AN ADVENT "CHRISTMAS CAROL" RETREAT - VIII
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Nativity scenes are part of the public ecology of Christmas. It’s perhaps the one time of the year that the larger culture admits visible representations of the Christian message on to the public square.
We should not forget that the society in which we live is losing its Christian roots. Some of that is explicit: immigration from around the globe has brought other faiths to these shores. Some of it is implicit: those who are nominally “Christian” in practice aren’t. The exodus of Christians—including Catholics and especially the young—from explicit religious practice is documented. Even those who haven’t consciously exited have in practice checked out. Christianity plays no practical role in their lives. It's only half-jokingly said there’s a demographic that would not recognize a church interior absent poinsettias and lilies.
So, a nativity scene has a potentially broad audience to reach. And, remember, a nativity scene is a tool of evangelization. Religion is not just words, even if Jesus is the Word. Religion speaks to all man’s senses, including the visual. That’s what Christian art is for (and why the fundamentalists who object to “graven images” are but recycled heretics of the ancient world’s iconoclasts). And that is what a Nativity scene is for.
Nativity scenes are precious albeit time-limited opportunities to express the Gospel with public visibility. Granted, in purely official spaces, that visibility is sometimes obscured: in the name of “religious balance” crèches are sometimes festooned with all sorts of other symbols: the Three Kings’ camels are parked next to Santa’s sleigh, while the drummer boy is making Frosty dance in his old silk hat to the light of a crescent moon under a rising Star of David. OK – you do what you gotta do. But on private property, the Christian message can be proclaimed in full, integral, unadulterated form – and should be. Because this is a once-in-a-year chance to present the Christian message visibly to the world we are supposed to be “accompanying.”
Which is why I take vehement exception to manger scenes that are bent to political purposes.
A priest in suburban Boston mounted a manger in which Baby Jesus is absent, replaced by a placard, “ICE was here.” Similar immigration gimmicks – zip ties and gas masks – were fastened to church manger scenes in Illinois. The clergy involved claim they are applying the Gospel message to today.
Bunk.
People who go to the Massachusetts manger are forced to make a choice. But it’s the wrong choice. They should be forced to confront the question: is this baby also the Son of God? Instead, they are forced into a diversion: to take a stand on what they think about immigration law enforcement.
That’s not what a manger scene is for.
On Christmas Day 1886, at Notre Dame Cathedral, the French intellectual Paul Claudel was converted from atheism to devout Catholicism. His conversion came about as he gazed on a late medieval statue of the Blessed Mother, Our Lady of Paris.
That’s what Christian art – including Nativity scenes – are for. And Our Lady did not carry a placard, “Down with the Bosch!” 16 years after the Franco-Prussian War.
That's why I take vehement exception to what's going on in Massachusetts.
Any political message that gets in the way of the encounter with Christ does not belong there. Christians should not be divided when they encounter a manger. There is only one profession somebody should have to make before such a scene: “I believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ.”
There is no political profession of “faith” preceding it. What is happening in Massachusetts is not application of the Gospel; it is its co-optation.
John Grondelski (PhD Fordham) was former associate dean of the School of Theology, Seton Hall University in New Jersey. He is a Catholic theologian with special interests in moral theology and the thought of St. John Paul II. All views are his own.
