(Vatican Radio) Pope Benedict XVI led the Universal Church in joyous celebrations
for the birth of Our Lord Christmas Eve in Mass attended by thousands and broadcast
globally from St. Peter’s Basilica. During his homily he posed a question to believers
and non-believers alike: Will people find room in their hectic, technology-driven
lives for children, the poor and God?. He also also prayed that Israelis and Palestinians
live in peace and freedom, and asked the faithful to pray for strife-torn Syria as
well as Lebanon and Iraq.
Below the full text of Pope Benedict XVI’s
Homily at Christmas Mass 2012
Homily Christmas Vigil
Dear Brothers
and Sisters! Again and again the beauty of this Gospel touches our hearts: a beauty
that is the splendour of truth. Again and again it astonishes us that God makes himself
a child so that we may love him, so that we may dare to love him, and as a child trustingly
lets himself be taken into our arms. It is as if God were saying: I know that my
glory frightens you, and that you are trying to assert yourself in the face of my
grandeur. So now I am coming to you as a child, so that you can accept me and love
me. I am also repeatedly struck by the Gospel writer’s almost casual remark that
there was no room for them at the inn. Inevitably the question arises, what would
happen if Mary and Joseph were to knock at my door. Would there be room for them?
And then it occurs to us that Saint John takes up this seemingly chance comment about
the lack of room at the inn, which drove the Holy Family into the stable; he explores
it more deeply and arrives at the heart of the matter when he writes: “he came to
his own home, and his own people received him not” (Jn 1:11). The great moral question
of our attitude towards the homeless, towards refugees and migrants, takes on a deeper
dimension: do we really have room for God when he seeks to enter under our roof?
Do we have time and space for him? Do we not actually turn away God himself? We
begin to do so when we have no time for him. The faster we can move, the more efficient
our time-saving appliances become, the less time we have. And God? The question
of God never seems urgent. Our time is already completely full. But matters go deeper
still. Does God actually have a place in our thinking? Our process of thinking is
structured in such a way that he simply ought not to exist. Even if he seems to knock
at the door of our thinking, he has to be explained away. If thinking is to be taken
seriously, it must be structured in such a way that the “God hypothesis” becomes superfluous.
There is no room for him. Not even in our feelings and desires is there any room
for him. We want ourselves. We want what we can seize hold of, we want happiness
that is within our reach, we want our plans and purposes to succeed. We are so “full”
of ourselves that there is no room left for God. And that means there is no room
for others either, for children, for the poor, for the stranger. By reflecting on
that one simple saying about the lack of room at the inn, we have come to see how
much we need to listen to Saint Paul’s exhortation: “Be transformed by the renewal
of your mind” (Rom 12:2). Paul speaks of renewal, the opening up of our intellect
(nous), of the whole way we view the world and ourselves. The conversion that we
need must truly reach into the depths of our relationship with reality. Let us ask
the Lord that we may become vigilant for his presence, that we may hear how softly
yet insistently he knocks at the door of our being and willing. Let us ask that we
may make room for him within ourselves, that we may recognize him also in those through
whom he speaks to us: children, the suffering, the abandoned, those who are excluded
and the poor of this world. There is another verse from the Christmas story on
which I should like to reflect with you – the angels’ hymn of praise, which they sing
out following the announcement of the new-born Saviour: “Glory to God in the highest
and on earth peace among men with whom he is pleased.” God is glorious. God is pure
light, the radiance of truth and love. He is good. He is true goodness, goodness
par excellence. The angels surrounding him begin by simply proclaiming the joy of
seeing God’s glory. Their song radiates the joy that fills them. In their words,
it is as if we were hearing the sounds of heaven. There is no question of attempting
to understand the meaning of it all, but simply the overflowing happiness of seeing
the pure splendour of God’s truth and love. We want to let this joy reach out and
touch us: truth exists, pure goodness exists, pure light exists. God is good, and
he is the supreme power above all powers. All this should simply make us joyful tonight,
together with the angels and the shepherds. Linked to God’s glory on high is peace
on earth among men. Where God is not glorified, where he is forgotten or even denied,
there is no peace either. Nowadays, though, widespread currents of thought assert
the exact opposite: they say that religions, especially monotheism, are the cause
of the violence and the wars in the world. If there is to be peace, humanity must
first be liberated from them. Monotheism, belief in one God, is said to be arrogance,
a cause of intolerance, because by its nature, with its claim to possess the sole
truth, it seeks to impose itself on everyone. Now it is true that in the course of
history, monotheism has served as a pretext for intolerance and violence. It is true
that religion can become corrupted and hence opposed to its deepest essence, when
people think they have to take God’s cause into their own hands, making God into their
private property. We must be on the lookout for these distortions of the sacred.
While there is no denying a certain misuse of religion in history, yet it is not true
that denial of God would lead to peace. If God’s light is extinguished, man’s divine
dignity is also extinguished. Then the human creature would cease to be God’s image,
to which we must pay honour in every person, in the weak, in the stranger, in the
poor. Then we would no longer all be brothers and sisters, children of the one Father,
who belong to one another on account of that one Father. The kind of arrogant violence
that then arises, the way man then despises and tramples upon man: we saw this in
all its cruelty in the last century. Only if God’s light shines over man and within
him, only if every single person is desired, known and loved by God is his dignity
inviolable, however wretched his situation may be. On this Holy Night, God himself
became man; as Isaiah prophesied, the child born here is “Emmanuel”, God with us (Is
7:14). And down the centuries, while there has been misuse of religion, it is also
true that forces of reconciliation and goodness have constantly sprung up from faith
in the God who became man. Into the darkness of sin and violence, this faith has
shone a bright ray of peace and goodness, which continues to shine. So Christ is
our peace, and he proclaimed peace to those far away and to those near at hand (cf.
Eph 2:14, 17). How could we now do other than pray to him: Yes, Lord, proclaim peace
today to us too, whether we are far away or near at hand. Grant also to us today
that swords may be turned into ploughshares (Is 2:4), that instead of weapons for
warfare, practical aid may be given to the suffering. Enlighten those who think they
have to practise violence in your name, so that they may see the senselessness of
violence and learn to recognize your true face. Help us to become people “with whom
you are pleased” – people according to your image and thus people of peace. Once
the angels departed, the shepherds said to one another: Let us go over to Bethlehem
and see this thing that has happened for us (cf. Lk 2:15). The shepherds went with
haste to Bethlehem, the Evangelist tells us (cf. 2:16). A holy curiosity impelled
them to see this child in a manger, who the angel had said was the Saviour, Christ
the Lord. The great joy of which the angel spoke had touched their hearts and given
them wings. Let us go over to Bethlehem, says the Church’s liturgy to us today.
Trans-eamus is what the Latin Bible says: let us go “across”, daring to step beyond,
to make the “transition” by which we step outside our habits of thought and habits
of life, across the purely material world into the real one, across to the God who
in his turn has come across to us. Let us ask the Lord to grant that we may overcome
our limits, our world, to help us to encounter him, especially at the moment when
he places himself into our hands and into our heart in the Holy Eucharist. Let
us go over to Bethlehem: as we say these words to one another, along with the shepherds,
we should not only think of the great “crossing over” to the living God, but also
of the actual town of Bethlehem and all those places where the Lord lived, ministered
and suffered. Let us pray at this time for the people who live and suffer there today.
Let us pray that there may be peace in that land. Let us pray that Israelis and Palestinians
may be able to live their lives in the peace of the one God and in freedom. Let us
also pray for the countries of the region, for Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and their neighbours:
that there may be peace there, that Christians in those lands where our faith was
born may be able to continue living there, that Christians and Muslims may build up
their countries side by side in God’s peace. The shepherds made haste. Holy curiosity
and holy joy impelled them. In our case, it is probably not very often that we make
haste for the things of God. God does not feature among the things that require haste.
The things of God can wait, we think and we say. And yet he is the most important
thing, ultimately the one truly important thing. Why should we not also be moved
by curiosity to see more closely and to know what God has said to us? At this hour,
let us ask him to touch our hearts with the holy curiosity and the holy joy of the
shepherds, and thus let us go over joyfully to Bethlehem, to the Lord who today once
more comes to meet us. Amen.