The feast of the Birth of Christ is not out of tune with the trial we are going through, because it is the quintessential feast of compassion, the feast of tenderness. Its beauty is humble and full of human warmth.
This was the message of Pope Francis on Monday when he met with participants of the upcoming Christmas Contest.
The event, organized by the Pontifical Foundation Gravissimum Educationis and Missioni Don Bosco Valdocco, “gives a voice to young people by inviting them to create new songs inspired by Christmas and its values.”
While admitting that this year again, the “lights will be dimmed by the consequences of the pandemic,” the Pope said that we mustn’t lose hope.
The beauty of Christmas shines through in the sharing of small gestures of genuine love. It is not alienating, it is not superficial, it is not evasive; on the contrary, it expands the heart, opening it up to gratuitousness – gratuitousness, a word artists understand well! – to the giving of self, and can also generate cultural, social, and educational dynamics.
The Pope emphasized the importance of beauty for our world by quoting Pope Paul VI.
I like to repeat the words of Saint Paul VI: “This world in which we live needs beauty in order not to sink into despair” [3].
Which beauty? Not the false one, made of appearances and earthly riches, which is hollow and a generator of emptiness. No. But that of a God made flesh, the one of faces – the beauty of faces, the beauty of stories; that of the creatures that make up our common home and which – as Saint Francis teaches us – participate in the praise of the Most High.
And today we celebrate...