THE GREATEST EVENT OF ALL

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 76, Issue 303, 23 December 1933, Page 1 (Supplement)

THE GREATEST EVENT OF ALL

"Et verbum caro factum est, et habitavit in nobis." The fleeting year has brought around once more the season that we know as Christmas, a season which of all periods in the church’s calendar is the most beautiful in its signification, and the most prolific in the blessings that it holds for man. It is a season that is ever welcome because of the boundless joy it brings; a season whose occurrence year by year reminds us forcibly, yet sweetly, of the greatest event that created nature has ever witnessed. No other happening in this created world can make comparison with it. Illustrious men have lived and died; great battles have been fought and won, empires have arisen, flourished and decayed, but their memory is swallowed up by the avalanche of time. Not so with Christmas! The scene in that stable at Bethlehem almost two thousand years ago still lives amongst us. Its memory is still green, its meaning is still unchanged, its purpose is still working amongst us. It is, as it were, the summit, the highest peak along the range of time. For four thousand years the nations looked forward to it, and, now that it has happened, all nations look back upon it, and will continue to look back upon it until the end of time. For when Christ was born at Bethlehem, He changed the whole face of this earth, and raised our fallen nature to the supernatural state. He found the world all cold and lifeless, the victim of widespread paganism, and He laid His hand upon this corpse, and it arose and followed Him. He breathed a spirit of life into the corruption of depraved society, that breath of life, that supernatural grace that had been withdrawn through man’s first sin, and in the keeping of His new-born church He placed His sacraments to minister this grace to souls until the end of time. Hence, then, the joy, the gratitude, the hallowed memories that Christmas each year awakens in the souls of men: and on Christmas eve at midnight Mass as the priest with outstretched arms invokes God’s benediction on the people, he will voice once more those words that came first to Bethlehem from Heaven by the lips of angels:—“Gloria in excelsis Deo, et in terra pax hominibus.” —Rev. Father Hoare. St. Mary’s Catholic Church.