It Looks Like It's Made of Legos to Me

 

 

 

I wish this wasn't real, but it is...

 It is not what we expected, and not what most of us want. This year’s Vatican creche has been laughed at and ridiculed for looking like a science fiction story or children’s toys. One figure was often described as looking like Darth Vader, though to me he looks more like a Sontaran from Doctor Who. More excitable people called it demonic, pagan, and idolatrous. Conservative English writer Tim Stanley called it “absolutely terrifying” in a tweet. This tweet from Edward Pentin has a short video of the whole creche.

“At the end of this extremely difficult year people are looking for beauty, for something to elevate, inspire, and unite them, and the scene offered in Saint Peter’s Square gives them something else altogether,” said the art historian Elizabeth Lev. “The misshapen figures in the Nativity scene lack all the grace, proportion, vulnerability, and luminosity that one looks for in the manger scene. The entire point of this holiday is the second person of the Holy Trinity taking human form, born as a baby of flesh and blood, and there is nothing particularly human about the forms we see before us.”...

 The creche is embarrassing. It’s not the depiction of the birth of our Lord faithful Catholics want and the world needs to see. I’ve often complained that Catholics ought to be more careful about airing our dirty laundry before the world, or allowing our internal debates over theology and praxis to become stumbling blocks to those outside the Church. I don’t want to give scandal with this piece. I want to admit the obvious — this creche is comically awful — but I also want to try to put it in some perspective.