Brussels’ Faceless Nativity: Desecration Masquerading as “Inclusive Art”
Catholic News Agency reports on November 2025’s installation of a “faceless Nativity scene” in Brussels’ Grand Place featuring cloth figures devoid of facial features, created by artist Victoria-Maria Geyer. The article notes this replaced a deteriorated traditional wooden Nativity after approval by both city officials and the dean of Sts. Michael and Gudula Cathedral. Critics including Belgian soccer player Thomas Meunier denounced it as cultural degradation, while supporters like Socialist Mayor Philippe Close defended it as “inclusive art” needing to “tone it down” during Christmas. The subsequent theft of the infant Jesus figure’s head intensified controversy, with Liberal Party leader Georges-Louis Bouchez condemning the display as “zombie-like” and launching a petition for traditional restoration.
Erasure of the Incarnate God
The deliberate facelessness constitutes sacrilegious iconoclasm directly contradicting De Fide Catholic teaching on the Incarnation. Pope Pius XI’s encyclical Quas Primas (1925) establishes that “Christ as Man received from the Father power, honor, and a kingdom” (Daniel 7:13-14), demanding visible public veneration of His sacred humanity. The artist’s reduction of the Holy Family to amorphous textile shapes aligns with Modernist heresy condemned in Pius X’s Lamentabili Sane (1907), which anathematized the proposition that “the dogmas of faith are to be understood only according to their practical sense” (Proposition 26). By stripping the Nativity of its sacramental visibility, the installation embodies the naturalism Pius IX denounced in his Syllabus of Errors (1864): “The Church ought to be separated from the State” (Proposition 55) and “human reason is the sole arbiter of truth” (Proposition 3).
Cathedral Dean’s Apostate Collaboration
Dean Benoît Lobet’s justification that facelessness symbolizes “precariousness” constitutes pastoral malpractice. His assertion that “the historical figures in the Nativity were precarious people” reduces the Theotokos and Infant God to Marxist sociological categories, denying the hypostatic union and Mary’s perpetual virginity. The dean’s approval exposes the conciliar sect’s systematic betrayal of sacerdotal duty to “preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching” (2 Timothy 4:2). Pius X’s Pascendi Dominici Gregis (1907) identified such clergy as “enemies within” who “corrupt the pure faith” by substituting social analysis for divine revelation.
Desecration as Progressive Revelation
Mayor Close’s demand to “tone it down” during Christmas – the liturgical season celebrating God’s maximum self-revelation – exemplifies the conciliar revolution’s radical inversion of truth. This aligns with Bergoglio’s 2020 statement that “proselytism is solemn nonsense,” revealing the anti-church’s programmatic dechristianization. The theft of the Christ Child’s head symbolizes the inevitable result of treating sacred art as disposable political theater. As Pius XI warned in Quas Primas, societies rejecting Christ’s kingship “will shake with terror at the slightest agitation” since they remove “the foundations of authority” (n. 18). Brussels’ UNESCO-protected square now displays what Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani identified in 1968 as “a new religion celebrating man’s auto-redemption.”
Silence on Supernatural Reality
The entire controversy omits the sensus Catholicus that Nativity scenes exist to inspire adoratio toward Emmanuel – “God With Us.” No mention is made of the Blessed Sacrament, the Mass, or mankind’s need for redemption through the Verbum Caro. This calculated silence confirms the installation as liturgical abuse, violating Canon 1268 of the 1917 Code which forbids “unworthy images.” The conciliar sect’s approval parallels the Arian suppression of icons, fulfilling Pius X’s warning that Modernists seek to “destroy the Church not from without but from within” (Pascendi, n. 2). As St. John Damascene declared against iconoclasts: “I do not worship matter, I worship the Creator of matter who became matter for my sake.”
Source:
Faceless Nativity scene on Brussels’ Grand Place sparks international controversy (catholicnewsagency.com)
Date: 02.12.2025