Christmas is a special time in the liturgical calendar of the Church and in the social calendar of many people, including our sisters and brothers of other religious traditions.

Since Christmas is a time when people will gather, worship and reflect, I decided to address the people of the archdiocese through a Christmas letter this year rather than a formal Christmas Message.

“My Sisters and Brothers in the Lord,
I am writing to you as your Archbishop on the weekend before Christmas through my column in the Catholic News. My prayer for all is that each person in the archdiocese will possess the peace and joy of Christmas.

I want you to think and pray and talk with each other about some issues as you rest and enjoy the Christmas holidays. I shall concentrate on just two issues:
1) The Solidarity Process and
2) Synod 2008.

 I shall also present the rationale for the distribution of my Pastoral Letter on Solidarity to the Parishes of the Archdiocese at all the Masses on Christmas Day. Finally, I shall conclude with a brief reflection on Christmas. 

The solidarity process

As many already know, earlier this year I published a Pastoral Letter on Deepening the Spirit of Solidarity in the Archdiocese of Port of Spain. For the general information of the Archdiocese, the text of the Pastoral Letter was printed in the Catholic News (June 10).

A study version of the Pastoral Letter along with reflection questions prepared by the Communications Commission was published and distributed to all the priests, Religious communities and to the departments of the archdiocese.

The Pastoral Letter was deliberately not distributed to the general membership of the archdiocese for two reasons:
1) During the adult education/formation experiment of the Antilles Episcopal Conference, the bishops learned that only when the adult education/formation DVDs were thoroughly facilitated in the parishes, did they achieve their intended goals. Consequently, I decided to train facilitators from the parishes before the Pastoral Letter was distributed.
2) It was thought to be important to have the Pastoral Letter studied and reflected on as the Archdiocese moves into the formal preparations for Synod 2008.

Personnel from the Archdiocesan Commission for Communication and the Department for Catechetics have now trained 170 facilitators to facilitate the understanding of the text of the Pastoral Letter and its implications for the upcoming Synod for the general population of the archdiocese.

The Pastoral Letter will be distributed in every parish on Christmas Day – one copy per family. The parish priest/administrator will make arrangements to have the facilitators from the parish begin to process the Pastoral Letter with the people early in the New Year.

Synod 2008

There is a very hopeful level of collaboration beginning to develop on the parish, vicariate and archdiocesan levels. It is hoped that the facilitation of the Pastoral Letter in each parish will continue the development of a spirit of collaboration throughout the archdiocese and have positive results for the Synod process.

The booklets published by the Synod Committee (Toward Synod 2008, Part I and Part II) have been very helpful to parishes and vicariates in preparing for their respective assemblies.

As examples of positive pastoral developments continue to multiply as a result of the solidarity process, the archdiocese will grow proportionally as a unified community of faith and pastoral collaboration.

We must accept the fact that we can only meet our pastoral challenges if we choose to collaborate together in solidarity. An outstanding example of solidarity was the agreement of priests to leave their parishes three to five times each year so that every parish/chapel community in the archdiocese can have Mass celebrated for the people at least twice each month,

A Christmas reflection

Christmas communicates the consoling truth that God loves us and wants to live in relationship with us. It is the revelation that the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity emptied himself in obedience to the mission he received from the Father and from a motive of love for humankind became one of us. In Jesus, God became visible and accessible to us.    

The visibility and accessibility of God to us continues through the Church until the end of time. While the visibility of the Church is clear in history, its spiritual reality as the communicator of divine life can only be seen through the eyes of faith.

That is why it is so important for people to keep alive their understanding and appreciation of the meaning of Christmas through reflective reading of the Scriptures, personal and liturgical prayer and openness to the teaching of the Church especially on Christmas issues: life, justice, love and peace.

The level of fear that grips the lives of so many people in the nation and the world is clearly not the Will of God. The fear and mistrust is the result of hatred, violence and selfishness.

In a sense, these negative influences help us to understand and appreciate the importance of the Christmas message. They motivate us to change and choose something better: to imitate God’s love for us.

At Christmas we open ourselves in gratitude to receive and trust in God’s love for us.  Our acceptance of God’s love enables us to love one another.

Without accepting God’s love for us, we are unable to understand the meaning of authentic love or why and how we should love one another.

Conclusion

My Christmas greeting to the archdiocese and nation is this: rise above fear and mistrust. Choose to accept God’s love and to share God’s love with others as we try to build families, community, Church and nation.

My Christmas Masses will be offered for the peace and spiritual growth of the entire archdiocese. May Jesus, the visibility of God, be with us as we strive in solidarity to become a Church that is truly alive.

A Blessed Christmas to all.”