Stand in the portico of St Peter’s Basilica today and you can walk through four of the five main doors without a second thought. Try the fifth, on the far right as you face the church, and it will not budge. It is not locked. It has been bricked up from behind since early January.
Visitors ask about it constantly, usually after reading something about the 2025 Jubilee and wondering if they can still see the Holy Door in action. Short answer: not this year. Here is what it actually looks like right now, how the opening and closing ritual works, and when the door is next expected to swing.
What the Holy Door looks like right now
The panel you see today is bronze, sixteen sections cast for Pope Pius XII after the 1950 Holy Year, replacing an earlier wooden door that Pope Benedict XIV had installed in 1748. Vico Consorti modelled the reliefs; the Ferdinando Marinelli Artistic Foundry cast them. It is a real, physical door, which is more than could be said for most of its history.
Between a jubilee’s closing and the next one’s opening, the door does not simply get locked. According to Wikipedia’s entry on the Holy Door tradition, “the doors are normally sealed by mortar and cement from the inside so that they cannot be opened.” That is the state it is in now: bronze on the outside, mortar behind it, functionally a wall until the next ceremony.
It was more literal than that for centuries. “Between 1500 and 1974, the entrance portal was barricaded by a solid wall, not a door,” the same source notes. There was no bronze to look at at all for most of that span, just brickwork where a doorway should be. That current arrangement, a door that gets sealed rather than a wall that gets built, only dates to 1974.
How the door is closed
The Holy Door most recently closed on 6 January 2026, Epiphany, ending the 2025 Jubilee Year. Per Wikipedia’s entry on Jubilee 2025, “on 6 January 2026, Pope Leo XIV closed the Holy Door of St Peter’s Basilica, thus officially concluding the Holy Year.” That detail carries weight this time round. Pope Francis opened the door on Christmas Eve 2024; he died at Easter 2025 and never got to close it. Leo XIV, elected that May, inherited the closing ceremony for a jubilee he had not opened.
As of this writing the door has been sealed for roughly seven months, and it will stay that way for years yet.
How the opening ritual actually works
The tradition goes back to 1300, when Pope Boniface VIII proclaimed the first Holy Year. For most of that history the opening was a piece of theatre involving a hammer. Popes struck the sealed door three times while singing a versicle: “the Pope knocked upon the door three times with a silver hammer, singing the versicle ‘Open unto me the gates of justice.'” Only after the ceremonial blows did masons move in and physically break through the mortar.
That changed with the Jubilee of 2000. Rather than have the pope hammer through actual brickwork on camera, workers pre-emptively cleared the seal beforehand. “Workers removed the concrete before the ceremony, so that the Pope only had to push on the doors with his hands.” The three symbolic knocks stayed as ritual; the demolition work happened out of sight ahead of time.
2024’s opening followed that modern form. Francis, by then using a wheelchair, arrived at the door on Christmas Eve. “The jubilee began on Christmas Eve (24 December) 2024, with Francis knocking on the Holy Door of St Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican from his wheelchair. The door was swung open and Francis rolled through the doorway as the basilica’s Christmas Eve Mass began.” From the following day, the door was open to any pilgrim who wanted to walk through it: official Jubilee materials record that “from December 25, 2024 all the faithful who wish to do so can make a pilgrimage to the Holy Door of St Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican.”
Why it gets sealed again at all
The mortar is not maintenance, it is the point. A Holy Door that stayed open would just be a fifth entrance to the basilica. Sealing it between jubilees is what makes walking through it, on the rare occasions it opens, a distinct act rather than routine foot traffic. The 2025 Jubilee ran 379 days start to finish, Christmas Eve 2024 to Epiphany 2026, a span close to the 1999-2001 jubilee that preceded it. Once that window closes, the door goes back to being wall.
When it opens next
Here the honest answer is: nobody has proclaimed a firm date yet. Ordinary jubilees have historically run every 25 years, which would point toward 2050, but extraordinary jubilees have opened the door outside that cycle before. Wikipedia’s entry on the Holy Door notes that the passageway “will be bricked up again until the next Extraordinary Jubilee, probably in 2033,” a year some point to because it would mark two thousand years since the Crucifixion. That is speculation being floated by commentators, not a papal bull. Treat 2033 as a number worth watching rather than a booking you can plan a trip around.
Until any such announcement, the door you will see on a visit is the sealed bronze panel, not an open passage.
What you can still see and do
None of this affects entry to the basilica itself, which remains free and open through its other doors. Current published hours run from 7:00am to 8:00pm from June onward, per the basilica’s own site, though it flagged a change to those hours announced in May 2026, so it is worth checking the current posting before you build a schedule around it. The dome climb and the Pétros ení digital experience run on their own separate hours and carry their own fee.
The Holy Door itself is worth pointing out to a guide on your way past, if only because so few visitors know what they are looking at: a genuine bronze door, sealed shut behind sixteen bronze panels, waiting out a gap in the calendar that could run another two decades.
Planning a visit
If you are coming to see the basilica’s interior, the Pietà, Bernini’s baldachin, the dome, or the necropolis beneath the altar, none of that depends on the Holy Door being open. A guided visit gets you past the queue and gives you someone to point out details like the sealed door that a self-guided walk-through would miss entirely. You can browse St Peter’s Basilica tickets and tours to find a slot that fits your dates.