Patriarch Cardinal of Lisbon urges Christian to live as part of the nativity scene | Christmas
This Friday, the Cardinal Patriarch of Lisbon focused his Christmas message on the manger, urging Christians not only to assemble it in Christmas season, but to be part of it.
“I don’t know if we will ever be able to fully appreciate the influence that this representation had on our culture, on our way of feeling, with regard to the deepest feelings, specifically the meaning of life and everything that concerns God ”, Manuel Clemente said in his message, related that in the “tradition of the nativity scene – as the Gospels show us the birth of Jesus – this immense novelty of everything that is divine becomes human and so close, so small and so fragile”.
For the cardinal-patriarch, a representation of the crib “ended up leading to (…) a vision of things, even beyond strict confessional boundaries”, leading to “attention to the immense in the smallest, to the divine in the human , to the greatness of God in the fragility in which life happens to each one”.
“The lesson of the crib, of a God represented in a child who is not even born in a normal house, because there was no room for him in the inn and had to be born precisely there, in a manger, in a crib… all this is a huge lesson ”, Which gives the Christian “ another way of seeing life, of being attentive to things and their greatness in the smallest and most fragile of circumstances”.
In his message, the cardinal-patriarch of Lisbon gave examples of hypotheses that, in Lisbon, show that the nativity scene “continues to happen”, such as the creation of a support group for the homeless that emerged after a nun passed through a square from the city “where she noticed the persistence of several homeless people and began to feel that it was also her problem”, from a support group for mothers with physical and mental difficulties and who did not need to take care of these children and who have so far already to be able to accompany more than half a thousand mothers, or the marriage of a young couple – the woman admitted to a palliative care unit – and the christening of their child.
“We usually say at this point – and it’s a good feeling – what a good thing it would be if Christmas, with all that it brings to society, families, and even those who don’t have them, were like that every day. And it can be, but it can be if for a crib and if we don’t just assemble cribs ourselves, but integrate ourselves in it, in the great crib in the world”, added Manuel Clemente in his Christmas message.