Scottish Catholic Observer

Faith, hope and charity: Three things are at the forefront of our minds this Christmas. Faith and charity spring easily to mind. We prepare spiritually throughout Advent for Jesus’ birth and, in doing so, hopefully support charities through Christmas cards and donations. Charity will hopefully continue throughout, for example, SCIAF’s golden jubilee year in 2015. Hope, well that can be a little harder, even when we remember—at Christmas time above all others—that the infant Jesus coming into the world is our new hope.

Some people are struggling to find hope this Christmas: The families and retired people struggling to make ends meet let alone stretch to a celebration; those at the fringes of our society; the marginalised who cannot speak for themselves… Then there are people such as Glasgow midwives Mary Doogan and Connie Wood for whom the Supreme Court ruling rejecting their right to conscientiously supervise abortion leaves them little cheer this Christmas. On a global scale, Christians are being persecuted and threatened with violence as the year ends, and Christian values are being trampled in the UK.

Who do we blame? That is not the question. The question is: What can we do about it? If we choose to simply to fault our leaders and elected representatives for a perceived failure to represent our values then we fail too. We must first educate them, or re-educate them, in our beliefs, our society’s Christian values. Evangelisation is one New Year’s resolution to make and keep, as is a return to prayer.

We can all get involved in the Knights of St Columba Spiritual bouquet prayer campaign in the run up to the 2015 Synod on the Family (SCO page 10 this week), backed by Archbishop Philip Tartaglia, the president of the Bishops’ Conference of Scotland, the campaign begins on Sunday, the feast of the Holy Family, and encourages members of the order, and the wider community, to pray as individuals and groups. The campaign, which will feature in the SCO throughout the year ahead, hopes to ‘send out a powerful message’ that our ‘country will again begin to put God back at the heart of our society,’ according to Charlie McCluskey, supreme knight of the Knights of St Columba.

The SCO wishes you a happy and a Holy Christmas, and may God keep you in the palm of His hand and fill you with hope and the Holy Spirit throughout the New Year.