“Parvulus enim natus”
a Christmas Pastoral Epistle

To the clergy, religious, and faithful of the Old Roman Apostolate, and to all those who seek to preserve the Catholic faith in its integrity and fullness:
grace to you and peace from God our Father, and from the Lord Jesus Christ.

Carissimi

Parvulus enim natus est nobis, et filius datus est nobis, et factus est principatus super humerum eius.¹

Beloved in Christ.

A child is born to us, a son is given to us — and the government is upon His shoulder. In this single sentence, Holy Scripture gathers together what the world insists on separating: humility and authority, weakness and rule, infancy and sovereignty. Christmas opens not with sentiment but with ontology. It does not begin by asking how we feel, but by declaring what is. Before consolation, before peace, before even hope as the world understands it, the Church proclaims a fact about reality itself: Christ is King.

This Kingship is not symbolic, not postponed, and not dependent upon recognition. It is rooted in who Christ is. The Child born at Bethlehem is King not because He will later acquire power, but because He is the eternal Son through whom all things were made. The Incarnation does not suspend His sovereignty; it reveals the manner in which divine sovereignty truly operates. The government rests upon His shoulder because all authority in heaven and on earth already belongs to Him — not by concession, but by nature.

The year now drawing to its close has made this truth unavoidable, precisely by attempting to deny it. Again and again, we have witnessed authority exercised as though it were self-grounding: law severed from truth, power detached from reason, and moral language emptied of objective content. Institutions have demanded obedience without accountability, compliance without coherence, and trust without truth. Compassion has been invoked not as a moral virtue ordered to the good, but as a rhetorical solvent dissolving moral distinction. As Nuntiatoria has documented throughout the year, this inversion has not yielded peace or justice, but anxiety, coercion, and fragmentation.² Christmas responds not by proposing an alternative ideology, but by reasserting the metaphysical ground of authority itself: the principatus belongs to Christ.

Nowhere has this been more evident than in the collapse of trust in institutions charged with justice and protection. Policing, courts, and safeguarding bodies have too often functioned as instruments of ideological enforcement rather than guardians of truth.³ Speech has been regulated while falsehood has been protected; narratives have been curated while facts have been obscured. In such circumstances, law ceases to be a participation in the eternal law and becomes merely an exercise of will. The result is not order, but fear. Christmas stands as a quiet rebuke to this deformation of authority. The Child who governs does not coerce. He illumines.

The suffering of children this year exposes the same theological failure in its most tragic form. When safeguarding becomes procedural rather than moral, when responsibility is displaced by policy, and when reputations are valued more than lives, authority has already abdicated its purpose.⁴ The Incarnation judges this failure with terrifying gentleness. God enters history not as one who dominates, but as one who must be protected. In doing so, He reveals that the measure of any authority is its willingness to suffer for the innocent. Systems that sacrifice the vulnerable in order to preserve narratives or maintain ideological coherence stand condemned by the manger.

Within the Church herself, the year has revealed a crisis not primarily of discipline or numbers, but of Christological confidence. Episcopal authority has too often been justified in managerial terms, as though governance were a technical skill rather than a participation in Christ’s own pastoral Kingship.⁵ Unity has been pursued by restriction rather than truth, by control rather than conversion.⁶ The priesthood has been flattened into a function, and the liturgy instrumentalised as a means to pastoral ends rather than received as the Church’s supreme act of worship.⁷ These developments are not merely administrative misjudgements; they reflect a deeper uncertainty about how Christ actually reigns in His Church.

Christmas answers that uncertainty decisively. Christ reigns not through bureaucratic neutrality, but through sacramental reality. He governs His Church through truth taught, sins absolved, sacrifices offered, and souls sanctified. Authority in the Church is not creative; it is ministerial. It does not invent the faith, but hands it on. Where this is forgotten, governance becomes anxious and defensive. Where it is remembered, authority becomes luminous and life-giving.

The disorders we have witnessed are not confined to one nation or communion. Across the Western world, the same moral grammar has asserted itself: emotion elevated over reason, inclusion over truth, process over substance.⁸ Yet alongside this decay, signs of grace have been quietly at work. Families have sought tradition not as an aesthetic preference, but as a school of reality. Young men have rediscovered discipline and vocation in a culture that has offered them neither meaning nor responsibility. Faithful souls have chosen reverence over novelty because they have intuited that worship shapes belief, and belief shapes life.⁹ These are not marginal developments. They are the beginnings of renewal.

The Son is given. This is the grammar of divine rule. Christ does not seize His throne; He receives it through obedience unto death. His Kingship is cruciform before it is glorious. That is why it endures when all others collapse. Earthly regimes rule by force or manipulation; Christ rules by truth and love ordered by justice. A Church that forgets this seeks relevance through accommodation and becomes indistinguishable from the age. A Church that remembers it becomes a sign of contradiction — and therefore a sign of hope.¹⁰

To our priests, this year has clarified your vocation with particular urgency. You are not managers of decline, nor facilitators of consensus, nor curators of institutional calm. You are configured sacramentally to Christ the King, the Priest, and the Judge. This configuration is not metaphorical, but ontological. By the character impressed upon your soul, you stand at the intersection of heaven and earth, charged not with inventing the Church’s mission, but with faithfully mediating Christ’s own authority to His people.

In a time when law collapses into power, when language is emptied of meaning, and when truth is negotiated rather than proclaimed, the priest is tempted either to retreat into silence or to seek safety in accommodation. Resist both temptations. Your fidelity to the altar is not ritualism; it is an act of governance, for Christ reigns first and foremost through His Sacrifice. Your fidelity to the confessional is not optional pastoral provision; it is the restoration of divine justice through mercy, the place where shattered consciences are healed and moral reality is re-established. Your fidelity to the full truth of the faith — taught without distortion, apology, or reduction — is not rigidity, but charity. Souls cannot be healed by half-truths.

Many of you have laboured this year under discouragement, isolation, or misunderstanding. Some have been pressured to soften what must be spoken plainly; others have been sidelined for refusing to confuse compassion with indulgence. Know this: Christ governs His Church not through managerial success, but through priestly fidelity. When you celebrate Mass reverently, preach the truth in season and out of season, and remain available to souls even when gratitude is scarce, you are exercising real authority — the authority of Christ Himself. It is through such hidden faithfulness that Christ continues to rule His people, even when His reign is denied in public discourse.¹¹

To our faithful, the implications of this year are no less serious. Neutrality is no longer a viable posture, nor is a private faith content to remain unseen. To raise children in the Catholic faith in a culture hostile to moral formation; to pray publicly when prayer is dismissed as eccentric or threatening; to speak truthfully when silence is rewarded and falsehood protected; to order one’s life according to Christ’s law rather than the shifting norms of the age — these are no longer culturally supported actions. They are acts of allegiance.

You should not be surprised if such fidelity costs you comfort, reputation, or ease. The Kingdom to which you belong is not an abstraction. It makes claims upon time, conduct, and conscience. You are not spectators to history, nor passive observers of cultural decline. You are subjects of a Kingdom that is real, demanding, and ultimately victorious. Your daily choices — often unnoticed and unrewarded — participate in that victory. The quiet perseverance of Christian families, the steady witness of moral integrity, and the refusal to surrender truth for acceptance are themselves signs that Christ’s reign has not been extinguished.¹²

Christmas does not promise that the coming year will be easier. It promises something far more bracing and far more consoling: that history is governed. The Incarnation is not a sentimental interruption of a tragic story; it is the decisive claim of God upon His creation. The manger already casts the shadow of the Cross, and the Cross already bears the title of the King. The Child who lies in straw already reigns from the Tree. His Kingship is not delayed until the end of time; it is exercised now — patiently, mysteriously, and often beneath the surface of events.

This truth steadies us when appearances suggest otherwise. History is not drifting toward chaos, nor surrendered to the will of the powerful. It is being judged, purified, and claimed. What seems like disorder is often the exposure of false authorities; what feels like loss may be the stripping away of illusions. Christ reigns even when His reign is denied, and He governs even when His governance is contested.

As we commend the year past to God’s mercy and entrust the year ahead to His providence, we do so without illusion. Trials will continue. Confusion will persist. Authority will be contested. But the government remains where it has always been: upon His shoulder. No court can revoke it. No synod can redefine it. No ideology can erase it.

The Nativity of Our Lord is not merely the revelation of divine humility; it is the manifestation of divine authority. As Pope Pius XI taught in Quas Primas, Christ’s Kingship is intrinsic to His Person and therefore extends beyond private devotion to laws, institutions, and public life itself.¹³ To separate Christmas from this doctrine is to sentimentalise the Incarnation and render it harmless. The Child laid in the manger already claims the nations. To deny Him that claim is not neutrality, but rebellion. To acknowledge it is not extremism, but obedience.

Christ reigns. Christ judges. Christ will triumph.

May the peace of Christ the King rule in your hearts and homes. May Our Lady, who first acknowledged His reign in her fiat and bore Him into history, intercede for us all. And may the blessing of Almighty God, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, descend upon you and remain with you always.

Haec est via.

I.X.

Brichtelmestunensis
In Vigilia Nativitatis Domini, A.D. MMXXV

Oremus

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¹ Isaias 9:6 (Vulgate).
² “Police Fabrication and the New Double Standard: The Maccabi Ban, Sectarian Politics, and the Moral Collapse of British Institutions,” Nuntiatoria, 23 November 2025.
³ Ibid.; see also “The Failure of the Via Media: How the ‘Reformed but Catholic’ Motif Collapsed in Anglicanism,” Nuntiatoria, 7 November 2025.
⁴ “The Invisible Child: The Death of Sara Sharif and the Culture that Failed Her,” Nuntiatoria, 14 November 2025.
⁵ “New Archbishop of Westminster: Biography, Context, and the Crisis of Episcopal Confidence,” Nuntiatoria, 19 December 2025.
⁶ “The Leaked CDF Assessment and the Fiction of Liturgical Unity,” Nuntiatoria, 10 July 2025.
⁷ “The Forgotten Disposition: The Crisis of Priesthood and the Loss of Sacramental Culture,” Nuntiatoria, 7 December 2025.
⁸ “The Illusion of Restoration: Christianity Without Christ, the Church Without Authority,” Nuntiatoria, 19 July 2025.
⁹ “Generational Shift in the Priesthood: Young Clergy, Tradition, and the Collapse of Synodal Enthusiasm,” Nuntiatoria, 24 October 2025.
¹⁰ Ibid.; cf. “The Orphaned Altar: On the Crisis of Episcopal Fatherhood,” Nuntiatoria, 17 October 2025.
¹¹ “The Holiness of Priests Contributes to Make the Faithful Holy,” Nuntiatoria, 16 December 2025.
¹² “The Apathy of Apostasy: False Compassion and the Collapse of Faith,” Nuntiatoria, 24 July 2025.
¹³ Pius XI, Quas Primas (11 December 1925), §§17–18.

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