Archbishop Viganò: Homily on the Most Holy Nativity of Our Lord Jesus Christ

[Stone]

Msgr. Carlo Maria Viganò

Sicut in cœlo et in terra
Homily on the Most Holy Nativity of Our Lord Jesus Christ

Lux fulgebit hodie super nos: quia natus est nobis Dominus:
et vocabitur Admirabilis, Deus, Princeps pacis,
Pater futuri sæculi: cujus regni non erit finis.

- Intr. ad Missam in Aurora

Dixit Dominus Domino meo: Sede a dextris meis; donec ponam inimicos tuos scabellum peduum tuorum (Ps 109:1). The Church repeats this Psalm at Vespers on every Sunday and feast day: The Lord said to my Lord: Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool. The Eternal Father, in the eternity of time, addresses the Eternal Incarnate Word, sanctioning His Eternal Lordship – Sit at my right hand – and His definitive victory over Satan and his servants. And this victory is Dominical, it is accomplished on the day quam fecit Dominus, when with the Resurrection from hell Our Lord brings to completion the Redemption of the human race by defeating death, suffered in the Passion to redeem us from sin and from the infernal yoke of the Adversary.

In the eternity of time, according to some of the Church Fathers, the Angels were put to the test by showing them the Mystery of the Incarnation, decreed by the Holy Trinity to repair the temptation to which our Progenitors would succumb when tempted by the Serpent. It was before this prodigy of infinite and divine Charity and Mercy, before the Word who becomes flesh and assumes our human nature, that the pride of Satan and the apostate angels refused to bow to the will of God, and launched their cry “Non serviam” in response to the “Ecce, venio” of Incarnate Wisdom, to the “Fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum” of the Mother of God, to the “Quis ut Deus?” of the Archangel Michael and the faithful Angels. Obedience and disobedience. Humility and pride. Adoring gratitude and arrogant rebellion.

In the eternity of time the Eternal Son responds to the Eternal Father and descends into History, bursts into the flow of days, into the changing of seasons, into the cycle of years and centuries, to restore the Divine Order that our Progenitors had broken. And this enmity between God and Satan, between the lineage of the Woman and the progeny of the Serpent, is announced in the Protoevangelium of Genesis, almost to show us the meaning of our earthly life, the reasons for our wandering, the goal that awaits us. Felix culpa: the fall of Adam and Eve merited us, along with expulsion from the earthly Paradise, the promise of a new Adam and a new Eve, of the Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity who becomes man and of an Immaculate Virgin who, through the working of the Holy Spirit, is made the Tabernacle of the Most High, the Ark of the Covenant, the Palace of the King, Mother of God.

The Church celebrates the Birth of Our Lord Jesus Christ secundum carnem because on this day two thousand and twenty-four years ago, as announced by the Prophets, the Divine Majesty descends upon the earth, the Light shines in the darkness, the Word resounds in order to be heard, the grain of wheat is thrown into the ground in order to sprout. And that promise made to our Progenitors, renewed to our fathers as they journeyed to the Promised Land, begins with the cry of a King, wrapped in swaddling clothes, laid in a manger, exposed to the harsh cold of a Palestinian night. The shepherds are allowed to glimpse a reflection of His Divinity in the song of the Angels, while the Magi recognize Him as God by scrutinizing the heavens and following the star from the East.

The cosmos is Christocentric: omnia per ipsum facta sunt, et sine ipso factum est nihil, quod factum est (Jn 1:3). Everything was made through Him. Per ipsum, cum ipso, et in ipso. Through him, with him and in him. Ut in nomine Jesu omne genu flectatur cœlestium, terrestrium, et infernorum (Phil 2:10). History itself also recognizes the distinction between a before and an after, marking the computation of the years starting from the Birth of Christ. And the Holy Church, which is the Mystical Body of Christ the Head, is the new Jerusalem, the new Israel, the people of the eternal Covenant that guards on its altars Emmanuel, God-With-Us, in the Most Holy Sacrament, until the end of time.

The Divine Order – the κόσμος, precisely – sees Christ as Alpha and Omega, Beginning and End: and this is true for nature, for every man, for civil societies, for the Church: sine ipso factum est nihil, quod factum est. Our Lord himself taught us: Adveniat regnum tuum; fiat voluntas tua, sicut in cœlo et in terra. It is not the world, therefore, that must conform to its own idols, but rather heaven that reveals God to men and gives them the model to conform to. The Angels repeat it: Gloria in excelsis Deo, et in terra pax hominibus bonæ voluntatis.

Everything refers to Christ; everything announces His coming, His Incarnation, His Birth, His Preaching, His Passion and Death, His Resurrection. Everything prepares for His Triumphal Return on the Day of Judgment: et iterum venturus est cum gloria, judicare vivos et mortuos; cujus regni non erit finis. Everything is accomplished in Christ, King and High Priest, donec ponam inimicos tuos scabellum peduum tuorum, until the Father has humbled the pride of the enemies of the Son by placing them under His feet. Dominare in medio inimicorum tuorum.

There are therefore enemies of Christ, and we know this well. Spiritual enemies – the apostate spirits cast into the abyss by Saint Michael – and enemies of flesh and blood, beginning with Herod, who out of fear of losing power goes so far as to have the innocent lives of newborns massacred. And there are the Pharisees and the scribes of the people, who plot to kill that Galilean who with His preaching and His miracles contradicts their political plans of rebellion against the Roman invader. And there are the High Priests, illegitimate in their authority given to them by imperial appointment, eager to maintain the prestige of their office. And then there are the pagans, ferocious persecutors of Christians; and also the heretics of all times, the barbarians, the adherents of the Lodges and the Freemasons, the revolutionaries, the socialists and the communists, the liberals, the globalists, the supporters of the Great Reset and the New World Order

What do those whom Sacred Scripture calls “workers of iniquity,” that is, the wicked of all times, share in common? Hatred of Christ: an implacable, ferocious, merciless, blind, mad, proud hatred. Hatred of the Holy Child just born in Bethlehem: Crudelis Herodes Deum Regem venire quid times?, asks the prose of the Epiphany hymn. Cruel Herod, why do you fear that God the King will come? And yet non eripit mortalia, qui regna dat cœlestia, he who gives spiritual kingdoms does not take away earthly things. But it is precisely for this reason that Christ is feared by His enemies, from Herod to Klaus Schwab, from Caiaphas to Bergoglio: because those earthly things, those economic and political powers, those riches and worldly success all claim to replace and eclipse the regna cœlestia, the powers of heaven, first and foremost among them the Universal Kingship of the Infant King, who opens His little arms in the cold of the manger already preluding the Cross that awaits Him: regnavit a ligno Deus, from that throne of pain and humiliation, a scandal for the Jews and foolishness for the pagans (1 Cor 1:23). And that Divine Kingship is intrinsically priestly, because the Kingdom of Christ is conquered in His Blood through his Immolation of Himself, and the Royal and Priestly Anointing of the Immaculate Victim is one of Blood.

We could say that the first to confirm the centrality of Our Lord Jesus Christ are precisely His enemies, who hurl themselves only and always against Christ, against the disciples of Christ, against those who bear the blessed sign of salvation, against the members of His Mystical Body. There is no other religion, nor superstition, nor idolatry, nor pagan cult that is the object of hatred of the wicked, who recognize in them the mark of their master, the fraud of the Prince of lies.

The hatred of the enemies of Christ is born of pride, that Luciferian pride which refuses to recognize in the Man-God He who is per quem omnia facta sunt, and to Whom the Divine Order necessarily imposes one to bow and kneel, because it cannot be otherwise, and because by not recognizing Christ as Lord one ends up erecting the creature as an idol, as a simulacrum, in that blasphemous subversion of the κόσμος which is the χάος, that is, the Revolution, the infernal soul of the rebellion against God.

Non eripit mortalia qui regna dat cœlestia: but mortal, earthly things are not taken away from us and are rather given to us in superabundance and a hundredfold only if we recognize Our Lord Jesus Christ as our Beginning, our End and our Means: He Whom the Father wanted to exalt supremely, and to Whom he wanted to give a name that is above every name (Phil 2:9). This ontological and indefectible necessity finds its reason in the obedience and humility of Christ, factus obœdiens usque ad mortem, mortem autem crucis (Phil 2:8), and in the evangelical precept: Si quis vult venire post me, abneget semetipsum et tollat crucem suam quotidie, et sequatur me (Lk 9:22). And Christ was the first, both in the eternity of time as the Word of the Father and in history as the God-Man, to give the example of this self-denial, this obedience, this humility. In capite libri scriptum est de me, ut facerem voluntatem tuam (Ps 39:8).

But if this humility and this obedience are the mark, so to speak, of the Redemptive work of Our Lord; if the Incarnation and the Birth of Christ mark the incipit of the great rite of Sacrifice with which God reconciles us to God; there is another Coming that will complete the Eternal Liturgy. It is the Second Coming of the Lord, at the end of the world, when that glimpse of glory that the Shepherds contemplated on the Holy Night will burst forth fully in the Triumph of Victory and in the restoration of the Universal Lordship of Christ the King, High Priest, and Judge. We will no longer see the Puer wrapped in swaddling clothes, nor the Man of Sorrows disfigured by the torments of the Passion, but rather the Rex tremendæ majestatis, He to Whom the Father will return the temporal scepter: Dominabit in nationibus, implebit ruinas, conquassabit capita in terra multorum… confregit in die iræ suæ reges. The terrible words of the Psalmist, divinely inspired, must sound like a severe warning to all of us, but especially to those who in this rebellious world – and in this Church tormented by her own Passion in conformity to the image of Her Head – still today refuse to adore Our Lord, to recognize Him as Divine King and to conform their will to His Holy Law. The emasculated and cowardly pacifism of the present times does not want to hear of a God who asserts His Dominion over the nations, who destroys and sows ruin, who crushes the proud heads, who destroys the powerful on the day of His wrath. But this is the ineluctable destiny of the wicked, the proud, of those who believe themselves to be gods and claim to decide what is good and what is evil, of those who refuse to welcome the Light that has come in the darkness. The Virgin Mother also recalled this in the Magnificat: Fecit potentiam in brachio suo, dispersit superbos mente cordis sui; deposuit potentes de sede, et exaltavit humiles; esurientes implevit bonis, et divites dimisit inanes.

Let us follow the example of the Shepherds and the Magi, dear brothers and sisters: let us kneel in adoration before the Infant King, in Whose gaze we can see the tenderness and sweetness of Emmanuel. Let us kneel at the foot of the Cross, contemplating the suffering and tormented gaze of the High Priest who sacrifices Himself for us to the Father. Let us kneel at the foot of the altar, on which the Sacrifice of Calvary is renewed for the salvation of many. Because to all who have welcomed Him, the Lord has given power to become children of God, to those who believe in His name, who were born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God (Jn 1:12-13). Thus we will see the words of the Most Holy Mary fulfilled: misericordia ejus a progenie in progenies timentibus eum, his mercy extends from generation to generation to those who fear him.

Dear brothers and sisters, on this Most Holy Christmas Day, allow me to address to all of you the words of the Lord to His Disciples: Take courage, it is I; do not be afraid! (Mt 14:27). Make your heart the manger in which the Most Holy Virgin places the Newborn Jesus: the more bare and poor it is, the more the Divine Guest and His August Mother will shine in it. Do not let your heart be troubled (Jn 14:1), despite the apparent triumph of the Enemy and his servants, despite the betrayal of the Hierarchy. When these things begin to happen, says the Scripture, stand up, lift up your heads, because your redemption is near (Lk 21:28). And so may it be.

+ Carlo Maria Viganò, Archbishop

25 December 2024
Nativitas D.N.J.C.