“Dear children! Also today - when God permits me to carry to you in my arms little Jesus, the King of Peace, that He may fill you with the ardor of love and peace, so that every heart may be similar to His Heart in this time of grace - be resolute and courageous defenders of the love of your God, that in this time of grace He may give you His peace. Thank you for having responded to my call.” (With ecclesiastical approval)
Dear children! Also today - when God permits me to carry to you in my arms little Jesus, the King of Peace.
On this Christmas Day, Our Lady says: “Dear children! Also today - when God permits me to carry to you in my arms little Jesus, the King of Peace.” What deserves our close attention here is the tense. Jesus was born into this world long ago—well over two thousand years ago—in the form of an infant, so as to become truly human like us. Yet Our Lady speaks in the present tense, saying that God is allowing her to bring the Infant Jesus to us now.
Certainly, the Nativity of Jesus is an event that took place in the past. And yet, that Nativity is also a present event—an event continually renewed in the “now.” Unlike us, who are bound by time and space, God is eternal; for Him, everything is always present. Therefore, today we do not merely remember Jesus who was born long ago; rather, we welcome and adore Jesus who is born anew in our midst today.
Just as she did in those ancient days, Our Lady brings us again this Christmas her Son, the Infant Jesus, the King of Peace, in her arms. What we truly need at Christmas is not a Christmas tree, cards, gift exchanges, or parties, but Jesus Himself. Without Jesus—our Savior and King of Peace—Christmas can have no real meaning. And if Jesus is not with us, our lives can have neither a future nor hope nor eternal life.
Our Lady is bringing us the One who matters most this Christmas. After hearing the angel’s words—“Do not be afraid. For behold, I proclaim to you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. For today, in the city of David, a Savior has been born for you, who is Christ the Lord. And this will be a sign for you: you will find an infant wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger” (Lk 2:10–12)—the shepherds hurried to Bethlehem to see the Child lying in the manger. Like them, we too must run to the church, where the manger, the tabernacle, and the Cross are found, kneel before Him, and adore Him deeply.
No one and nothing in this world can give us eternal life. Only the Infant Jesus, born poor and humble, can give us eternal life and true happiness. And the place where we can meet Him is the church. In the church are the manger where He was born, the altar where at every Mass He becomes present anew in the mystery of the Incarnation, the tabernacle where His Body is reserved, the Cross, and the Word. There, too, is the priest, through whom the presence of Jesus is brought to us by all these sacred realities. On the feast of Jesus’ birth, this church becomes our new Bethlehem.
This Christmas, what we must ask of God is this: that He keep our hearts always wide open, so that we may receive with our whole heart Jesus who comes to us each day through Our Lady and through the priest. We must beg that our hearts not be bound to any person or thing in this world, but be open only to Jesus and bound to Him alone.
He may fill you with the ardor of love and peace, so that every heart may be similar to His Heart in this time of grace.
At the birth of Jesus, a multitude of the heavenly host appeared and praised God, saying: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to those on whom His favor rests!” (Lk 2:14). In this hymn, the purpose of Jesus’ coming into the world is revealed with clarity. Jesus came to give glory to God the Father and to grant peace to those who are pleasing to Him.
Who, then, are those who are pleasing to Jesus? They are the ones who first heard this hymn and went to adore Him—the shepherds watching their flocks on the fields of Bethlehem. They received the angel’s words and the sign of Jesus’ birth just as they were. They believed what they saw, and, praising God who had sent them a Savior, they returned home in joy.
Medjugorje is a new Bethlehem of our time. Through the apparitions in Medjugorje, Our Lady desires to make known to the whole world that at every Mass Jesus is born anew upon the altar and that He is truly alive in the Eucharist. We must become the shepherds of this new Bethlehem. Just as they believed and received the Infant wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger as the sign of their salvation, so we must firmly believe and receive Jesus who is alive under the appearance of the small white Host—Jesus, the Word made flesh, who dwells among us—as the sign of our salvation.
For this, we need the pure and childlike faith the shepherds possessed. Our Lady calls us to pray with the heart, to pray until prayer becomes life, to pray and to pray again, so that such faith may be born within us. And the end of that prayer is the complete transformation of our hearts—until they become like the Heart of Jesus. If, in prayer, Jesus fills our hearts with the fire of love and with peace, and our hearts come to resemble His Most Sacred Heart, then we will find ourselves shedding tears of joy.
Be resolute and courageous defenders of the love of your God, that in this time of grace He may give you His peace. Thank you for having responded to my call.
In life we defend and protect many things for ourselves. When our life and safety, our rights, or our possessions are threatened, we fight desperately to safeguard them. Yet Our Lady calls us not to defend ourselves, but to “be resolute and courageous defenders of the love of your God.”
This call reveals a sobering reality: the love of God is ignored, rejected, and even persecuted by many. This was true not only in our day, but also at the time of Jesus’ birth. Thus the Evangelist John writes: “He was in the world, and the world came to be through Him, but the world did not know Him. He came to what was His own, but His own people did not accept Him” (Jn 1:10–11).
The same John who proclaimed, “God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him might not perish but might have eternal life” (Jn 3:16), also declares in his letter: “God is love” (1 John 4:8). And he bears witness to that love in these words: “God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent His only Son into the world so that we might have life through Him. In this is love: not that we have loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son as expiation for our sins” (1 Jn 4:9–10).
God loved us and sent His only Son into this world in our human likeness as a sacrifice of atonement for our sins. Through this love we are saved from sin and death and come to share in eternal life. Nothing in this world can be compared to this love.
Our Lady calls us to become those who firmly and courageously defend this love of our God. To be firm in defending this love means to reject decisively everything that stands against it and to choose only the love of God. There can be no compromise and no mixture. We cannot serve two masters.
Jesus, who showed by His life and His death that God is love, became a sign of contradiction and endured persecution and suffering. Yet He did not retreat even an inch before those who rejected Him. Because He is Truth itself, He always remained in the love of the Father and bore witness to that love to the very end.
Through Jesus we have come to know what the love of God is, and in our daily lives we experience it. Therefore, as children of the Father and disciples of Jesus, we must become those who firmly and courageously proclaim, testify to, and defend that love. The Emmanuel—Jesus, who said, “I am with you always, until the end of the age” (Mt 28:20)—desires that we bear fearless witness to the Gospel, and so He tells us:
“Therefore do not be afraid of them. Nothing is concealed that will not be revealed, nor secret that will not be known. What I say to you in the darkness, speak in the light; what you hear whispered, proclaim on the housetops. And do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in Gehenna. Are not two sparrows sold for a small coin? Yet not one of them falls to the ground without your Father’s knowledge. Even all the hairs of your head are counted. So do not be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows. Everyone who acknowledges me before others, I will acknowledge before my Father in heaven” (Mt 10:26–32).
