Ms Young mentioned that “adults dress as zombies or mutilated corpses – the bloodier, the better” is not the point I’m saying.
The point I am making is that Halloween can be redeemed by going back to the early practices of our Irish Catholics and to help our children celebrate Halloween by praying for the dead as what All Saints and All Souls are all about, and that we need not be afraid of the dead as what the secular world teaches.
Secondly, all celebrations whether it be Chinese New Year or National Day (as Ms Young points out) – that “it is a time where we honour our elders, visit friends and family to spread good tidings of God’s peace and blessings, and even have a special Mass where we thank God for a good Lunar New Year ahead” – are congruous with our Catholic faith and so are teaching points for parents as first catechists.
Mr Figueroa misread my sentence: “Jesus wasn’t even born on Dec 25, it has its roots as a pagan celebration of the Sun God.” His point, “the Dec 25 feast of Sol Invictus appears to have been the Romans’ attempt to paganise a Christian festival, rather than the other way around”, is exactly what I said in the sentence above.
To explain what I was trying to bring across is that the New Testament gives no date or year for Jesus’ birth. In the fourth century AD, Christians imported the Saturnalia festival – Roman pagans first introduced the holiday of Saturnalia, a week-long period of lawlessness celebrated between Dec 17 and 25.
It was imported hoping to take the pagan masses in with it.
Christian leaders succeeded in converting to Christianity large numbers of pagans by promising them that they could continue to celebrate the Saturnalia as Christians.
The problem was that there was nothing intrinsically Christian about Saturnalia. To remedy this, these Christian leaders named Saturnalia’s concluding day, Dec 25, to be Jesus’ birthday.
The early Christians who first observed the Nativity on Dec 25 did not do so thinking that Christ was born in that month, but because the heathens’ Saturnalia was at that time kept in Rome, and they were willing to have those pagan holidays metamorphose into Christian ones.
Because of its known pagan origin, Christmas was banned by the Puritans and its observance was illegal in Massachusetts between 1659 and 1681.
The point I was making with this is that we do not stop celebrating Christmas just because the secular world celebrates it with excessive dining, wining and partying.
We should use Christmas as a teaching tool that Christmas is about God giving us His Son Jesus and not the copious food, wine, presents and parties.
Ellen Tan
Singapore
Managing Editor: With this letter, we close the discussion on the topic
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Comments
I must once again reassert that Christmas is not based on Saturnalia nor Sol Invictus, and that date for Christmas can be biblically reached. Aside from my post in the last publication of the Catholic News where I referred to Jewish Tradition pertaining to prophets and martyrs, and how some had interpreted it to arrive at December 25th, this can also be arrived at from Scripture.
If one notes when the Angel Gabriel spoke to Zechariah and announced that Elizabeth would conceive, it was during is rotation for priestly duties, which historians agree was likely Yom Kippur. This is celebrated between September 22-30 on the modern calendar. This is the time that it is traditionally believed that John was conceived, as his birthday has been celebrated traditionally on June 24th. The Blessed Virgin Mary had visited Elizabeth. When she had conceived (Mary), Elizabeth was in her sixth month, and she remained with her for 3 months, and then Elizabeth gave birth.
Let's see how this works out.
March - Mary Conceives. [Travels to Elizabeth]
April - 1 [Month 1 with Elizabeth]
May - 2 [Month 2 with Elizabeth]
June - 3 [Month 3 with Elizabeth/ Elizabeth gives birth]
July - 4
August - 5
September - 6
October - 7
November - 8
December - 9 months (Mary gives birth and what people in the Church have taken from the Gospel of Luke).
Whether December 25th be the exact date of Christ's birth or not is beside the point. It is what the Church believed, and it is conjecture to simply allude that it was overtake the pagans and incorporate Saturnalia, or a simple morph of holidays into Christianity when the Church's writing gives no such allusion. The Church Fathers were harsh on paganism and wanted no relation between Christ and paganism/pagan festivities.
In fact, the Catholic Encyclopedia makes mention that no correlation for the creation of Christmas should be sought in Saturnalia.
On a closing note, I do not think the early American Puritan conception of Christmas relevant to this conversation, as we are discussing the origin of the Church's belief, and they were among the most radical of puritans and possessed a divergent philosophy and theology which we would consider heterodox. Further, their denial of many of our traditions would not surprise anyone in the least. They had denied many aspects of Catholicism; hence, denying Christmas would not be a shock.
Nope.
In New England, Puritans virtually outlawed the celebration of this "papist" feast, requiring employees to work and students to attend school on December 25, all under penalty of dismissal or expulsion. Factory owners would even open their plants earlier than usual on Christmas Day to make sure that Catholics could not attend a morning Mass.
-p. 17, "Why Do Catholics Eat Fish on Friday? The Catholic Origin to Just About Everything" by Michael P. Foley
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