There is concern in both the Vatican and the Indian Church about the intensifying attempt to make Christmas a secular festival.
NEW DELHI: Is the greeting ‘Merry Christmas’ giving way to ‘Happy Holidays’? There is concern in both the Vatican and the Indian Church about the intensifying attempt to make Christmas a secular festival.
In the UK, Christmas stamps issued by post offices have disappeared and some local councillors have chosen to rename Christmas ‘Winterval’. In the US, some companies have been disallowing Christmas decorations in their offices.
Although the situation in Asia is not as worrisome, Catholic Bishops Conference of India (CBCI) spokesperson Father Babu Joseph said the trend to de-link Christmas celebrations from their religious moorings is unfortunate. “Christmas taken out from its religious roots will lose its relevance,” Joseph said. “Christmas is not just a social festival but primarily a religious festival.”
Joseph said the increasing ‘marketisation’ of Christmas was regrettable but welcomed the production and sale of Christmas symbols in agnostic China.
While the CBCI termed the tendency to dilute Christmas’s religious significance as unfortunate, the Vatican clergy has characterised it as ‘cultural derision’.
Secularism, not Islam, is behind the war on Christmas, said Capuchin Father Raniero Cantalamessa, a preacher of the Pontifical Household in the Roman Curia. “It is not the Muslims who do not want these symbols but a certain non-believing group in society,” he said.
“Muslims have nothing against the Christian celebration of Christmas; indeed, they honour it.”
Vatican’s semi-official newspaper L’Osservatore Romano recently carried an article by Mario Gabriele Giordano on the widespread attacks on the Christian holiday. It said some retail stores no longer sell Nativity figurines.
Giordano wondered why the need not to offend the sensitivity of believers or followers of other religions materialised “as if non-believers and followers of other religions appeared suddenly only this Christmas”.
Giordano attributed the secular sensitivity to a “misunderstood sense of modernity [which] has trampled on sentiments and values.”
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