Dear Friends and Benefactors,
the Holy Christmas of Our Lord is now upon us and the Observatory will stop too for a few days of rest and celebration.
The wish that we heartily address to you and your families is to live Holy Christmas as a time of grace in which to nourish faith and grow in love, finding in the birth of the Redeemer the light to face the darkness of our times with the strength and serenity that comes from God.
The hope is that Holy Christmas sees families united in Christ as a small domestic Church ready to resist strong in faith despite the unprecedented crisis that is affecting our civilization and the universal Church itself. Catholic families in which pray, transmit the faith, educate and instruct the children, preserve the cultural heritage of the ancestors, live the moral law, do economics and politics according to the natural order of justice and the evangelical truth. The Holy Family must be a model and source of inspiration for all Catholic families, for all of us.
In the Virgin Mary and in Saint Joseph we have the perfect model of femininity and virility placed at the service of Jesus Christ. Mary is an obedient and humble bride, Joseph is a hard-working and prudent husband, both totally dedicated to the service of God in the complete donation of their own lives. May Holy Christmas call us back to this horizon of sanctity and vocation far from the ideological deceptions of the world.
Before the Nativity scene, the gaze at the manger made into a cradle for the Child Jesus cannot help but make us think of the Holy Land tormented by war, the horror of thousands of innocent civilian victims, many of whom were children, the hatred that is fueled every day by new horrors. The devastation of Gaza and Lebanon and now Syria fallen into the hands of cutthroats with the satisfaction of a mad West ask us to pray so that the fog of madness may dissipate, the roar of weapons may cease immediately and the Holy Land may be at peace.
But what peace? The peace of Christ, He who is the Prince of Peace, He who is true peace. He who today is dethroned and ousted from the once Christian states, He who is less and less welcome in the Holy Land, where Christians have been in constant decline for decades.
Only where Christ reigns there is true order, that is, truth and justice in action. For peace to occur, everything must be in harmony according to the natural and divine order of justice, and this is possible only in the social Kingdom of Christ.
That Child who is born in Bethlehem is the King of kings who is entitled to reign over all the peoples of the earth. The first to prostrate themselves at His feet are the Magi, the first fruits of the people, who offer Him the symbol of royalty in gold. On the Epiphany of the Lord, with the holy Magi, we too profess our faith in Jesus, King of kings, and place the social Kingship of Christ at the center of our social-political commitment, as taught by Pope Pius XI in the encyclical Quas primas of 1925 (in 2025 we will celebrate the 100th anniversary of Quas primas) in response to modern secularism.
Let Christ reign to have true peace: Pax Christi in Regno Christi.
May the new year see the end of the fratricidal war in Ukraine and the definition of a balance of peace between Russia and the USA that includes Europe (from the Atlantic to the Urals, from Portugal to Russia) finally as a space of friendly commercial, cultural, political-diplomatic relations and not as a battlefield in a mad NATO-Russia war. Let us pray that Europe, once again at peace, may rediscover its being a Christian civilization from Lisbon to Moscow and that Christ may reign over Europe. Only in this way will Europe be saved from its own suicide.
Praying and waging the good fight in the cultural, social and political fields, always keeping action and prayer together. This is the profound meaning of the Observatory’s commitment to the SDC, a commitment to apostolate nourished by prayer.
The best wish we can make for 2025 is to find ourselves even more united in our commitment to the SDC, for the establishment of the social Kingdom of Christ.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all!
Semper in Xto;
Fr. Samuele Cecotti
Vicepresident of the Observatory
(Foto: Natività, Jean Baptiste Marie Pierre, wikioo)
