May your faith be stirred into flame as you contemplate the profound gift of Divine Love. May your life be a testimony of what you believe.
You will be remembered in the prayers and Masses of the sisters during the Christmas season.
About the image:
To celebrate the birth of Christ, St. Francis recreated the manger scene in a hillside cave above Greccio, Italy. Fifteen days before the great feast in 1223, Francis asked a close friend, a converted knight called John of Greccio, to prepare a setting that would recall to memory the little Child who was born in Bethlehem, and set before our bodily eyes in some way the inconveniences of His infant needs, how He lay in a manger, how, with an ox and ass standing by, how He lay upon the hay where He had been placed. (1C 84)
As a result of this enactment, St. Francis is often credited with giving us “the first Christmas crib.” His devotion to the Christmas mystery of the Incarnation no doubt influenced our modern custom of arranging Nativity scenes in our churches and homes at Christmas.
