Monday, December 25 : Saint Leo the Great

This is the day our Saviour was born: what a joy for us, my beloved! This is no season for sadness, this, the birthday of Life – the Life which annihilates the fear of death, and engenders joy, promising, as it does, immortality. Nobody is an outsider to this happiness. The same cause for joy is common to all, for our Lord. . . came with redemption for all. Let the saint rejoice, for he hastens to his crown; let the sinner be filled with joy, for pardon is offered him; let the Gentile be emboldened, for he is called to life. When the designated time had come, which God in his deep and impenetrable plan had fixed upon, God’s Son took the nature of man upon himself in order to reconcile man to his Creator. . . The Word who is God, the Son of God “who was in the beginning with God; through whom all things came to be, and without whom nothing came to be”, has become man to deliver man from eternal death. He humbled himself to assume our mortal condition yet without diminution to his greatness. Remaining what he was and assuming what he was not, he united our condition of a slave to his condition of equality with God the Father. . . Greatness was clothed with humility, strength with weakness, eternity with mortality: true God and true man, in the unity of a single Lord, “the one mediator between God and the human race” (1Tm 2,5). . . My beloved, let us offer thanksgiving to God the Father, through his Son, in the Holy Spirit. In the great mercy with which he loved us, he had pity on us, and “in giving life to Christ, gave life to us too, when we were dead through sin,” so that in him we might be a new creation, a new work of his hands (Ep 2:4-5; 2Co 5:17). . . O Christian, be aware of your nobility!

Roman Extraordinary (Tridentine) Daily Readings – rosary,team