Pope Francis’s Christmas Homily.

Matt O’Donnell, Chicago, IL
Community of Sant’Egidio | January 31, 2017

It has been a little over a month since Christmas. As a Chicagoan, it means that my mind is now firmly set on June 1st, the date I can feel confident there will be no more snow (for at least a few months). As an employee in corporate America, it means that as President’s Day draws near, so too does the drought of three-day weekends (Memorial Day you can’t come fast enough). And as a Catholic, this time usually means that the “warm and fuzzies” of the Christmas spirit have faded away and I likely will not yet think about Easter until I see my first fellow Catholic donning their ashes on Ash Wednesday.

This year, though, I made a note. I wanted to make an effort to not let Christmas slip away so easily. I hope to do this by holding onto a message from Pope Francis’s Christmas Eve homily. I set this as a goal for myself because the messages we hear every major Christian holiday are not meant to be left in their respective holiday seasons. They are meant to be lived out during the year. They are not meant just for Catholics. They are meant for all of us.

Below is the YouTube video, with English translation, of Christmas Eve mass at St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican. It starts playing at the beginning of Pope Francis’s homily. My hope is that those reading this blog post take the time to listen to and read his homily. I hope you are able to find something in it that resonates with you: a message, a theme, a new way of thinking. I hope you find something that you will carry with you beyond the holiday season and into the year ahead.

For me, this was when Pope Francis said this about the birth of Christ:

“He appears not in the splendor of a royal palace, but in the poverty of a stable; not in pomp and show, but in the simplicity of life; not in power, but in astonishing smallness. In order to meet him, we need to go where he is. We need to bow down, to humble ourselves, to make ourselves small.”

As I get older, I notice that my faith, and how I interpret it, is constantly evolving. In high school, I may have interpreted the words above to mean that I must humble myself before God, that God manifested himself in the human form, so that he may guide us. Although I can still see merit in that view, my current views are a bit different. I now read these words and think that God does not appear in the splendor of being a deity that is separate and apart from us. Rather, he appears in the simplicity of life, which is within all of us. He can be found in the astonishing smallness of the person who sits next to you at work. He can appear as a Muslim, a Jew, a Christian, or an atheist. God can be American, Italian, Iranian, or Japanese. As corny as I may sound, I think this is an apt message for where we find ourselves today. We need to be reminded to humble ourselves in front of each other so that we may see the good in each other. So that we may see God in each other. It is not easy to do this. It takes courage. When we act in fear, we puff out our chests and isolate ourselves. It is a natural instinctual reaction that we have to protect ourselves. This leads to division and disarray. If we humble ourselves, and quiet ourselves, if we go to one another, and meet one another, maybe it just might feel a little more like Christmas year round.

(English Transcript)