VATICAN CITY (LifeSiteNews) — A number of Catholics have expressed consternation after the Vatican used the non-Christian dating notation “BCE” instead of the Catholic style of “Before Christ” in a papal document.
In recent days, social media posts on X (formerly Twitter) highlighted passages from Pope Francis’ July letter on the role of literature in formation.
Section 12 of the Pope’s text contained two quotations from writers who lived before Christ’s birth, and reads:
This verse contains two quotations: one indirect, from the poet Epimenides (sixth century B.C.E.), and the other direct, from the Phaenomena of the poet Aratus of Soli (third century B.C.E.), who wrote of the constellations and the signs of good and bad weather.
The traditional designations of year dates has been “B.C.,” meaning “before Christ,” and “A.D.,” meaning “anno Domini” or “in the year of Our Lord,” for the time since Christ’s birth. The entire system is thus derived oriented around the birth of Christ.
However, in recent years the terms “before the common era (BCE)” and “common era (CE)” have become commonly used to replace “B.C.” and “A.D.” While BCE and CE largely owe their wider use to Jewish scholars in the 1800s, their use has especially predominated in recent decades in an attempt to divorce mainstream culture from any orientation to Christianity, despite following the Gregorian calendar.
Indeed, use of the BCE/CE terms has been commonly linked to direct attempts to present de-Christianized historical accounts, and has divided opinion accordingly.
Criticism of the Vatican’s use of the term has thus been made, with Catholics accusing the Vatican’s text of being “pernicious” and of representing “apostasy.” Others have suggested that using the term was a genuine, though unfortunate, error.
While many have swiftly criticized the Vatican for employing the terminology, the BCE term only appears in the English translation, with the seven other language versions of the Pope’s letter using the “B.C.” term.
The French version refers to the sixth and third centuries “before Jesus Christ,” as do the Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, German, and Arabic translations.
The sole use of the “BCE” term in the English translation would appear to be the result of the officials in the Secretariat of State and the Holy See Press Office tasked with preparing the Pontiff’s discourses and writings for public consumption.
News releases and papal statements from the Vatican come as part of a coordinated effort between office-based officials in the Secretariat of State and staff at the press office. The press office in turn is under the auspices of the Dicastery for Communication.
The predominant language of the Vatican is Italian. English is a widely spoken additional language among a number of clerical and lay officials, particularly with the continued growth of English-speaking Catholic media based at the Vatican.
Despite this, numerous minor inaccuracies and errors regularly appear in the Holy See Press Office’s online releases, with the English translation often being notably out of date and less detailed when contrasted with the daily Italian listings.
“I would classify this under ‘dumb’ rather than ‘evil.’ It’s most likely that the English translator is some woke bureaucrat,” commented Crisis Magazine Editor-in-Chief Eric Sammons. “But it does reflect badly on the Vatican that such people are hired in the first place. Well-run organizations vet their people carefully.”
Problems between various language translations of Vatican texts is not a recent problem, and predates the current pontificate. However, with the Dicastery for Communications receiving one of the largest budgets in the Holy See (some tens of millions of euros), particular attention is justly being given to the proper use of such a sum of money.