Editorial

By Paul Schratz

Writing the Christmas editorial, I imagine, must be something like giving a homily at a wedding. What can possibly be said that hasn’t been said millions of times before, and much better?

Yet it’s an opportunity to address some fundamentals of the faith that a lot of people never get to hear. For many of the folks sitting in the pews, it’s their first, and possibly last, time in a church. The challenge is to say something appropriate and meaningful in the hope it might touch the life of one person who might never be back.

Fortunately Christmas is itself a pre-written homily enacted through an entire season, from Advent through Epiphany. It is God coming down to us. From Scripture, through to the Christmas carols we sing, this idea is reflected as Jesus ransoming captive Israel and bringing our slavery to an end. Pope John Paul II wrote in Redemptoris Missio that only in Christ “are we set free ... from slavery to the power of sin and death.”

The idea of Christ bringing an end to our slavery resonates because the concept of slavery, of families being broken up and sold, of people being kidnapped and abused, is so horrific.

With our modern concepts of freedom, slavery seems such a foreign and dated concept, and we’re tempted to treat it like ancient history, yet slavery still abounds in the form of trafficking, with women religious and groups such as the Catholic Women’s League trying to address the problem.

A fellow journalist once chewed me out for the way the Catholic Church oppresses women. They’re so oppressed, she said, that they’re like slaves who don’t know any better than to bow to the whims of their oppressors.

While the part about women being oppressed by the Church is nonsense, the thought of slaves who don’t know any life other than slavery has stayed with me.

There are many forms of slavery from which we need deliverance, and all too often we don’t even know it.

The poor souls in the downtown east side who need deliverance from their addictions and lifestyles are the most obvious slaves, yet all of us are in some way slaves to sin, whether it’s manifested chemically, or through abusive relationships, or in some other way of thwarting God’s plan for our life.

The grudges that we hold against people who have treated us shabbily are a form of bondage. Slavery can also take the form of dependence, whether to excessive work, to drugs or alcohol, to pornography, or to some other form of diversion.

We can be slaves to our emotions, our frustrations, our doubts, or our impatience: whatever prevents us from loving God and neighbor.

St. Peter Claver, the 17th-century Spanish Jesuit known as the “slave of the slaves,” was responsible for some 300,000 baptisms in Colombia. His motto was to “speak to them with our hands before we try to speak to them with our lips.” It’s an appropriate message as this diocese prepares to implement the synod’s call for new efforts in evangelization and holiness.

During this season of hope we can be grateful that even our culture’s fondness for the trappings of Christmas reflects a remote appreciation of the underlying meaning of those symbols: the candles and bulbs that remind us of the Light Who came into the world; the gift-giving that reminds us of the Great Gift that broke the chains that bound us.

During this time of peace to men of good will, our culture at least has a glimmer of recognition that there is a better way than slavery.

Have a blessed Christmas.