vAgainst the background of the war between Israel and the radical Islamic Hamas, Pope Francis has called for peace. “Our hearts are this evening in Bethlehem, where the Prince of Peace is still repelled by the doomed logic of war, by the noise of weapons that, even today, prevents him from finding a home in the world,” the Pope said on Sunday at Christmas mass in St. Peter's Basilica.
In his sermon to the approximately 6,500 believers who celebrated Christmas Eve with him in Rome, the old leader of the approximately 1.3 billion Catholics mentioned neither Israel nor the Gaza Strip. But he made numerous allusions to violence and war.
God does not “break in with limitless power”; he does not defeat injustice “from above with violence, but from below with love,” said Francis. In his weekly Angelus prayer, he had previously emphasized that “we are close to our brothers and sisters who are suffering from war – we think of Palestine, of Israel, of Ukraine.”
Pope: Many have false ideas about God
The 87-year-old Pope personally led the Christmas mass in St. Peter's Basilica, but remained seated most of the time due to a knee problem. Francis called on believers to think about their image of God, especially at Christmas, and, as he did last year, spoke out against a culture of “consumerism”. “There is a danger that we celebrate Christmas with a pagan idea of God in our heads.” The idea of God as a “powerful ruler” who is associated with “worldly success and the idolatry of consumerism” is wrong .
The Pope continued: “The false image of an uninvolved and vindictive God who treats the good well and is angry with the evil always recurs; a God who is created in our image and whose only purpose is to solve our problems and free us from evils.” However, there is no “commercial God of “everything and immediately”. God comes to people “to change reality from within.”
On Monday afternoon, Francis will announce his Christmas message, in which he usually addresses conflicts in the world. From the loggia of St. Peter's Basilica he gives the solemn blessing “Urbi et Orbi” (to the city and the world).
Few visitors in Bethlehem
In Bethlehem in the West Bank, the biblical birthplace of Jesus, Christmas is celebrated in a more subdued mood. In view of the war between Israel and Hamas, the city council and church representatives decided to forgo “unnecessarily festive” celebrations. The usual rush of visitors also failed to materialize.
The Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Pierbattista Pizzaballa, said on Sunday when he arrived at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem that his thoughts were with the people of the Gaza Strip and especially with the Christian community in the Palestinian territory.
“We are here to pray and not just to call for a ceasefire, a ceasefire is not enough,” the patriarch said. “We must end these hostilities and start a new chapter because violence only leads to more violence.”
In his traditional midnight mass in the St. Catherine's Church adjacent to the Church of the Nativity, the Latin Patriarch promised the people of the Gaza Strip: “We will not give up on you.” The people in the Palestinian territory “no longer have a safe place, no house, no roof,” he said in front of hundreds of believers. People lack the bare necessities, are starving and are exposed to “incomprehensible violence”.
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