Don Enrico Finotti
Our liturgies and Christian traditions are today disturbed by so many commercial distractions and so much clamor. Is it still possible to live a real Christmas?
Christmas has become world culture. Even non-Christian peoples have unconsciously assumed, in the current phenomenon of globalization, the mentality and customs proper to Christian Christmas. This fact in itself is good and is in some ways a prophecy of the day when the Gospel will be announced to the whole world. Even our society, now secularized, does not give up setting Christmas on symbols and traditions that are of Christian origin. The lights, the gifts, the meals, the tree, the songs, etc. they are all traditions that historically arise on the stock of Christian culture.
There is, however, a singular friction in today’s culture: on the one hand the use of Christmas traditions as a widespread use of Western and opulent culture, on the other a rejection of their soul, which manifests itself in the elimination, at least public, of those Christmas signs that directly and unequivocally refer to the Christian event, such as the nativity scene. We want Christmas, but we want it tamed to the dominant values of practical atheism. One would say a “politically correct” Christmas. Hence a subtle attempt to change the contents and change the historical origin of the same party, led back to a cosmological-seasonal festival of the winter solstice.
How to act as Christians in this context? First of all it is necessary to avoid a radical contestation of the consumer-commercial Christmas, even to the point of invoking a change of date on the part of the Church. It would incur the same error, which was made in the past decades, when in Christian circles the fall of the societas christiana was invoked in the name of a minority Christianity and irrelevant in public and educational institutions. The movement has caused great damage to evangelization, has cracked the concept of mission and has deprived young generations of a fruitful encounter with the gospel in public and scholastic institutions in general. Moreover, the erroneous principle of the agnostic state has been theorized, that was in any case extraneous to the religious dimension of the citizens.
The road ahead is another one. It is a matter of giving back to Christmas and its symbols their Christian ideality, that is, bringing them back to the springs from which they originated and to the Gospel event that generated them. This operation is not accomplished by canceling them or abandoning them to the corruption of the world, without more hope, but rather animating them from within with a courageous, motivated and widespread testimony of faith. Here then is the mission, humble and tenacious, which awaits Christians.
Priests, parents, teachers, politicians, journalists, media operators, traders, etc. they must show their faith by intervening as Christians in education, in folklore, in cultural and commercial events, in the management of “Christmas projects,” by making targeted choices in urban decorations, in Christmas shows, in concerts, in televised debates, so that Christmas speaks of Christ and does not marginalize him with stratagems that are inconsistent and contrary to historical truth. While having to recognize that the mysterium iniquitatis is always working to the end and treacherously undermines the work of the Church, however, if Christians are not able to carry out such a work, it also means that the Christmas crisis does not lie in the world, which distorts its meaning, but in the Christians themselves who are no longer the soul of society and culture. Ensuring the celebration of the Christmas night with fidelity at midnight is a suitable and effective means not to further grant the flattery and falsifications of the mundane Christmas and thus to introduce into it the vital oxygen of its true identity.
(From Il mio e il vostro sacrificio. Il liturgista risponde, 2018©Chorabooks. Translated by Aurelio Porfiri. Used with permission of the publisher. All rights reserved)
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