An Italian church has displayed a nativity scene featuring Mary with another woman.
Father Vitaliano Della Sala created the scene to emphasize social changes in the family unit.
“There are many ways of being a family,” he said, according to Panorama.
“The contempt, even on the part of sectors of the Catholic Church, against the “rainbow families” and their condemnation regardless, without a serious and honest discussion and comparison, is the brushstroke of darkness that contributes to painting the night of our time. Therefore there are two mothers in the nativity scene: This year I see the light of Christmas also shining on these families affected by inhuman and anti-evangelical criticism and condemnation,” he wrote on Facebook.
“Exclusion has traced a red trail of blood and pain throughout history,” he Father Della Sala added. “Even today, the dignified survival of billions of human beings is at stake a lot around exclusion. With the primacy of the economy we have built a type of society that in order to survive needs to exclude, to push back to the margins or into the sea.
“To men who always try to describe [Jesus] as the almighty, God tells his story of salvation to show us the opposite: he prefers the small, the insignificant, the weak,” he claimed.
Pro-Vita & Famiglia, a pro-family organization, called the display “dangerous, as well as shameful and blasphemous.”
The display follows a declaration from the Vatican that same-sex couples can receive blessings.
The British Confraternity of Catholic Clergy, however, criticized the decision, writing in a letter that the “traditional teaching of the Catholic Church” remains “unchanged and unchangeable.”
While the British priests “note the pastoral desire to assist people to move forward by a renal of life and the call to conversion,” they see “no situation in which such a blessing of a couple could be properly and adequately distinguished from some level of approval.”
