Editorial
Today is Christmas Day! The day we say the Holy Father’s Son was born in Bethlehem. Bethlehem, we are told, is once again lighting lamps after years of darkness, even as those same streets remain soaked in the confused carnage of unarmed people killed in the name of competing rights, sacred claims, and carefully worded justifications. This is the first obscenity of modern Christmas: we commemorate a child born into occupation while calmly accepting occupation everywhere else as “complex”. We sing of peace while mastering the grammar of violence, and we call it realism. The cradle has become a prop, the star a decorative logo, and Bethlehem a headline that flickers briefly before being replaced by sales figures and sermons carefully scrubbed of discomfort. If the Nativity were not safely buried under tradition, it would still be considered a dangerous story.
The Church, which claims custodianship of this story, has perfected the art of reverence without resemblance. It speaks endlessly of holiness while drowning in political compromise, moral cowardice, and institutional self-preservation. Its proximity to corrupt power has become so normal that outrage itself now feels impolite. Even more damning is the long, sickening catalogue of personal abuses and sexual crimes, not merely committed by individuals but protected by systems designed to silence, relocate, and forget. This is not sin in the abstract; it is harm with names, dates, and shattered lives. The philosophical joke, if one dares call it that, is brutal: an institution founded on confession became allergic to truth. If Jesus returned today and saw how authority was used to shield predators, how victims were treated as inconveniences, and how repentance was replaced with legal strategy, one suspects he would not be crucified again. He would simply leave. And that quiet departure would be the final judgement.
Nor is this corruption confined to old stone churches. A parallel religion thrives in stadiums and screens, led by self-proclaimed prophets who monetise desperation with theatrical miracles and instant healings, harvesting unimaginable wealth in God’s name. They speak confidently of private conversations with the divine, as though God were a personal brand manager, endorsing luxury, immunity, and applause. Faith has been reduced to performance, God to a vending machine, and suffering to a marketing opportunity. The grand deception is complete: religion has become a refuge not for the broken, but for the ambitious. We are left wondering where God resides now, and how He views these masked men who claim to speak directly for His only Son while behaving as though accountability were optional. Perhaps this is the real Christmas question, the one buried beneath greetings and glitter: whether God is absent, or whether He is simply standing outside the institutions built in His name, listening as we wish each other “Merry Christmas” with straight faces and uneasy souls.
