THE Pope urged Christians to embrace the true meaning of Christmas yesterday, amid a row in Italy over traditional celebrations.

Presiding over a ceremonial switching-on of Christmas tree lights in St Peter’s Square, where 10,000 pilgrims had gathered, the Pope cited a phrase from the Psalms to draw attention to “the meaning of this liturgical season of Advent”, an aide said. “It is a royal psalm which portrays a just and devout king who defends the poor and the oppressed.”

At the weekend the Pope weighed in over whether Italian state schools were right to cancel Nativity plays and cribs because of the alleged sensitivities of immigrant Muslim children. The Pope said on Sunday that Christmas traditions remain “an important element of our culture and faith”. The Nativity scene was “a familiar and expressive representation of Christmas”.

One school at Como has replaced the word “Jesus” with “virtue”, in a carol, and another at Treviso is to stage Little Red Riding Hood this year instead of a Nativity play, arguing that the fairytale also represents “the struggle of good against evil”. Schools from Cagliari to Modena have decided not to display cribs.

“Exaggerated attacks on Christmas traditions reflect a much wider attitude,” said Cardinal Camillo Ruini, a papal aide. Vatican officials are campaigning to have “Christianophobia” recognised by the United Nations as an evil equal to hatred of Jews and of Muslims. Vatican officials argue that Christianity is under threat not only from militant Islam and New Age sects but also from the secular ism of increasingly vocal and influential “anti- religious forces”.

The Vatican was dismayed over the failure of the European Union to refer to Europe’s Christian heritage in its new constitution, as well as the rejection by the European Parliament of Rocco Buttiglione as Italy’s EU commissioner because of his traditionalist Catholic views on homosexuality and the family.

The Vatican hopes the United Nations will this month condemn “Christianophobia” in the same way as anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.

Archbishop Giovanni Lajolo, the Vatican Foreign Minister, coined the term — or at least gave it currency — by telling a recent conference in Rome on religious freedom that “the war against terrorism, although necessary, had as one of its side- effects the spread of Christianophobia in vast areas of the globe”.

However, even Italian Muslim leaders have criticised an “excess of zeal” by school authorities, and Bishop Agostino Marchetto, head of the Vatican department for migrants, said he suspected “Muslim sensitivities” were being used as a pretext by secular leftwingers to attack Catholic culture. “The real enemy is secularisation,” he said.

According to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith the Pope’s ideological “enforcer” for two decades, the problem is that “the West does not love itself”. Cardinal Ratzinger, who has co-written a book on Europe’s Christian roots that was published this week, said that Western “self-hatred” was leading to “a loss of moral values . . . Western society is in flight from itself”.

The Vatican is alarmed by moves in Europe — even in Catholic Spain — to legalise same-sex marriage, liberalise abortion laws and allow stem-cell research. Such trends, according to Cardinal Ruini, are “emptying the family of its significance”. This is a “lay offensive”, Vatican offcials say. “Only a Europe which rediscovers its Christian roots can face the great challenges of the third millennium, ” the Pope said last May.

A year ago the Pope warned visiting Catholic bishops from England and Wales that Britain “despite being steeped in a rich Christian heritage faces the pervasive advance of secularism . . . It is a mentality which exaggerates individualism and destroys the bonds which define social living.” The “loss of a sense of God” was leading to “social disintegration, threats to family life and the ugly spectres of racial intolerance and war, leaving many — especially the young — feeling disorientated and even at times without hope”.

Last month Cardinal Ratzinger told La Repubblica that “we are faced with an aggressive and intolerant secularism that seeks to reduce Christianity to something purely private”. However, Pietro Scoppola, a church historian, told the same paper that the idea of an “anti-Catholic offensive” was “unrealistic and without foundation”. Alberto Melloni, another church historian, agrees: the “real persecution of Christians”, he says, is taking place outside Europe. “All this chatter is the result of incomprehension. Some in the Catholic Church are having trouble coming to terms with the modern world . . . to call this persecution is an insult to Christians in Africa and Asia who really are being persecuted, even killed for their beliefs.”

Church leaders were “playing the victim” and “dreaming of a return to a lost form of Christianity”, Professor Melloni said. “What we really need is a more open form of debate in the Church, not reactionary conservatism. We live in a disorientated society — but that is the nature of democracy.”

CHRISTIANITY UNDER FIRE

October 2004: Bombs hit five churches in Baghdad

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