Dearest friends, I would not do my duty as a bishop if I said to you ‘Happy Christmas’ without disturbing you. I, instead, want to trouble you. Indeed, I cannot bear the idea of having to give you innocuous and formal good wishes that are imposed by the routine of the calendar. I am even flattered by the hypothesis that someone will return them to their sender because they are not wanted.

   So many uncomfortable good wishes, then, my dear brothers and sisters!

     May Jesus who was born for love give you the nausea of a selfish and absurd life that is without vertical impetuses and grant you the invention for yourselves of a life charged with giving, prayer, silence and courage! May the Child who sleeps on the straw take away your sleep and make the pillow of your bed as a hard as a boulder until you have given hospitality to a person who has been evicted from his home, to a Moroccan, to a poor man travelling through!

     May God who became man make you feel worms every time that your careers become the idol of your lives; advance, the project of your days; and the back of your neighbour the instrument of your upward climbing!

     May Mary who found in the dung of animals the cradle in which to place tenderly the fruit of her womb force you with her wounded eyes to suspend the longing for all the sing-songs of Christmas until your hypocritical consciences accept that a garbage bin, the incinerator of a clinic, has become the grave without a cross of a life that has been eliminated!

May Joseph, who in the affront of a thousand closed doors is the symbol of all paternal disappointments, disturb the drinking of your huge meals, rebuke the warmth of your bingo games, bring about short circuits in the waste of your lights, until you allow yourselves to be placed in a state of crisis by the suffering of very many parents who shed secret tears for their children who are without luck, without health, and without jobs!

May the angels who proclaim peace once again bring war to your somnolent calm which is unable to see that a little further away than a palm’s distance, with the aggravating circumstance of your accessory silence, injustices take place, people are evicted, weapons are manufactured, the lands of the humble are militarised, and peoples are condemned to the extermination of hunger!

   May the poor people who hurry to the grotto, when the powerful conspire in the darkness and the city sleeps in indifference, make you understand that if you, too, want to see ‘a great light’ you should start with the last!

May the alms of those who gain at others’ expense be useless tranquillisers!

May the furs bought with multiple thirteenth salaries make a good impression but not generate warmth!

May the delays in the building of houses of ordinary people be acts of sacrilege if they are brought about by the speculations of large companies!

May the shepherds who keep watch at night, and peer into the dawn, give you a sense of history, the thrill of expectations, and the joy of abandoning yourselves to God. And may they inspire in you the deep wish to live as poor men which is the only way of dying rich! Happy Christmas! May hope be born over our world that is dying!