Recent years have seen a “war on Christmas.” It takes the form of turning Christmas into a holiday in the closet, daring not to speak its name. Instead, we say “happy holidays,” while kids get “winter break” from school. Those who contend there’s a war on Christmas argue that its public erasure — keep the trappings but speak not of their origins — is part of a general secularization to drive visible Christianity from the public square. (For more, see here.) The useful idiots who question if there’s a war on Christmas long ago hoisted white flags above their doors, not wanting to alienate their friends in political causes and/or believing secularization is actually a good thing, especially for Christianity.

Roughly two-plus weeks away from Christmas, I feel compelled to note a disturbing trend: There seems to be a sideshow ecclesiastical battle in the war on Christmas. Whereas secularizers want to banish religion from public visibility, the ecclesiastical battle over Christmas may come down to preserving sacred traditions while ensuring sacred elements are not enlisted for partisan advocacy. To illustrate, I offer three examples, two involving crèches.

It used to be that manger scenes were the stuff of the religious versus secular battleground: cities put up manger scenes, courts ordered them taken down. Worse, they ordered them to be “balanced,” i.e., surrounded by all sorts of non-Christian “holiday” symbols. I wrote about this 26 years ago in this journal (here).

The crèche conflict in the civil space has remained, but it has now also become ecclesiastical.

Civilly, consider this manger scene from Brussels. Look at the faces. There are none! The faces are replaced by corrugated brown fabric. Its maker argues he is symbolizing “human diversity and inclusion” by making the faces brown and then ensuring different shades of brown are found on them.  The real persons who went to Bethlehem — including a real Person, the Son of God incarnate as a real and true human being — here become “symbols,” stand-ins for an ideology. I’d even call this what Pope Leo has recently branded modern Arianism. The scene coopts Christianity to make ideological statements while paying lip service to Christian universalism. Happily, such junk “art,” patronized under the last pontificate, appears to have disappeared from St. Peter’s Square.  It went north. (The nativity scene in St. Peter’s Square is here.)

Religiously, consider this manger scene from Dedham, Massachusetts. A church has foisted this outside its doors, in public. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph are absent — not because it’s not yet Christmas but to make a political statement about immigration law enforcement. No doubt the priest thinks he is being a faithful servant of the U.S. episcopate or even Pope Leo XIV.

I’m not going to get into technical qualifiers about how the Holy Family was in Bethlehem not to cross borders illegally but because they complied with the law saying to go to their ancestral town and register for the census. My issue is this: Jesus, Mary, and Joseph are not props for a political message, even one bishops endorse.

When St. Francis erected the first manger scene 802 years ago, he didn’t build it to make a political statement against Assisi or even his rich father. He constructed it to bring people directly to Christ. The manger is intended to be a direct encounter with Him who “was made flesh” as a real human being and with whom I, as another real human being, am invited into a personal relationship — to approach Him whose kingdom is not of this world without having to make a political statement first.

Pace Christopher Hale, a political operative who wants to make Leo XIV the patriarch of the Democratic National Committee (see here), emphasizing the “profound political consequences” of the Lord’s Nativity is misdirected. It reminds me of Strelnikov, the little tyrant Zhivago meets on a rail siding in Russia, lecturing him about how everything is now political (see here).

Is the Massachusetts manger a one-off deviation? I flag it because I have no doubt, especially after this year’s USCCB “Special Pastoral Message” about illegal immigration, that there will be more such stunts. I especially fear that December 28 will be coopted to this end. December 28 is traditionally the day of the Holy Innocents, the young babies murdered by Herod in his frenzy to kill Christ. Already in recent years, the theological left — like Austen Ivereigh and Father James Martin, SJ — have pulled a bait-and-switch with that feast, shifting the attention from the murdered children to the flight into Egypt as a scene of “solidarity with immigrants.” (For more on that, see here.) As I noted, there’s a reason the Church uses red vestments, the color of martyrs, on that day: to focus on the little martyrs. “The Church wears red because the babies are dead, not because the Holy Family fled.” I object to this switcheroo because the deemphasis on the actual martyrs has a contemporary reflection: the tendency to downplay the greatest child slaughter of our day — abortion — by admixing it with all sorts of issues that do not directly take lives (and certainly not in the numbers of the abortion license) to make this preeminent life issue practically disappear. It is the liturgical version of Joseph Bernadin’s seamy “garment of life” theory.

Mercifully (or maybe not), December 28 falls this year on the Feast of the Holy Family, which preempts Holy Innocents. On one hand, it may prevent explicit bait-and-switch approaches to the feast. On the other, it may facilitate shifting attention away from the martyred infants to the Holy Family that, in turn, will become the homiletic hook to talk about “concern for the immigrant” and “family separation.”

Again, in a society where the very definition of “family” is under assault, where the culture (and even Fr. Martin) don’t give much weight to the normativity of “male and female He created them,” to pivot from these central issues that affect and should concern all of us to comments that are arguably about policy choices to deal with border enforcement is, I humbly suggest, to engage in the ecclesiastical version of Titanic deck chair rearrangement.

Finally, I present a third concern about an ecclesiastical battleground in the war on Christmas: The Vatican just released the papal Christmas schedule (here). It has the Pope celebrating Midnight Mass on December 24… at 10 p.m.

Thirty-seven years ago, the Vatican issued the document “Preparing and Celebrating the Paschal Feasts” (here). The Holy See was concerned about ensuring that parishes celebrate Lent and especially the Paschal Triduum — the heart of the liturgical year and our salvation — correctly. One of the abuses the document wanted to put an end to was celebrating the Easter Vigil too early. Back then, many parishes were scheduling the Easter Vigil at the same time they scheduled their Sunday-anticipated Saturday evening Masses. Since some parishes celebrate that Mass as early as 4 p.m. and most around 5 p.m., it’s usually still in the light of a spring late afternoon, which vitiates what a “vigil” is.

The document insisted the Vigil not begin before dark. Indeed, it called such practices “reprehensible” (no. 78) (just like Vatican II called abortion and infanticide “unspeakable crimes,” but not enough for “consistent ethic” clerics to level them with other things). But what caught my eye was a comment in that same paragraph: Recognizing some might complain that waiting until dark for the long Easter Vigil would make it late, the Vatican responded by saying such objections are “not put forward in connection with Christmas night.” In other words, if nobody had a problem with Midnight Mass, why did they have a problem with a late Easter Vigil?

Well, now it seems the Vatican may have a problem with Midnight Mass.

Pope Francis innovated in this regard, pushing “Midnight” Mass earlier into the evening. In the last few years, during COVID, he also maintained a rigid limit on the congregation’s size, even after the zenith of the pandemic passed and despite what anybody who’s ever been in St. Peter’s Basilica knows about its floor space. We suffered Francis’s shifts, attributing them perhaps to his age and frailty. But, with a new and apparently healthy Pope, it seems legitimate to ask: Why not have Midnight Mass at midnight? What is the reason, in a world of modern transportation, to give short shrift to what generations walking in the snow had no problem doing? And how many families — especially with kids waiting for Santa Claus — will be “all snuggled in bed,” the lights out at 10:00 p.m.? Or do we just retitle the carol: “It Came Upon a 10 p.m. Clear”? Has midnight just become a pious proposition? This year I’ve seen a resurgence in promotion of the St. Andrew Novena (see here), a prayer recited 15 times daily from November 30 until Christmas Eve. The Archdiocese of Philadelphia is even using it as a “prayer campaign” to ask God’s graces to bring back to the Church local Catholics who have fallen away from the sacraments and Mass participation (see here).

The Novena prayer makes a big deal out of blessing “the hour and moment in which the Son of God was born of the most pure Virgin Mary, at midnight, in Bethlehem, in the piercing cold.” Shall we just write that off as rhetorical fancy, not worth our effort to stay up two more hours for — just like “Twelfth Night” becomes “nearest Sunday to Twelfth Night” and ascending into heaven on the 40^th day after Easter becomes ascending “on the Sunday after the 40^th day after Easter?” And then we wonder why we need a multimillion dollar “Eucharistic Revival” when poorly-catechized-but-always-“accommodated”-Catholics decide the Real Presence is also so much rhetorical symbolism?