By Cindy Wooden
Catholic News Service

VATICAN CITY — “With tears in our eyes, let us raise our prayer for peace,” Pope Francis said as he thanked the people of Bethlehem and Palestinian authorities for a Nativity scene to decorate the Vatican audience hall.

A Christmas creche conveys the “message of peace and love that Jesus left us,” the pope said Dec. 7 during a meeting with the artisans, volunteers, and government representatives responsible for the Christmas decorations in the Paul VI Audience Hall and in St. Peter’s Square.

Pope Francis asked them all to remember the people in the Holy Land and in other parts of the world who are “suffering from the tragedy of war.”

“Enough war, enough violence,” he said. “Do you know that one of the most profitable investments here is in arms production? Profit for killing — But why? Enough wars! May there be peace in all the world and for all people, whom God loves.”

In the creche in the audience hall, the olive-wood baby Jesus is lying on a white and black kaffiyeh, a Palestinian headdress. Some commentators remarked that the choice seemed to imply that Jesus was born a Palestinian rather than a Jew. And The Times of Israel called it “provocative.”

In a tweet describing the Nativity scene, the American Jewish Committee wrote, “We are disappointed and troubled that a meaningful religious tradition has been politicized in this way.”

In the meantime, the Vatican announced Dec. 10 that Pope Francis would meet Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas Dec. 12. The two last met in 2021 at the Vatican.

Neither the Israeli nor the Palestinian embassies to the Holy See responded to a request Dec. 10 for comment about the kaffiyeh in the creche.

The Nativity scene in St. Peter’s Square for 2024 came from Grado, Italy, an island surrounded by a lagoon dotted with other tiny islands where the people have “casoni” or mud and thatch huts; traditionally people out fishing would stop to rest and fix lunch in the huts.

The townspeople, with 40 volunteer artists and craftspeople, recreated a casone for the Holy Family in St. Peter’s Square. And the three Magi journey toward the baby Jesus in a flat-bottomed boat piloted by an old fisherwoman.

Pope Francis noted that “a ‘batela,’ the typical flat-bottomed boat” is needed to cross the water.

Today, too, “a boat is needed to reach Jesus,” he said. “The Church is the boat. One does not reach Jesus alone — never — we reach Him together; we reach Him as a community, on that great little boat that Peter continues to lead and on which, huddling together a little, there is room for everyone.”

“In the Church, there is always room for everyone,” Pope Francis insisted. “One might say, ‘But what about sinners?’ They are the first, they are the privileged, because Jesus came for the sinners, for all of us, not for the saints. For everyone. Do not forget this. Everyone, everyone, everyone, everyone inside.”

Antonio Boemo, the designer of the Nativity scene in the square, told reporters the scene is composed of 102 pieces of recycled material that will be dismantled and taken back to Grado after Christmas.

He also noted that Mary is holding a lily in her lap. On Christmas Eve, the lily will be replaced with a statue of the baby Jesus.

Pope Francis, at the morning audience, and officials from the small mountain town of Ledro in northern Italy, speaking in the evening, insisted the red pine Christmas tree the town sent to the Vatican was cut down as part of an ecologically sound forest management project.

A local group had launched a petition in October to prevent what they called “fir tree-icide.”

Pope Francis said the old tree giving its life to provide the space and light the younger trees need to grow “can be a beautiful image of the Church,” which spreads the light of Christ “precisely due to the succession of generations of believers who gather around the single origin, Jesus: the old gave life to the young, the young embrace and protect the old, in a mission in the world and on a journey toward heaven.”

Cutline for featured image: A fisherwoman guides a boat carrying the Three Kings toward the Holy Family in a detail of a Nativity scene from Grado, Italy, set up in St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican during a preview for the press Dec. 7, 2024 (CNS photo/Lola Gomez)