What Goes Around

The Church should abandon Christmas.

An Irish Catholic priest has called for Christians to stop using the word Christmas because it has been hijacked by “Santa and reindeer”.

Father Desmond O’Donnell says the words Christmas and Easter have lost all sacred meaning

Well, given that the church hijacked both festivals from the indigenous pagans, they never did. My heart bleeds. No, really it does…

O’Donnell’s comments follow calls from a rightwing pressure group for a boycott of Greggs bakery in the UK after the company replaced baby Jesus with a sausage roll in a nativity scene.

I smiled when I saw that. You would have to be completely devoid of humour to take offence – but, then, taking offence has become an industry in this country. And if I want a Greggs pastry when I’m out and about, I’ll buy one. Calls for a boycott merely encourage me to patronise the boycotted business even more.

“We’ve lost Christmas, just like we lost Easter, and should abandon the word completely,” O’Donnell told the Belfast Telegraph.

“We need to let it go, it’s already been hijacked and we just need to recognise and accept that.”

Fine, go ahead. The commercial festival will go ahead without you much as it has done for an awful long time already.

O’Donnell said he is not seeking to disparage non-believers. “I am simply asking that space be preserved for believers for whom Christmas has nothing to do with Santa and reindeer.

It has nothing to do with a miracle birth in a manger either.

“I’m just trying to rescue the reality of Christmas for believers by giving up ‘Christmas’ and replacing it with another word.”

The reality being that it is a mid-winter festival and Easter is a pagan celebration of spring and new life. Neither has anything to do with the bollocks peddled in some middle eastern scriptures. Believe what you want to believe, but this never had anything to do with the church, miraculous conception, shepherds, magi or stables. The church hijacked both. Now the pagans’ descendants have hijacked them back. Get over it.

O’Donnell said unless Catholicism addressed the reality of what the word Christmas has come to mean, “secularisation and modern life will continue to launder the church”.

What you mean here is; the church is irrelevant and fairly pointless, much as it has always been and we don’t need it. As for reality, well, I’m not the one who talks to invisible men in the sky and expects a response… I do occasionally wear a frock, though 😀

3 Comments

  1. It is very doubtfull if modern society would exist without the Christian religion. Calling it irrelevent is not a particularly accurate assesement. No religion is perfect and some are decidedly less perfect than others but to say they are irrelevent just isn’t bourne out by experience. Of course in modern left and athiestic thinking, many positive virtues inspired by religion are considered bogus to progress, what ever that is.

    • +1 Christianity, especially Protestant, has been the greatest enabler of progress and humanity for mankind.

      Unfortunately, it has now been infiltrated, especially CoE, by SJW left.

  2. It isn’t Christianity or Christmas that has become irrelevant. The story of the nativity is still precious to many people.
    No it’s the clergy who have rendered themselves irrelevant, largely through their attention seeking antics and forays into political controversies under the risible pretence of making religion “relevant” to people’s daily lives. This was never anything other than a vanity project- it was their own status they sought to embellish.
    Dissatisfied and bored with themselves, and with their core congregations of the traditionally minded, they ventured off-piste to court a new clientele. But those newcomers have no serious investment in continuous attendance at worship. Once the novelty wears off, they lapse and are gone. The problem of half-empty churches has been solved though, replaced by empty churches.
    The very aspect most hated by the “modernisers”, namely the solidly constant nature and tone of the services, the steady cycle of the Church calendar, the emphasis on timeless and familiar standards of morality, the avoidance of political partisanship, the liturgy, devotional music, all of these things have been treasured by countless generations of generally modest folk who always knew when it was Ascension Day and always carried some money for the collection plate, and showed up. They found solace and comfort there.

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