Following are Father Hawkswell’s homilies for Christmas, the Feast of the Holy Family, the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God, and Epiphany. 

Christmas, Year C
First Reading: midnight Is 9:2-4, 6-7; dawn Is 62:11-12; day Is 52:7-10
Second Reading: midnight Ti 2:11-14; dawn Ti 3:4-7; day Heb 1:1-6
Gospel Reading: midnight Lk 2:1-16; dawn Lk 2:15-20; day Jn 1:1-18

“Look!” a young Muslim said proudly as he showed me his first driver’s licence.

“Wonderful!” I exclaimed, as I examined it, “but what’s this name in front of yours?”

I knew him as “Sina,” but the name on the licence was “Seyed Sina.”

“Oh, that’s part of my family name,” he said. “It means I’m related to God.”

“Impossible!” I replied. “How can you be related to God?”

“He’s made a mistake,” his friend explained quickly. “It means he’s related to Mohammed.”

As the two started arguing about it, I added, “I could say that I’m related to God, but you can’t.”

“How can that be?” Sina asked curiously.

“I’m a Christian,” I replied. “We know that God became a man about 60 generations ago. He had a mother, a grandmother, a grandfather, perhaps cousins. I could be related to one of them. At any rate, my claim is more plausible than yours.”

What do we mean when we say that God became Man?

We mean that the creator of the world became one of his own creatures; the author of life became one of his own characters; the playwright walked on to the stage. The Word became flesh, and lived among us; myth became fact; the prophecies were fulfilled. God became man.

It’s not just a vague, pious thought. It actually happened, during a well defined period of history: during the census decreed by the Roman Emperor Augustus, while “Quirinius was governor of Syria,” as we hear in the Christmas Readings. On that night, a terrifying angel of the Lord appeared to shepherds in the hills near Bethlehem in Judea, telling them that God had become a little baby, “wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger.”

The baby born that night had two natures: the nature of God and the nature of man. Although we believe it, we find it difficult to imagine. Indeed, the Church’s belief was attacked repeatedly right from the beginning.

Paul of Samosata, Bishop of Antioch in Asia Minor, held that Jesus was God’s son by adoption, not by nature.

Arius, a priest in Alexandria in Egypt, taught that the Son of God was of a different “substance” from the Father. In reply, the Church promulgated the creed we still say on Sundays, affirming that the Son of God is “begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father.”

Nestor, Bishop of Constantinople (now Istanbul in Turkey), taught that Christ was two persons, a human person joined to the divine Person of God’s Son, instead of one person with two natures.

The Monophysites claimed that Christ had only one nature, the divine nature, and that He was not truly human.

The Church formally condemned all these heresies at various ecumenical councils. Jesus Christ is fully and perfectly God, and fully and perfectly man.

Why did God the Son become man? The Catechism of the Catholic Church quotes St. Athanasius: “so that we might become God,” and St. Thomas Aquinas: “so that He, made Man, might make men gods.”

It is as difficult to imagine that we are to share in God’s divinity as it is to believe that he shares our humanity. Yet that is what we pray in the Offertory at every Mass: “By the mystery of this water and wine, may we come to share in the divinity of Christ, who humbled himself to share in our humanity.”

“He gave himself for us so that he might redeem us from all iniquity and purify for himself a people of his own who are zealous for good deeds,” St. Paul says. “He saved us, not because of any works of righteousness that we had done, but according to his mercy.”

This Christmas, let us renew our belief in the divinity of Christ, and pray, with the Church, that by our communion with God made man, we may come to share in that divinity.

Father Hawkswell is again teaching The Catholic Faith in Plain English. The whole course is available in written form and Sessions 1-13 in YouTube form at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course. Session 14, “Supernatural Life,” will be available in YouTube form starting Jan. 2.


The Holy Family: a model for us all


Holy Family, Year C
First Reading: 1 Sm 1:11, 20-22, 24-28
Second Reading: 1 Jn 3:1-2, 21-24
Gospel Reading: Lk 2:41-52

This Sunday, the Church presents the Holy Family as a model. Unfortunately, many people cannot see it that way. They know that Mary was, and remained, a virgin, so they picture Joseph as an elderly man called by God merely to protect her reputation and her Child.

No, said Pope St. John Paul II in Redemptoris Custos (“Guardian of the Redeemer”).

While Joseph was still seeking a way out of the “difficult situation” caused by Mary’s pregnancy, an angel told him, “Do not fear to take Mary your wife, for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit; she will bear a son, and you shall name him Jesus.”

The angel visited Joseph “as Mary’s spouse,” the Pope said, giving him “the responsibilities of an earthly father with regard to Mary’s son.” Obediently, Joseph took Mary as his wife “in all the mystery of her motherhood,” along with “the son who had come into the world by the Holy Spirit.”

For the Jews, Pope Francis noted in Patris Corde (“With a Father’s Heart”), to name a person or thing (as Adam did) “was to establish a relationship.”

Mary’s reproach to Jesus in the Gospel Reading – “Your father and I have been searching for you” – is not just a “conventional phrase,” he said; it shows “the complete reality of the Incarnation” present in the Holy Family.

In particular, the right and responsibility to name a child belonged to the father. In naming Mary’s son, therefore, Joseph declared his “legal fatherhood” over Jesus, Pope John Paul said. “The juridical basis” of his fatherhood was his marriage to Mary. It made Mary’s son “also Joseph’s son.”

Mary’s reproach to Jesus in the Gospel Reading – “Your father and I have been searching for you” – is not just a “conventional phrase,” he said; it shows “the complete reality of the Incarnation” present in the Holy Family. Mary and Joseph “both deserve to be called Christ’s parents.” Joseph was Jesus’ father in the same way that he was Mary’s spouse: “in mind, not in the flesh.”

It is because people find “the sublime mystery” of this “spousal communion” so hard to imagine, the Pope said, that ever since the second century, they have pictured Joseph as elderly, more guardian than husband. Rather, it was by “his interior perfection, the fruit of grace,” that he lived his marriage to Mary in “virginal affection.”

Joseph and Mary realized “all the goods of marriage,” he stressed – “offspring, fidelity, and the Sacrament.”

Notice: “offspring” are one of the “goods” of marriage, as the First Reading suggests.

The Church does not support “an ideology of fertility at all costs, urging married couples to procreate indiscriminately and without thought for the future,” Pope John Paul said. “One need only study the pronouncements of the Magisterium to know that this is not so.”

In fact, said Pope St. Paul VI, the Church upholds “responsible parenthood”—not by contraception (as if spouses should be free to obey every urge to sexual intercourse), but by “knowledge” of the “biological laws” of procreation and by the “dominion” of “reason and will” over “instinct or passion.”

Spouses must not make “decisions about the number of children and the sacrifices to be made for them” simply for comfort or peace, Pope John Paul said. It is better “to deny their children certain comforts or material advantages” than to deprive them of “brothers and sisters, who could help them to grow in humanity and realize the beauty of life at all ages, in all its variety.”

The late Father Donald Neumann used to quote Pope John Paul in an annual homily. As a result, he boasted, he was “responsible” for at least 20, probably 30, and possibly more children in the Vancouver Archdiocese.

“Frequently, especially at Baptisms, people say that my homilies have struck a chord,” he said. “As a pastor, I see the happiness of children in big families. They know how to give and take. I also see the sadness of parents when an only child dies; there’s no one to share the grief.”

May his words continue to “strike a chord”!

Father Hawkswell is again teaching The Catholic Faith in Plain English. The whole course is available in written form and Sessions 1-13 in YouTube form at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course. Session 14,"Supernatural Life," will be available in YouTube form starting Jan. 2.


Mother of God and our mother, too

Mary, Mother of God
First Reading: Num 6:22-27
Second Reading: Gal 4:4-7
Gospel Reading: Lk 2:16-21

By calling Mary “mother of God,” we glorify not only her, but also her Son, says the Catechism of the Catholic Church. “What the Catholic faith believes about Mary is based on what it believes about Christ, and what it teaches about Mary illumines in turn its faith in Christ.”

Jesus, whom Mary conceived as man by the Holy Spirit, who truly became her Son according to the flesh, is none other than God the Son, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, and so Mary is truly God’s mother.

Image of Our Lady of Perpetual Help. “Is not Mary the mother of Christ? Then she is our mother also,” said Pope St. Pius X in his 1904 encyclical Ad Diem Illum. (Michael Swan/Catholic Register)

Mary’s cousin Elizabeth was the first to use this title when, prompted by the Holy Spirit, she called Mary “the mother of my Lord.” (The Jews, out of respect, always replaced God’s name, “Yahweh,” with His title, “Lord.”)

Still used today, “mother of God” is one of the most ancient of Mary’s titles. As early as the third century, the Church in Egypt prayed, “We fly to your patronage, O holy mother of God.”

In the fifth century, some theologians began to argue that “mother of God” implied that Mary had originated God. They claimed that she had given birth to Christ’s human nature, but not his divine nature.

In reply, St. Cyril of Alexandria noted that a mother gives birth to a person, not to a nature. The Person to whom Mary gave birth is God the Son. She did not originate him, but she certainly “mothered” him, in the same sense that a man “fathers” a child.

Mary’s title has profound implications for us.

“Is not Mary the mother of Christ? Then she is our mother also,” said Pope St. Pius X in his 1904 encyclical Ad Diem Illum.

Christ has a physical body like that of any other man, the Pope explained: the body he acquired when he was conceived in Mary’s womb. However, he also has a mystical body: the body he acquired when he gave his apostles his body to eat and his blood to drink, the body that incorporates all the baptized, what St. Paul calls the “one body in Christ.”

Mary “did not conceive the eternal Son of God merely in order that he might be made man, taking his human nature from her,” the Pope said, “but also in order that by means of the nature assumed from her, he might be the Redeemer of men.... Hence Mary, carrying the Saviour within her, may be said to have also carried all those whose life was contained in the life of the Saviour.” Accordingly, all who are united to Christ—through Baptism and the Eucharist—“have issued from the womb of Mary like a body united to its head.”

It is as members of Christ’s mystical body that we are God’s children. “See what love the Father has bestowed on us in letting us be called children of God!” St. John says. “Yet that is what we are.”

St. John, standing by the cross with Mary, had heard Jesus say to him, “There is your mother,” and to her, “Woman, there is your son.” It was not just a metaphor, nor simply a request that John care for Mary after Jesus’ death.

It was a statement of fact. We had become Christ’s brothers and sisters—in Greek, adelphoi, literally, “from the same womb”—when we had eaten and drunk his body and blood the night before.

Mary’s role in our salvation “is not something optional for Christians,” says theologian Scott Hahn. “It is not something ornamental in the Gospel. Mary is—in a real, abiding, and spiritual sense—our mother.”

To know our brotherhood with Jesus, he says, we must know the mother we share with him. “Without her, our understanding of the Gospel will be, at best, partial. It will be stalled out in the Old Testament, where God’s fatherhood was considered to be metaphorical, and man’s sonship was more like servility.”

Father Hawkswell is again teaching The Catholic Faith in Plain English. The whole course is available in written form and Sessions 1-13 in YouTube form at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course. Session 14,"Supernatural Life," will be available in YouTube form starting January 2.


‘Salvation is from the Jews’

Epiphany of the Lord
First Reading: Is 60:1-6
Second Reading: Eph 3:2-3a, 5-6
Gospel Reading: Mt 2:1-12

Recently, chatting to a Jewish repairman, I referred to “the chosen people.”

“Why would God choose one particular people?” he replied.

From “all the nations,” God “chooses Israel,” Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI says—but “with a view to healing the whole human race.”

That seems to be God’s way: choosing and thus excluding, but with the design of including everything.

“At the heart of the divine act of creation is the divine desire to make room for created persons in the communion of the uncreated Persons” of the Trinity, says the International Theological Commission.

However, God started with inanimate matter. His creation “did not spring forth complete,” says the Catechism of the Catholic Church, but was created “in a state of journeying” toward its perfection.

Although they were Gentiles, the magi had come to Jerusalem “to pay homage to the King of the Jews,” the one who would be “King of the nations,” says the Catechism. (Fr. Lawrence Lew, OP/Flickr)

For 13-14 billion years, God made choices. He chose the star and the planet to make a fitting home for life; the rest were excluded. Again and again he chose the species whose evolution would culminate in humans; the rest were excluded. Finally he chose two individuals of a species on whom he could stamp his own image, and called them to share his own divine life, through knowledge and love; the rest were excluded.

However, that is not the whole story. “From the least things to the great events of the world and its history,” God makes nothing without purpose.

Having created man, God made him his “fellow-worker,” giving him dominion over the earth “in order to complete the work of creation, to perfect its harmony.”

God had narrowed His choice to a single man and woman, but with a view to perfecting all creation.

Thus God created. However, deceived by Satan, the first humans counter-created. In response, God decided to re-create.

Here, again, for some 200,000 years, he made choices. In about 2091 BC, he chose Abraham. Of Abraham’s sons, he chose Isaac. Of Isaac’s sons, he chose Jacob. Gradually, he fashioned the descendants of Jacob’s 12 sons into a nation.

“You are a people sacred to the Lord, your God,” Moses told them about 1440 BC. “He has chosen you from all the nations on the face of the earth to be a people peculiarly his own.”

In about 1000 BC, from the Tribe of Judah, God chose Jesse’s youngest son David as King, promising that his “house” and “kingdom” would “endure forever.”

Finally, God chose Mary, a virgin betrothed to “Joseph, of the House of David,” who freely agreed to co-operate with him completely. Through her, God the Son became man.

In that man, God completed this phase of His new creation. Jesus is the new man, the second Adam. In him, humanity has the perfection to which God has always called it.

Again, that is not the whole story. God made one Man new with a view to re-creating the whole human race. Jesus’ last command was, “Go and teach all nations.”

However, until his death, Jesus upheld his Father’s exclusiveness. Asked by a Canaanite woman to cure her daughter, he explained, “My mission is only to the lost sheep of the House of Israel”; he refused “to take the food of sons and daughters and throw it to the dogs.”

Nevertheless, the woman’s faith-filled prayer moved him to anticipate his Father’s inclusiveness: he healed the girl, saying, “Woman, you have great faith!”

The Epiphany is another such incident, when Jesus manifested himself to the magi—once again, because of their faith. Although they were Gentiles, they had come to Jerusalem “to pay homage to the King of the Jews,” the one who would be “King of the nations,” says the Catechism.

God chose Israel not because of its superiority to other peoples, says Pope Benedict, but for something: to “endure something,” to “accomplish something for others,” to render a special service to history—nothing less than the salvation of the world.

Father Hawkswell is again teaching The Catholic Faith in Plain English. The whole course is available in written form and Sessions 1-14 in YouTube form at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course. Session 15, “The Communion Among the Saints in the Mystical Body of Christ,” will be available in YouTube form starting Jan. 9.