The Christmas Octave highlights death and points to everlasting life

Some things are just too good to let go of, so we prolong them. That’s the intuition that the Church concretizes in her observance of octaves—eight-day-long celebrations—a liturgical inheritance from our elder brethren in faith who, even more importantly, gave us our Lord and Messiah. We began with the three Masses of Christmas—in the night, at dawn, and in the day.

And then, the Church has us honor those an ancient tradition calls the “Comites Christi” (the Companions of Christ): St. Stephen, the Protomartyr on the 26^th; St. John the Evangelist on the 27^th, and the Holy Innocents on the 28^th. For a good portion of the Middle Ages, all three feasts were also holy days of obligation. The great liturgist and father of the liturgical movement of the nineteenth century, Dom Prosper Guéranger, notes:

The sacred Liturgy blend[s] the joy of our Lord’s Nativity with the gladness she feels at the triumph of the first of her Martyrs. Nor will Stephen be the only one admitted to share the honours of this glorious Octave. After him, we shall have John, the Beloved Disciple; the Innocents of Bethlehem; Thomas, the Martyr of the Liberties of the Church; and Sylvester, the Pontiff of Peace.

But why sully a Baby’s birthday party with commemorating dead people, two of whom had violent deaths? It serves as a kind of reality check. The Venerable Archbishop Fulton Sheen was fond of reminding us about the uniqueness of the One whose birth we laud these days. “Every other person who ever came into this world came into it to live,” he said. “He came into it to die.”

St. Fulgentius, a North African bishop of the sixth century, preaching on the feast of Stephen, makes this point: “Yesterday, we celebrated the temporal Birth of our eternal King: to-day, we celebrate the triumphant passion of his Soldier.” The Child, born to die, would grow into Manhood, teaching us how to live, precisely so that we would also know how to die. We see that in St. Stephen as he is being stoned to death for his proclamation of the Gospel. St. Luke, in the Acts of the Apostles, recounts: “And as they were stoning Stephen, he prayed, ‘Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.’ And he knelt down and cried with a loud voice, ‘Lord, do not hold this sin against them’” (7:59-60). In his dying moments, he is able to echo the dying words of his Savior, rendering his soul to Him and praying for his persecutors. It was fitting that Stephen, whose name in Greek means “crowned,” should be the first Christian to be “crowned” with the grace of martyrdom.

The Beloved Disciple, Tradition informs us, is the only Apostle not to die a martyr. However, an early legend says that once St. John was given a cup of wine which had been poisoned but that, by his blessing, the poison came out of it in the form of a snake, so that our Saint could drink the cup unharmed. One of the lovely customs that grew up around this legend is the blessing of wine on the feast of St. John, in which the wine is taken home for the main meal, as members of the family drink from a common cup, inviting each other to drink “the love of St. John.” John knew the meaning of love, deep down, as he was the only Apostle to stand boldly at the foot of the Cross with the Mother of the Lord. As a reward for that faithful love, he gained Our Lady as his Mother—a reward he shares with all of us who take our place in faithful and courageous witness to the Child who was born to die.

Next, we alight on December 28, the day of the Holy Innocents. Those little ones died in the place of Him who, later in life, would become the very Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world. The Collect for that day puts these lovely words on our lips: “O God, whom the Holy Innocents confessed and proclaimed on this day, not by speaking but by dying, grant, we pray, that the faith in you which we confess with our lips may also speak through our manner of life.” This beautiful church of ours is proud to have its nationally recognized Shrine to the Unborn. In a shocking testimony to unparalleled barbaric cruelty, we have to call out—in horror and in righteous anger—all the modern Herods of our nation who have allowed or, worse, even actively participated in the murder of over 63 million little innocents. We shout out from this House of God: No more abortion! No more artificial contraception! No more in vitro fertilization! No more trafficking of children! Following a venerable usage associated with the feast, even this evening, when you go home, bless your children or grandchildren; if you can’t do so physically, at least bless them in prayer.

On the 31^st, we honor the memory of Pope St. Sylvester, who was the first pope not to die a martyr, reigning as he did during the time of Constantine, whom he baptized. Sylvester, dubbed the “Pope of Peace” because of the peace which came to the Church on his watch, was buried at the Catacombs of St. Priscilla on this day. In many Catholic countries, New Year’s Eve is called “Silvestro” because his feast ends the civil year. It is also a long-standing usage to chant the Te Deum on that day as a prayer of thanksgiving for the Lord’s blessings throughout the past year. For centuries, popes hied themselves to the Church of the Gesù for that ceremony; John Paul II broke that tradition to express his intense displeasure with the Jesuits, and since then, it has been held in St. Peter’s Basilica. A devotional aside: The praying of the Te Deum, even prayed alone in a sacred place, carries with it the possibility of a plenary indulgence.

The Octave ends on January 1. One of the calendar changes that makes sense was the return of that day to honor Our Lady as Mother of God. Indeed, the oldest Marian feast in the Western Church was that of January 1 under that very title. After all, there would have been no Octave to observe, had she not uttered her loving and obedient fiat.

And now, “circling back” to our Saint of the day—as good, old Jen Psaki used to say (who would have thunk she would come to be seen as a “good” press officer!). If you didn’t learn the story of Thomas à Becket from history class, you undoubtedly learned it from the 1964 award-winning film, starring Richard Burton as the Saint and Peter O’Toole as the villainous Henry II. The film is actually based on the 1959 play by Jean Anouilh, insightfully entitled, Becket or the Honor of God, because that is exactly what the battle was about between the King and the Archbishop, which led to his death in 1170, as he refused to compromise on “the honor of God,” enshrined in the “libertas Ecclesiae.” Henry’s perhaps off-handed remark, “Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?,” was interpreted by some flunkies as a royal wish, causing them to murder the Archbishop in Canterbury Cathedral on this very day during the Christmas Octave as Becket led the praying of Solemn Vespers.

From the very beginning, the Church has had to contend mightily to gain, maintain, or re-gain her freedom. In light of that realization, I thought it might be worth taking a journey down that Memory Lane called “Church History” to see how that struggle has played out. Spoiler: The Church has always come out on top!

Nero engaged in the first governmental persecution of the Church. The Church survived, and for what is he remembered? Starting the fire in Rome, for which he scape-goated the Christians, as well as killing his mother, wife and brother, and eventually, himself. The last and greatest persecution of the Church in the Roman Empire was waged by Diocletian, who—exhausted by the absymal failure of his reign—resigned his post and, despairing over the wreckage of his Empire, in all likelihood, committed suicide. And then there was Julian the Apostate, a baptized Christian and even an ordained lector, who turned his back on Christ and attempted to revive the old pagan religion. Speared to death in the Persian War at the age of 32, his last words admitted the ultimate defeat: “You have conquered, O Galilean!”

Fast-forwarding to the Middle Ages, we can consider Henry IV who, in 1077, got into a major conflict with Pope Gregory VII on the appointment of bishops. A mob of Henry’s supporters attacked the Pope during Christmas Mass and imprisoned him; the following day, a mob of papal supporters freed him, and he resumed the Mass! Unsatisfied, Henry demanded Gregory’s abdication, leading to Gregory’s excommunication and deposition of Henry. The Pope gave the King one year to repent. Just shy of that time, realizing he could not rule without papal sanction, Henry was literally brought to his knees for three days in the snow at Canossa, seeking reconciliation with Gregory, which the Pope granted.

Further on, after the Becket-Henry II strife, we encounter Henry VIII, who is remembered as a syphilitic adulterer and murderer, who also disinterred Becket and had his bones destroyed.

In 1593, Henry of Navarre, a Protestant, wanted to become King of France. Knowing that such an affiliation would be a non-starter for his ambition, he famously quipped, “Paris vaut bien une Messe” (Paris is worth a Mass), leading to his “embrace” of Catholicism, at least officially. By the way, what is it with all these “Henrys”!

Moving on, most of the hateful and godless French revolutionaries ended up on the guillotine themselves. Napoleon tried his hand at destroying the Church; his gift to posterity is his name attached to a psychiatric disorder. There is, however, one great anecdote from that Napoleonic attempt: As Napoleon threatened his hostage, Pius VII, with the total destruction of the Church, Catholic realism caused the Pope’s Secretary of State, Cardinal Ercole Consalvi, to mock the little dictator by asking, “If we priests haven’t done it over the centuries, you think you will successful?”

The anti-clericals of the Spanish Civil War and Mexican Revolution were no more successful, either. Although the latter did bequeath to us, through the brave Cristeros, the rousing cry of “Viva Cristo Re!” Hitler and Stalin were likewise failures in their campaigns to eradicate Christ and His Church from human experience.

We don’t have to rely on Cardinal Consalvi to assert the indefectibility of the Church. One need only consult someone like Lord Babington Macaulay—a nineteenth-century Evangelical and no great friend of Catholicism—who could write something like this about the Catholic Church:

There is not, and there never was on this earth, a work of human policy so well deserving of examination as the Roman Catholic Church. The history of that Church joins together the two great ages of human civilisation. No other institution is left standing which carries the mind back to the times when the smoke of sacrifice rose from the Pantheon, and when camelopards and tigers bounded in the Flavian amphitheatre. The proudest royal houses are but of yesterday, when compared with the line of the Supreme Pontiffs. That line we trace back in an unbroken series, from the Pope who crowned Napoleon in the nineteenth century to the Pope who crowned Pepin in the eighth; and far beyond the time of Pepin the august dynasty extends, till it is lost in the twilight of fable. . . . She saw the commencement of all the governments and of all the ecclesiastical establishments that now exist in the world; and we feel no assurance that she is not destined to see the end of them all. . . . And she may still exist in undiminished vigour when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul’s.

With good reason did the bishops of our nation, several years back, call for an annual observance of a Week for Religious Freedom, concerned about assaults on that “first freedom” guaranteed us in our founding documents. Those assaults began in the Obama regime, had a brief respite in the Trump years, and have been renewed by the “devout” Catholic Joe Biden. Of course, what we endure here is nothing compared to what our co-religionists suffer on a daily basis in places like Nigeria, Nicaragua, China, the Holy Land, and North Korea, to name but a few. It is incumbent upon us Catholics in the United States, however, to practice eternal vigilance to safeguard our religious freedom and, thus, also be a credible defender of the same for our persecuted brethren elsewhere.

In 1961, Ronald Reagan spoke one of his many truisms that bears repeating as we apply it particularly to the “libertas Ecclesiae”:

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it on to our children in the bloodstream. The only way they can inherit the freedom we have known is if we fight for it, protect it, defend it, and then hand it to them with the well fought lessons of how they in their lifetime must do the same. And if you and I don’t do this, then you and I may well spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free.

Following the example of the sainted Archbishop of Canterbury, may we never tire of upholding “the honor of God” against any and all incursions on it from any and all Caesars (or Henrys). It is not optimism, but Christian hope, that gives us the assurance that Christ’s Church will always be victorious because we know that the One who came as the Babe of Bethlehem will come at the end of time as Judge of the Universe. Therefore, even in times of struggle, we experience that peace which the world cannot give, that peace which comes from the Prince of Peace Himself.

One of the Collects of the Christmas cycle has us pray in these words:

Almighty and invisible God, who dispersed the darkness of this world by the coming of your light, look, we pray, with serene countenance upon us, that we may acclaim with fitting praise the greatness of the Nativity of your Only Begotten Son.

A final point on the meaning of an “octave”: The “eighth day” symbolizes eternity, which is to say that Christmas never ends. In reality, Christmas happens for us every day, for every time we offer the Eucharistic Sacrifice, God once more becomes Man—for us; and, every time we receive Holy Communion, God once more pitches His tent to dwell within us.

And rightly so, because He who would one day declare Himself to be “the Bread of Life” (Jn 6:35) was, after all, born in Bethlehem, which means, precisely, “House of Bread.” Or, as Pope Benedict XVI put so poetically in his 2006 Christmas homily: “The manger of the animals became the symbol of the altar, on which lies the Bread which is Christ himself: the true food for our hearts.” In that way, we too become the “Comites Christi” in our life here below—and unto eternity. Amen.

(Editor’s note: This homily was preached for the commemoration of St. Thomas à Becket during the Christmas Octave on December 29, 2023, at the Church of the Holy Innocents in New York City.)