The Vatican inaugurated the 2024 manger and Christmas tree this Saturday, December 7, in St. Peter’s Square in the Vatican, the same day that Pope Francis created 21 new cardinals and on the eve of the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception .
In a ceremony held tonight, the large 29-meter-high natural fir tree was illuminated, which, as Pope Francis explained when receiving a delegation from the Italian towns of Grado and Ledro, in charge this year of the tree and the nativity scene. — “it was cut in accordance with the ecological principles of natural forest renewal.”
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Andrea de Walderstein, architect, designer and construction director of the Bethlehem, told CNA – the English agency of EWTN News – a few years ago that they have also been “the first to bring water to St. Peter’s (square), highlighting that This takes place in the Grado lagoon, a city of about 8,000 inhabitants located on an island in the Adriatic Sea, between Venice and Trieste.
The traditional Christmas figures of Mary, Joseph and the Baby Jesus are inside one of the fishermen’s cabins, called “casone”.
Pope Francis’ speech
When receiving this morning the delegation from Grado and Ledro, and the envoys from “martyred Palestine” – who this year have taken some cribs to the Vatican – the Holy Father said that the tree can be “a beautiful image of the Church, people and body”, which is around Jesus, his origin and center, in a similar way to the branches and the trunk.
The “casone”, where the fishermen spend their daily lives, continued Pope Francis, can also be “a symbol that tells us about Christmas, in which God becomes man to share our poverty, coming to build his Kingdom in the earth not with powerful means, but through the weak resources of our humanity, purified and strengthened by his grace.”
The Pope then said that in the Church, also at Christmas, “there is room for everyone,” also for sinners, who “are the first, the privileged, because Jesus came for sinners, for all of us, not for saints. For everyone. Don’t forget this. For everyone, for everyone.”
When meditating on the births from Bethlehem (Palestine), Pope Francis wanted to remember “our brothers and sisters who, there and in other parts of the world, suffer the tragedy of war.”
To conclude, the Holy Father made wishes that there be no more wars and “that there be peace throughout the world and for all men, whom God loves.”
Walter Sánchez Silva
I have been a husband since 2008. My wife and I have three children here and one who went to heaven in 2023, before he was born. Since I joined ACI Prensa in 2005, I have had the opportunity to cover various events of the Catholic Church. Among them, the World Youth Days in Cologne, Madrid and Rio de Janeiro and the apostolic trips of Pope Benedict XVI to Mexico and of Pope Francis to South Korea. I have been sent to the Vatican to cover the Family synods, in 2015; of the Amazon, in 2019 and that of Synodality, in 2023. I closely follow the situation of the Catholic Church in Nicaragua, which suffers persecution from the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega, as well as current ecclesiastical events in the region.