ArticleIt’s time to put up the Christmas tree — or is it? Last month the Vatican seemed to hesitate sprucing up St. Peter’s Square with a 30 metre tree, after protests came in about this act of “fir-tree-icide”. Chopping a 200-year-old evergreen down for a temporary display, after all, seemed to contradict the Pope’s 2015 exhortation to “care for our common home”.
Is there a way to bring our Christmas celebrations in line with Pope Francis’s expressed desire for a collective “ecological conversion” and for a new solidarity in the face of climate crisis?
Pope Francis draws extensively on the life of his thirteenth century namesake, Saint Francis of Assisi, as inspiration to live in harmony with all creatures, including non-human “sisters and brothers”. It was Saint Francis who staged the first nativity scene in December 1223: a cave with live animals and a hay-filled manger in rocky crags outside of Greccio, a clifftop town 80 kilometres north of Rome.
It was also Saint Francis of Assisi who first invited an ox and donkey to join this rustic pageant. The Gospel accounts do not explicitly place animals in the place of Jesus’s birth. Mary wraps Jesus in cloths and places him in a manger, an animal eating trough, “because there was no guest room available for them” (Luke 2:7). And because the Gospels tell us that shepherds visited the new mother and baby, Christians over the centuries have also thought it natural to expand the invitation to include sheep and other animals. Australian poet Les Murray even included dogs in his 2006 poem “Animal Nativity”:
Dogs, less enslaved but as starving
as the poorest human there,
crouch, agog at a crux of presence
remembered as a star.
The theologian Ann Loades considered that all the nativity scenes crowded with animals over the years remind us of our interdependence with our animal companions and workmates. When it says in Isaiah 1:3 that “the ox knows its master, the donkey its owner’s manger”, it’s a reminder that animals have a felt investment in the nativity scene, too.
Saint Bonaventure, one of St Francis of Assisi’s biographers, describes a visitor to the Greccio nativity as an ex-soldier who had “left the warfare of this world” for the love of Jesus Christ. This ex-soldier has a vision of Saint Francis lifting the real baby Jesus from his manger and holding him. Later, animals are said to have been miraculously cured of disease with the manger hay.
Saint Francis’s original nativity scene provides a vision of intergenerational peace — of leaving behind the warfare of this world to hold a newborn baby — as well as a sense that this vision is linked to the care and healing of the whole created world.
The pope sees Saint Francis and his joyful singing and sermonising even to the flowers as an example of the awe, wonder and sense of kinship we humans need to cultivate in order to avoid having the attitude of “masters, consumers, ruthless exploiters, unable to set limits on their immediate needs”.
The rustic nativity scene is an important contrast to our extravagant tendencies at this time of year, when our shopping impulses tend to run the most amok.
It is particularly ironic that nativity scenes still feature in some shopping malls, adding to the Christmas vibe and perhaps, underneath it all, singing a different Christmas tune to the lavish consumerist one.
Christmas traditions have an in-built critique of our human propensity to be “masters, consumers, ruthless exploiters”. Last Christmas five English women, members of Christian Climate Action, stood in front of a fifteenth-century painting by Filippino Lippi in the National Gallery of London, a depiction of Mary feeding Jesus within an Italian countryside. They disrupted the pastoral calmness of the painting by holding up a replica of the scene that replaced the lush backdrop with a climate-devastated wasteland, and by handing out postcards elaborating sober details of the effect of the climate crisis on the world’s children.
On Christmas Eve this year, the Catholic church will officially open the Jubilee Year pilgrimage celebrations for 2025. Pope Francis draws attention to the spiritual dimension of the Jubilee, which calls for conversion — a turning back to the understanding that “all of us are pilgrims on this earth, which the Lord has charged us to till and keep”, and that caring for creation “is an essential expression of our faith in God and our obedience to his will”.
The rustic reality of the nativity scene, and its animals — our animals, the animals that always belonged there — can remind us that we need to turn back and to care for the whole created world with the same tender care with which Mary swaddled her newborn babe.
Danielle Terceiro is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Public Christianity. She has recently submitted a PhD in the area of theology and literature, considering how stories are retold for children in picture books, graphic novels and animations. This article first appeared in ABC Religion & Ethics.