Happy Holy Days! (Part One)
Cataloging Catholicism’s Contributions to the Calendar
What do Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the kid next door in the monster mask begging for candy at the end of October all have in common?
They’re Catholic!
Well, maybe not the Easter Bunny.
The kid might be—you’d have to ask his parents (though if they’re a strict enough denomination of Protestant they probably wouldn’t let him go trick-or-treating in the first place).
Now Santa Claus, he’s definitely Catholic…but we’ll get to that later.
Okay, so not all of these mascots are Catholic, but the holidays they represent—Christmas, Easter, and Halloween, respectively—most certainly are.
And they’re not alone.
From the retail romance of Valentine’s Day to the green-beer guzzling at a Paddy’s Day parade; the Pilgrim-inspired pig-outs on Thanksgiving and even the red-white-and-blue ballyhoo of a Fourth of July picnic—it turns out all your favorite holidays, distorted and disfigured by secular consumerism though they may be, are holier than thou realized.
Let’s find out how!
NEW YEAR’S DAY
"If Christmas were just the birthday of a great teacher, like Socrates or Buddha, it would never have split time into two, so that all history before the advent of Christ is called B.C. and all history after, A.D." —Venerable Fulton J. Sheen1
While the entry for Christmas is last on this list, Archbishop Sheen’s quote on the calendar is apt considering the Catholic liturgical year begins not on the 1st of January (which instead owes its allegiance to the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God) but on the First Sunday of Advent (late November/early December).
But even the so-called secular timetable owes its existence, as the quote suggests, to the Catholic Church—in this case, by way of the highest level Catholic possible, the Pope!
In 1582, the Julian Calendar received a more equinox-accurate upgrade courtesy of Pope Gregory XIII, and it’s been in Western use ever since—much to the chagrin of “the Church hates science!” critics the world over.
And speaking of science, the lady in the lab coat really doth protest too much with recent atheistic attempts at replacing the traditional calendar eras (Before Christ (BC) and anno Domini (AD, meaning In the Year of the Lord)) with BCE (Before the Common Era) and CE (Common Era).2
As for the day itself, New Year’s resolutions bear a striking similarity to the Catholic Act of Contrition prayer, which ends with the line: I firmly resolve, with the help of Thy grace, to sin no more and to avoid the near occasions of sin.
Amen!
VALENTINE’S DAY
Believe it or not, when Catholics think of hearts, it’s usually not the candy-coated cartoon version you see lining store shelves on February 14th3 that comes to mind—this despite the holiday's (albeit little-known and long-forgotten) eponymous dedication to a martyred Catholic saint4.
No, to think of hearts in the Catholic mind is to think of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, bloody and burning, wreathed in thorns and carrying a cross; or the Immaculate Heart of Mary, beset by flowers and fire, and pierced by seven swords of sorrow; or even of St. Philip Neri, whose love was so great that his rib cage burst open to make room for his miraculously expanding heart.
Of course, whether it be the anatomically accurate heart of the crucified Christ or the silly pink ideograph stamped onto Hallmark greeting cards, these are all ultimately just different representations of the same theological virtue that Valentine’s Day represents: love.
Love comes in many forms, but C.S. Lewis (not Catholic but close!) boiled it down to four: affection, friendship, romance, and charity.
The love so commonly celebrated in the name of St. Valentine is of the third kind, romance, written more specifically by Lewis in its Greek translation as Eros, a god of love better known by his not-Roman-Catholic but Roman equivalent of Cupid.
Here is the pious, platonic ideal of love that exists in the popular imagination: hearts and arrows, X’s and O’s, boxes of chocolates and bouquets of roses—all those lovely little things that lovers so long for.
These signs and symbols of love share many similarities to the courtly, chivalrous love of the Catholic Middle Ages—indeed, the holiday’s association with love can be traced back to none other than famous Medieval Catholic writer Geoffrey Chaucer!
This is all good as far as it goes. But just as the terrifying, tetramorphic cherubs of the Old Testament have been infantilized into the lovey-dovey, bow-and-arrow babies we all know (and love?), the real meaning of love itself has been watered down and commercialized to the arrowpoint of absurdity.
We must not forget the fourth kind of Lewis’s love, the unconditional agape that Christ showed for us on the Cross—and for which the real St. Valentine earned his martyr’s crown.
SAINT PATRICK’S DAY
While at least half the people rocking green and orange on March 17th aren’t Irish and/or Catholic—and most of them probably think St. Patrick is the leprechaun on the Lucky Charms cereal box—there’s something quaint about an overtly Irish-Catholic holiday gaining so much ground in Anglo-Protestant America.
The real St. Patrick—the man who singlehandedly converted the Emerald Isle armed only with a crozier and a breastplate—would surely balk at the drunken revelry that occurs in his name annually on city streets across the globe.
That said, there’s no denying that Catholics are by no means teetotalers (though sadly the Irish have come to be known more for their alcoholism than their Catholicism...)
Indeed, the recent apostasy of Ireland serves as a cautionary tale, showing how the trappings of Catholicism—the culture and the aesthetics and the historical prestige—aren’t enough.
You have to believe.
Without the foundation of faith, Ireland—and Saint Patrick’s Day itself—has confused the Trinity for a shamrock,5 the crozier for a shillelagh, and the grace of God for the luck of the Irish.
I can’t source the exact origin of this quote, but it was too good not to include.
Funny how you don’t hear anyone clamoring to rename the months of the year and days of the week, which are named after various pagan gods (June for Juno, Thor for Thursday, etc.)
Interestingly, while still celebrated in the Anglican communion, in the Catholic Church veneration of St. Valentine has been relegated to local calendars and his feast day is no longer official (since 1969), presumably due to questions of historicity.