Music Revealing the Greater Ages: "Scaling" out the NT/OT Fulfillments
I agree that modern Christmas is commercialized terribly, but regarding the date of Christmas being changed by the Church to fit paganism, and other accusations that the Catholic Church is a corrupted form of Christianity by paganism, let us consider the epic Scripture of Apocalypse, where the Woman, there seen as the great Spouse of God, the Church is given the wings of the eagle and flies to rest in Apocalypse 12. Is it possible that the winds represent certain pagan elements that the Church has borrowed? Let us probe it.
More particularly, Greece, the leopard, had four wings in Daniel 7, and there were four great elements of Greek culture that elevated it above a brute materialism: Philosophy, Art, Drama, and Athletics. The Catholic Church hyper-Christianized two of these in the Middle Ages: Philosophy and Art.
To this day, conservative Protestants are largely afraid of Reason, or philosophy, because it shows the illogical nature of their heresies. Persons who read Catholic dogma and Philosophy cannot really attack it, because it doesn't have gaps and illogical things. The Catholic Church is not afraid of reason because all truth is of God, even natural. To this day, most Protestants who read the documents of the council of Trent for themselves and try to understand what the Fathers of the Council meant, it is difficult for them not to convert to Rome, since the philosophy is impeccable.
Most Protestants have never read Trent in its entirety and in context, and with a sincere desire to get into the mind of what the Fathers really meant. Greek Philosophy is a brutal spiritual weapon that the Catholic Church took from Greece and harnessed it to defend and explain her teachings with greater abstractions and depth, hence, as if the Woman's two Wings in Apocalypse 12 are from the Leopard in Daniel 7.
Toward this end, the other wing the Church took from Greece is Art. Already in the 700's, the heresy of rejection of Sacred Art was dethroned and was not resurrected from its filfthy stench until the Protestant Rebellion. When a normal person walks into a Middle Ages Cathedral replete with astounding statues and paintings of Mary, Jesus, and the Saints, they know, by common sense, that none of this idolatry. They know these are just pictures of the persons that most Catholics love in their heart, just like a Protestant minister will carry images of his wife and children in his wallet.
And this is what the Catholic Church does unapologetically with any elements of a pagan civilization that she is converting. She Christianizes them, transforms them:
Many pagans seek the truth like Christians do, they just never had the Gospel brought to them. Hence, they can, by God's grace, be led to develop elements of culture that are precursors to the Gospel, and the Catholic Church rejoices when they have these elements. If other elements are problematic, they can transform them.
God met the Jewish People where they were at with physical things that didn't matter in and of themselves (most of the Old Law), and there is no reason that God cannot meet pagan cultures where they are, including, therefore, Christianizing the elements of their culture for ease of reference