After a tiring day of work as a construction day laborer, a weary Aurelio was looking forward to seeing his wife, Maria, and their five children in their small, cramped apartment in downtown Los Angeles. But the sight that greeted him when the door opened made his eyes pop with confusion, and later made his heart swell with gratitude: the joyful faces of his entire family surrounded by an avalanche of gifts in their tiny living room, all thanks to Adopt-A-Family. "I was incredulous. I knew they said they were going to help us, but we didn't know they were going to give us so much," Aurelio (last name withheld by request) said later. "We just thank God that it was true," he told The Tidings, newspaper of the Los Angeles Archdiocese. Adopt-A-Family is a Los Angeles archdiocesan outreach program coordinated by the Mission Office that provides gifts of household essentials and longed-for presents to hundreds of struggling local families with children every December. "My kids were so happy to receive so many presents, everything they had asked for," continued Aurelio, a native of Mexico. "I've lived here in the U.S. for almost 15 years and I had never experienced anything like this. We are ending this year on a positive note. Thank you to everyone who made this a happy Christmas for us." This is the best of what Christmas can be. We all need to make a difference in our part of the world. Merry Christmas to you and yours!
The spiritual climax of the Gospel of John, as Father John Waiss points out, occurs at the foot of the Cross, where Jesus utters his parting words: “Woman, behold, your son!” and “Behold your mother!” (John 19:26-27). While these words were addressed to the Apostle John, the disciple whom Jesus loved, the Church has long understood this moment as a universal adoption. To truly image Christ, we must share in His parentage; if we embrace God as our spiritual Father but reject Mary as our mother, we treat Christ as a half-brother rather than our "firstborn among many brethren" (Rom. 8:29). As Origen noted as early as the third century, the profound depths of the Gospel are only accessible to those who, like John, rest their heads on Jesus’ breast and receive Mary into their own homes. This maternal role is deeply rooted in biblical typology, positioning Mary as the fulfillment of the great mothers of the Old Covenant. She is the New Eve , the mother of all the living according ...