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Reflections on the Date of Christmas: Substitution, not Development, of Roman Paganism
Associate Pastor's Column
Sunday, December 3, 2006

            An otherwise intelligent Catholic young man went to college. His mother insisted we go fishing together the summer after his first year, as she was concerned about strange things that the college professor was telling him. While we fished, he informed me very dogmatically that Catholics worship the sun, because Constantine worshipped the sun and made everyone follow his religion, and that Christmas was the sun-god’s feast and Catholics celebrate Christmas to this day; that’s what his college professor had told him.

            (Note: This is one more story we can all chalk up, about an agenda-driven college professor, who, full of ignorance, went far out of his way to attack the faith of his students in an embarrassingly ignorant manner.)

            During Advent, it’s not unusually for many popular newspapers and magazines to print articles of little academic value which “expose” the truth about Christmas, that the early Church – again, accusing Constantine in particular – adopted the Saturnalia as the feast of Christmas, so, essentially Christians are pagans.

            The argument usually goes like this: “Constantine updated the Saturnalia to Christmas, therefore Christians worship the sun.” Myself being a student of logic, one of my specialties in my philosophical studies, such lapses move me to either laugh or cry, and sometimes I know not which to do.

            There is even a Wikipedia entry on “Christmas” which discusses the pre-Christian origins of Christmas. How could Christmas have pre-Christian origins? The failure of logic and historical acumen here is worthy of the most vile ridicule.

            Christmas has one origin: the Catholic Church’s liturgical celebration of the virgin birth of the incarnate Son of God. If one attempts to answer the historical question of how Christmas got its date without this premise of faith, any conclusion they come to after that might be true only by accident.

           Christmas was indeed celebrated in the Church even before Constantine, “The feast of Nativity, or Christmas, began to be observed in many dioceses in the third century, and by the beginning of the fourth its observance had spread throughout the Western Church.” (Johnson, Hannan, Dominica, The Story of the Church, 1935, p. 51.)

            So what does the “Saturnalia” and Constantine have to do with anything? In 274 AD, Emperor Aurelian designated December 25 as the festival of Sol Invictus, which later became the Saturnalia. This was a feast celebrated by those who followed a popular religion called Mithraism. Gifts were given, and tomfoolery was practiced and there was looseness with the observance of the law, which over the years eventually degraded into perverse practices.

            Many commit the anachronism of associating the small gift-giving on the Saturnalia with the gift-giving popular in 2006’s America (and some other countries, too), to prove somehow that gift giving on Christmas originated with the pagan feast. But that is nonsense and has no historical basis. Let us remember that even to this day, not every culture associates gift giving with Christmas, but rather gifts are exchanged in other countries on Epiphany, the feast of the Kings.

            Constantine’s imposition of Christianity as the official religion, after the famous Battle of Ponte Milvio, did not suppress paganism, rather, he tolerated it. “While Constantine did not forbid pagan practices, he skirted public disfavor – and, more important, disfavor among the old Roman aristocracy – by making a show of not participating in pagan rituals. Just a few years earlier, he could have been executed on grounds of treason for such non-performance… He took the pagan Saturnalia and made it the official date for the celebration of Chrsitmas.” (Crocker, Triumph, p. 51.) He also forbade cases to be heard on Easter, and made Sunday a civil day of rest. These actions were obviously taken “in your face,” so to speak, against the pagan world. Temples were plowed and Churches were built on the same sites; pagan feasts were ignored and Christians celebrated Christian feasts on the same day ignoring pagan ritual demands; even some practices of clothing were substituted for Catholic custom, custom and symbolism.

            So to such nonsense every Catholic can reply that there is a big difference between substitution and continuation. Christmas was the celebration of a truth (the Virgin Birth), which replaced, and did not develop, the celebration of the falsehood of slavery to paganism.

Picture: Sandro Botticelli, c. 1489/90, Annunciation, Tempera on panel, 150 cm x 156 cm Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi