In a Christmas reflection by the then Fr Joseph Ratzinger in the Bavarian Catholic journal Hochland in 1959, the young priest addressed the significance of the location of Jesus Christ’s birthday in the midst of the winter solstice days. The days approaching the winter solstice appear to have been days of trepidation, even terror, for many of the ancients, as one of their great fears was “the primitive fear that the sun would one day die”. What was to guarantee for them that the days which had been growing shorter, darker, and colder since the summer solstice, would not simply die altogether?
And so many ancient religious rituals are connected to that moment of “salvation” at the winter solstice when the sun’s worrying decline is thankfully reversed. Festivals such as Saturnalia in Rome or Yuletide in Scandinavia were very significant points in the calendar… and even the most significant human structures in the landscape such as Stonehenge or our own Newgrange are clearly moored to the winter solstice.
Ratzinger points out that though physics – “with the cool touch of its clear formulas” – has banished such primitive fears, in the modern age man is still very much “a creature of fear”: “What period of human history was more afraid of its own future than our own?” If that was true in 1959 how much truer it is in 2022 when motives for fear, even terror, are legion: the climate, natural resources, human nature, Western culture, the list goes on.
But unfortunately these days there is also a whole cottage industry dedicated to generating a climate of fear from within the Church, and among Catholics. This point has recently been made by Fr Stefano Cecchin who is one of the foremost experts on the Virgin Mary and is the President of the Pontifical International Marian Academy. He speaks of the worry of the Academy at the huge number of online sites making all kinds of claims linking improbable Marian apparitions with claims that the Covid pandemic and now the war in Ukraine are divinely mandated punishments for the world, that Pope Francis is the antichrist, etc. And Fr Cecchin doesn’t mince his words about these kinds of claims, comparing them to attempts of the likes of the Nazis to sow terror amongst whole populations. He asks the pointed question: “Fear of the state, of law and order, of the Pope, of the Church … who benefits from this?”
Living in terror at the state of the world, the Church, and the imminent apocalypse could not be further removed from the spirit of joyful (which doesn’t mean naive) optimism. It is the perennial experience of the Church that pagans have found in her teachings the answer to all their fears: the primitive fear that somehow the sun would no longer rise, that the cosmos was governed by malevolent gods and spirits, or the fear that our existence in this world had no meaning.
That Christ came precisely to bring peace and not fear forms part of the angelic proclamation to the shepherds:“Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among men of good will” (Luke 2:14). Peace, at the personal and social levels, is one of the hallmarks of Christianity, precisely because the Prince of Peace has come into this world of ours, which otherwise would indeed be doomed. As the then Fr Ratzinger put it in his Hochland article:
In the stable of Bethlehem there is placed the sign which joyfully answers us: yes, because this child – God’s only begotten Son – is set up as a sign and a guarantee for this. He is the sign that in the end God keeps the last word in world history, He, who is the truth and the love. That’s the true meaning of Christmas. It is the birthday of the undefeated Light, the winter solstice of world history, which gives us the certainty amid the rise and decline of this story that here, too, the light will not die, but has already achieved the final victory.