Is Christmas still Christian?

Two weeks before Christmas and Pope Benedict XVI is busy doing what popes do best - warning about the perils of rampant consumerism just as the Yuletide shopping season is kicking off in Italy. “Too often, today’s manner of living and perceiving Christmas suffers from a materialistic mentality,” he said.

Of course, he has a point. Increasingly, Christmas has become a commercial, secularised celebration, which makes shopkeepers happy but the Pope sad. To say the very least, Christmas is not what it once was.

Texting Saints

In Italy, you can send a saint, a Virgin Mary or a Jesus - and probably soon a John Paul II or a Benedict XVI - to your friends by SMS for Christmas. In a country in which everyone has at least two mobile phones and a “holy card” (santino) in his or her pocket a company found a gap in the market and filled it.

So now, instead of carrying wrinkled and worn ‘santini’ in your wallet or handbag you can get the image sent to your phone for only three euros. “This is in really bad taste… selling ‘santini’ for cell phones is horrifying,” fumed Bishop Lucio Soravito De Franceschi, a member of the Italian bishops conference committee for doctrinal matters, to the newspaper La Stampa.

God drinks Red Bull

In Poland, bishops are also infuriated about a Red Bull advert showing a fourth Wise Man presenting the infant Jesus a can of the famous Austrian energy drink (which becomes infamous when mixed with vodka). The 30 second TV and cinema spots showed the Holy Family visited in their Bethlehem stable by four Wise Men, one of whom is carrying a box of cans and telling a tired Virgin Mary: "Mary, Red Bull is an energy drink which gives you wings. How else could the heavenly host keep it up?"

No need to say that in Poland, the advert didn’t go unnoticed: 95 percent of the 38 million population belongs to the Catholic Church, and the Polish state radio and TV council received numerous complaints by viewers after the Red Bull advert was aired. The church has demanded the withdrawal of the advertisement. “Such exploitation of Christmas traditions is scandalous," Bishop Tadeusz Pieronek, a professor of church law, told the Dziennik daily newspaper.

Midnight mess

Finally, in Britain, midnight mass will be held early in the evening or even the morning before at churches across the country this Christmas to prevent drunks disrupting the services. Father James O’Keefe, priest of St-Bede parish in Newcastle, told the Catholic weekly newspaper “The Tablet”, that the Cathedral of St Mary in the heart of the city’s entertainment district will be holding its Christmas Eve Mass at 8pm this year. Father O’Keefe says that “a lot of people, having been disgorged from the pub, were attracted by the light and the music and used to disrupt proceedings.”

It's not just drunks and unscrupulous entrepreneurs who are destroying the magic of Christmas. Even senior bishops are happy to play the role of sceptical killjoys in these rabidly rational times. Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams said that “Christmas cards which showed the Virgin Mary cradling the baby Jesus, flanked by shepherds and wise men, are misleading.” He concluded that Jesus was probably not born in December at all, explaining that: "Christmas was when it was because it fitted well with the winter festival."

So maybe next year we should all celebrate Christmas in January or February when the sales are over, the nights are longer and all mention of religion has been quietly erased.