CATHOLICS IN AUSTRALIA have criticised a new government initiative replacing the country’s school curricula, dropping the terms ‘BC’ and ‘AD’ to refer to the time before and after the birth of Jesus.

The new curriculum will scrap the references in favour of an alternate system with secular terminology which does not explicitly use Christ’s birth as a reference point for numbering years before and afterward.

Instead of ‘BC’ (Before Christ) and ‘AD’ (Anno Domini, meaning ‘the year of our Lord’), the curriculum will instead refer to ‘BCE’ (Before Common Era) and ‘CE’ (Common Era), two equivalent systems.

A third term, ‘BP’ (or ‘before present’), is also being introduced, where it is standard practice to refer to the year 1950 as the beginning of the ‘present’. Under this system, for example, the year 1930 would be referred to as 20 BP.

Adelaide Now quoted the Anglican archbishop of Sydney, Peter Jensen, who described the new practice as an “intellectually absurd attempt to write Christ out of human history”.

The new system merely scrapped the terminology of BC and AD but not their actual logic, he argued, which meant that “the coming of Christ remains the centre point of dating”.

The changes – backed by the increasingly unpopular prime minister Julia Gillard – have also been ridiculed by the opposition Liberal National Party, who described them as having “the fundamental flaw of trying to deny who we are as a people”.

“Australia is what it is today because of the foundations of our nation in the Judeo-Christian heritage that we inherited from Western civilisation”, education spokesman Christopher Pyne told the Australian Daily Telegraph.

Australia’s Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority insisted that the new terms were becoming increasingly common and were slowly supplanting ‘BC’ and ‘AD’ anyway.

What do you think of removing ‘AD’ and ‘BC’ from school curricula?