Nativity scene

The Catholic Encyclopedia (C. C. Martindale, 1908) credits Francis of Assisi with the crib of today: in 1223 he took what had been a church custom and made it popular and extra-liturgical. Pope Francis’s letter tells what happened. Francis was probably on his way back from Rome, where Pope Honorius III had confirmed his Rule on 29 November 1223, and the caves at Greccio, near Rieti, reminded him of the country around Bethlehem, which he had visited. Fifteen days before Christmas he asked a local man named John to help him see with his own eyes “how he lay in a manger, and how, with an ox and an ass standing by, he was laid upon a bed of hay”. On 25 December friars and people from the farms around came with flowers and torches, and found a manger full of hay, an ox and a donkey. “At Greccio there were no statues”, the letter says; the scene was enacted by everyone present.

Bonaventure’s Life of Francis tells the same night. It was three years before Francis’s death, and so that it “might not seem an innovation” he first obtained leave from the pope. He had hay brought, with an ox and an ass, Mass was celebrated over the manger, and Francis preached on the birth of the poor king, whom he called the Child of Bethlehem. A knight, Messer John of Greccio, said he saw a beautiful child asleep in the manger, who seemed to wake when Francis took him in his arms. Thomas of Celano, Francis’s first biographer, records the same vision.