SUMMER 2010 · ISSUE 11

A "Crèche" Course at Christmas

by Mark Bosco, S.J.

The story of the Nativity, which the crèche represents visually, has its own unique history. Most of the figures of the crèche—Jesus, Mary, Joseph, the angels, the shepherds, and the Magi—are in the gospels of Matthew and Luke combined, but the early church also had hidden gospels (called apocryphal gospels) that speak about the origins and the end of Christ's life. These folk stories were never recognized by the Church because of their fanciful content and their late arrival on the scene (written 100 years after the four gospels in the Bible). But some of these folk gospels are important to the Nativity story. The Protoevangelium of James from the third century, for instance, contains many improbable legends about the childhood of Mary, her courtship with Joseph, and the childhood of Jesus. The Gospel of Mary, probably more recent than other writings and even more fanciful, mentions the Holy Family's long journey into Bethlehem on the same donkey that helped to warm the infant Jesus at his birth in the stable. The first grasp of the significance of the Nativity story comes out of these stories, narrating the connection of the Christian community to the life of Jesus and his family, including Mary and Anne, the first mother and the first grandmother of all Christians.

The devotion to the infancy of Jesus, precisely as encountered in the Nativity crèche, was inspired by Saint Francis of Assisi. In 1223, Francis asked permission from Pope Honorius III for a special observance of Christmas. Having received the pope's consent, Francis set up a manger in a mountainside cave outside of Assisi using a wooden infant Jesus and a live cow and donkey so that the community could better encounter the simplicity of Christ's birth. Francis saw the need to visualize in a tangible manner the events surrounding Christ's birth in a tangible medium that encouraged participation by everyone—the artist and the laborer, the wealthy and the poor, the clergy and the laity.

The devotion to the crèche grew over the next centuries. The heyday—one might call it mania—of the crèche was in Naples during the 16th and 17th centuries. The the first recorded account of a crèche for a private home is that of the Duchess of Amalfi in 1567. Her crèche was an extravagant 167 figures. Soon afterward, the crèche became common, if less elaborate, in private homes. Variations of it spread over Europe, but in each place the style of the crèche was molded from the available resources and made by local artisans. As Western European culture expanded to the Americas, Africa, and Asia, the crèche followed as each culture made the Nativity scene its own. Wherever the crèche is rendered, artists give the figures features of their own cultures as one of the first artifacts of Christian enculturation. Whether highly stylized or folkloric, the crèche suggests that the human story and the divine story intersect and develop together.

Mark Bosco, S.J., received his PhD from the Graduate Theological Union and is an associate professor in the theology and English departments at Loyola University Chicago. Father Bosco is a member of the LUMA Board of Advisors and the guest writer for this holiday issue of the LUMANARY.

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