The Pope used his Christmas Eve mass this year as yet another occasion to decry the commercialization of Christmas.  He said we should look past the “superficial glitter” of the season and instead focus on “the child in the stable in Bethlehem”.  Being a fan of all things ironic, I enjoyed that this message was being delivered by a Prada-wearing pontiff who resides over the single richest institution on the planet.  Indeed, the Catholic Church has over the ages perfected the art of many things, not least of them the ability to achieve ginormous commercial success.

Consider first the rather high likelihood that Jesus wasn’t even born on December 25.  The Bible gives no specific date of birth and descriptions of the manor scene are suggestive of Spring rather than Winter.  In those times, birthdays were less relevant than death days, so not much was made of Jesus’ birth until the church’s brain trust decided to make a play for popularity by taking on the popular pagan religions of the time (most of whom engaged in special celebrations around the time of the Winter solstice).  As church leaders debated strategies for supplanting the popular cults, they chose to wage a head-to-head battle for attention on an already established sacred date.  December 25 had long been the pagan day for celebrating the births of their own gods, but now the upstart Christians would claim that day as their own.  In a masterful twist of revisionist history – and a brilliant stroke of marketing – church leaders declared that December 25 just so happened to also be the day when their Jesus Christ was born (note this declaration was made some 400 years after Jesus’ death).  This made it easier for converts to transition to a new belief system since they were already accustomed to treating this time of year as holy.  Location, framing, and timing are crucial to the success of many businesses, something to which the early church leaders were highly attuned.

Christianity – more specifically, Catholicism – took this temporal sleight of hand and built one of the most successful commercial enterprises of all time.  It is a fact that the Vatican has amassed ungodly sums of money through centuries of force and fleecing, a wealth that is flaunted in its grandiose cathedrals and priceless art collections.  And we can be sure that churches across the globe are doing their part to grow (or at least sustain) that wealth by using the holy season to maximize their revenues through timely manipulation of spiritual heartstrings.  Marketing, positioning, branding.  These are hallmarks of any commercial pursuit.  And dare I say that the Pope and his peeps are among the savviest purveyors of their product this planet has ever seen.

Christmas can, of course, be a time for contemplation and good deeds.  And in many cases – thankfully – it is.  But it’s also a nice reminder for the realists among us that money makes the great world spin.  For money is the root of all power, a fact easily observable in the spheres of finance, entertainment, politics, education, sports, and – yes – religion.  The reality is the consumerism that the Pope pretends to discourage is the very lifeblood of his existence.  The church needs its parishioners to have disposable income so that they can be in a position to tithe (and consume goodwill).  This requires some degree of economic growth in a particular society, which is dependent upon consumption.  The more people consume, the more economic activity there is.  The more economic activity there is, the more earnings there are for companies to distribute as income.  The more income there is, the more donations the church can hope to receive.  On a truly spiritual level, I’d bet that the Pope would prefer that everyone sat around praying, being thankful, and thinking about doing good deeds.  But on a practical level, you can be your bottom dollar that the Christmas his church really wants is precisely the one that it currently has.

Speaking of irony, someone who enjoyed such incongruities was Christopher Hitchens, who sadly lost his battle with esophageal cancer last week.  He would’ve found ironic the fact that he left this world just days before the death of one of history’s most detestable human beings, Kim Jong Il.  For Hitch was an opponent of many things, not least of which included totalitarianism and dogma of any stripe, making him an enemy of despots and religious zealots the world over.  Some might paint his “militant” atheism as being evidence of his own dogmatism but that would miss the point.  While his distaste for religion undoubtedly served to nurture his own penchant for contrarianism (not to mention a good fight), his spiritual denials had more to do with rejecting the obsequiousness that comes with blind devotion to any cause or person.  He despised cults of personality and the mass suffering they had the potential to produce.  He detested the rejection of reason that is a prerequisite for faith.  His disappointment in humanity was palpable whenever he contemplated the killing done in religion’s name.  His battle wasn’t with the religious per se but with the hypocrisy, violence, and disingenuousness that religion often begets.  And while some claim that his outspoken assault on religion was a war on belief writ large (making him as much the fundamentalist as his opponents), Hitch was no more a proselytizer of atheism than a science professor is an advocate for the scientific method.  His erudition made it easy to maintain courage in his convictions, and watching him dismantle arguments (with spoken or written word) was truly a sight to behold.  He was a writer, thinker, and agent provocateur of the highest order.  It’s easy to conclude that the world is a much better place without the likes of Kim Jong Il in it.  The same most definitely cannot be said about Hitch.  From his loss, nothing is to be gained.