By JAMES MONTI
The unfolding of the Advent season almost entirely within the concluding month of the year serves to accentuate the sense of the past, present, and future all converging in this liturgical season devoted to recalling the first coming of Christ and anticipating His return in glory. On a more personal level, as Christmas draws near, we all experience the stirring of deeply cherished memories of Christmases in our own past, but also a certain longing for the beauty of Christmases long past, those of our forefathers in the faith, echoed in centuries-old Christmas carols and visually preserved in religious art.
What I would like to offer here are several vignettes of Christmas from different times and places, all marked by that unique atmosphere that Christmas brings even amid difficult circumstances.
For several centuries, the single most venerated image of the Christ Child in Rome was that of the Church of Santa Maria in Aracoeli, a small statue of olive wood known simply as the Santo Bambino of Aracoeli, carved in the fifteenth century by a Franciscan friar from the wood of an olive tree of the Garden of Gethsemane.
By the late eighteenth century, the image had so great a reputation for miracles of healing that it was attracting numerous pilgrims. The crowned image was adorned with costly jeweled votive offerings donated by grateful supplicants. In 1798 and again in 1848 the image narrowly escaped destruction by anti-clerical fanatics; in 1994 thieves stole the image. It has been replaced with a replica. At the high point of devotion to this figure of the Christ Child during the nineteenth century, a carriage was delegated with the mission of conveying the statue to the bedsides of the sick hoping for a miraculous cure of their infirmities.
Christopher Flynn, a correspondent writing in 1915 for the periodical The Irish Monthly, recounts in vivid detail the procession with the Santo Bambino that would take place every year on Christmas morning in the Church of Aracoeli, describing likewise the closely associated custom of having little children “preach” before the enshrined image during Christmastide:
“High Mass is going on, attended by crowds, far down at the high altar. After the Gospel is sung, a strange procession begins: fully a hundred men appear dressed in blue and white surtouts; ecclesiastics follow, carrying a dazzling little figure on a small platform. This is the miraculous Bambino, the Holy Image before which all Rome bows down, at which the people have prayed for centuries that they may be shielded in time of sickness; the image they have loaded with their choicest jewels — watches, bangles, necklaces on every part of it. The procession stops at the Crib and the chief minister [celebrant] solemnly places the Child in the manger, confident that none will approach to despoil it.
“At this moment a curious scene begins. On the platform opposite [i.e., facing the manger] there mounts a child, perhaps eight years old, and he begins to speak with rising fervor of the glories of the Incarnation, or the sufferings of the Holy Family. He is followed by another, and another, sometimes a boy, sometimes a girl. I well remember two tiny children, two little sisters, the elder being not more than five, holding a dialogue in which they knelt down with joined hands and prayed aloud….These sermons end with High Mass, but go on again each day at the same hour till New Year’s” (Christopher Flynn, “Christmas in Rome,” Irish Monthly, volume 43, n. 499, January 1915, p. 7).
The coming of the early missionaries to the New World brought the light of Christmas to peoples who for countless centuries truly had been dwelling “in darkness and in the shadow of death” (Luke 1:79). In colonial Mexico this dawn of salvation came to be expressed in a Christmas custom well known in the American Southwest, the tradition of lining the exteriors of homes and streets with candlelight on Christmas Eve. What is perhaps not realized is just how quickly this custom arose following the arrival of the missionaries.
In a book entitled Historia de los Indios de la Nueva Espana (“History of the Indians of New Spain”), Fray Toribio de Benavente, also known as “Motolinia” (c. 1487-1569), one of the very first Franciscan friars to preach the Gospel in the Americas, describes this practice as already established just two or so decades after the conversion of Mexico following the apparitions of Our Lady of Guadalupe in December of 1531. His account of how Mexicans made ready for Christmas night is likewise replete with details of the floral adornments employed:
“They decorate the walls of their churches very handsomely and where tapestries are lacking, they use many reeds and flowers, and on the ground, they strew rushes and mint…and where the procession is to march they make many triumphant arches with roses in many designs and garlands….
“On Christmas Eve they put many lights in the patios of the churches and around their houses and since there are many houses with a flat roof and the houses extend for a league or two or even more they seem at night like a starry sky” (quoted in Luis Rubluo, “The Celebration of Christmas in Sixteenth Century Mexico: ‘The Song the Angels Sang’,” Artes de Mexico, n. 157, 1972, p. 92).
A particularly poignant Christmas episode is recorded by the Spanish Franciscan missionary Fr. Pedro Font (1737-1781), author of a famed diary of the 1775-1776 “Anza Expedition” to what is now San Francisco, which was led by the Spanish military commander Juan Bautista de Anza (1736-1788). The hardships of the expedition took a toll on Fr. Font, who was ill for much of the journey, but his diary is an amazing record of what he and his companions saw and experienced. His daily entries almost always begin with the simple statement, “I said Mass,” a testament to the reality that whatever each day might bring, it was the Mass that made every day worthwhile, the one truly necessary thing.
It is in Fr. Font’s diary entry for November 24, 1775, that he first mentions an unnamed pregnant woman who had become ill amid the cold weather they had experienced. A nourishing meal provided by the commander of the expedition restored the woman’s strength, but when nearly a month later, on December 23, she began to go into labor, her health again faltered. As her labor pains continued on Christmas Eve, it became clear that she was in peril of dying, and Fr. Font was asked to hear her Confession. He found her to be very fearful of death, so he did what he could to comfort her. The holy night of the Savior’s birth gently descended upon the camp of the weary travelers, and at 11:30 p.m. that night, the woman whose life had hung in the balance gave birth to a healthy baby boy. Midnight brought the beginning of a very special Christmas Day graced by the presence of a newborn infant.
Fr. Font celebrated the customary three Masses of Christmas, after which he baptized the baby, who was given the name Salvador Ygnacio (cf. Anza’s California Missions: Volume IV: Font’s Complete Diary of the Second Anza Expedition, trans. Herbert Eugene Bolton, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1930, pp. 66, 151).
It Will Always Be Christmas
As the French missionary priest Abbe Emmanuel Domenech (1825-1903) prepared to celebrate the Christmas of 1851 in Brownsville, Texas, it brought back bittersweet memories of Christmases past, particularly those of his native France. His sentiments then were not unlike what he had experienced on Christmas night of 1849:
“. . . it was a starlight night, and our little cottage was filled with colonists who came to congratulate us, bringing us at the same time cake and pork. . . . I could scarcely shake off a vague sadness by which I was oppressed. Already had four years passed away since this fete had been a family festival; and my imagination bore me back to other times when friends and parental caresses were not absent at this holy season. Alas! Life seems to be but a perpetual farewell to men and things” (Abbe Emmanuel Domenech, Missionary Adventures in Texas and Mexico: A Personal Narrative of Six Years’ Sojourn in Those Regions, London, Longman et al., 1858, pp. 186-187).
Abbe Domenech’s candid words are a reminder of the very real sacrifices that missionaries make to preach the Gospel far from home. It was the sight of the vast populace he had come to serve filling his church, including those of other faiths who nonetheless felt the irresistible attraction of the sacred Catholic liturgy in all its festive glory, that gave him consolation as Christmas Day of 1851 began:
“Christmas-day arrived, with its rejoicings for the people and its sorrows for me. . . . The memories of the past — of family and country — came fresh upon my mind, wrapt in an undefined melancholy. During the midnight Mass I had a moment’s happiness in seeing a crowd of every age, sex, and creed, take possession of the house of God, which was at this moment in all its splendor. The draperies, the flowers, the lights, supplied in profusion, were in sweet harmony with French taste, become proverbial with strangers. The Mass was sung by fourteen of my countrymen, who had very sweet voices.
“The chasuble which I wore, was the gift of a Mexican. It was gold brocade embroidered with gold and silk; and though more than a hundred years old, it reflected rays of light in all directions. Upwards of 300 who could find no room in the church had to hear Mass in the open air. Fireworks, set off by the officers of the garrison, terminated this feast, which had never before been celebrated with so much solemnity on the frontiers of Texas” (ibid., pp. 350-351).
The special memories of Christmases past, whether those of long past or those of our own past, point to a future beyond this world where the light of Christmas will never fade, where it will always be Christmas, for it is there that at long last we will be with Christ and all those we love for all eternity.
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