Reprinted from: The PointDecember, 1955
Edited under Fr. Leonard Feeney M.I.C.M.
There will be much talk this December about “putting Christ back into Christmas". Tragically, in all the holy commotion which will accompany this talk, not one person will speak up and ask that most pertinent question: “But who took Him out in the first place?”
The answer is in no sense a seasonal one. For the attack that threatens Christmas each December is part of an all-out, full-time offensive — which will be striking at our parochial schools next March, at our New Testament next May, and at the basic Christian structure of our country next October. It is born of an enmity as old as our Faith. And it is sustained, from father to son, by that curse which a Jerusalem mob called down upon itself when it cried, “Crucify Him! His Blood be upon us and upon our children!”
The drive to “put Christ back into Christmas” makes the ancient enemy only half worried — for, at best, it leaves our shattered word “Christmas” only half restored. It is The Point ’s lonely battle cry this December that Christmas be entirely salvaged — that, purged of the tinsel and the trappings, it may become, for all our readers, the Holy and Joyous celebration of “Christ’s Mass.”
