We are in the first week of the new year of 2024 celebrating the joyful season of Christmas. In our first readings during our Daily Masses this week, we are hearing from the letters of John from the New Testament. These letters were probably produced by the same community that wrote the Gospel of John more than 100 years after Christ’s birth. Even in this era, this community was still trying to understand who Jesus really was, especially regarding his identity of being both human and divine. In today’s reading, we hear this community being called to have confidence in its faith in the Lord, in the identity as children of God. However, we hear the community dealing very openly with sin, about the need to turn away from their sins to truly be disciples of Christ.
Today, January 3, we celebrate the feast of the Holy Name of Jesus. Both St. Bernardine of Sienna (1380-1444) and his student St. John of Capistrano (1386-1456) promoted devotion to the Holy Name of Jesus. In their preaching missions throughout Italy, they carried a monogram of the Holy Name surrounded by rays. In its origin, the monogram IHS is an abbreviation of the name Jesus in Greek: I and H representing Iota and Eta, the first two letters of the name; to which later was added S, a Sigma, the final letter. A later tradition holds that IHS also represents the Latin Iesus Hominum Salvator, meaning “Jesus Savior of Mankind.”
Pope Cement VII in 1530 allowed the Franciscans to celebrate a feast day in honor of the Holy Name. Pope Innocent XIII extended this to the universal Church in 1721, to be celebrate in early January. The feast day was dropped with the revision of the liturgical calendar in 1969 by Pope Paul VI, but was later brought back by Pope John Paul II. What a wonderful feast day to celebrate in this Octave of Christmas.
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