Posted on December 29, 2019 View all news
Laudetur Jesus Christus! Gelobt sei Jesus Christus!
Sia lodato Gesù Cristo! Praised be Jesus Christ!
I wish each of you a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! Please note that this coming Wednesday, January 1, is a Holy Day of Obligation. See the Mass schedule on the following pages in the bulletin. Please join us for our Holy Hour, with two opportunities for an indulgence, on December 31 at 11:00 p.m. at Old St. Mary’s. I again thank everyone who helped make everything possible, please know that you are in my daily prayers! We couldn’t have done it without you!
Please find, as I have done in previous year, this Christmas Day sermon from St. Leo the Great. This is just a small selection of paragraphs, you may read the whole sermon here: http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/360321.htm. Have a blessed week ahead!
“Our Saviour, dearly Beloved, was born this day. Let us rejoice. Sadness is not becoming upon the Birth Day of Life Itself, which, now that the fear of death is ended, fills us with gladness, because of our own promised immortality. No one is excluded from sharing in this cheerfulness, for the reason of our joy is common to all men. Our Lord, the Conqueror of sin and death, since there was no one free from servitude, came that He might bring deliverance to all.
Let us, therefore, give thanks, dearly Beloved, to God the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit; Who, because of the exceeding great love, wherein He has loved us, has had compassion on us. And even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together in Christ, that in Him we might be a new creature, and a new clay. Let us strip ourselves of the old man with his deeds; for being made partakers of the Birth of Christ, let us renounce the deeds of the flesh.
Acknowledge, O Christian, the dignity that is yours! Being made a partaker of the divine nature, do not by an unworthy manner of living fall back into your former abjectness of life. Be mindful of Whose Head, and of Whose Body, you are a member. Remember, that wrested from the powers of darkness, thou art now translated into the Light and the Kingdom of God. By the sacrament of baptism you have become the temple of the Holy Spirit. Do not, by evil deeds, drive out from you such a One dwelling with thee, and submit yourself again to the bondage of the devil. Because your price was the Blood of Christ; because in strictness He shall judge you Who in mercy has redeemed you, Who with the Father and the Holy Spirit, livest and reignest, world without end. Amen.” – St. Leo the Great