21 December
From December 17 to 23, the Catholic Church prepares the feast of Christmas by singing at Vespers the great “O antiphons”. DICI presents them to you together with some meditations of Pope Pius XII. These texts highlight how the Child of the crib is the peaceful King who came to save all men and to reign over the nations.
| O Oriens, splendor lucis æternæ, et sol iustitiæ : veni, et illumina sedentes in tenebris et umbra mortis. | O Day-spring,Brightness of light eternal, and sun of justice,Come and enlighten them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death. |
“The church bells, which announce this message in every continent, not only recall the gift which God made to mankind at the dawn of the Christian Era; they also announce and proclaim a consoling reality of the present, a reality which is eternally young, living and life-giving; it is the reality of the "True Light which enlighteneth every man that cometh into this World," and which knows no setting. The Eternal Word, Who is the Way, the Truth and the Life, began His mission of saving and redeeming the human race by being born in the squalor of a stable and by thus ennobling and hallowing poverty. He thus proclaimed and consecrated a message which is still, today, the Word of Eternal Life. That message can solve the most tortuous questions, unsolved and insoluble for those who bring to their investigations a mentality and an apparatus which are ephemeral and merely human; and those questions stand up, bleeding, imperiously demanding an answer, before the thought and the feeling of embittered and exasperated mankind.” “Pray and work to obtain from God the grace that the new year may be for wounded Europe and for nations torn by discord, a year of rebirth and of peace. So pray and work that after the rout of the spirit of darkness, the angel of the bottomless pit, the sun of justice may rise over the world: Jesus Christ our Lord, to Whom be honor and glory in time and in eternity.”
Pius XII, radio messages to the world, December 24, 1942 and 1947
