We receive and publish from the Diocese of San Marino-Montefeltro:

Merry Christmas! With these simple words we evoke an extraordinary yet dear and familiar event: the birth of a Child, “great joy that belongs to all the people”.

This is the case for the birth of every child, but faith teaches about Jesus the divine origin and the saving mission. Jesus belongs to everyone, he is for everyone, he is with everyone.

The vigor of his message of love and peace is renewed every year, but it does not deny the efforts that seem to want to take away our hope. We are not celebrating Christmas to forget or to escape from the people who mark our days or to pretend that there are no problems around us and within us.

I wish everyone to know how to listen, as if it were the first time, “the cry in the night and the light that appeared in the darkness”. A cry that the fathers and sentinels of history have heard and transmitted before us.

Beyond an ephemeral emotion, beyond even the beautiful external traditions, I propose to listen to the incredible message of Christmas, of God for us, with us and in us.

A passage of the prophet Isaiah which is proclaimed on Christmas Day is surprising: it is an invitation to song and praise: “Break out together in songs of joy, ruins of Jerusalem, because the Lord has consoled his people, he has redeemed Jerusalem”. How can the “ruins” find reasons for song and joy? We are marked by failures, detachments, sorrows, conviction …

The fact is that the Child of Bethlehem – the Word made flesh – came to take to save and redeem what is his, because “everything that exists was done for him and for him”; he got involved in our struggle to exist to restore to everyone the certainty that something can change, indeed that everything can change, and to give us this hope as a traveling companion. He walks in front of us and we – behind him – are a caravan of brothers who help each other along the restless roads of the earth. We have intelligence, heart and knees. Intelligence to seek truth and ever new ways, heart to leave no one behind and to understand each other more, knees to pray for one another, to ask for help from the One who is close to us. It depends on each of us whether today is Christmas or not. The Child Jesus gives himself to us: let him enter our home, our life, where we really are.

Best wishes: it’s Christmas!