Freakish Nativity Scene in Rome
December 16, 2020
Two figures in the Vatican Nativity Scene, 2020
THE brutalist, post-modern Nativity scene erected in front of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome this year has created quite a stir. The outcry is the only good thing about it. At least, ugliness still causes pain. This is a scene of such grotesqueries that some are calling it an “anti-nativity.”
The most noticeable thing about this freakish display is that the figures don’t look human. They are monsters, robots, and depersonalized, vacant-eyed matryoshka dolls. It’s a fitting tribute then not to the sublime mysteries of Bethlehem, where human nature was elevated, but to the ugly, dehumanizing effects of totalitarianism, 2020-style.
Judge for yourself. Here’s a video of the unveiling of the scene and photos, as well as a news round-up. Italian art historian Andrea Cionci wrote in an Italian daily (translation here):
“Forget the sweet face of the Madonna, the tender, luminous incarnation of the Child Jesus, the paternal sweetness of St. Joseph and the devout wonder of the shepherds. For the first time in the middle of Bernini’s colonnade, the Vatican has erected a brutally postmodern work dating back to the sixties.” It includes “a Muslim imam, a Jewish rabbi, an astronaut and even an executioner (as a symbol of protest against the death penalty) but only some of them have been exhibited.”
“… [T]he angel with the ‘cooling fins,’ the horned warrior, the stunted and hairy animalistic figures, the Assyrian-Babylonian beards of the Magi, the ‘Alien’ cosmonaut and other totemic figures more similar to archaic matryoshka (nesting dolls) than to characters in a Nativity scene.”
It really is hideous. As one art critic said, this kind of avant-garde art isn’t even stimulatingly provocative anymore. It’s boring. It is, however, in keeping with the visuals of Vatican II, which demolished Catholic imagery, replacing aesthetic glories with one depressing monstrosity after another. Most modern Catholic churches are about as inspiring as your local YMCA.
Make no mistake about it, this is totalitarian art, the sort of stuff long churned out by Italian Communists who despise beauty, the Catholic Church and their country’s long association with both. Vatican II theologians and innovators, with their sixties pantheism and limitless, intellectual vanity, absolutely adore this garbage. Throw in the occult, Masonic superstitions of today’s global technocrats, also on display, and you have a high level of aesthetic criminality.
AS with the ecological light show in 2015 that projected animals on the facade of St. Peter’s Basilica, this year’s Nativity scene shows the simple-minded, if they dare to see, that Rome has abandoned the faith. The visible beauty of Catholicism has always been one of the marks of its truth. Ugliness is false.
In 1987, William F. Strojie wrote of the reactions to the revolution of Vatican II:
I see roughly five categories of acceptance of, or reaction to, the radical reforms. Number one is comprised of those who have gone along willy-nilly, or in enthusiastic acceptance of “the changes”. “We follow the Pope”, they say, disregarding that the Vatican Two popes depart radically, totally from the Popes of more than nineteen centuries.
No. 2: The young people, of the television age, who, living in a closed world of “teen” talk, lack entirely the Catholic sense, and even common sense.
No. 3: Baptized Catholics who do not like the changes, who are even aware of departures from Catholic doctrine and practice. But with the Divine Promise of protection from error on the part of the Popes fixed in their minds — the only Catholic doctrine they seem now to remember — they think it all must somehow come out right in time. That it must come out right is true, but not in the way they like to think.
No. 4: Those who have faced up to the falsity of the reforms, but who have set up their own little Churches, so-called Traditionalist chapels and house-Mass circuits. The priests of these groups have no authority. More on this presently.
No. 5: Scattered Catholics who, seeing that the reforms are not Catholic, reject them in simple obedience to the Divine Law. No priest or bishop speaks for these people.
In view of the unCatholic words and actions of the Vatican Two popes, how ought we to understand the Divine Promise of protection from error, “even to the consummation of the world”? In this way: It is not Christ who failed to keep His promise; how could He? It has therefore to be that the Vatican Two popes deliberately teach error. I waste no time on those who say the error doesn’t count because these popes were invalidly elected.
No Nativity Scene in Rome speaks for Catholics today. As Theresa Stanfill Benns recently wrote:
From all eternity, the times in which we live today were ordained to complete the course of the Church on earth. I say our own situation is analogous to the Holy Innocents because like them, we have been caught up in a storm of persecution against the Son of God and all He stood for. And this precisely because God wills that the Scriptures be fulfilled, even though it may cost us dearly in way of our loss of all spiritual direction, Mass and Sacraments and any normal Catholic existence.
