Fr CARLO GIUSEPPE ADESSO Diocese of San Marino-Montefeltro - lecturer in Church History Welcome dear brothers and sisters to this beautiful, huge square that welcomes us to the city of Bethlehem. This square is the heart of Bethlehem, a place so dear to all of us. A place that already in its name, Bethlehem, encapsulates all that we will visit and say in this special. Bethlehem is a word that can have three different interpretations depending on its etymology. There is an etymology, an explanation that I call archaic, from an ancient Canaanite deity, therefore prior to the history of Israel, and the name of the city means house of battle. And if you think about it, the great battle between darkness and light was fought here, as the evangelist John says. There is a second etymology, the more famous one from the Hebrew Bethlehem, meaning house of bread. And here St Jerome, whom we will get to know and meet on our journey, greeted Bethlehem with these words: ‘Hail Bethlehem, city of bread, where he who is the bread of heaven was born’. But there is also a third etymology, which I like very much, from Arabic. Bethlehem means house of the flesh. And this is also very beautiful, if you think about it, because here the Word of God took on our mortal flesh. He was born of the Virgin Mary and shared in everything, except sin, our human condition. This large square leads us into the basilica with the smallest doorway in the world. You can see the smallest door behind me, a gap only 130 centimetres high. It is generally called the door of humility. Certainly one can make a spiritual reading of this door, but in truth that door, so small, also speaks of all the history, all the difficulty that this place and that door, so small, bear witness to. To enter the basilica, one must bow down, and we will bow down to embark on this long journey to discover not only the places but above all the daily procession that takes place inside the holy places that witnessed the birth of Christ, the adoration of the Magi, the nativity scene and so on. The façade of this basilica is like a parchment, a parchment that speaks. At the top you see the massive portal leading to the ancient basilica, the one built by St Helena between 326 and 333 and then enlarged by the emperor Justinian two centuries later. On the way down you see a second portal, you can easily recognise it by this sort of pointed arch, it is called a pointed arch, that is the portal of the Crusader basilica, in memory also of the Crusader kings of Jerusalem, for example Baldwin I and Baldwin II, who had themselves crowned in this basilica at the dawn of 1100, here not in Jerusalem, out of respect for the king of kings, our Lord who had died in Jerusalem. And then on the way down you see what I call the ‘Franciscan door’, the door of humility, this 130-centimetre gap. We have news of it towards the end of the 16th century and evidently not for spiritual reasons, this entrance was lowered, but because at the time with the Ottoman conquest there was a risk that Muslims would enter the church with beasts of burden... And the Franciscans, to avoid desecration of the church, lowered the entrance as much as possible. Obviously there is also a spiritual profile, the humility needed to approach the mystery of the birth of Christ, and now with great humility and joy we enter to discover something of this great mystery. Read More