope, in 2026 the Wednesday papal audience makes far more sense than a closed door.