In his Christmas message, Father Christian Carlassare, Combonian missionary and Bishop of Bentiu, offers us a word of truth born of attentive listening to a people marked by war, poverty and displacement. From South Sudan – a young land, deeply wounded – there rises an announcement that neither avoids suffering nor glosses over it, but passes through it: Christian hope is not an illusion; it is a tenacious seed, capable of taking root even in parched and broken ground.
Christmas, he reminds us, is the mystery of a God who chooses to draw near precisely where humanity groans and waits. It is not a nearness expressed in words alone, but a concrete presence that takes upon itself the wounds of history and transforms them into places of encounter. This is the Gospel lived among the ruins of our world, where poverty is not a sentence of exclusion but a space of solidarity, and where the poor are not passive recipients but active subjects and teachers of faith.
In the Apostolic Exhortation Dilexi te, Pope Leo leads us to the heart of this mystery with the words: “I have loved you.” From this love, freely received, flows the preferential option for the poor – not as an optional gesture, but as the path by which the Gospel is rediscovered in its integrity and purity. To love the poor, we are reminded, is not to act for them, but to love with them, allowing ourselves to be evangelised by their faith, their resilience and their hope.
As the Daughters of Charity Canossian Sisters, we recognise in this message a deep resonance with the charism entrusted to us by Saint Magdalene of Canossa: a charity that educates, accompanies and shares life; a mission born of nearness and sustained by daily fidelity; a Church that is poor and with the poor, able to reveal to the world the merciful face of Christ.
This Christmas invites us to look upon the world with the gaze of the Child of Bethlehem – a gaze that does not dominate but gives itself, does not impose but welcomes. May the God who became poor draw us ever closer to the wounds of our time and grant us eyes able to recognise, in the poor, the living presence of Christ who comes. Only in this way will our mission be authentic, and our witness continue to generate hope.
(From the Christmas message of Father Christian Carlassare, Bishop of Bentiu – South Sudan To download the original letter Father Carlassare, click HERE
