The Fathers of the Church don’t say much about the New Year, because there is no such day on the liturgical calendar.  For the Western Church today, the first day of January is the Solemnity of Mary, a feast day commemorating and honoring the great blessing to us of her motherhood.

Just a thought on this lazy after-Christmas day – a thought about the lazy demand for short cuts.  One of the most popular supposed short cuts is imagining that we can make our decisions easier by bypassing value judgments and assigning numbers to everything.  Call this the numerical fallacy, or the fallacy of false precision.

But this Only Son of God, the Father Almighty, let us see what He did for us, what He suffered for us.  "Born of the Holy Ghost and of the Virgin Mary."  He, so great God, equal with the Father, born of the Holy Ghost and of the Virgin Mary, born lowly, that thereby He might heal the proud.  Man exalted himself and fell; God humbled Himself and raised him up.

The coalition that has just taken power in Germany has announced that among other things, it wants to lower the voting age to 16.  The proposal isn’t surprising, because most coalition supporters are young.  Enacting it would require a constitutional amendment.