The New York Times’ “Ethicist” column is an anti-gift that just keeps on giving. On December 20, it discussed “family planning in uncertain times” (a link is below). The gist of the correspondent’s question is whether, at a time when the climate is changing and the bogeyman of “overpopulation” still stalks the writer’s mind — and now with “Hitler” imminently ready to take over America — one should have children. It’s not an uncommon question today, so in that sense the correspondent represents a pervasive strain of American “thought.” Celebrity Miley Cyrus doesn’t want to have children (see here) because there aren’t enough fishes in the rivers she visits. The B4 protest ladies (see here) are shaving heads and renouncing sex because Donald Trump was elected. Women are tricked (see here) into believing maternity is not something to be risked absent a guarantee of abortion-on-demand-through-birth. All these examples demonstrate that the attitude of the correspondent is not unique.

What was encouraging to me was the “Ethicist’s” reply. Stepping back for some historical perspective, he noted what having a baby in 1925 would have been like — and yet people still did it. He gently prompted the question whether one’s child might not be so much part of the problem as of the solution. And he concluded with a line worth pondering: “If having a child is always a form of hope, not having one because you’re sure what lies ahead can, I fear, be a form of hubris.”

It was providential this column surfaced just now. The Church’s Gospel on the Fourth Sunday of Advent always focuses on Christ’s prenatal period. This year it brought us the joyful news of Mary’s visit to Elizabeth. In other years, it proclaims the Annunciation or reassures St. Joseph amidst his concerns. The common thread is an unborn child and God’s plan.

Of course, this week that unborn child becomes a born child. It’s what billions of people will assemble tonight to celebrate.

Modern people, though, would have counseled Mary to kill Jesus before birth because He would be killed afterwards. After all, we have mothers rationalizing such killing as “acts of love” (see here). They redefine reality to call birth “wrongful life” (see here) and call abortion a favor to a child.

There are those who will complain I’ve imported a “culture war” into the celebration of Christmas. But Christmas — the first Christmas — was the confrontation between the culture of life brought by Jesus versus the culture of death mankind inherited from sinful Adam. To cover over that reality is to deny why Christmas even occurred in the concrete historical dispensation in which humanity lives.

In Discourses 215, 4, where St. Augustine explains the articles of the Creed, he uses Mary as an example of faith. It’s where he writes his famous quote that Mary conceived Jesus in her heart before she did in her womb. St. Augustine (and Fr. Paul Scalia, who masterfully preached on this last Sunday) uses that as an example of faith: it was faith in God’s designs that made Mary open to the Divine Will regardless of her ability to understand by purely human criteria “how this will come about.”

Every child is an act of faith, which is what the “Ethicist’s” correspondent and his or her peers lack. But the “Ethicist” is also right in noting that a child is a gift of hope. Whatever faith may be lacking to you, at least have hope that God or history or “things” may lead to better outcomes than your obsessive conviction about your ability to control them can.

This Christmas opens a holy year whose theme is hope. Hope is not a concept. Hope is a child, the Child found in a manger tonight par excellence.

A blessed, Merry Christmas!

[A link to the NYT Dec. 20 column is here.]