Archbishop Gomez of San Antonio:

Our cathedral also reminds us that the Christian faith has deep roots in America. It is amazing to think that decades before the Declaration of Independence, Spanish-speaking immigrants were preaching the Gospel and celebrating the Eucharist here in San Antonio and elsewhere throughout the country.

I worry that we are trying to forget our country’s Christian roots. There are powerful secularizing forces at work in our culture. We are told over and again that religion is something we should keep to ourselves, that it has no place in our public square, that it shouldn’t influence how we think, act, work or vote.

We often see dramatic examples of this secular mindset around this time of year. Our country’s founders would never have dreamed that one day it would be against the law to display images of the baby Jesus at Christmastime.

An America that doesn’t have room for Christ at Christmas, an America that is afraid to let all of its people express their beliefs in public, is not the true America. It’s an America that has forgotten the promise of its noble beginnings.

Sometimes, individuals can do the same thing with God that our culture does with religion. We can push God to the margins of our lives; go about our business as if he doesn’t exist, as if we can do without him. We can fill our days with other priorities, with material things and passing fancies.

But a person who doesn’t have room in his life for God isn’t being true to himself. He has forgotten the great promise of his own noble beginnings.

That’s why I love Christmas so much. Christmas is always a great jubilee, a time for reconciliation, for making peace with each other and with God.

Christmas tells us that we don’t have to be prisoners of the mistakes we’ve made in the past. We can say we are sorry, we can resolve to turn our lives around, to come back to God our Father.

That is my prayer for everyone in our great city in this holy season, in this Jubilee Year.

Like the magi on that first Christmas, we all need to discover the Child Jesus lying in the manger. In this infant, we see the depths of God’s tender mercy and love. He loves us so much that he came down from heaven to dwell among us — to grow in a mother’s womb, to enter this world as a helpless child, to experience all our sorrows and joys, to suffer and die as we do.

In this, Jesus fulfilled a plan that God formed long ago, at the foundation of the world. In that plan, God has a place for each one of us. As Pope Benedict XVI has said, "We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary."

The promise of Christmas is what the angel told Mary: "With God, nothing will be impossible."

This Christmas, we can all make a noble new beginning. God wants us to.

Let us offer this child the gift of our own selves. Let us see in this child the father we have in heaven, the God who wants us to live as his children and as brothers and sisters to one another.