JINGLE Bells and jingling tills are the sounds that accompany the weeks of frantic end-of-year activity running up to Christmas.
Yet among it all it can’t be a bad thing even among the reindeers and the glitter to see scenes of Christ’s birth and epiphany depicted in public places or hear some words of Christian truth and teaching carolling away in the supermarkets for two months each year.
Most Australians of all religious views or none don’t mind acknowledging that the Christmas celebration does have a religious origin, and don’t see much sense in rebadging Christmas as “Happy Holidays” or some such.
We are also comfortable with the dating of our calendar and styling its years as BC and AD. Most of us would be surprised that anyone should want to change them and wonder who’s behind the move to replace AD with CE (Common Era) and BC with BCE (Before the Common Era).
It’s a practice at any rate taken up by the academics and experts who devised the new National Educational Curriculum, with the evident aim of forcing future Australian school students to abandon the hitherto unquestioned expressions BC and AD.
Perhaps those in this minority circle are uncomfortable with the titles of “Christ” and “the Lord” which these letters abbreviate, and are aiming to push aside another reminder of the inherited Judeo-Christian tradition which is the foundation of our Australian cultural heritage.
What’s the point? – if not to change by subterfuge a tradition hallowed by immemorial use.
One also suspects the honesty of the enterprise, since the “Common Era” is still held to commence with Christ’s Birth and CE could still be understood as “Christian Era”.
If this push comes from within certain academic and educational circles, then Catholics and other Christians declare we’re more than happy to continue with the expressions everyone knows and understands.
In Catholic schools and colleges we’ll be staying with BC and AD.
My prayer in this Year of the Lord, Anno Domini 2011-12 is that everyone will be surrounded afresh by Christmas blessings of peace, joy and hope in each home and family.
May our celebration echo far and wide into our communities God’s abounding love and mercy in the birth among us of His Son.
BISHOP GEOFFREY JARRETT
Apostolic Administrator
of Brisbane
