Vatican’s ‘SciFi Crèche’ getting flak from the faithful
Francis allows odd ceramic pieces some have labeled ‘hideous’
VATICAN CITY — A couple stood in front of the Vatican’s new Christmas Nativity scene in St. Peter’s Square, trying to understand exactly what they were looking at.
The three wise men, life-size and cylindrical, looked as if constructed from ceramic oil drums. Joseph and Mary, likewise torpedo-shaped, seemed like enormous, Biblethemed Weebles. Two enigmatic, totemic figures stood in the middle of the platform. One held a shield and a decorative spear and had for a head what appeared to be an overturned caldron, carved like an angry Halloween jack-o’-lantern. The other wore an astronaut’s helmet and held the cratered moon in its hands.
“That one there?” Giorgio Banti, 71, asked his wife, Anita, as they gazed at the figures Wednesday morning. She shrugged and read the informational poster. “First landing on the moon.”
Every year, the Vatican unveils a different Nativity scene, usually donated by an Italian town, to be displayed next to the ancient obelisk in the center of St. Peter’s Square. Last year’s artists sculpted the holy family, the Magi, angels and donkeys out of beach sand. In 2016, the display featured a Maltese fishing boat to evoke the travails of refugees.
This year the Vatican went in another direction, toward Castelli, a town in the Abruzzo region of central-eastern Italy known for centuries for its ceramics.
Between 1965-75, students and teachers at a local art school sought to revive that tradition by using ancient coiling techniques — rings of ceramic stacked in sections like marble columns — to create more than 50 Christmas-themed figures. They graced Rome’s Trajan Markets in 1970, and made it to Jerusalem in 1976.
Finally, this year, they made it to the big show, the “churchyard of Christianity,” as the crèche’s official description put it.
The reviews haven’t been so hot. “It’s hideous,” said Anita Banti, who looked at the ceramic menagerie of animals — chicks that looked like fallen meteorites, a camel made of ceramic cubes — with horror. “Why do they have that one with the horns?” she asked. “What is that? A turkey?”
That critique has been amplified by conservatives who see in the ceramic figures a further erosion of church traditions and customary images they hold dear.
“The Vatican’s Embarrassing SciFi Crèche,” read a headline in the conservative Catholic Herald, which like many conservative outlets and commentators, condemned the crèche.