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Christmas 2006

On the second Sunday of Advent we prayed with the Church in the Holy Mass of that day: “Stir up our hearts, O Lord, to make ready the paths of Thine only begotten Son, that through His coming we may become worthy to serve Thee with purified minds. Thou Who art God living and reigning for ever and ever.  And on the third Sunday we make this appeal: “Lend Thine ear, O Lord, we beseech Thee to our prayer, and lighten the darkness of our minds with the grace of Thy coming.”

Surrounded by a noisy world which is becoming ever more “the world of the prince of darkness,” we must close our ears to the message of secularism being proclaimed day after day by RTE and the media generally; a message which excludes, to a great extent, reference to the Birth of Christ. Let us pray with generous hearts those prayers I have given you, and prepare our souls by a good Confession so that the paths to our hearts are well cleaned and bright with sacramental grace to give a warm welcome to the Babe of Bethlehem; and make Him the cause of the joy and peace and love in our homes; and to bring that with us into whatever families we may visit.

And art Thou come, blest Babe, and come to me?
Come down, to teach me how to come to Thee?
Welcome, thrice welcome, to my panting soul,
Which, as it loves, doth grieve that ‘tis so foul.
The less ‘tis fit for Thee come from above,
The more it needs Thee, and the more I love.

                                 [Anonymous]

Lighting a Candle

The most important way of bringing the reality of Christ’s birth into our lives is the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass; but we must prepare ourselves well to make ourselves spiritually one with the Priest, and so with Christ the Priest and Victim, and with all the angels and  saints of Heaven. At the Synod of Bishops, October 2005, Cardinal Ivan Dias, Archbishop of Bombay and now Prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples, made this intervention, which should be a great help to us all:

“The mystical dimension of the Eucharistic Mystery must be made present every time a priest celebrates Holy Mass. There are myriads of invisible witnesses who surround him as he re-enacts the august Sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross.   At every celebration of the Holy Mass, the celebrant and his congregation must be aware of the ‘communion of saints’ which unites the faith, hope and love of all the members of the Universal Church:  the expectant faith of the People of God on earth, the hope of the holy souls in Purgatory, and the love of those surrounding the throne of God Almighty.

The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass thus mingles the Magnificat of the Blessed Virgin with the Hallelujah and Hosanna of the angels and saints in heaven, the Kyrie Eleison of the holy souls in Purgatory and the Maranatha of all the faithful on earth. The adoration of the Most Blessed Sacrament is available to everyone, even to Catholics who for any reason cannot receive Jesus in Holy Communion.

Among the many shadows in our Church today, the decreasing number of churchgoers, the waning interest in sacramental confession, and the lack of catechesis have been mentioned. These problems have been in the Church always, albeit in different ways. On the other hand, the Church has also had persons who have tackled such situations in ways which can inspire us even today. Everyone knows of the saintly Curé of Ars and great apostle of the confessional, John Mary Vianney; and of Archbishop Fulton Sheen, the brilliant speaker who reached millions of persons through his television and radio broadcasts. The secret of their resounding success was the many hours they spent in prayer before the Blessed Sacrament. They could well be role models for priests and bishops to-day.

There is a Chinese proverb which says: ‘Instead of cursing the darkness, light a candle’.  As we are immersed in the darkness of spiritual and moral ills all around us, would it not be wonderful if bishops and priests all over the world would spend an hour in praise and worship of the Blessed Sacrament every day, interceding for themselves, for the faithful entrusted to their pastoral care and for the needs of the whole Church?”

The Immaculate Conception

“Clothed with the sun, the moon under her feet and upon her head a crown of twelve stars” — O Immaculate Virgin, heavenly vision of the Apocalypse, thou art all fair! Powerful with the strength drawn from the Cross, thou tramplest under foot the accursed serpent.”

In the first antiphon at Vespers, the Church proclaims: “Thou art all fair, O Mary, unstained by original sin.” This cry of admiration, which the Church puts on our lips, expresses the feelings of mankind subject to the evil consequences of sin, before the spotless purity of our Lady. From all eternity God had chosen Mary to be the Mother of the Word Incarnate; the Epistle of the feast begins with: “The Lord possessed me in the beginning of His ways.” He therefore decked her in holiness preserving her from all stain and making her a worthy dwelling for His Son. The Blessed Virgin’s perfect redemption which, from the moment of her conception, preserved her from original sin cannot, therefore, be dissociated from our redemption by Christ; and so the feast of the Immaculate Conception, coming in the course of Advent, heralds the splendours of the Incarnation of the Redeemer.

As we have it today, the feast was instituted by Pope Pius 1X when he defined the dogma on December 8th, 1854. However, a feast of the  “Conception” was celebrated long before; it is to be found in the East in the eighth century, in Ireland in the ninth and in England in the eleventh century. These feasts are evidence of the traditional veneration of Mary’s spotless holiness; Pius IX’s definition only reaffirmed and defined the meaning of the Church’s traditional belief.

The early Fathers of the Church were lost for words, so to speak, in their veneration of Mary on this great feast. Just listen to part of a sermon of St. Jerome: “The virtue and the greatness of the blessed and ever glorious Mary ever Virgin were proclaimed in God’s own words by the Angel when he said: ‘Hail full of grace, the Lord is with thee, Blessed art thou among women.’ For it was fitting that the Virgin should be enriched by gifts so great as to make her full of grace — she who gave glory to heaven, the Lord to earth, poured out peace on the world, gave faith to the nations, made an end to wickedness, brought order to life, instruction and discipline to human ways.  And indeed she is full of grace, for whereas grace is given to others only in part, on Mary it was poured out all at once in all its fullness. She is truly full of grace; for even though, as we believe, the holy Prophets and Fathers possessed grace, it was not yet in fullness; but in Mary came the whole fullness of all grace, which is in Christ, although in another way. And therefore the Angel says, “Blessed art thou among women.” Thus whatever curse devolved upon mankind through Eve was wholly removed by the blessing given to Mary. All the special gifts that Eve lost by original sin, were restored to Mary in their fullness establishing her as the ‘second Eve’ mother of all the living.….Everything about her is wholly the work of purity and simplicity, of grace and truth, of the mercy and justice that look down from heaven.    All are in accord with St. Anselm when he says: “It is fitting that the Virgin should be resplendent with purity such that none could be conceived more perfect save only God.”  And St. Thomas Aquinas exegesis of Psalm 18 v.6:  “He hath set His tabernacle in the sun”: “This” says St. Thomas,  “means that Christ caused His body to rest in the sun, that is in the Blessed Virgin who had no darkening of sin, according to the word of the Canticle: ‘Thou art all beautiful, my beloved, there is no spot in thee’” And in Pope Pius 1X’s decree:  “Mary, wholly ordered to Jesus from the first instant of her existence, identified with His Passion in the being of grace which made her the new Eve, was thus wholly of the Blood of Jesus, His daughter according to the Spirit, before He was of her blood according to the flesh in that ineffable motherhood which was to be the eternal giving back in love of all that she had received from Him.  Jesus triumphant in Mary: Mary made totally His, conceived for Him and already prepared for Him in the first instant of her existence:  that fundamentally is what faith has come to see, giving to the angelic salutation the plenitude of possible meaning: Hail full of grace, the Lord is with thee.   As in the Blessed Trinity, the Father is His Paternity, as a living relation to His Son, so likewise the Blessed Virgin draws, so to speak, all her personality from the ineffable relation which consecrates her wholly to that same Son, Whom she bore in her flesh as the fruit of the Spirit.”

The Burning Babe

As I in hoary winter’s night stood shivering in the snow,
Surprised I was with sudden heat which made my heart to glow;
And lifting up a fearful eye to view what fire was near,
A pretty Babe all burning bright did in the air appear;
Who, scorched with excessive heat, such floods of tears did shed,
As though His floods should quench his flames with which His tears were fed
“Alas” quoth He, “but newly born in fiery heats I fry,
Yet none approach to warm their hearts or feel My fire but I,
My faultless breast the furnace is, the fuel wounding thorns;
Love is the fire, and sighs the smoke, the ashes shame and scorn;
The fuel justice layeth on, and mercy blows the coals;
The metal in this furnace wrought are men’s defiled souls;
For which, as now on fire I am to work them to their good,
So will I melt into a bath to wash them in My Blood.”
With this He vanished out of sight and swiftly shrunk away,
And straight I called unto mind that it was Christmas day.

[Robert Southwell 1561–1595]

This Christmas, make sure you celebrate the wonderful message of the Angel choir to the Shepherds: “This day is born for you a Saviour, Who is Christ the Lord!” — then He will surely enkindle in your hearts the warmth of His immense love.