Message from Pr. Cipriano

A BLESSED CHRISTMAS TO YOU

Christmas is the day we have longed for, and for which we have been preparing during these past four weeks of Lent.

When we hear or proclaim "today is born our Savior" we are not using an empty, conventional expression. Rather, we mean that God is offering to each one of us the possibility of welcoming Him, so that He may also be born in our lives and renew, illuminate and transform them by His Grace and by His Presence.

Christmas is the commemoration of the earthly birth of God's eternal Son. No words can express the importance of this event in the history of humankind as well as our personal lives.

Christmas and Easter are both feasts of Redemption.

Christmas celebrates it as God's entry into history, clothed in flesh visible to human eyes and tangible to our hands as well. He was born of a Virgin's womb, in order to restore mankind to God...

God humbled Himself to the point of being laid in a manger, already a prelude to the humbling of Himself in the hour of His Passion. The culmination of the love-story between God and man passes through the manger in Bethlehem and the tomb in Jerusalem.

Easter celebrates the victory over sin and death; it marks the final moment when the glory of the Man-God shines out like the light of day.

Blessed be God who sent His only Son to be one of us; to share our problems, worries and aspirations. In Christ the divinity of God's Son was made to share in our mortality, that we might share in His immortality.

Let us open our hearts and lives to welcome our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

Fr. Cipriano Bontacchio