While many churches worldwide celebrated Christmas last year by sticking to longstanding traditions, a church in a town in Italy did something different, especially when setting up the Nativity scene, often a centerpiece in many communities and churches.
The Church of Saints Peter and Paul in Capocastello di Mercogliano became the center of controversy in Italy after it set up a Nativity scene featuring two mothers instead of Joseph and Mary's traditional setup.
Nativity scene featuring Jesus with two mothers slammed as ‘blasphemous’ https://t.co/Fm0TJysjhM
— PinkNews (@PinkNews) December 24, 2023
Many conservative and religious political figures in Italy criticized the unusual Nativity scene. The Pro-Vita & Famiglia (Pro-Life and Family) group, which recently proposed measures to amend Italy’s abortion laws, described the setup as “dangerous, as well as shameful and blasphemous.”
Italian Senator Maurizio Gasparri of the center-right Forza Italia said the Nativity scene “offends all those who always had respect and devotion for the Holy Family.”
Father Vitaliano Della Sala defended the church’s decision to create a nativity scene portraying two mothers, saying the church wished to showcase and welcome different families.
It’s appalling.
— Mr Christiansen (@TheNorskaPaul) December 31, 2023
“I wanted to show with this scene that families are no longer just the traditional ones,” the priest told Reuters.
“In our parishes, we see more and more children from the new types of families that exist and are part of our society, children of separated and divorced people, gay couples, single people, young mothers,” he also added.
Della Sala also said in the video interview with the news agency that as priests, they must look at how they “treat these children, the children of these people, the children of these families, and above all, how we treat these families.”
“I say we must welcome in the best possible way. We must make them feel at home,” he continued.
The priest is well-known for supporting the LGBTQIA+ community, saying that he backs Pope Francis’s recent decision to allow the Catholic Church to bless same-sex couples.
The criticism over the two-mother Nativity display comes amid a crackdown on LGBTQIA+ couples in Italy, which began when far-right and anti-LGBTQIA+ Giorgia Meloni took over as the country’s prime minister.
In July last year, a list of 33 birth certificates of children born to lesbian couples since 2017 was provided to judges in northern Italy, asking them to remove the names of the mothers who did not give birth to the child from the records.
