The National Catholic Reporter has a brief article on the background of Secularists Repeatedly Reminding You to Be Aware of Them Day, also known as Atheism Day. I joke, of course; kakangelists would never accept just one day to harass the rest of mankind. In honesty, I refer to April Fool’s Day. Peggy Fletcher Stack reports: “April Fools’ Day isn’t a religious holiday, but there are some religious roots.”

I found the historical corrective about the Feast of Fools fascinating. I do not know whether the quoted scholar Max Harris is correct, but I suspect so. I always thought that the blasphemous revelry recounted jarred with what I knew of medieval society. I also know that moderns take perverse liberties in the depiction of their ancestors, as I recently mentioned in “Woman as Yesterday’s Slave.” To pull a Hume on Hume’s friends, it is as though the human craving for fancy leads modern men into believing all sorts of nonsense about previous ages. Harris’ description of the feast makes more sense. If you are interested further, you may read his Sacred Folly: A New History of the Feast of Fools.

Posted by Joseph on Tuesday, April 1, Anno Domini 2014
Religion | Roman Catholicism • Comments