Take a close look at the photo. It’s a Christmas photo, though
unlike one you might expect on the issue of the Catholic New World
that comes out on Christmas Eve.
Yet, wrapped up in that photo–solemn, dark and utterly joyless–is
the spirit of Christmas, 2000, the Jubilee celebration of the
birth of Christ in Bethlehem.
The photo is set in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, which
now sits on the West Bank. Bethlehem, and the short highway linking
that Arab town to Jerusalem,
has seen violence in the weeks of continuing trouble between Palestinians
and Israelis.
That man standing between the church’s ancient pillars? I know
him. Not by name, but by role. He was the Greek Orthodox the Orthodox
are custodians of the Church of the Nativity—who sat quietly above
the traditional grotto of Jesus’ birth and for a donation blessed
a bag of small olive-wood crosses I was bringing home for this
newspaper’s staff during a Holy Land visit last year.
My wife and I were two of hundreds of people passing hourly through
the grotto, which lies behind and below, the hooded figure in
the photo.
Today there are no tourists. Bethlehem is empty. The nearby site
of the shepherd’s field has seen gunbattles and rock-throwing.
A few score of yards from where this photo was snapped lies Manger
Square, last year the site of a triumphal Christmas pageant on
the eve of the new millennium. There will be small events, but
no triumph this year, despite the hopeful protestations of Hanna
Nassar, Bethlehem’s Palestinian Christian mayor whom I visited
last June as part of a national Catholic-Jewish study group sponsored
by the American Jewish Committee.
None of us anticipated, however, that the tensions would blossom
into what has become horrible bloodshed—in the name of faith,
yet—and turn this into a place where pilgrims fear to tread. Both
Israel and Palestinian lose; both have come to enjoy, and count
on, tourist dollars. Today, there are few such dollars.
For 17 centuries, the Church of the Nativity has been revered
as the place where God touched the face of humankind. The current
church, walls rebuilt during Crusader times, has seen violence
before, even on Christmas. The violence may not be new, but it
does put our faith in perspective.
The Holy Land, that slice of contested rock, sand and people,
is the ancient cradle of three great faiths, much as the grotto
below the church is the ancient cradle of a child named Jesus.
Our Christmas, probably, will not face the challenges and pain
of Christmas in the Holy Land. Our concerns will likely be more
about what color a gift is, or who’s coming to dinner. Nor would
I wish to dampen your holiday spirit, for we celebrate the Messiah
always in our own time and place.
But as you do that, I invite you to pray, too, as Cardinal George
and other U.S. bishops have asked, for a return to peace in that
holiest of lands, the cradle of faith. On this Jubilee Christmas,
in the name of the staff of New World Publications, I wish you
a holy and merry Christmas.
—Tom Sheridan,
Editor and General Manager
Send your comments
Top
