Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and God of all encouragement, who encourages us in our every affliction, so that we may be able to encourage those who are in any affliction with the encouragement with which we ourselves are encouraged by God (2 Corinthians 1: 3 - 4).

There is no doubt that Christmas, the Incarnation and Birth of Jesus, is one of the principal comforts that the Father has given us. It is the manifestation of his great tenderness and his limitless, unconditional love. It is about nothing less than the manifestation of God's humanity (Titus 3: 4). As God made manifest his humanity in Christ, we can understand better God's dream for each of us, our primary vocation to be fully human like Jesus, the perfect man. We cannot keep this great grace and this extraordinary comfort for ourselves. Christmas means sharing this gift that the Father gives us in Jesus with everyone and renewing it each year as an important milestone in our efforts to make the world a more human place.

Brothers and all members of the Lasallian Family, we are all called to make visible the invisible love of God revealed in Jesus, to work tirelessly so that in each human face, especially in those of the children and the young people we educate and in those of the poor we serve, the image of God might be made fully manifest, and God's dream might be realized. Thus, as Gaudium et Spes tells us, we are witnesses of the birth of a new humanism, one in which man is defined first of all by this responsibility to his brothers and to history (55).

Next year we will have the International Assembly on Association for Mission, and no doubt that gathering will give us new impetus and new ideas in order to respond better to the wonderful mission which the Lord has entrusted to us in favor of his chosen ones, the small, the young, and the poor.

A VERY, MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL OF YOU AND A NEW YEAR FILLED WITH DIVINE BLESSINGS!

Brother Álvaro Rodríguez Echeverría
Superior General