In Die Nativitatis Domini
Ad Tertiam Missam
Chapel of the Seminary of Saint Philip Neri
Gricigliano
25 December 2024
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
The Gospel of the Third Mass of Christmas gives sublime expression to the Mystery of the Birth of Our Lord, the cause of our inexpressible joy today. It recounts for us, in the words of Blessed Ildefonso Schuster, “the twofold begetting of the Word in his divine and in his human nature.”[1] God the Son, the Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity, generated eternally by God the Father, is, at the Annunciation, generated by God the Father in time, in the womb of the Virgin Mary, through the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit.
God the Son is the Word Who, from the beginning, gave order and beauty to all creation. “He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made.”[2] He gives life to all things; all creation participates in His Being – All Good, All True, All Beautiful.
God the Father has also generated the Eternal Word in time when God the Holy Spirit overshadowed the womb of the Virgin Mary: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.”[3] God the Father has united our human nature to His divine nature through the Virginal Conception and Virginal Birth of God the Son. Why? So that we, poor humans, adopted by Him in His Incarnate Son, may share here and now in His divine truth and love: “And from his fullness have we all received, grace upon grace.”[4]
Blessed Ildefonso Schuster comments on the text of the Gospel:
As a creature[, Jesus’] birth does not proceed from the will of the flesh, nor from the will of man; the Immaculate Virgin Mother conceives him by the power of the Spirit of God, a divine begetting in which we also are allowed a share as often as, by faith, we receive Jesus into our souls. In becoming man and setting up his tent amongst us he loses nothing of his divine attributes, so that we, through the veil of his Humanity, see all the divine pleroma, the infinite fullness of grace and truth. This word pleroma should be noted as being opposed to the false learning against which the Evangelist is here speaking.”[5]
How great, how beyond words, is the mystery of God’s love for us that He would become one of us so that we could be one with Him – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – now and for all eternity!
This is the reality which we ponder as we kneel before the image of the Infant Jesus, as we kneel before the Sacred Host. It is not some gnosis, some human invention, some ideology. It is the Real Presence of God the Son Incarnate Who desires that our human hearts rest completely and forever in His glorious-pierced Heart, Human and Divine. God the Father speaks to us through His Son “whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the ages.”[6] He is always “the same, and [His] years will never end.”[7] Christ alone is “the way, and the truth, and the life.”[8] In Him alone God the Father accomplishes His plan of salvation “to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.”[9]
Filled with wonder at the mystery of God’s love at work in our lives and conscious of the sinful indifference, ridicule, and hostility of so many before the mystery, we have consecrated ourselves to the Virgin Mother of God, Our Lady of Guadalupe, on her feast day, this past December 12th, asking her to intercede for the grace of the daily conversion of our hearts, one with her Immaculate Heart, to the Sacred Heart of her Divine Son, Jesus. At the same time, united with her in the love of her Divine Son, we have placed ourselves, our families, and our homelands within her mantle, asking her to intercede for the conversion of all hearts to His Most Sacred Heart, the only source of our salvation. We pray especially for the conversion of the many souls who have known Christ but then have left His company and for the conversion of millions of souls who have not yet known Him. We have asked that we, with the Virgin Mother of God, might lead many souls to Christ Who alone is our salvation.
May we never fail to cooperate with the immeasurable and unceasing grace which flowed from the Heart of the Child Jesus, which flows from His glorious-pierced Heart into our hearts. May we live daily the consecration to Our Lady of Guadalupe, doing whatever Her Divine Son tells us.[10]
May we, with Saint Juan Diego, be her messengers, co-workers with her in the mission of God the Son Incarnate: the salvation of our souls and the salvation of the souls of our brothers and sisters in His Mystical Body, the Church
Rejoicing in the Nativity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, let us now place our hearts completely into His Most Sacred Heart. Let us be completely one with Him as He makes sacramentally present the Sacrifice for which He was born into the world, the Sacrifice by which He has won for us eternal life. Through the union of our hearts with His Most Sacred Heart in the Eucharistic Sacrifice, may His holiness, His grace and truth, shine forth in our every thought and word and action. So may Christ win in us the victory over sin and death. So may He win the same victory in the lives of our brothers and sisters.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
Raymond Leo Cardinal Burke
[1] “… doppia generazione del Verbo nella sua natura divina ed umana.” A. I. Schuster, Liber Sacramentorum. Note storiche e liturgiche sul Messale Romano, Vol. II (Torino-Roma: Casa Editrice Marietti, 1933), p. 167. [Schuster]. English translation: Ildefonso Schuster, The Sacramentary (Liber Sacramentorum): Historical & Liturgical Notes on the Roman Missal, Vol. I (Parts 1 and 2), tr. Arthur Levelis-Marke (Waterloo, Ontario: Arouca Press, 2020), p. 376. [SchusterEng].
[2] Jn 1, 3.
[3] Jn 1, 14.
[4] Jn 1, 16.
[5] “Come creatura, la nascita di Gesù procede non da volontà di uomo o da desiderio di carne, ma l’immacolata Vergine Maria lo concepisce per virtù dello Spirito di Dio, generazione divina alla cui partecipazione siamo ammessi anche noi, qualora mediante la fede accogliamo nell’anima Gesù. Egli rendendosi uomo e stabilendo fra noi la sua tenda, nulla perde dei suoi attributi divini, onde noi attraverso il velo della sua umanità vediamo tutto il pleroma divino – è da ritenere questa parola contro la falsa gnosi cui oppugna l’Evangelista – , l’infinita grazia e verità.” Schuster, pp. 167-168. English translation: SchusterEng, pp. 376-377.
[6] Heb 1, 2.
[7] Heb 1, 12.
[8] Jn 14, 6.
[9] Eph 1, 10.
[10] Cf. Jn 2, 5.