{"id":6182,"date":"2005-12-21T12:14:51","date_gmt":"2005-12-21T12:14:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2005\/12\/merry-christmas.html"},"modified":"2005-12-21T12:14:51","modified_gmt":"2005-12-21T12:14:51","slug":"merry-christmas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/12\/merry-christmas.html","title":{"rendered":"Merry Christmas"},"content":{"rendered":"

From the Pope!<\/a><\/p>\n

Awesome. <\/p>\n

I see from a quick survey, from Zadok to Fr. Tucker to Whapping, everyone’s stoked about the hat, but let’s calm down and contemplate what the man said:<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

\n
\n

Holding the audience talk on the Northern Hemisphere’s shortest day of the year, Pope Benedict said the Christmas use of light helps people understand the holiday’s true meaning.<\/p>\n

The newly lengthening days, candles and Christmas lights everywhere "help us understand better the theme of the light that advances over the darkness," he said.<\/p>\n

"It is a symbol evoking a reality that touches the depths of the person … the light of goodness that vanquishes evil, of love that overcomes hatred, of life that defeats death," Pope Benedict said.<\/p>\n

He said that in the liturgies immediately preceding Christmas "the savior awaited by the nations is greeted as the ‘rising sun,’ the star that shows the way and guides people, wandering amid the darkness and dangers of the world, toward the salvation promised by God and realized in Jesus Christ."<\/p>\n

The pope asked Christians to keep their Christmas traditions alive, explaining them to their children and resisting the attempts of a consumer society to strip all religious symbols from the celebration of the feast of Christ’s birth.<\/p>\n

"In particular, in seeing city streets and squares decorated with shining lights, let us remember that these lights are a reminder of another light, which is invisible to the eyes but not to the heart," he said.<\/p>\n

"While we admire them, while we light candles in church or illuminate a Nativity scene or Christmas tree in our homes, let us open our hearts to the true spiritual light offered to all people of good will," the pope said.<\/p>\n

Pope Benedict prayed that Jesus, the "sun of light that never sets, would give us the strength to follow always the path of truth, justice and love."<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From the Pope! Awesome. I see from a quick survey, from Zadok to Fr. Tucker to Whapping, everyone’s stoked about the hat, but let’s calm down and contemplate what the man said: Holding the audience talk on the Northern Hemisphere’s shortest day of the year, Pope Benedict said the Christmas use of light helps people…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6182","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nMerry Christmas - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/12\/merry-christmas.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Merry Christmas - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"From the Pope! Awesome. I see from a quick survey, from Zadok to Fr. 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Awesome. I see from a quick survey, from Zadok to Fr. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6182","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6182"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6182\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6182"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}