Kevin Basil

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Touchstone Archives: Calculating Christmas

This is appearing in several places, because an AP article on it ran about a year ago. Mollie Ziegler at Get Religion links to a North County Times archive of the AP piece by Richard Ostling. Father John Whiteford links to a World Magazine article from December 10, 2005. However, they all reference the above article by William Tighe from 2003, published in Touchstone Magazine. Tighe is an Associate Professor of History at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and a faculty advisor to the Catholic Campus Ministry. He is also a member of St. Josaphat Ukrainian Catholic Church in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

Tighe’s thesis is that the date of December 25 for commemorating Christ’s Birth in the Flesh was set relative to the extant date for the Annunciation, March 25, and that the celebration of the solus invictus, the invincible sun, was established by the Roman Emperor Aurelian as a competing festival. Obviously, this thesis turns the prevailing theory on its head.

I’m no scholar, but my interest in liturgics and liturgical theology has led me to read rather widely about the development of liturgical practices in the patristic era. Tighe’s thesis seems quite solid and consonant with my knowledge of the liturgical developments of this era.

Hat tip: Father Joseph Huneycutt at OrthoDixie

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