Pope's 3 wishes for the Christmas season

December 09, 2011

As he turned on hundreds of lights forming the “world’s largest Christmas tree” on a mountainside outside Gubbio, Italy, Pope Benedict XVI said that he has 3 personal wishes for the Christmas season.

Speaking from Rome—where he was linked to Gubbio by a video conference, and remotely activated the lights—the Pope disclosed his wishes:

1. My first wish, therefore, is that our gaze, that of our minds and our hearts, not rest only on the horizon of this world, on its material things, but that it in some way, like this tree that tends upward, be directed toward God.
2. My second wish is that we recall that we also need a light to illumine the path of our lives and to give us hope, especially in this time in which we feel so greatly the weight of difficulties, of problems, of suffering, and it seems that we are enshrouded in a veil of darkness.
3. My final wish is that each of us contribute something of that light to the spheres in which we live: our families, our jobs, our neighborhoods, towns, and cities.

 

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Further information:

• Pope's Three Wishes for Christmas (VIS)
• Vatican's giant Christmas tree arrives; Pope to illuminate mountainside above town (CWN, 12/6)