It's Auntie's Time Again

Easter is relatively late, so the BBC has a campaign against the Easter holiday. When Easter is relatively early, then the BBC has a campaign against the Easter holiday. Whenever there is an Easter, then the BBC has a campaign against the Easter holiday. And there is an Easter every year. Oh, well, it's really a pagan festival. Isn't it?

No. It is not.

Neither Christmas nor Easter derives from any pagan festival at all, whatever some middle-brow pub bore may identify himself by telling you. But it matters not a jot that, uniquely, the English word for Christ's Passover has such an origin, and it is only to be expected that they meet the human need for winter and spring festivals respectively. That need is of God, and it is for God. God duly provides for it by, in, through and as His Church.

Of course churches throughout the world, and not least throughout Europe, are built on converted communities' pre-existing holy sites. Of course there are shrines of Our Lady and the Saints where once were centred the cults of all manner of Saint Paul's elemental spirits, which are Saint John's fallen angels. Even if certain folkloric practices may, in some corrected form, have been carried over, nevertheless no properly instructed member of the Church is thus practising any such cult, while the Church, as such, actually cannot do so.

There are, however, no such folkoric continuations in these Islands. As it happens, next to nothing is known of the pre-Christian religions here, and the charge of paganism is a purely Protestant one against things that are Medieval, and usually Late Medieval at that.