Fr. Roger Landry: ‘Contemplate Jesus’ This Christmas: A New Bethlehem and the Lessons of Greccio

We live at a time in which Christmas crèches have become so much a part of Catholic piety that many believe that they must have existed from the first centuries of Christianity.

But they are an “invention” of St. Francis of Assisi, who, 800 years ago this December, created a living Nativity in the mountainous Italian village of Greccio, located about halfway between Rome and Assisi. The topography and architecture of Greccio — where Francis would frequently stay to preach and to pray — reminded him of Bethlehem, which he had visited four years before. So with the permission of Pope Honorius III, who in the previous month had definitively confirmed in Rome the Franciscan rule, and the help of Giovanni Veleti, Greccio’s chief nobleman, Francis decided to try to bring the mystery of Bethlehem alive.

His first biographer, Thomas of Celano, says that “of Greccio there was made as it were a new Bethlehem.” Per Francis’ instructions, in a cave, Veleti arranged an ox, a donkey and a manger full of straw. The townspeople came in huge numbers, with tapers and torches that combined to illumine the night like the ancient star of Bethlehem. ….

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