Bishop Christian Carlassare: “Blessed journey of Advent and Merry Christmas!”

A CHRISTMAS OF CLOSENESS TO THE POOR:
FRATERNITY IS BORN IN THE WOUNDS OF THE WORLD

Dear friends,
Christmas is the feast of closeness and fraternity. This has been the guiding dream of my twenty years spent alongside the people of South Sudan. As a missionary I have witnessed both light and shadow. I have seen how hope and the cross are interwoven throughout the history of this people so beloved by God.

I shared in the joy of the 2005 peace agreement and in the dream of an independent nation in 2011—a nation singing of justice, freedom, and prosperity. But I have also witnessed the deep wound of an internal conflict that has divided the country and torn apart its social fabric, forcing millions to flee and plunging them into misery, depriving them of essentials and wounding their dignity. And yet, right there, amid the rubble of conflict, the Gospel reminded me that hope is never an illusion: it is a stubborn seed, capable of sprouting even in parched soil.

Daniele Comboni refused to give up before a mission many considered impossible, and he continued to glimpse a prosperous future for Africa. For this reason, we keep believing in a world where no one is discarded, where life is respected, and poverty is not a condemnation but a starting point for solidarity as we build a fraternal society. We dream of a South Sudan where children can play without fear, where young people can go to school, and where it is no longer more likely for a girl to die in childbirth than to earn a high-school diploma. We dream of a land where resources are not a cause of injustice but a tool for development; a country where people can work and live with dignity, without depending on humanitarian aid.

South Sudan—young and wounded—is a living parable of Christmas. Where violence, poverty, and division seem to suffocate hope, the birth of the Son of God continues to shine forth as the most radical sign of God’s closeness. God chooses to come into the world where humanity groans and waits. God chooses the path of poverty to reveal to us our true wealth. Pope Leo’s apostolic exhortation Dilexi te opens with the words, “I have loved you.” This is our only true wealth: His love. It is a message that touches us deeply, for we know the fragility of the human heart—unable, on its own, to sustain fraternity, communion, and peace. Yet it is precisely there that the Lord comes to meet our poverty and clothes it with His grace. In South Sudan, as in every “South Sudan” of the world, we can witness that God’s love mends what we break, heals what we wound, and raises up what we trample. This is the mystery of God in Bethlehem: not a closeness expressed in words alone, but a concrete nearness, a presence that lifts us up because it needs us—our attention, our care, and even our fragile love.

In Dilexi te, Pope Leo reminds us that love for the poor is not simply an act of charity, but a real participation in the very love of Christ. It is not about doing for but loving with. He reprises the preferential option for the poor, the beating heart of the Church’s mission and prophecy. It is not an optional choice, but the path that leads us back to the Gospel in its essence. As Daniele Comboni said, “The poor are our masters”—those before whom we remove our sandals because it is there that God dwells. The poor are not merely recipients of aid: they are active subjects, silent teachers, the first evangelizers. Their wounds speak to our pride; their faith questions our certainties; their hope shows us the path of conversion.

A Church that is poor and with the poor is the only Church capable of revealing to the world the merciful face of Christ. It is a Church unafraid of getting its hands dirty, one that seeks neither power nor relevance, but kneels before the suffering flesh of Christ in His little ones. It is a Church that walks, listens, accompanies, and allows itself to be accompanied. It is a Church that makes common cause with those who suffer, for it knows that extra pauperes nulla salus: without the poor, there is no salvation, no Gospel, no Church, no fraternity, no future.

Christmas invites us precisely to this: to look at the world through the eyes of the Child of Bethlehem—who does not dominate but gives Himself, does not conquer but loves, does not impose but welcomes. This is the gift we can offer today to our wounded humanity: a love without limits, a hope that endures, a faith that embraces every man and woman and builds fraternity.

I ask the Lord that this Christmas rekindle in us the courage to dream and to turn our dreams into concrete steps. May the God who became poor draw us closer to the poor of our time and give us eyes to recognize in them the living presence of the Christ who comes.

Only then will our mission be true, and our Church a seed of hope.

Blessed journey of Advent and Merry Christmas!

+ Christian Carlassare, mccj
Poor Bishop – South Sudan