NEWS & VIEWS
from a CATHOLIC perspective

      NEW YORK, 22 (NE) Cardinal John O´Connor, Archbishop of New York, recently highlighted in his Christmas Pastoral Letter the centrality of reconciliation in the celebrations of the Great Jubilee. "Why do we rejoice in celebrating Christ's coming as a man? We rejoice, we are jubilant because of his reason for coming: to reconcile us. He reconciled us by becoming not simply one of us. He made us one with himself," said the Cardinal. The Lord Jesus "made possible our purification, our renewal, our reconciliation with his Father. He began that process by being conceived in the womb of a woman, by being born into the world on the first Christmas Day, by being crucified unto death, by rising to restore us to life… That's what the great jubilee will commemorate. That's why we will be jubilant."

      Expressing his hope "that a year, a millennium, of reconciliation will see an end to the culture of death," the Archbishop of New York invited Catholics of his archdiocese to actively work for the reconciliation of mankind, so that we could see "an end to killing; to the destruction of infants in or leaving their mothers' wombs; the killing of men and women on endless battlefields; the destruction of the poor by oppression and greed and indifference; the killing of minds by the poisons of pornography; the self-destruction of human lives by suicide."

      "We prepare for a year -for a thousand years- of great reconciliation: reconciliation of the whole world with itself, with God," said Cardinal O´Connor.