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.

They are so many silent witnesses to denounce this blot on the story of mankind which, deliberately blind to the brilliance of Him Who is the Splendor and Light of the Father, deliberately straying from Christ, has descended and fallen into chaos and into the denial of its own dignity.

Even the little lamp is out in many majestic temples, in many modest chapels, where before the tabernacle it had shared the watches of the Divine Guest over a world asleep. What desolation! What contrast! Can there then be still hope for mankind?

DAWN OF HOPE

Blessed be the Lord! Out from the mournful groans of sorrow, from the very depths of the heart-rending anguish of oppressed individuals and countries there arises an aura of hope. To an ever-increasing number of noble souls there comes the thought, the will, ever cleared and stronger, to make of this world, this universal upheaval, a starting point for a new era of far- reaching renovation, the complete reorganization of the world. Thus while the armed forces continue to engage in murderous battles with weapons ever more deadly, the statesmen, responsible leaders of nations, meet for talks, for conferences, to determine the fundamental rights and duties on which should be built a community of states, and to blaze the trail towards a better future, more secure and more worthy of mankind. [cont.]

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