L'Osservatore Romano criticises the BBC for wanting to "erase all traces of Christianity from Western culture"

The Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano has published a scathing opinion piece today (5 October), which questions the real motives behind the BBC's desire to replace the ancient dating abbreviations "BC" (Before Christ) and "AD" (Anno Domini) with the more secular "BCE" (Before Common Era) and "CE" (Common Era). The BBC recently announced its plans to drop the more traditional historical dating system, claiming that the terms BC and AD might offend non-Christians. L'Osservatore Romano, though, says it "is an act of enormous foolishness" to deny the historical fact that our Western calendar, as well as our understanding of humanity and human rights, is based on the "revolutionary" importance of the coming of Christ.

The anti-Christian Calendrier Republicain (1794)

In her piece for L'Osservatore Romano, Lucetta Scaraffia, suggests that the BBC's excuse for getting rid of the ancient historical abbreviations is merely a smoke-screen, one that has often been used by a small minority of secularists "who want to erase all traces of Christianity from Western culture." She points out that the leaders of the French Revolution tried to eradicate the Christian dating system, replacing it with a bizarrely bureaucratic calendar, which even contained new names for the months and a new year zero - namely 1789, the year of "revolution." Needless to say, this new dating system, which smacked of "something false and ridiculous", didn't survive long, and was wiped away by Napoleon in 1806. Scaraffia also mentions the abortive attempts made by Lenin and Mussolini to de-Christianise the Western calendar and its historical dating system. In that sense, then, the BBC's drive to secularise Britain through pretending that our calendar is not based on the historical, political and spiritual revolution of Christ's coming into the world, is just another misguided attempt to create some new (and joyless) utopia. One wonders what the BBC is now planning to call Christmas - how about "Common Era Day"? Such a term should be bland and soulless enough for the Beeb!

The L'Osservatore Romano article also points out that most non-Christians do not "feel at all offended by the traditional dating," suggesting that it is actually the minority of leftist social-engineers at the British state broadcaster who really want to change the historical abbreviations. In fact, many commentators - including some who work for the BBC - have pointed out that it is nonsense for the BBC to try and suggest that non-Christians would be offended by the terms BC and AD. As Melanie Philips, who is Jewish, said in her Daily Mail article, "the idea that any of us [Jews] would be offended by anyone else using BC and AD would be totally ridiculous." Philips also said that the BBC's desire to drop the traditional dating abbreviations, which is something that has been happening in secularist institutions for some years now, "is part of the wider desire to obliterate Christianity in British culture." All of this seems to suggest that, contrary to its mandate to represent British society as a whole, the BBC really is following a minority secularist agenda, and really does have it in for our immensely important Christian culture and traditions.

Scaraffia calls the BBC's proposals to change the dating abbreviations "anti-historical" and "historically senseless hypocrisy." Instead of being enlightened or rational, such a change is in fact absurd - for it is an attempt to deny the historical and cultural shift that happened with the birth of Christ. Replacing BC and AD with BCE and CE is a secular way of acknowledging the traditional Western calender - based on Christ - whilst also trying to reject its rationale at the same time! In her L'Osservatore Romano article, Lucretta Scaraffia also suggests that the world "changed" with the coming of Christ, which made it possible "for the peoples of Europe to discover the world and for scientists to start the experimental study of nature that led to the birth of modern science." For this reason, Scaraffia asks, "Why then deny that civilization has a cultural debt to Christianity? There is nothing more anti-historical and foolish, as Jews and Muslims have clearly understood. It’s a matter of reason, not of faith."

Although I totally agree with the L'Osservatore Romano article, a part of me feels that some have over-reacted the the BBC's proposals to stop using BC and AD. For some reason, I thought the BBC - like many schools and other educational and cultural institutions (or bastions of the Left) - had already ditched the traditional historical abbreviations many years ago. If others like me hadn't realised that the BBC were still using BC and AD, will many notice the introduction of such terms as BCE and CE? Having said that, though, the really disturbing aspect of this story - and one that Scaraffina does well to highlight - is the fact that Britain (and the West as a whole) is currently being de-Christianised through the efforts of an elite minority of cultural secularists. Aggressive atheists and irrational anti-Christians are trying their very best to rewrite history, to obliterate Christianity from our present as well as our past. Needless to say, though, their attempts to eradicate our joyful Christian heritage are ultimately bound to fail, just as they failed in Revolutionary France, Communist Russia and Fascist Italy!


NB - Mary Kenny has written a very similar piece to Scaraffina's, which was published in last weekend's Catholic Herald (print version).

[Images: 1 depiction of L'Osservatore Romano; in the public domain. 2 Louis-Philibert Debucourt's French Revolutionary Calendar of 1794; copyright expired; source: Wikimedia Commons]