The Working Catholic: Christmas 2024 by Bill Droel

Christmas is the feast of the Incarnation—Jesus Christ, simultaneously fully divine and fully human, dwelling among us. He comes to the world not in splendor, but in a stable in an out-of-the-way town “where ox and ass are feeding.” That stable, displayed in millions of homes this month, symbolizes our modern world, broken yet redeemed.

For over 400 years Roman Catholicism ducked its appointment with modernity, reacting many times with aloof superiority or even with hostility. Since 1517 Catholicism has been uneasy with the loss of community as the individualism associated with the Protestant Reformation ascends. Catholicism was additionally turned off by the violent anti-clericalism of the French Revolution and later revolutions. Further, Catholicism takes a defensive posture with those expressions of Protestant Christianity in this country and elsewhere that are explicitly anti-Catholic. Catholicism’s caution about the modern world is also related to its opposition of communism’s total denial of the spiritual. Finally, Catholicism was and remains cautious toward some “scientific” trends, including a materialistic notion of evolution and eugenics with its accompanying embrace of abortion.

Catholicism’s defensive strategy officially changed at Vatican II (1962-1965). The new method is dialogue with modern ideas. The dialogue means learning about God’s revelation from the world of science, reason, exploration, forms of governance, modern art, and global commerce, from non-Catholic expressions of Christianity and from non-Christian expressions of faith. This dialogue with the world, please realize, does not exclude disagreements.

The new strategy requires a fresh definition of church. The word still applies to buildings, but that is not its deepest meaning. Nor is the church primarily bishops, their clergy, and their helpers. The word church means all the baptized.

How are people today able to gather around the Christmas stable—a symbol for our world? 

In recent days Pope Francis concluded a multi-year synod that was meant to model how Catholic leaders can internally discuss vital topics. It was a synod about a process. Understandably, the press did not find a three-year meeting about a new process interesting. Instead, newspaper and magazine ink was mostly given to a few controversial topics like ordained women deacons in Catholicism and changes in celibacy requirements for clergy, better treatment of gays, lesbians, and those others whom Catholicism has maligned. 

Nonetheless, the synod was an expression of Vatican II and particularly of Pope Francis’ primary theme: In our modern place and time the church (people of God) finds the incarnate Christ along the peripheries. To hear the word of God, people must attentively listen to those   huddled around a stable in Bethlehem, those scrambling among ruins within Syria, those in line at the Wednesday morning food pantry, and those young adults who are unsatisfied with our vacuous culture.

How can Catholics and others from the east and west find the stable and there have fruitful engagements with what is happening in our modern world? This month happens to be the 60 th anniversary of Vatican II’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church. Therein is a paragraph about the new definition of church, about how that church influences the world, about how the world enriches the church and about the true meaning of Christmas:

The entire people of God by their very vocation seek the kingdom of God by engaging in temporal affairs and by ordering them to the plan of God. They live in the world, that is in each and in all of the secular professions and occupations. They live in the ordinary circumstances of family and social life from which the very web of their existence is woven. They are called there by God so that by exercising their proper function and being led by the Spirit of the gospel they may work for the sanctification of the world from within, in the manner of leaven.

Droel edits a free newsletter on faith and work, INITIATIVES (PO Box 291102, Chicago, IL 60629)

 We are meditating on the meaning of the resurrection of Notre Dame Cathedral at this time. 

Henry Adams reminds us that Mary, after whom the Cathedral is named, represented the energy “of love and of matter.” Mary is a protector and living intercessor between mankind as individuals and “the perils of law, whether human or divine.” 

A carved-wood depiction of Mary — unusual in that here, the infant Jesus is directly facing her, rather than towards the viewer, and both appear completely adoring of each other. Location unknown. Photo by Grant Whitty on Unsplash.

A martial religion of “predominate masculine energy” ruled in the 11th century, but Mary represented “the assertion of the supremacy of love over force” with the Gothic reality of the 12th and 13th centuries. She represented “boundless sympathy” and “not even the weakest human frailty could fear to approach her.” 

As Adams puts it, she represented the Buddhist sense of compassion, “the first of all virtues.” 

She represented a new civilization which included a whole new creation of education, when the university movement in the cities displaced the monastic hold on education in the countryside. And “university” originally meant a place to go to find one’s place in the universe. (Not just one’s place in a man-made work world, which is what it has come to mean during the modern era.)

The Virgin of the twelfth and thirteenth century had not only the powers of Eve and Demeter and Venus; she was also the mistress of all the arts and sciences, was afraid of none of them, and did nothing, ever, to stunt any of them…She was Queen by divine right and compassion and understanding, not by law and formula. She was “the practice of the true balance of powers, with the individual always tilting the balance.” 

Highlights from the reopening of Notre Dame de Paris on December 7th, 2024. Video by CBS Sunday Morning. You can also watch the replay of the entire opening ceremony HERE.

She was a “personal presence” and a “saving grace” [and] the personal equation at the heart of law and justice.” She gave birth to “fresh creations of order.”* 

The very word “cathedral” derives from the word for throne (as does the Goddess Isis, the original Black Madonna). So another aspect to Notre Dame Cathedrals is that they honor the Goddess who sits ruling a city (or a country) with compassion and justice for the poor, not for the rich. And for the celebration of life. (Again, anthropocentric and patriarchal religion have reduced the “throne” in the cathedral to a place where a bishop sits, but that leaves out the cosmos and the divine feminine that are so central to the deeper meaning of cathedra.) 

Such a building offers a fine reminder for our time of a new cosmology, a cosmogenesis story of how our Earth and our species made the 13.8-billion-year journey to be here.

The South Rose Window in the cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris. Photo by jmvnoos in Paris on Flickr.

And to be grateful for being here. Which is religion’s task, to spread the thanks. As Thomas Aquinas (who was in Paris at the time the rose windows were being installed in Notre Dame cathedral) put it: “Religion is supreme thankfulness or gratitude.” And that is what the Sabbath is about, he says: giving thanks and first and foremost for creation.

It seems the Divine Feminine might have something needed and necessary to say to our times. Maybe the resurrection of Notre Dame de Paris might assist us in taking in that wisdom. If we choose to listen.