Europe’s monarchs used to speak of Christmas as custodians of a civilisation. Decades ago, their season allocutions were full of Christian feeling, as well as patriotic love; it is no surprise, then, that their speeches formed a central part of national life at Christmas, with families calibrating dinners and celebrations so they could be sitting reverently in front of the telly by the time the monarch was ready for the much-anticipated speech. Parents and children would listen in awed silence—such was the respect that monarchy inspired in Europeans of just a few decades ago, in days that were no less turbulent, frenetic, and technology-obsessed than our own.
Much has changed since then. Europe’s kings and queens now increasingly speak as regional managers of a post-national NGO, taking Frederick the Great’s concept of the sovereign as “the first citizen of the state” to its decidedly materialistic, empty, and unsatisfactory—if, perhaps, predictable—paroxysm. The recent Christmas messages of King Charles III of Britain, King Felipe VI of Spain, and King Philippe of the Belgians weren’t revealing for what they said; they were revealing for what they left conspicuously unsaid. Christianity—the very Christ the King who, with His crown of thorns, shaped the crowns of gold of earthly monarchs, legitimised their thrones, sanctified their offices, and is the whole centre and point of Christmas—was reduced to a footnote or omitted altogether.
In all three cases, the language used was safely anodyne, with the pretence of neutrality and self-enforced aloofness broken only for a series of not-so-subtly political condemnations needlessly dragged into that most special of nights. Felipe, speaking without a Nativity scene in sight, cleansed of any hint of Christian symbolism, attacked “extremism”, with little doubt as to what “extremists” he had in mind—with Santiago Abascal’s VOX polling at near-record numbers and a heavy Socialist defeat in Extremadura putting the political longevity of disgraced Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez into serious doubt, the king’s speechwriters can hardly be commended for their discretion.
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