For the bishops’ message customary at Christmas, we tried to choose something old and new, spiritual and personal. We did not want it to be too “Christmassy” because the world of business has taken over the caroling, cards and candles.

The message should speak of the spirit of the Great Feast, not the body. In the Gospel this simple, unadorned Spirit permeates the whole narration. Simple things -- a road, a stable, some lambs, a star. Delightfully humble things that a man’s spirit can appreciate when his body is weary, surfeited or sick.

Like the juice of an apple or a plum, another virtue enriches the Christmas spirit. There is generosity in the air. Joseph protects Mary; Mary nurses her Child; the shepherds bring lambs, the magi give gold. Indeed all the happy people of the Bethlehem story want to get in the act. Everyone, that is, except Herod and a thousand or so more who missed the whole point of giving, and couldn’t care less.

Around here the spirit of Christ keeps growing, and this year the spirit of Christmas reflects it. Catholics are speaking to the world, the community, and not in overtones of hostility, sarcasm or revenge. The religious bigotry of the past was the product of majority aggression and minority protest. Neither was pleasant; neither was Christian. Now Christmas can sum up a year of friendship among clergy and laity of different religions. It is slow but encouraging.

The same is true of Catholic concern over the Negro, the poor, the needy, the worker. If we are to be the Church of Bethlehem’s stable, if Christ is to be really present, this must be the Church of the poor.

But despite the necessary movement of the Catholic pendulum from individualism to community, the spirit can go dry very easily. Our worship must be public, our witness open and our image public. But each document of Vatican II reminds us that in living to society, man cannot stop living also to self. A rosary, a short meditation, a quiet act of love are marks of Christianity just as surely as the more open acts of demonstration.

The building of a church in which to sing God’s praise and celebrate his sacrifice should involve beauty and warmth, good taste and usefulness. Only the man unlettered in the Gospel, forgetting Our Lord’s reply to Judas, will sneer at the cost of the sacrifice, and insist that the money should have been given to the poor. We must do both. Without giving, the Church becomes a proprietor of real estate. But without the responsibility of structure, the Church could be nothing but a welfare agency.

Nowhere in Northern Georgia does Christmas live as vividly in the hearts of some fifty boys and girls whom I visited this week. They receive wonderful presents. They are cared for by sisters who love them. They are anticipating, as only the young can, moving to their home in Atlanta.

But their home now is not really their home. There is little security in their lives. For their parents are deceased or divorced or have deserted. What you and I probably took for granted as a child, these girls and boys simply do not have. Their lives have been given an ugly twist -- right at the start.

If this message is getting through I am inviting you to your finest Christmas. I am asking you to share, spiritually and personally, in the good things you give and get on Christmas. Could you take a percent, say 5 percent of the gift total (make and outgo) and put it in the basket on Christmas for these boys and girls?

It goes to them.

But it comes from you.

It is the kind of Christmas message that can get through easily. It is the kind of gift that shepherds and wise men, Joseph and Mary understand. It is you giving of yourself. At 5 percent, it’s at least a down payment on the loan that the Child gave us. He, the Son of God, emptied himself to become a man.

Paul J. Hallinan

Archbishop of Atlanta