A Baby Jesus without a face, a continent that will not look the divine in the eye

For God’s sake, those maniacs now simply did away with the face of Jesus. In the Grand Place of Brussels, once the beating heart of Catholic Flanders, beside the illuminated Christmas tree now stand Mary, Joseph, and Baby Jesus as life-size rag dolls wrapped in recycled textiles. In place of their countenances, there is only beige-and-brown patchwork. An “inclusive mix of skin tones”, officials said, while deleting one of the most defining cultural elements of Christianity and the West.

City authorities declared the traditional wooden crèche “too damaged” to restore. Rather than repair or replace it with something recognisably Christian, they commissioned this €150,000 installation for the next five-years. Mayor Philippe Close, a secular socialist, insisted Brussels would not follow cities that simply abolish Nativity displays altogether. Then, after the City came up with this proposal, he passed the final decision to St. Michael and St. Gudula Cathedral.

The cathedral, otherwise guardian of the faith for centuries, gave its blessing to the manikins. Sure, why not delete His face, the morally castrated clergy obviously figured – note that the face of Baby Jesus is not even patchwork, but blank, absolutely blank. The artist, Victoria-Maria Geyer, speaks of sustainability, diversity, and “fabrics of coexistence”. The actual result resembles an upmarket laundry basket that strayed into sacred space.

So the Holy Family stands mute, safe from rain and safer still from the contemporary general culture of taking offence. Sacred iconography, which for two millennia has dared to show the invisible made visible, has been replaced by ideological upholstery. And this is not the worst part.

The worst part is that no minority demanded this desecration. No immigrant association marched against carved wooden figures. No interfaith council pleaded for a Jesus without features. The initiative came entirely from the usual suspects: Progressive elites that regard Europe’s founding faith as a peculiarity and an embarrassment to be neutralised. The same class that renamed Christmas markets “winter markets” and banished Christmas trees from nurseries for reasons of “religious freedom”, is now stripping divinity itself of a face.

This is the essence of the word iconoclastic. The Iconoclasm was a bitter and bloody crisis that rocked the Eastern Roman Empire for two whole centuries. It was no Byzantine artistic quarrel. It was a struggle over the very meaning of the Incarnation: If God truly became man and took flesh, then matter can be sanctified and the invisible can be depicted. The victory of the iconodules, those who revere religious icons, in 843 is still seen in Orthodoxy as the ultimate vindication of the reality of Christmas itself, celebrated to this day.

An orthodox ear can still tune in empirically to the victory of the fundamentally Western, Greek and Roman traditions of confronting the divine face to face, as opposed to Semitic and Middle Eastern dogmas who chose not to dare and allow human interpretations of the holy appearance in human or other form. So maybe a Catholic or a Protestant, as well as any Christian, should pay attention here too, for it was the foundation of Christianity on a Western and European groundwork that is at stake when sophomores strip God of his look.

Christmas celebrates the most audacious claim of our civilisation: That the Word took flesh, that God entered history, received a human face which could be kissed, caressed, or spat upon. A human face that faced the agony of the Crucifixion for humanity. And one that was first and foremost born, incarnated. This we revere, in all its forms that our holy traditions have entrusted us with.

Brussels – therefore Belgium, and in a symbolic sense the EU too – has opted for the precise opposite of incarnation: Disincarnation. A manger without a face perfectly symbolises a continent that is instructed not to look the divine in the eye.

This is not inclusion. Inclusion would have added figures: the Magi from Persia, one of whom has throughout the ages been portrayed as black, shepherd boys from the Judean hills, perhaps even a Roman centurion peering in wonder. Instead, Brussels simply excluded humanity and any type or form of individual culture which make the truly ecumenical fabric of Christendom.

The result is a tableau that was intended not to offend anyone only because it says nothing at all, but ended up offending the ones it was supposed to primarily represent: Christians.

Our God has a face. It has been depicted for millennia in some of the most exquisite works of art. It is one that, contrary to other religions, we proudly dare to confront. Deprive us of our Lord’s face and our faith becomes unrecognisable, a hollow postmodern remain with a spiritual façade.

Europe does not need more of this ridiculous universality. Europe needs the elementary decency to recognise its own children, to look upon the face it once dared to call holy, and to find there the courage that built cathedrals, conquered fear, civilised half the world. If the rag dolls remain on the Grand Place until 2029, they will be a monument not to diversity, but to surrender. An installation teaching children that faith, to be tolerable, must first be made unhuman and anonymous.