One Holy Catholic Church at Christmas

Christmas 1984 I was surprised with a large Christmas bonus the last day of work before the holiday, which allowed me to greatly expand my Christmas shopping the last day or so before Christmas. That left me wrapping presents late on Christmas Eve, and, searching for something Christmasy on have on TV as I worked, I first ran across the Midnight Mass broadcast "live" from the Vatican ("Live" because midnight hit the Vatican quite a few hours earlier than it did Eastern Standard Time). I'd been raised largely ignorant of Roman Catholicism and Church History in general--judging from my Sunday school lessons there simply were no "real Christians" between John the Revelator and Martin Luther--and had only recently begun attending an Episcopal Church and getting comfortable with the idea of liturgy not being all "vain repetition" condemned by Jesus. So, I was surprised and intrigued to realize how much of the service sounded familiar (once translated) to what I was hearing and saying Sunday mornings.

Looking back on that now I think of my earlier self as laughably naive. Shortly afterwards one of my best friends (and the only one I can claim in any way to have had an influence on his conversion to Christianity) decided to return to the Catholic Church he'd been raised in (and had pretty fully rejected when I'd first met him in high school), and that--along with my own rediscovery of liturgy--caused me to begin a serious investigation of Catholicism. Some time later I was prompted to do some reading on the Orthodox church, and eventually at seminary I had to take a few courses in Church History (which my wife now teaches). Despite various frustrations with the Episcopal Church and Anglicanism in general, and despite seeing many of my friends from seminary depart for either Rome or Constantinople, I've never felt the need to move any further up the ecclesial family tree (or down towards the roots?) than Anglicanism, but I appreciate what I have and can learn from other traditions and their followers. As former Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey said (in a quote I read a couple days ago):

From the deeds of Jesus in the flesh, there springs a society which is one in its continuous life. Many kinds of fellowship in diverse places and manners are created by the Spirit of Jesus, but they all depend upon the one life. Thus each group of Christians will learn its utter dependence upon the whole Body. It will indeed be aware of its own immediate union with Christ, but it will see this experience as a part of the one life of the one family in every age and place.

--quoted from The Gospel and the Catholic Church (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock (1936/1990), 43-44.

All of that to say, I watched the Pope's sermon on Christmas Eve, and found it quite moving. Though, with an introduction this long, I now will have to wait for a future post to comment on what he had to say.