The name Bethlehem will ring frequently in our ears in the coming days. Until quite recently Bethlehem was the place in the Holy Land where the Christian presence was most marked. How has the harshening of the Judeo-Palestinian conflict changed the situation?

The plight of Christians throughout the Middle East, most notably in Iraq, led the Holy See to call a special meeting of all the bishops of the Middle East with counterparts in Rome. There has been as massive an exodus of Christians from the Holy Land as from Iraq, where they had been present since the earliest times of the Church. Christians had constituted 20 per cent of the population of Jerusalem in 1948. Today, they only amount to two per cent. They number about 15,000, of whom some 2,000 are religious not born there and only some 4,000 are Catholics.

Moreover, a French writer has been prompted to write a book with the title Christians in the Holy Land: Disappearance or Mutation? The alternative she poses is due to the fact of the louder voice with which Catholics who speak Hebrew as their language and even a group calling themselves Christian Zionists are making themselves heard.

The efforts made by the ex-Latin Patriarch Mgr Michel Sabbah and others to encourage Arab Christians not to abandon Palestine and Jerusalem, are failing in the face of the progressing Israeli colonisation of east Jerusalem.

There is even a desperate feeling among Palestinian Christians that some of their leaders have resigned themselves to be satisfied with just a guarantee of open access to the holy places, which will inevitably be reduced to museums for tourists and pilgrims, despite all the appeals made by successive popes for the internationalisation of the Holy City.

The de-Christianisation of Bethlehem is an even sadder story. Malta has helped support a college that is one of the last remaining traces of the once flourishing Catholic community there. A significant measure of support for Middle Eastern Christians is surely one of the most appropriate ways in which we could celebrate Christmas.

There seems to be a veritable persecution of Christians not only in Iraq but almost across the world. At the same time there have been verbal assaults on the Catholic Church and in particular on the Pope, inspired by the feeling expressed by Richard Dawkins that the “superstitions taught by the Catholic clergy were worse than the paedophilia”. How does this square with the spectacular resurgence of religions of all kinds all over the globe?

In the book God is Back, How the Global Rise of Faith is Changing The World (2009), the two authors Micklethwait and Wooldridge, who are an atheist and a Catholic, devote several chapters of their social study to characterising much of the religious revival as being a largely American export, particularly to Brazil and Korea.

Its dominant values are the market and individualism. The new faithful tend to pick and choose beliefs and codes of conduct as if they were on a shopping spree in a supermarket. A charismatic leader told the authors that he had to confront to achieve success not only the wiles of the devil but also of his competitors offering similar brands of goods.

If Micklethwait and Wooldridge are right, then it is not strange that mainstream Catholicism (and they say also Liberation Theology) are excluded from the favours of the upsurging fundamentalists or frenzied adepts of God.

Even the Pope’s emphasis on the need of faith for a deep vision of the meaning of human existence is always coupled with a firm tribute to reason and communion.

To illustrate this point can you exemplify this marriage of faith and reason in dealing with the central question that haunts the Christmas season, namely what does it mean to say that Jesus is both God and man?

According to Thomas Aquinas it means there are two different ways of talking about Jesus that are both valid. For instance, one can say ‘Mary’s child was put in a manger’. One can also say ‘The Son of God was put in a manger’. The first way of putting it is easy to understand. The second way is not really understandable, because the word ‘God’ is incomprehensible.

However, the word is only used here as a subject-word and functions well if it suffices to identify what is being referred to. In this case, the ‘Son of God’ is just as efficient a pointer to Jesus as ‘Mary’s child’.

The logical situation is different if one is dealing with a proposition such as ‘The Son of God became Mary’s child’ (hereafter referred to as x).

Here one might begin to examine the proposition by asking whether it is like: (a) Joseph became a postman or (b) Joseph became sexually mature: (a) is unlike x because Joseph is said to have acquired something contingent, that is not affecting his nature, that of a human being. On the contrary, (b) is like x, in that the something that Joseph becomes appertains to his nature as a human being.

The defining feature of humanity is the use of language. Now this capacity is found pre-eminently in God, so much so that we speak of His eternal Word, another name for the Son of God. Thus the Divine nature of the Son of God englobes the human nature signified by the term ‘Mary’s child’.

In this way Aquinas has certainly not explained the mystery of the double nature of Jesus, but he has shown why proposition x is not gobbledegook.

Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Miriam Vincenti.