Church ridiculed for using Daleks and Darth Vader in nativity scenes

A nativity scene set up by the Vatican in St Peter’s Square is facing ridicule after figures were compared to Star Wars characters.

The astronaut, left, in the nativity scene set up by the Vatican in St Peter’s Square. Picture: Vatican Media

A nativity scene set up by the Vatican in St Peter’s Square is facing ridicule after figures were compared to characters from Star Wars and Wallace and Gromit.

Among the abstract ceramic figures unveiled by Vatican officials were an astronaut and a character wearing a warrior-like helmet featuring a skull motif that was likened by unkind critics on social media to a Dalek or a Lego version of Darth Vader.

In a stinging article entitled The Vatican’s Embarrassing Sci-Fi Creche, the Catholic Herald newspaper called the collection “comically awful” and one online wag said it resembled “a meth addict’s garage sale”.

Francis’s many conservative critics saw the nativity scene as another chance to have a poke at the Pope. Picture: AFP

The collection chosen by the Vatican for this year’s annual depiction of the birth of Jesus in a stable in Bethlehem was created by students and teachers at a school in Abruzzo in central Italy in the 1960s and 70s and inspired by ancient ceramic techniques in the area. Different figures are chosen each year. Pope Francis claimed in an apostolic letter last Christmas: “The nativity scene is like a living Gospel rising up from the pages of sacred scripture.”

Some visitors to St Peter’s Square were more befuddled than uplifted. “It’s rather cold — and why is there an astronaut? I don’t really understand what is going on,” Anna Francesca Zocchi, 58, a Rome civil servant, said.

The astronaut is a reflection of the years in which the models were made — shortly after the moon landing — but that did not wash with Francis’s many conservative critics, who saw the nativity scene as another chance to have a poke at the Pope.

“We have to stop passively putting up with these insults to the faith and Catholic sensibilities,” one critic wrote on Twitter.

Another said: “I hope (the Pope’s) veneration or worship of these very strange idols doesn’t trigger another even greater pandemic.”

Even America magazine, a US Jesuit publication that normally backs Francis, published an article entitled Why is Darth Vader in the Vatican’s nativity scene? that quoted Elisabeth Lev, the art historian.

“The problem is, there is a universal outpouring of mockery,” she said. “They’re making fun of the Holy Family; people are vying with each other to come up with the funniest name.”

The Times