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A Roman Catholic diocese in Germany has expressed regret over a televised Christmas Eve mass featuring a portrayal of the newborn Christ by an adult woman covered in sticky rice paper that was described by some critics as “slime Jesus”.
The broadcast on ARD television from St Mary’s in Stuttgart showed a manger in which a female performance actor was huddled up in a foetal position and covered with sticky rice paper.
The officiating priest, Thomas Steiger, said during the service: “The nativity scene shows a real human being, lying there miserable, naked and exposed.”
Next to him the actor breathed heavily and slowly writhed in the paper, which was apparently meant to represent vernix covering the newborn child.
“This is how radically God becomes human: close, touchable, without distance, real,” said Steiger, who is employed as an on-camera clergyman by the regional public broadcaster SWR.
Milena Lorek, who designed the show, identified the figure in the creche on Instagram as Eleni Sismanidou. Lorek has said she conceived the scene as “a moment of uncertainty between safety and distress”.
Rightwing media outlets, which have for years campaigned against Germany’s public broadcasters and the licence fees that finance them, went on the attack, calling the scene disrespectful to the faithful.
Bild splashed with the headline “ARD shows Christmas mass with slime Jesus”. The newspaper quoted viewers who said the figure in the straw looked more like a “breathing alien” and condemned the spectacle as “sick and twisted”.
SWR said it had received more than 1,400 comments about the televised service, many of them critical. Local members of the Christian Democrats, the conservative party of chancellor Friedrich Merz, said the audience-financed installation represented artistic freedom run amok.
“It’s disgusting,” said Klaus Nopper, a CDU member of Stuttgart city council. “This is the Christmas story being hijacked by wokeness. Lines keep getting blurred and our values thrown overboard. This is how you destroy society.”
After nearly three weeks of mounting criticism and online mockery, the Rottenburg-Stuttgart diocese acknowledged on Monday that not all had gone according to plan.
“Bishop Dr Klaus Krämer and the diocesan leadership have taken note of the feedback and carefully reviewed it over the past few days,” it said in a statement on its website. “The reactions to the broadcast have shown that religious feelings were hurt.”
It said the Catholic broadcasting service at SWR, which was responsible for the design of the nativity scene and the programme that was aired, “deeply regret this and emphasise that at no time was it their intention to provoke or disparage central tenets of faith”.
“Nevertheless, it has become clear that the chosen form of presentation caused bewilderment, incomprehension and anger among many people – especially on an important holiday such as Christmas,” the diocese added.
It admitted that it had also cut a few corners in the traditional Christmas liturgy “for the television format”.
“These deviations were incorrect and will be addressed,” it said, adding that future church service broadcasts would be subject to “a coordination and decision-making process” in order to “do justice to both the church’s responsibility and the particular sensitivity of such formats”.
