Christmas: the magic of the eve mass. But baby Jesus was not born at midnight

Mass Christmas to midnight evokes childhood memories, a family custom that wants, at least on that occasion of the year, everyone in the church to defy sleep and frost to celebrate together Jesus birth. For many Italians, even of the new generation, that liturgy in the middle of the night remains a domestic tradition that must be maintained and passed on to children and grandchildren. These are the same men and women to whom the somewhat improvised departure of Minister Boccia in the Bambinello that this year, to respect the anti-Covid curfew, will be born two hours before.

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However, once the mockery is collected, the terms of the speech should be clarified: not only there is no liturgical precept what requires the celebration of the first Christmas mass at midnight (the Missal in this regard is limited to a shy “habitually”), but it is the birth of Jesus himself, on December 25, which is not found in the Bible.

Let’s go in order. Choosing to celebrate the coming out of Son of Man at that precise date it is the result of a process of inculturation of Christianity in the pagan society of the late Western Roman Empire. Which had its recurrences, some of eastern origin, such as the Sol invictus (Sun never defeated), better known as the Winter Solstice, which will be celebrated on December 25. This time the wedding took place between the longest night and the shortest day of the year, the rebirth of the world, in other words. The sun has a minimum of light and heat and then it becomes vital and invincible on the darkness itself. A new birth, a pagan Christmas.

Roman historiography (see Aelius Lampridius’s Historia Augustus) traces the emperor Eliogabalo (known among other things for extravagances at the table) the spread in the city of the Syrian festival of Sol invictus, in the first decades of the third century. More than a hundred years later, in 330, an imperial decree will make the nativity of Jesus coincide with the pagan cult of the natal of the Sun and, the December 25th. Not a day more, not a day less, Constantine established that for this reason he was also venerated for a long time in the Eastern Church as the thirteenth apostle. The one who brought the Christians out of the catacombs (Edict of Milan, 313), the one who in 325, at Nicaea, convened the first ecumenical council (not the Pope of that time, Sylvester I, as some medieval legends would have us believe) .

And what about him birth of the savior a midnight broken? If we stick to the clock, the evangelists are not Swiss: theirs is more a story aimed at awakening faith than dedicated to the timely chronicle of events. Of course, Luca, the only one of the four sacred authors with Matthew who speaks of Christian childhood, wants to tell us that, when Mary gave birth, the shepherds “spent the night in the open air to tend their flock” (Lk 2,8). However, apart from the fact that this bucolic custom was staged (on the heights of Bethlehem) between the Easter holiday and that of Capanne, that is, between April and October (not in December, therefore), the evangelist remains vague about the time of Jesus’ birth …
The custom of celebrating at midnight is greatly affected by a mystical suggestion, Old Testament. It is in the middle of the night when in the book of Wisdom (18,14-15) the “omnipotent word from heaven (…) is thrown into the middle of that land of extermination”. For the primitive Church, the moment in which the Word became flesh could only be exactly 24. So far spirituality. History, on the other hand, prefers not to pronounce itself.