Philosopher Ralph McInerny reflects on, and responds to, our consumerist culture's subversion of Christ's Mass:

Morose delectation is more often a temporary grace than a settled view of life, but longevity brings the feeling that one has outlived his time, that there are events it would have been better not to see, that human folly is a bottomless resource. Now when the secular Advent begins more or less on Labor Day, the familiar lament that Christmas is being trivialized, commercialized, and secularized is once more heard in the land, even though the mourner’s bench has becomes less crowded.

Christ’s Mass, the annual commemoration of the Word becoming flesh, the liturgical dwelling on the early chapters of Luke, the hymns that lifted the heart – all that is lost among the tinsel. Philip Roth, in one of his not infrequent anti-gentile passages, chuckles over the way Irving Berlin turned Christmas and Easter into a snowy landscape and a fashion parade, respectively. We all knew what dreaming of a white Christmas meant, but now little is left but the white.

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