Father Shay Cullen is an Irish Columban missionary who has worked in the Philippines since 1969. In 1974, he founded the Preda Foundation, a charitable organization dedicated to protecting the rights of women and children and campaigning for freedom from sex slavery and human trafficking.
Children from a slum community play on the shore of Manila Bay. (Photo by Angie de Silva)
Christmas is the celebration of the wonder and great value we have in children. We celebrate their rights and dignity.
Every family ought to protect and care for their children, not to pamper and spoil them as objects and victims of crass "commercialization" and exaggerated gift-giving.
No gift can ever buy the love of a child. No gift is more valuable than the genuine love and appreciation of parents for their children.
There are gifts that are much better than toys, which are thrown aside in time. These are the gifts of knowledge, truth, honesty, integrity, and straight talk. They are priceless and spiritual.
As they grow older, children will develop an awareness of the world around them. They need to understand the roots of social inequality.
Children understand greed and selfishness from an early age in the kindergarten playroom where they interact. That is where they learn how the aggressive ones dominate and exploit the others.
With the example of caring parents with social concern and action for the downtrodden, children will develop social awareness and deep, intelligent understanding and compassion. This will blossom into that greatest love of all: love for the poor.
The children will quickly learn to share with and help others. The greatest gift of all is the good example of parents. Children will learn from their parents, the good and the bad.
What can children learn from the Christmas Nativity story?
There are some beautiful, traditional customs of Christmas that remind us of our childhood. The Christmas "Belen," or manger scene, depicts the baby Jesus wrapped in swaddling clothes and surrounded by adoring parents, shepherds, and animals.
However, the meaning and significance of that image of the most revered person in history being born into the world is not explained or widely understood. It has no message about who Jesus was and what his mission would be to the world.
Sadly, it is a sanitized version of a harsh, unwelcome truth. It does not depict the reality of what historically happened or what the Gospel story is telling us.
The reality of the birth, if historically true, is that it was a painful dangerous birth of a child of impoverished parents who could not get a place in a Bethlehem inn.
There was no experienced midwife, clean clothes, hot water, light in the darkness or sanitary surroundings. Infection was likely in the dirty stable surrounded by animals.
It was a painful dangerous birth that about 1.1 billion impoverished children endure in the world today. A million newborn babies die annually on the day they are born. More than 11,000 newborns die on their first day in the United States, the highest of 68 countries.
One message is clear from the Gospel — that this specially gifted person, who would describe himself as the Son of Man, was and is a representative of all impoverished humanity.
He speaks for all men, women and children who are hungry, deprived of a decent life and who suffered torture and an unjust death.
But not only was it a day fraught with danger from the weakness of his mother, the lack of clean surroundings, the effects of crude hardship and poverty but there was more — the death squads and murderous military, sent out by a manic ruler searching to kill all who opposed and criticized him, even impoverished children. They were, he believed, a threat to his power.
The death squads and military slaughtered every newborn child up to the age of two years old in the district of Bethlehem. Thousands were slaughtered. If he had been found, Jesus of Nazareth would have been among them.
Cruel and evil humans would have once again altered the destiny of the world and deprived humanity of infinite goodness and love personified.
The parents of Jesus, like millions of refugees and migrants fleeing hunger and poverty and death threats today, fled into Egypt. There, they were welcomed. What a lesson it is for the world today.
It is a story by which parents can explain to the children the truth and realities of the world we live in.
Today, the rich world has closed its hearts and doors to people fleeing from Syria, Iraq, and Africa.
If we see Christmas as a challenge for us to embrace the words and example of Jesus of Nazareth and teach it to our children, what a different world it would be.
What a lasting Christmas gift for life if that spirit of giving and sharing and working for a more just, loving world came to be in the minds and hearts of our children? It would be heaven on earth as Jesus also intended.
Irish Father Shay Cullen, SSC, established the Preda Foundation in Olongapo City in 1974 to promote human rights and the rights of children, especially victims of sex abuse.
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