Bishop Fintan Gavin Bishop of Cork and Ross

Each year, when we sit at the Christmas table, whether on our own, with family, friends, or a neighbour, we bring with us all that the year has held, and we also hope to take something away with us.

We bring our joys: a new birth or marriage, the seeds of a new relationship or friendship, the courage to take a new step in life, or the quiet relief of finding peace after a challenge or entering a new stage in life.

Alongside these blessings, we also bring our disappointments, our grief, and the worries and troubles that have burdened us during this year.

Beneath all the decorations and celebration, Christmas remains about the real lives we live and share.

That is why so many are drawn to the Christmas crib, whether in a church or in our homes.

The crib at Bethlehem is not complicated. Its simple honesty touches us. It reminds us that God loves us and keeps His promises.

He has sent His Son among us so that we may have new life and new light.

At Christmas, we are invited to be touched again by that light—the light of God born as one of us.

Our world needs it still: the light that overcomes the darkness of war, the shadow of injustice, and the cries of those who hunger or suffer. The same light of love that shone over Bethlehem now shines quietly in our kitchens and classrooms, on farms, in towns and in city streets.

Christmas is not something distant or confined to a story long ago. It happens wherever people love one another: When a neighbour checks in. When a hand is offered. When forgiveness replaces anger. That’s where God draws near.

As a faith community, in the year that is drawing to a close, we have prayed with the Universal Church around the theme of hope. As a local diocesan church we have been asking the Holy Spirit to give us God’s light as we plan for the future of our parishes.

Faith, hope and love are at the heart of Bethlehem, at the heart of our crib at home or in church, and at the heart of our own lives.

The light of Christmas draws its rays from the Saviour born at Bethlehem. It is multiplied and reflected when every one of us in our way allows our lives to be touched by its radiance.

May your Christmas be filled with His light.

Lord Jesus, be close to us this Christmas.

Fill our hearts with Your peace. Help us bring Your light to our homes, our schools, and our friends.

Amen.

The Right Rev Dr Paul Colton Bishop of Cork, Cloyne and Ross

As Christmas 2025 approaches I am very conscious that it will be my last celebration of this wonderful season as the serving Church of Ireland Bishop of Cork, Cloyne and Ross.

I recently announced my intention to retire in April 2026, so I am starting to go through the first of the ‘last this and that’ in my ministry.

I am very grateful, therefore, to have this opportunity, this Christmas, through The Southern Star, to thank you all one last time for your friendship and encouragement over the years.

And, ‘thank you’ also to The Southern Star for all that it is and everything that it means and does for our community.

My wife and I eagerly look forward to its arrival each Thursday.

Most of all, I want to thank the people of West Cork for all the countless ways in which you support and serve each other. That’s the Christian Gospel in action, as I see it: ‘Love your neighbour.’

Naturally, this year, for me there is a lot of ‘looking back’. My first Christmas as a bishop in 1999 was very different.

I cannot help reflecting now on how much we and the world we live in have changed - not universally for the better.

In 1999, in my office, I still had an answering machine plugged into my desk phone.

Now I don’t have either of those. In those days too, if I needed to travel for work, I went to an airline ticket office or a travel agent and was issued a paper ticket. Often too there was a paper voucher to hand to a hotel to claim overnight accommodation.

The digital revolution has changed everything. I remember how in the early 1990s a senior clergyman in the Dublin Diocese poked fun at me as a young priest. ‘I suppose you have that email thing’ he said. ‘I do,’ I said. ‘Wasting your time’ he answered, ‘it’ll never take off.’

But it did and countless other things took off too that have changed our lives: the World Wide Web.

Not just mobile phones, but smartphones. The iPhone arrived in 2007. Soon after its invention I had a Blackberry (not the sort that grows in our ditches) and they stopped making those in 2016.

Since Christmas 1999 we have access to high speed internet, GPS, digital maps, streaming services for TV, radio, music and film, smartwatches, drones, cloud storage, electronic payments and banking, cloud storage and, to my mind, the big one that is changing us more than we realise: social media.

No doubt you can think of other things we have now that we didn’t have then.

Since 1999 there have been many geo-political changes also. 1999 was the year of the Good Friday Agreement.

The Euro arrived. The indoor smoking ban. There have been more and still emerging centres of global power, the expansion of the European Union (I was a guest in the European Parliament myself the day that they voted for that expansion), the 9/11 attacks (2001) and ensuing ‘war on terror’, the financial crash here and the end of the Celtic Tiger, our economic shift to dependence on multinational corporations, increased ethnic and religious diversity, the legalisation of same-sex marriage in 2015 and abortion in 2018, the war in Ukraine, on our own continent, and the Coronavirus Pandemic, and horrendous conflicts not only in the Middle East but in countless other places around the world.

Immigration has become a key dynamic in our daily lives. Alongside all of these many have a changed attitude to believing and to institutional religion.

In spite of growing secularisation, we approach Christmas 2025 and, once again, the Christmas traditions will shape countless lives and activities in our homes. More than that, the Christmas message will ring out as it has always done: ‘Behold I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.

For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.’ Yes, in spite of all the change and changes, the message and promise of Christmas to us is still the same: the baby in the manger is Emmanuel which means, ‘God with us’. The baby in the manger is Messiah and Saviour.

The baby is ‘The Word of God made flesh’. As Saint John puts it in the Christmas Gospel: ‘The word became flesh and lived among us.’

That baby himself became a refugee and as an adult was a wandering teacher whose message, life, death and resurrection changed the world forever.

My prayer for you is that this enduring Christmas good news will bring you joy and peace, and sustain you this Christmas and in the many Christmasses that still lie ahead.

Thank you all again, and I wish you and yours a happy and blessed Christmas.