The birth of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke is more than a simple narrative. It is the theological statement of the Christian faith that Jesus is the long-awaited Messiah and the very Son of God.

Now there is more here than the Grinch who stole Christmas. There is a deep-seated antagonism against the place of religious expression in the public forum. We began as a land to which people fled in order to practice their religion openly. However, for some, the remembrance of our nation’s religious patrimony is anathema.

After Adam and Eve sinned, God did not become impatient and immediately wipe them from the face of the earth. “The Lord is full of compassion, slow to anger” (Ps. 145:8). God’s slowness to anger is His patience; His mercy translated into deed.

Thanksgiving cannot be divorced from freedom. When the Pilgrims joined together with the Native Americans in the autumn of 1621, they celebrated their first successful harvest. They also reveled in their newly acquired freedom of religion.

Today the discoveries of science and technology open new possibilities for human development. Yet, when uprooted from a moral context, they exalt reason to the level of self-destructive autonomy. Relativism ignores the objective order of truth and extols the tolerance of all convictions as equal truths.

Evangelization is all about the Church growing and welcoming all. For many Catholics, the word ‘evangelization’ sounds uncomfortably non-Catholic. We are indebted to Pope John Paul II for reintroducing us to a word that is part of our biblical heritage

Prior even to the Church’s teaching on morality, there is an objective order of right and wrong. Reason can recognize this order. Reason can embrace this order and build a just society. Within this objective order of right and wrong, some rights take precedence over another. For example, the right to defend one’s own life against an unjust aggressor takes precedence over the rights of the aggressor. In the objective order of truth, the right to life is fundamental.

We are at a new moment in the liturgical renewal initiated by Vatican II’s document Sacrosanctum Concilium, the decree on the liturgy. The Church is now preparing new translations of the prayers used in liturgy.

Beyond the borders of Turkey, the city of Konya is well-known. Located just south of Ankara, it is Turkey’s most religiously conservative city. On the trip I made this summer with the Interfaith Dialog Center, all of us, Catholics, Protestants and Muslims, were excited to visit this center of Sufi mysticism.

At the heart of the Eastern Roman Empire, this imposing statement of the Christian faith was served by 80 priests, 150 deacons, 60 subdeacons, and 75 doorkeepers. In the summer of 1968, I had visited this church. This past summer, I had the good fortune of visiting it again with a greater appreciation of its place and meaning in history.