Pope Francis offers Christmas Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica on Dec. 24, 2021 / Vatican Media
Vatican City, Dec 24, 2021 / 14:00 pm (CNA).
Below is the full text of Pope Francis’ homily for the Solemnity of the Nativity of the Lord, delivered Dec. 24, 2021 in St. Peter’s Basilica.
In the darkness, a light shines. An angel appears, the glory of the Lord shines around the shepherds and finally the message awaited for centuries is heard: “To you is born this day a Savior, who is Christ the Lord” (Lk 2:11). The angel goes on to say something surprising. He tells the shepherds how to find the God who has come down to earth: “This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in swaddling clothes, and lying in a manger” (v. 12). That is the sign: a child, a baby lying in the dire poverty of a manger. No more bright lights or choirs of angels. Only a child. Nothing else, even as Isaiah had foretold: “unto us a child is born” (Is 9:6).
The Gospel emphasizes this contrast. It relates the birth of Jesus beginning with Caesar Augustus, who orders the census of the whole world: it presents the first Emperor in all his grandeur. Yet immediately thereafter it brings us to Bethlehem, where there is no grandeur at all: just a poor child wrapped in swaddling clothes, with shepherds standing by. That is where God is, in littleness. This is the message: God does not rise up in grandeur, but lowers himself into littleness. Littleness is the path that he chose to draw near to us, to touch our hearts, to save us and to bring us back to what really matters.
Brothers and sisters, standing before the crib, we contemplate what is central, beyond all the lights and decorations, which are beautiful. We contemplate the child. In his littleness, God is completely present. Let us acknowledge this: “Baby Jesus, you are God, the God who becomes a child”. Let us be amazed by this scandalous truth. The One who embraces the universe needs to be held in another’s arms. The One who created the sun needs to be warmed. Tenderness incarnate needs to be coddled. Infinite love has a miniscule heart that beats softly. The eternal Word is an “infant”, a speechless child. The Bread of life needs to be nourished. The Creator of the world has no home. Today, all is turned upside down: God comes into the world in littleness. His grandeur appears in littleness.
Let us ask ourselves: can we accept God’s way of doing things? This is the challenge of Christmas: God reveals himself, but men and women fail to understand. He makes himself little in the eyes of the world, while we continue to seek grandeur in the eyes of the world, perhaps even in his name. God lowers himself and we try to become great. The Most High goes in search of shepherds, the unseen in our midst, and we look for visibility, to be seen. Jesus is born in order to serve, and we spend a lifetime pursuing success. God does not seek power and might; he asks for tender love and interior littleness.
This is what we should ask Jesus for at Christmas: the grace of littleness. “Lord, teach us to love littleness. Help us to understand that littleness is the way to authentic greatness”. What does it mean, concretely, to accept littleness? In the first place, it means to believe that God desires to come into the little things of our life; he wants to inhabit our daily lives, the things we do each day at home, in our families, at school and in the workplace. Amid our ordinary lived experience, he wants to do extraordinary things. His is a message of immense hope. Jesus asks us to rediscover and value the little things in life. If he is present there, what else do we need? Let us stop pining for a grandeur that is not ours to have. Let us put aside our complaints and our gloomy faces, and the greed that never satisfies! The littleness, the wonder at that small child – this is the message.
Yet there is more. Jesus does not want to come merely in the little things of our lives, but also in our own littleness: in our experience of feeling weak, frail, inadequate, perhaps even “messed up”. Dear sister or brother, if, as in Bethlehem, the darkness of night overwhelms you, if you feel surrounded by cold indifference, if the hurt you carry inside cries out, “You are of little account; you are worthless; you will never be loved the way you want”, tonight, if you hear this, God answers back. Tonight he tells you: “I love you just as you are. Your littleness does not frighten me, your failings do not trouble me. I became little for your sake. To be your God, I became your brother. Dear brother, dear sister, don’t be afraid of me. Find in me your measure of greatness. I am close to you, and one thing only do I ask: trust me and open your heart to me”.
To accept littleness means something else too. It means embracing Jesus in the little ones of today. Loving him, that is, in the least of our brothers and sisters. Serving him in the poor, those most like Jesus who was born in poverty. It is in them that he wants to be honored. On this night of love, may we have only one fear: that of offending God’s love, hurting him by despising the poor with our indifference. Jesus loves them dearly, and one day they will welcome us to heaven. A poet once wrote: “Who has not found the Heaven – below – Will fail of it above” (E. DICKINSON, Poems, P96-17). Let us not lose sight of heaven; let us care for Jesus now, caressing him in the needy, because in them he makes himself known.
We gaze once again at the crib, and we see that at his birth Jesus is surrounded precisely by those little ones, by the poor. It is the shepherds. They were the most simple people, and closest to the Lord. They found him because they lived in the fields, “keeping watch over their flocks by night” (Lk 2:8). They were there to work, because they were poor. They had no timetables in life; everything depended on the flock. They could not live where and how they wanted, but on the basis of the needs of the sheep they tended. That is where Jesus is born: close to them, close to the forgotten ones of the peripheries. He comes where human dignity is put to the test. He comes to ennoble the excluded and he first reveals himself to them: not to educated and important people, but to poor working people. God tonight comes to fill with dignity the austerity of labour. He reminds us of the importance of granting dignity to men and women through labour, but also of granting dignity to human labour itself, since man is its master and not its slave. On the day of Life, let us repeat: no more deaths in the workplace! And let us commit ourselves to ensuring this.
As we take one last look at the crib, in the distance, we glimpse the Magi, journeying to worship the Lord. As we look more closely, we see that all around Jesus everything comes together: not only do we see the poor, the shepherds, but also the learned and the rich, the Magi. Everything is unified when Jesus is at the center: not our ideas about Jesus, but Jesus himself, the living One.
So then, dear brothers and sisters, let us return to Bethlehem, let us return to the origins: to the essentials of faith, to our first love, to adoration and charity. Let us look at the Magi who make their pilgrim way, and as a synodal Church, a journeying Church, let us go to Bethlehem, where God is in man and man in God. There the Lord takes first place and is worshipped; there the poor have the place nearest him; there the shepherds and Magi are joined in a fraternity beyond all labels and classifications. May God enable us to be a worshipping, poor and fraternal Church. That is what is essential. Let us go back to Bethlehem.
It is good for us to go there, obedient to the Gospel of Christmas, which shows us the Holy Family, the shepherds, the Magi: all people on a journey. Brothers and sisters, let us set out, for life itself is a pilgrimage. Let us rouse ourselves, for tonight a light has been lit, a kindly light, reminding us that, in our littleness, we are beloved sons and daughters, children of the light (cf. 1 Thess 5:5). Brothers and sisters, let us rejoice together, for no one will ever extinguish this light, the light of Jesus, who tonight shines brightly in our world.
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Francis says: “It will do us good to ask ourselves if we are still living in the period in which we need the Law, or if instead we are well aware that we have received the grace of having become children of God so as to live in love,” he said.
JESUS SAID: “If you keep My commandments, you will abide in My love; just as I have kept My Father’s commandments and abide in His love.” (John 15:9-10)
JESUS ALSO SAID: If you love me, you will keep my commandments. (John 14:15)
So yes, we are aware. Jesus commanded we obey the commandments as the method through which we give and receive God’s love and grace.
“But Peter and the apostles answered, ‘We must obey God rather than men.’ (Acts 5:29).
And Jesus warned, in the form of a command: “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravening wolves.” (Matthew 7:15)
And then, other than the Fourth Gospel, there are the letters of John:
“And by this we can be sure we know him, if we keep his commandments. He who says that he knows him, and does not keep his commandments, is a liar and the truth is not in him. But he who keeps his word, in him the love of God is truly perfected; and by this we know that we are in him” (1 John 2:3-5).
What is there about “thou shalt not have strange gods before me” that leaves a niche inside St. Peter’s Basilica for Pachamama and the synodal antics in Germania; or about “thou shalt not commit adultery” that offers wiggle room, so to speak? But who are we to judge?
“Do I disregard the Commandments? No. I observe them, but not as absolutes, because I know that what justifies me is Jesus Christ.”
And, therefore, we never mention Veritatis Splendor which holds that “…the commandment of love of God and neighbor does not have in its dynamic any higher limit, BUT (Caps added) it does have a lower limit, beneath which the commandment is broken” (n. 52).
And lest moral ambiguity itself be made into an absolute (!), this: “The relationship between faith and morality shines forth with all its brilliance in the UNCONDITIONAL RESPECT DUE TO THE INSISTENT DEMANDS OF THE PERSONAL DIGNITY OF EVERY MAN (italics), demand protected by those moral norms which prohibit WITHOUT EXCEPTION (Caps added) actions which are intrinsically evil” (n. 90).
So much for the new pseudo-absolutes: the Fundamental Option, “proportionalism,” and “consequentialism” (nn. 65 and 75).
His Holiness is on a mission to reinterpret the Apostle Paul as the epistles of Martin Luther. Paul made it clear Christ perfects the Law since it is in Christ and love for him that we can live the Commandments [Rules] in spirit and in truth. If you love me, keep my commandments (JN14:15). A fundamental truth that we are justified by Christ alone was misinterpreted by Luther with omission of works, whereas Christ, Paul, the Apostles demanded repentance. The marketing of His Holiness’ doctrine to the world is as most know mercy sans strict adherence to rules with the deceptive argument of Luther’s doctrine of justification. In principle[only] it is true since it is Our Lord who first provides prevenient grace. A premise Luther cites as election. Nonetheless, we do respond to grace in time although in the order of nature God first provides grace. What is omitted is free will, a reality that troubled Luther. Therefore, predestination. We are free to reject that grace as Saint Thomas Aquinas pointedly asserts. Otherwise without consent there would be no true repentance, simply facsimile. Jesus’ Gospel as Bishop Barron faithfully markets is instead the Word on Fire.
Noticing another card on the table, we see that Predestination is not only key to Lutheranism but is also a central tenet of Islam. As a mindset, we are broadly alerted to the similar DNA for early Protestantism and for much-earlier and more distant Islam:
“There is something decidedly Islamic in original Protestantism, with its idea of an all-controlling hidden God and His infallible Prophet, its secularization of marriage, its Puritanism and messianism. Even today some of the survivals of original (i.e., pre-liberal) Protestantism in remote parts of Scandinavia, Holland, Scotland and the United States have, at least culturally, more affinity with the Wahhabis than with Catholics from which they stem. It must be borne in mind that not so much the authoritarian organization but the liberal theology [e.g., free will versus Predestination of the elect] of Catholicism was the target of the reformers” (Eric von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, “Liberty or Equality,” 1952).
A complication to keep in mind—-grace without moral absolutes—-as Church voices propose mutual understanding now at the cross-cultural (no longer inter-religious) level, under the Abu Dhabi Declaration of 2019….
“The pluralism and the diversity of religions, colour, sex, race and language are willed [!] by God in His wisdom, through which He created human beings,” states the bundled document (versus an only “permitted” pluralism of religion).
Interesting nexus between Protestant reform and Islam. Abu Dhabi credo pluralism and diversity of sex seems inserted under camouflage of religions, race, language. There’s an affinity in Abu Dhabi with Fratelli Tutti. About the distancing from free will by the Reformers beginning I suppose with Luther, at least markedly is the satisfying sense of being saved whatever. And with that an icy Kantian coldness [Kant despised sentiment, music comparing the latter with flatulence] seen in rejection of a Loving Blessed Mother given us by her Son from the Cross. Certainly not however for Protestants I’ve known who in our day became more religiously eclectic. Now with Francis there’s emphasis on sentiment, perhaps, not anomalously couched in harshness toward the very human aesthetic of tradition, and his frequent striking derogation of Mary.
Silly me. I always thought the multiple moral laws that require defending life from harm had a self-evident connection to love. Where did my parents go wrong in raising me? Where did my teacher of moral theology who taught in more fomal terms what my parents taught me go wrong?
Just as I was getting very depressed at witnessing Francis express another point of Lutheran ignorance in not distinguishing between ancient ritual law and divinely endowed innate natural law that Our Lord revealed in all its beauty, at the Sermon on the Mount, that is a healing salve for the world as a field hospital for which Francis claims to care but gives many indicators to the contrary, I watched EWTN’s World Over rebroadcast of an interview of Father Richard Neuhaus from 2002, being prophetic about the integration of moral doctrine, the truth about love, and the crisis in the Church. Watch it. It will remain on YouTube for a long time. (08-26-21 broadcast)
46 While he was still speaking to the people, behold, his mother and his brethren stood outside, asking to speak to him. 48 But he replied to the man who told him, “Who is my mother, and who are my brethren?” 49 And stretching out his hand toward his disciples, he said, “Here are my mother and my brethren! 50 For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother, and sister, and mother.” (Matthew 12:46-50)
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11 Then I saw a great white throne and him who sat upon it; from his presence earth and sky fled away, and no place was found for them. 12 And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Also another book was opened, which is the book of life. And the dead were judged by what was written in the books, by what they had done. 13 And the sea gave up the dead in it, Death and Hades gave up the dead in them, and all were judged by what they had done. 14 Then Death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. This is the second death, the lake of fire; 15 and if any one’s name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire. (Revelation 20:11-15)
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According to these passages we need to give a response to God’s love and His call. The way some people use God’s unconditional love and justification through Jesus Christ appears to suggest once saved always saved. For all practical purposes hasn’t a stiff-necked, hard-hearted, impenitent sinner filed for divorce from God? Reconciliation with God requires sinners who are willing to repent of their own free will.