Pope Pius XII
POPE Pius XII delivered this Christmas message, “Democracy and a Lasting Peace,” in 1944:
“But when the goodness and kindness of God our Saviour appeared” (St. Paul’s Epistle to Titus, Chap. 3, 4th verse).
For the sixth time since the opening of the dreadful war, the Christmas liturgy again hails with these words redolent of peaceful serenity, the coming into our midst of God, Our Saviour.
The humble, mean cradle of Bethlehem, by its wonderful charm, focuses the attention of all believers. Deep into the hearts of those in darkness, affliction and depression there sinks and pervades a great flood of light and joy.
Heads that were bowed lift again serenely, for Christmas is the feast of human dignity, “the wonderful exchange by which the Creator of the human race, taking a living body, deigned to be born of a virgin, and by His coming bestowed on us His divinity” (first antiphon of first vesper for the feast of the Circumcision).
But our gaze turns quickly from the Babe of the Crib to the world around us, and the sorrowful sigh of John the Evangelist comes to our lips: “and the light shines in darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it” (John, first chapter, fifth verse).
For alas, for the sixth time, the Christmas dawn breaks again on battlefields spreading ever wider, on graveyards where are gathered the remains of victims in ever-increasing numbers, on desert lands where a few tottering towers tell with silent pathos the story of cities once flourishing and prosperous, and where bells fallen or carried off no longer awaken the inhabitants with their jubilant Christmas chimes. Read More »