Nativity lessons

In Umbria the truth of the Nativity was revealed to me

Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O�Connor

15 December 2007

Life in Italy as a student priest

Once I had rather an unexpected adventure in Assisi when on gita with some of my students during my time as rector of the venerable English college. I suddenly found that I just could not move, and had dreadful pains in my back. So the students with me went to someone they thought was a local doctor — but he turned out to be a local vet! Eventually I found myself in a cottage hospital in a small room with one other, very sick friar who was obviously near the end of his life. By his bedside was another friar saying the Rosary, which I joined with them in praying. At the end the friar came over to me and asked me how I was, and from under his habit he produced a bottle of wine and invited me to have a drink, which I gratefully accepted. Surely, I thought at the time, it was right that, in Assisi, sickness, prayer and enjoyment of a glass of wine somehow go together.

Saint Francis made his mark not only in Assisi but also throughout Umbria and beyond. The village of Greccio, about ten miles northwest of Rieti, is a particularly significant Franciscan site, because what happened there in 1223 has a great deal to do with the images we have of the birth of Jesus at the first Christmas. According to one of Francis’s earliest biographers, Friar Thomas of Celano, about two weeks before Christmas Francis asked his dear friend Giovanni from Greccio to set up a scene of the birth of Christ in a manger. He told Giovanni it would be good and edifying ‘to have set before our bodily eyes in some way the inconveniences of his infant needs, how he lay in a manger, how, with an ox and an ass standing by, he lay upon the hay where he had been placed’. Giovanni was enthralled by the poetic vision Francis had described. Many people set to work and Francis was delighted with what they achieved, because now he had a way of showing people how small, poor and humble God had appeared on that first Christmas night in Bethlehem.

It snowed on Christmas Eve, which meant the valley was unusually silent. Franciscan brothers from nearby communities came to Greccio, as did many of the country people; the candles and torches they brought really brightened the ‘night that has lighted up all the days and years with its gleaming star’. Francis himself was the deacon for the midnight Mass; the way he read the Gospel and preached about Christ’s birth in Bethlehem evidently had a remarkable effect on many of those who heard him. He wanted to show people that the crib scene is not just about shepherds and wise men from the East, but also about a child born among the cobwebs and hay, surrounded by the heavy breath of animals. And he did this with the first ‘live crib’, in which the population of a rural valley in Italy brought the Gospel to life.