Make your Advent count: Five Ways to Approach the Manger

This is the first in a Catholic Business Journal exclusive five-part daily series of Make Advent Count: Five Ways to Approach the Manger — Christmas is a time of celebration and Advent a time of preparation. Often, though, the preparation is eclipsed by the celebration – and much consternation. Instead of readying hearts, minds and souls for Christ’s coming, the secular world uses Advent as a time for countless office Christmas parties, a countdown of harried shopping days, and credit card accounts spilling over into annual personal financial disasters.

So, is there a proper way to make Advent count?

A look at the scriptural account of Christ’s birth will tell a different story from the hanging tinsel, the hangovers, and budget spreadsheets hanging in the balance.

In the same way that Catholics prepare for Easter by praying the Stations of the Cross, Catholics can also meditate on certain elements in St. Luke’s Gospel narrative of Christ’s birth. Church fathers, doctors of the Church and contemporary Catholic writers have provided important insights regarding this narrative – and such insights also speak to injustices in the world today.

As the faithful strive to prepare for Christ’s coming this Christmas, the Catholic Business Journal presents five moments in the Christmas story; one a day for five days. Each “moment” provides an entrée into this preparation for the celebration of Christ’s birth – and remind us of the hope and overwhelming joy which is at the heart of Christ’s Incarnation.

1. The Virgin Birth
Behold thou shalt conceive in thy womb and shalt bring forth a son: and thou shalt call his name Jesus. (St. Luke 1:31)

Perhaps no greater mystery accompanies one of the greatest of all mysteries – Christ become man – than that of Mary’s perpetual virginity before and after Christ’s birth. Doctor of the Church St. Francis de Sales has written extensively on Christ’s birth and how we best ought to prepare for it. In his writings, St. Francis employs highly imaginative and startling analogies to explain the various mysteries of the Christian faith – such as the Virgin Birth.

“Stars produce their light virginally and without any detriment to themselves,” he writes in a sermon for Advent. “Quite the contrary, for the light makes them even more beautiful to us. In the same manner Our Lady produced the inaccessible light [1 Timothy 6:16] of her most blessed Son, without receiving any injury from it nor staining in any way her virginal purity. There was, however, this difference. She produced Him without any effort, nor shock, nor any violence whatsoever. This is not the case with the stars, for it is clear that they produce their light by shocks and, it seems, with violence and force” (De Sales 54).

This is also not the case with many women around the world who, according to the Population Research Institute (www.POP.org), are forced by oppressive government mandates to have abortions and undergo sterilization.

“Under the terms of Beijing’s one-child-per-family policy, women who have one child must have IUD’s inserted,” PRI reports. “Women who have two children must be sterilized, or their spouses must be sterilized. Women who are pregnant with an over-quota child must be given ‘remedial measures’; namely, an abortion.”

While China recently revised its one-child policy, allowing families to have two children, forced surgical abortion is still the norm as PRI president Steven Mosher recently testified to Congress.

“China’s new two-child policy does not mean a new dawn of reproductive freedom in China,” says Mosher. “The Chinese Communist Party will remain as firmly in control of fertility as ever. Abuses such as forced abortions and forced sterilizations will continue.”

In India, as well, 1 in 3 women who have been sterilized, PRI reports on its website, “say they were not informed that the procedure was permanent.”

While contemplating the mystery of the Virgin Birth in the stable of Bethlehem, Catholics should also pray for an end to these and other injustices against women around the globe.

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