The Feast of the Circumcision, RIP
Carol and I went to Mass today, and I was shocked to see that January 1 is no longer the Feast of the Circumcision of Jesus Christ, but instead "The Solemnity of Mary, the Mother of God." I'm a little surprised that I hadn't run across this before, since the change happened a long time ago, but I was a lapsed Roman Catholic for decades before returning to the faith through the Old Catholic Church back in the 90s, and I'm sure I've missed other things as well.
I've spent a little time trying to scout out a reason for the change in the feast, or even the precise year when the change occurred, and have come up empty. The cynic in me wonders if the Church would rather not admit that Jesus had a foreskin, or any sex organs at all. (If they weren't reluctant to admit it before, they probably are now, in the wake of umpty zillion copies of The Da Vinci Code in Catholic hands.)
Interestingly, circumcision is not an inherently Catholic or Christian procedure. Christians were relieved of the Jewish obligation to be circumcised within a few years of Jesus' death, at what we now call the First Council of Jerusalem, which is described in Chapter 15 of The Acts of the Apostles. The Council released gentile Christians from the bulk of Jewish ritual and dietary protocols, including circumcision. What gentile Christians were required to observe are what we call the Noahide Laws, which pre-date Moses and go back to Noah. The Noahide Laws are the precursors of the Ten Commandments, and are supposedly those laws that God holds binding on all human beings, not simply the Jews. They include abstention from idolatry and blasphemy, dishonesty, murder, fornication, and the consumption of meat cut from a living animal or from an animal that had been strangled. (The text in Acts is pretty terse and there is some argument about the details-for example, dishonesty is not explicitly mentioned-but that's the gist of it.)
Jesus really was a Jew, and thus was required to be circumcised. The near-universality of circumcision among American Christians is something of an anomaly, and doesn't hold true in the rest of the world. I haven't found a good historical treatment of circumcision as an American medical and cultural obsession, but I suspect that the elimination of the Feast of the Circumcision simply reflects a lot of general Church squeamishness over matters sexual. Mary has all kinds of feast days, and I would think a feast that put the lie to the heresy of Docetism (which denies that Jesus was truly human as well as divine) would be a good thing to retain. Alas, it is not to be, and it's one of a number of things I do miss about Tridentine Catholicism.