VATICAN CORNER
This year the Nativity scene in St. Peter’s Square is not getting rave reviews from some people. It is criticized for not being the peaceful scene of a silent night, all cozy calm and bright. Ever since Pope Saint John Paul II moved the Nativity to the piazza in St. Peter’s Square, there has been a secondary theme to be used. This year the Corporal Works of Mercy theme has brought along some figures that tend to drown out the traditional image of the baby Jesus, Mary and Joseph. Of the 20 or so clay/ceramic-based figures, some as tall as 6 feet, there is a naked man being “clothed”, a dead man being buried, a prisoner being visited, a thirsty man getting water, a sick man being comforted and a shelter the homeless guy. Because of the large number of figures, it becomes somewhat difficult to spot the three main characters. The naked man is very muscular and sprawled out on an itchy-looking hay bale with just a white cloth loosely covering his genitals and with his mouth agape. He is the first thing that catches your eye, and instead he probably should have been posed huddled down and trying to stay warm. Some people have been creeped out by the ghostly white dead man, saying it looks like a scene from a horror film. But people tend to forget about the partial nudity or gruesome scenes in many of Catholic artworks. People were not pleased at all with the naked bodies in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel paintings. The pictures of David holding the severed head of Goliath, or Jael nailing Sisera’s head to the ground with a tent stake, are gruesome scenes too, but they are important depictions of stories from our faith. And what about the central image of our faith, a naked man tortured, exposed and nailed to a cross? Anyway, Pope Francis says the current representation of the night of Jesus’ birth is a reminder “that Jesus told us: ‘Do to others what you would have them do to you.’ The scene just might make it a little difficult to explain the birth of our Lord to the kids this year. Pope Francis has made a tradition of inviting Vatican bureaucrats each Christmas for a Jesuit-style examination of conscience. On December 21, 2017 he told cardinals, bishops and priests who work for him, “Reforming Rome is like cleaning the Egyptian sphinxes with a toothbrush. You need patience, dedication and delicacy.” He acknowledged that there were plenty of competent, loyal and even saintly people who work in the Holy See, but there were others who were chosen to help him reform the Vatican’s inefficient and outdated bureaucracy that were clearly not up to the task. He said when these people are then “delicately” removed, they falsely declare themselves martyrs of the system, of an ‘uninformed pope’ or the ‘old guard’, when in fact they should have done a mea culpa.” Pope Francis during his late evening Mass on Christmas Eve at St. Peter’s Basilica compared the journey of Mary and Joseph to those of millions of modern-day migrants forced to leave their homeland for survival or a better life. He expressed hope that no one will feel that “there is no room for them on this Earth.” He said “Christmas is a time “for turning the power of fear into the power of charity.”
Sources: veritas-vincit-interna!onal.org, thedailybeast.com, thecatholictraveler.com, .catholicregister.org, usatoday.com