The Parliament and the nativity scene

The nativity scene has been banned in Parliament.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
18 December 2022 Sunday 17:37
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The Parliament and the nativity scene

The nativity scene has been banned in Parliament. Today, Josep Maria de Sagarra could not write in his Christmas Poem: "You will see the moss in the manger, / with the clay figures. / You will see the safe mountain, / white with white goods, / with the light of your eyes as a child”.

In the Parliament, the symbol of the ox and the mule, of the shepherds and of the heavenly angels, of the star that announces the good news of Jesus, Mary and Joseph is no longer possible.

Those of you who rule have turned the rivers into silver foil and the cork mountains crowned with cotton, transformed into landscapes of illusion, into barren land.

Eliot recites: “Agony in places of stone, tears and confusion, prison and palace and reverberation of vernal thunder in the distant mountains, he who once lived is now dead. We who were alive are now dying." And it is that in his purposes, there is no longer room for our hope, which the prophet extols: "May the desert and the dry land rejoice, may the steppe rejoice and flourish... Strengthen your languid hands, affirm your knees hesitant. Say to the faint-hearted: Courage, do not fear! Here is your God who comes to do justice” (Is. 35, 1-4).

The censorship of the nativity scene is generating a much greater dynamic of destruction, since the religious foundations have not been confined to the space of the sacred. They have been grafted onto the more material dynamics of society, intertwining with the maturation of rationality. If that relationship is lost, what is left is a casing without internal substance because the sources that fed it have been blinded. The same ones that have led us to the moral principles of interiority, emancipation, dignity and self-giving love, to place four keys to our culture.

The allegedly religious censorship not only punishes the majority of Catalans who consider ourselves Catholic, but also becomes a cultural exclusion, because in a country like ours, culture and the national fact are inseparable from Christian signs. What do we celebrate on April 23 and 27 but a saint and a virgin? Certainly faith is a gift, but culture is a duty.

They say that they do it out of respect for secularism – a concept imposed because it is not part of the Statute or the Constitution. False. It is not respect, but censorship. It is a rampant secularism, the most powerful ally of excessive consumption, because it is precisely the nativity scene, river and mountain of immaterial illusions, its popular counterpoint. Thus, the joy of family reunions, the joy of Christmas carols, the joy of Christmas markets are eliminated, and the art of the Olot school is excluded from the home institution, because it has the audacity to give shape to celestial signs. Without a nativity scene, the Parliament declares itself outside of the Catalan tradition, the same one that the Statute claims to affirm historical rights.

Pese a todo, para muchos de nosotros: “The road has brought us to Bethlehem! / The new joy squeals!... / It was a night that the star blossomed, / and the Child was born!”.

Merry Christmas!