What the Pope Really Said About Christmas
What the Pope Really Said About Christmas
The Pope’s new book, Infancy Narratives, was released on November 21. The day’s headline of the Daily Mail? “Killjoy Pope crushes Christmas nativity traditions: New Jesus book reveals there were no donkeys beside crib, no lowing oxen and definitely no carols.” CNN’s online story followed suit. The New York Daily News repeated the claim about the animals.
Back to that Daily Mail headline: “. . . no donkeys beside crib, no lowing oxen and definitely no carols.” Let’s have a look.
Any book editor worth his or her salt would notice the obvious pronoun disagreement. “No way is that in the English edition,” I thought. In comparing the stories, I noticed that the Daily Mail and others instead rendered the quotation: “No nativity scene will give up its ox and donkey.”
In the book, the sentence in question seems to be on page 69: “No presentation of the crib is complete without the ox and the ass.” This is different from both representations.
Which was it?
I sought to find out for myself.
Random House confirmed via email that neither of the first two quotations listed is in the book; rather they are poor translations from the Italian. Not only have they misquoted the book, perhaps hastily translating the work from Italian, but these unofficial quotations have circulated among multiple publications—secular and religious.
First Things