The Vatican Nativity Display is Ugly

 

So downright ugly that I refuse to post a picture of it.

If you haven’t seen it and are in a penitential mood, google “Vatican Nativity 2020”, but I recommend it only on an empty stomach, and, even so, only for a quick glance.

It’s best described as Alien meets Fisher Price.

Who decided this was a good idea? That this was what the Catholic faithful in 2020 need?

Ugly is not the only adjective that comes to mind. Some others are: disgusting, disgraceful, childish (though it will frighten small children), hideous, post-modernistic, anti-Catholic / anti-Christian, blasphemous, embarrassing – and on and on.

Now this leads me to the first great truth I’ve realized this year.

The current occupants of the Vatican are not on your side.

What do I mean by this?

Well, empirical evidence suggests that they don’t believe in the teachings of the Church to which they belong.

Want some of that empirical evidence?

Okay. How about any Francis encyclical. How about the whitewashing of the McCarrick report. How about the four-plus years of vigorously ignoring the Dubia, five questions put to the Pope asking whether he upholds traditional Catholic teaching in light of his first encyclical, Amoris Laetitia. How about the head-scratching “theology” of dozens of Francis’s off-the-cuff remarks. How about the placing of Pachamama idols in a Rome church in October 2019. How about prior homoerotic Nativity scenes at the Vatican.

How about this year’s Nativity scene, an utter affront to Our Lord and Our Lady, as well as to good taste. Uplifting it ain’t.

It’s tiresome. So tiresome.

Therefore I’ve realized that the Vatican is not on my side. They make it more difficult to live as a Catholic and pass on the Faith to my children.

So where does one turn?

This is my second great truth:

You turn to the 1,900 year tradition of the Church, her writings.

I’ve read through the entire Bible this year (with the exception of the Psalms, but I took that journey back in 2016). I’ve also begun daily readings in my 1962 Missal. This has brought great comfort to me in these trying times *. More comfort than the Vatican, or even my parish priest, has offered.

I fully intend to continue in 2021. I have felt “called” to read through the writings of St. Augustine. Aquinas, as the summit of intellectual Catholic thought, has always been on my bucket list, but I fear his writings too lofty for me at this stage of life. However, Augustine, sinner as I, feels more down to earth to me, more practical, more approachable. I have a tome of his on the shelf behind the writing desk I plan on cracking in early January, and if all goes well, I may purchase some more for later. I have some experience with his Confessions, City of God, and On Christian Doctrine, but all could use a focused re-reading.

After all, any pre-1965 spiritual reading is worth infinitely more than the modernistic anti-Catholic claptrap coming from Francis and his cabal of crony Cardinals. Augustine’s writing much, much closer to the Crucified Christ, indeed almost at the foot of His Cross, than the Hippie Picasso Jesus these post-Vatican II dinosaurs worship.

 

* Pandemic, scamdemic, mask mandates, the Media, the Presidential Election, race riots, lockdowns, economic insecurity, the Sovietization of the workplace … to name just a few.