On Christmas, pope makes appeal for Gaza and displaced people

ROME – On Christmas day, Pope Leo XIV issued an appeal on behalf of refugees and the displaced, including in Gaza, saying the peace offered to the world at Jesus’s birth is found in showing solidarity with others.

In his Dec. 25 homily, the pope said that “since the Word was made flesh, humanity now speaks, crying out with God’s own desire to encounter us. The Word has pitched his fragile tent among us.”

“How, then, can we not think of the tents in Gaza, exposed for weeks to rain, wind and cold; and of those of so many other refugees and displaced persons on every continent; or of the makeshift shelters of thousands of homeless people in our own cities?”

Reflecting on the fragility of the infant Jesus, who he said this fragility is also seen in “the flesh of defenseless populations, tried by so many wars, ongoing or concluded, leaving behind rubble and open wounds.”

“Fragile are the minds and lives of young people forced to take up arms, who on the front lines feel the senselessness of what is asked of them and the falsehoods that fill the pompous speeches of those who send them to their deaths,” he said.

When the fragility and vulnerability of those who are suffering penetrates minds and touches hearts, “when their pain shatters our rigid certainties, then peace has already begun,” Leo said.

“The peace of God is born from a newborn’s cry that is welcomed, from weeping that is heard. It is born amidst ruins that call out for new forms of solidarity. It is born from dreams and visions that, like prophecies, reverse the course of history,” he said.

Pope Leo delivered his appeal during Christmas morning Mass in Saint Peter’s Basilica, having celebrated a midnight vigil Mass for some 6,000 faithful the previous night for Christmas Eve.

After morning Mass, he will also offer the traditional Christmas Urbi et Orbi noontime blessing.

In his homily Christmas day, Leo XIV said that with Jesus’s birth at Christmas, the world itself is reborn and as Christians, “We too are part of this new beginning, even if few as yet believe it: peace is real, and it is already among us.”

Jesus is the Word of God made flesh, he said, saying this “Word” is “a word that acts.”

“This is a hallmark of God’s Word: it is never without effect. Indeed, many of our own words also have effects, sometimes unintended,” he said.

Leo noted that paradoxically, Jesus comes into the world as God’s word, but cannot speak, choosing to come “as a newborn baby who can only cry and babble.”

“Though he will grow and one day learn the language of his people, for now he speaks only through his simple, fragile presence,” he said.

This flesh that Jesus took upon himself “is the radical nakedness that, in Bethlehem as on Calvary, remains even without words – just as so many brothers and sisters, stripped of their dignity and reduced to silence, have no words today,” the pope said.

“Human flesh asks for care; it pleads for welcome and recognition; it seeks hands capable of tenderness and minds willing to listen; it longs for words of kindness,” he said.

As someone for whom advocacy for human dignity has been a hallmark of his priestly, episcopal and brief papal ministry so far, Pope Leo said that Jesus gave peace to the world with his incarnation, but humanity must welcome and accept it in order to become true children of God.

“God’s gift invites us in; it seeks to be welcomed and, in turn, inspires our own self-giving,” he said, saying, “God surprises us because he leaves himself open to rejection. He also captivates us because he draws us away from indifference.”

In this regard, the pope said that becoming children of God is “a true power” that can change the world through action and solidarity.

However, this power “remains buried so long as we keep our distance from the cry of children and the frailty of the elderly, from the helpless silence of victims and the resigned melancholy of those who do the evil they do not want,” he said.

Leo quoted Pope Francis’s first apostolic exhortation in 2013, Evangelii Gaudium, in speaking of the joy of the Gospel, given at Christmas, saying, “Sometimes we are tempted to be that kind of Christian who keeps the Lord’s wounds at arm’s length.”

Jesus, however, “wants us to touch human misery, to touch the suffering flesh of others,” he said. “He hopes that we will stop looking for those personal or communal niches which shelter us from the maelstrom of human misfortune and instead enter into the reality of other people’s lives and know the power of tenderness.”

Peace, Pope Leo said, thus implies solidarity with those who are suffering and defenseless, including refugees and the displaced, despite the obstacles and resistance that might exist.

“The Gospel does not hide the resistance of darkness to the light. It describes the path of the Word of God as a rugged road, strewn with obstacles,” the pope said.

Those who wish to be authentic messengers of God’s peace must follow this path of welcome and solidarity, he said, saying this is the path that “ultimately reaches hearts – restless hearts that often desire the very thing they resist.”

“In this way, Christmas gives fresh impetus to a missionary Church, urging her onto the paths that the Word of God has traced for her,” he said, saying God is not “domineering” and forceful in imposing this path, but rather “inspires goodness, knows its efficacy and does not claim a monopoly over it.”

The church’s mission at its heart is “a path toward others,” Leo said, saying, “In God, every word is an addressed word; it is an invitation to conversation, a word never closed in on itself.”

This, he said, is the renewal promoted by the Second Vatican Council, and “which will bear fruit only if we walk together with the whole of humanity, never separating ourselves from it.”

The opposite of this, he said, “is worldliness: to have oneself at the center.”

Jesus’s incarnation at Christmas, then, is not only an invitation, but a call to conversion, the pope said, saying, “there will be peace when our monologues are interrupted and, enriched by listening, we fall to our knees before the humanity of the other.”

“In this, the Virgin Mary is the Mother of the Church, the Star of Evangelization, the Queen of Peace. In her, we understand that nothing is born from the display of force, and everything is reborn from the silent power of life welcomed,” he said.

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