Hope for the Christmas Child

Editorial printed on 24 December 2004

Many retailers have enjoyed one of their busiest Christmas seasons, with some Dublin traders claiming business is up by as much as 8 per cent. It is no wonder the American writer and preacher John Hynes Holmes once described the Christmas season as "the period when the public plays Santa Clause to the merchants."  But it is too easy to become cynical about the commercialisation and secularisation of Christmas.  As reports in this newspaper in the past week have shown, Christmas still offers an attractive message to many who appear to have abandoned all religious practices for then rest of the year.  They have been left with a sense of something missing, a yearning of the sacred, a mourning for childhood innocence, or a longing for a community connection.  They want the candlelights and the carols, even if they cannot have the child in the crib.

The relevance of the child in the crib was brought home in the Christmas message from all the Irish church leaders.  Their messages remind us that the Christmas story is neither comfortable nor cosy.  It is the story of a child born in poverty to parents forced to become refugees who find that they are unwelcome strangers when they return home.  It challenges us to remember the needs of strangers for, as Archbishop John Neill points out, that first Christmas family was so like many of the people coming to Ireland today who "have traumatised, whether by violence, political oppression or poverty, " yet find no welcome and no understanding.

It was once a truism that Christmas was all about Children.  But this is hardly so for the children highlighted in this week's Prime Time report on poverty in Ireland, or for any child born in Ireland to non-national parents.  It is certainly not so for many children throughout the world.  The latest report from Unicef shows one in six children is severely hungry, one in seven has no healthcare, one in five has no safe water, and one in three has no toilet or sanitation facilities at home.   Archbishop Robin Eames points out that this Christmas thousands of children are dying of HIV/AIDS, and suffering hunger and neglect.  "The faces of tormented infants in refugee camps of the global south and the begging arms of mothers on our TV screens cry out for help," he says. "Perhaps these images present the greatest contrast imaginable to the secular obsession of the west, as we flock to buy and spend fortunes on ourselves."

But hope is also at the heart of the Christmas message, and we can do something for the Christmas Child.  We can help and encourage the development and mission agencies, so long the conscience of Ireland on development issues; we can remind the Government of its commitment to give 0.7 per cent of GDP to the developing world; and we can remind all governments that although the estimated annual cost of meeting the eight Millennium Development Goals by 2015 is $40-$70 billion, world military spending is running at $956 billion a year.

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