“For a child has been born for us, a son given to us; authority rests upon his shoulders; and he is named Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.” -Isaiah 9:6
Every convert to Catholicism had a few things that took a while to fully make sense. For me, one of these was devotion to the Child Jesus. The image, common to the cradle Catholic (and sometimes in a cradle himself), was completely foreign to me outside of the Christmas Season. As I wrestled with, and surrendered to, Marian veneration, the Papacy, and transubstantiation, I continued to dismiss the yearlong devotion to the Christ Child as a Catholic quirk, a vestige of the Middle Ages.
Consider the Child of Prague. You will find Him on grandmothers’ mantles, in basement chapel corners, and among the porcelain dolls at Goodwill. A figure of the Child Jesus in full regalia, often wearing a crown larger than his own head. His popularity raises the question: why? Why pray to the child Jesus when you could simply pray to the adult one? No one supposes that Jesus sits at the Right Hand of the Father in toddler form. Is this depiction not also historically inaccurate? Christ was surely venerated as a king from birth, but the notion that He crawled around Egypt dressed as the king of hearts is dubious at best. What, then, does the Child of Prague, and devotion to the Child Jesus more broadly, have to offer modern Catholics?
The Child Jesus surely reminds us of Christ’s humanity, and the innocent appearance of a child demands innocence from us, but this devotion also reveals social truths. When we dress the Child Jesus like a monarch, we remind ourselves that the driving force of a rightly ordered society is service to the weak. Christ tells Saint Paul that “power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9). This is why He identifies Himself with the socially weak, the poor, in Matthew 25, and why Saint Paul says He took “the form of a slave” when He became man. It is no coincidence that He took this form as a child first. Children are the weakest among us. Throughout the Old Testament, God and the Hebrew authors lament the practice of child sacrifice as the particularly defiling sin of the gentile nations. In our own nation, we have killed over 63 million children in the womb since 1973. Then and now, this sin defiles entire societies because it is a complete inversion of what society is for. It is the victimization of the weaker to serve the stronger.. When Christ is born, He is vulnerable to this danger immediately, as shown when King Herod orders His death. The social message of the Child Jesus, then, is clear. If we want to build a nation that serves Christ, it must serve the weak.
The Prophet Isaiah’s “peaceful kingdom” is the model of this. He writes, “The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them… The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den.” (Isaiah 11:6, 8). The peace between the weak and strong animals in this kingdom is perfected by the presence of the child. He, the weakest, need not fear danger, because the animals’ power is directed to his service. This is the essence of social peace, hence the peacemakers are called “children of God” (Matthew 5:9). When we let the Christ Child lead us, He leads us to this peace.
The Child Jesus also demands responsibility and virtue by reminding us of our role in creation more broadly. The Catholic agrees with the environmentalist (and the Catholic environmentalist rejoices at the fact) that we create the world our children receive. In Genesis, God tasks Adam, the master and steward of creation, with tilling and keeping the ground and naming the animals. In doing so, Adam participates in God’s creative act; he helps create the world that Eve, and all generations after, will receive. All human work fits into this formula. Like Adam, we receive the world from above, we shape it, then we give it to those below. It is our responsibility to shape the world in a way pleasing to God. This principle is at the heart of Catholic Social Teaching, as it is the origin of human power and responsibility. It is what Saint Paul means when he writes, “those authorities that exist have been instituted by God (Romans 13:2), and what Jesus means when He says to Pilate, “you would have no power over me unless it had been given you from above” (John 19:11).
As this principle applies to the islands of trash that our children will inherit, and the social order they will be born into, it also applies to the world, or worldview, of each individual child. A child who does not know right from wrong, or truth from falsehood, receives the world as we give it to him. No one can escape this responsibility. Children are like sponges. All you do around a child will create his world. If you sin, his world is sinful. If you lie, his world is false. Sin and falsehood will become to the child like water to a fish. The child, then, serves the unique, Christlike role of receiving our world. In light of this, the figure of the Christ Child is ironically eschatological. In the end, when Christ receives the world that we have helped to create, He will be filling this “childish” role. Therefore, in “Alpha and Omega” fashion, the Child Jesus serves as a potent reminder of not only the Incarnation, but also the Second Coming. He reminds us that we are, in fact, creating the world we inhabit, physically and socially, and that we will be held accountable for how we have done so.