by Michele Gatta
Words are important! That's how important they are! Especially when they indicate choices and trace the indelible signs of a collective memory. Now the risk that you suddenly want to put a red line on the words becomes more and more likely. All this at times to affirm healthy universal principles which, however, in modernity can become communicative "dictatorships". that's what you risk with the word "Christmas". We are not referring to some historical battle that could still cause cultural, social and religious rifts today. But to a document from a few months ago.
Last November, speaking at a conference on «Christian values and the future of Europe», Card. Hollerich referred to the letter that Pope Francis sent on the occasion of the 40th Anniversary of Comece (Commission of the Episcopal Conferences of the European Community); in it the Holy Father speaks of "his dreams for Europe". Dreaming – explained the cardinal – «is different from having an illusion or, worse, a delirium; a true dream directs us towards a better future and gives us energy and orientation to achieve it."
Meanwhile, at the end of October a document from the European Commission was released advising Commission officials (but visible to everyone on the Internet) to use inclusive, i.e. non-discriminatory, language in official documents. It was a guide for internal use, in short.
The document was titled “European Commission Guidelines for Inclusive Communication – #UnionOfEquality”. It was composed of 32 pages and divided into various chapters. Reading it you will also find many useful tips that should absolutely be kept in mind.
The case of Christmas is specified in the chapter «Cultures, lifestyles or beliefs». Here the advice is not to "take for granted that everyone is Christian because everyone celebrates Christian holidays, and not all Christians celebrate them on the same dates". The invitation was therefore to be "sensitive to the fact that people have different religious traditions and calendars". And an example was given: instead of talking about the "Christmas period", it is better to use the expression "holiday period". And when choosing proper names, to give some examples, it was suggested not to only use names of Christian origin, such as "Mary and John". These are the facts.
We want to believe in good faith, but by wanting to defend inclusion we risk encouraging exclusion. Also overshadowing the suspicion that anti-religious prejudice characterized some passages of the draft.
The document, at the time of writing, has been withdrawn. The strange thing is that, with the idea of keeping up with the times, we ended up backtracking on the very achievements of modernity. Because we would like to point out that today's European societies are characterized by their multiculturalism and their multi-religion. The response to the presence of the Christian religion as a majority cannot be to relegate it. A pillar of European culture cannot be removed; the whole house would fall. Inclusiveness, perhaps more than neutrality, will be the attempt to favor everyone, to nourish mutual knowledge. Otherwise we would have to return to the "festival of light" of Roman and pagan memory. Thus putting a red line on two thousand years of history, which is the history of Europe. Here, we simply wanted to say that some modern passages of the document are anachronistic.
So let's go back to October, to Pope Francis' dream. Who dreams of a Europe "which is family and community", where God and Caesar remain distinct but not opposed: "a land open to transcendence".