Vatican attacks 'foolish' BBC for ditching BC and AD to be PC

Backlash: BBC presenter Andrew Marr is one of the most high-profile dissenters over the broadcaster's politically correct rule

The Vatican has accused the BBC of an ‘act of enormous foolishness’ for dumping the terms BC and AD in case they cause offence to non-Christians.



The Roman Catholic Church also severely criticised the ‘senseless hypocrisy’ of Britain’s public service broadcaster for using a false respect for other religions to purge Christianity from Western culture.



‘It is by now very clear that respect for other religions is only an excuse, because those who wish to erase every trace of Christianity from Western culture are only a few secular westerners,’ said a front page editorial in L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican’s official newspaper.



‘The BBC has limited itself to changing only the description, rather than the computation of time, but in doing so, it cannot be denied that it has made a hypocritical gesture - the hypocrisy of those who pretend not to know why years began to be counted precisely from that moment,’ the paper said.



‘To deny the historically revolutionary importance of the coming of Christ on the earth, which is accepted even by those who do not recognise him as Son of God, is an act of enormous foolishness.



‘Why not recognise that from that moment the world changed?,’ the paper added. ‘There is nothing more anti-historical and senseless.’



The new guidance from the BBC asserts that the abbreviations for Before Christ and Anno Domini (the Year of the Lord) infringed its protocols on impartiality.



It instructs employees to instead replace them with the non-religious phrases BCE and BC – Before Common Era and Common Era.



Swotting up: University Challenge is one of the BBC programmes already using the non-religious terms

The new phrases are numerically equivalent to BC and AD but they explicitly exclude any reference to Jesus Christ.



‘As the BBC is committed to impartiality it is appropriate that we use terms that do not offend or alienate non-Christians,’ said the instruction from the BBC’s religion and ethics department.



‘In line with modern practice, BCE/CE are used as a religiously neutral alternative to BC/AD.’

BBC programmes which are already regularly using the new politically-correct phrases include University Challenge, presented by Jeremy Paxman, who was recently criticised for a fawning interview with the campaigning atheist Richard Dawkins on BBC2’s Newsnight. They also include include BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time, which is hosted by Melvyn Bragg.



But some senior BBC employees are publicly dissenting from the edict – including Andrew Marr, one of its most high-profile presenters – in what has become a backlash.



When asked on the Andrew Marr Show on BBC1 if he was now using the new terms, he replied: ‘No I am not.’



Bizarre: The common use of Jesus's birth in referring to dates could be purged from the BBC

Mr Marr said: ‘I say AD and BC because that’s what I understand. I don’t know what the Common Era is. Why is it the Common Era in 20AD and it wasn’t the Common Era in 20 BC?’



John Humphrys, the presenter of Mastermind and Radio 4’s Today programme, also refused to adopt the new phrases.



‘I will continue to use AD and BC because I don’t see a problem,’ he said. ‘They are terms which most people use and understand.’



Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, who presented a BBC television documentary on the Roman Empire, also described the guidance as ‘puerile, spineless and absurd’.



He said that licence-fee payers should complain to senior executives and ‘fight this Beeb drivel now’.



Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, the former Anglican Bishop of Rochester, said he thought that the policy ‘amounts to the dumbing down of the Christian basis of our culture language and history’.



A BBC spokeswoman said the guidance was not binding and that individual programmes were free to choose which terms were used.



‘Whilst the BBC uses BC and AD like most people as standard terminology it is also possible for individuals to use different terminology if they wish to, particularly as it is now commonly used in historical research,’ she said.



BC and AD emerged in the sixth century and are used in the Gregorian Calendar, which is recognised around the world.

