“Everyone is free to express their opinions, but that statue [of St. Nicholas of Myra] is a sign of an historical event and historical events cannot be cancelled.” This is how Fr. Giovanni Distante, prior of the Pontifical Basilica of St. Nicholas in Bari—a city in southern Italy intimately connected with St. Nicholas—responded to the potential removal of a well-loved statue of St. Nicholas. The saint in question is the precursor of St. Nick, or Santa Claus, and is one of the most celebrated Christian saints revered in Eastern and Western churches. And he is a point of unity, healing the schism between Eastern and Western Christianity since the 11th century.

Why is the statue of St. Nicholas at risk of being cancelled?

In 2003, the Russian President Vladimir Putin donated the bronze St. Nicholas statue, the work of the prominent Georgian artist Zurab Konstantinovich Tsereteli, to the city of Bari, with a signed dedication on a plaque honoring the citizens of Bari and the centuries-old unity between Russia and Bari:

May this gift be not only testimony of the veneration of the great Saint by the Russians, but also a constant aspiration of people of our countries consolidating friendship and cooperation.

An online petition, receiving 17,600 signatures, asked for the removal of the plaque as a gesture of solidarity with the Ukrainian people. Others, including Nicola Colaianni, professor of canon law at the University of Bari and former parliamentarian, requested the dismantling and removal of the St. Nicholas statue from the central plaza in front of the basilica, to a discreet place, where visitors would need to specifically go and see it.

As we know by now, cancellations breed cancellations. For example, the University of Milan Biccocca cancelled a course on Fyodor Dostoevsky (the decision was later retracted by the university). As a recent essay in The Atlantic observed, the West is pursuing a “cancel Russia” strategy: “isolating the country with coordinated official sanctions and a rapid cascade of uncoordinated, highly moralized, unilateral private-sector boycotts.”

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