During the Christmas season when I was a boy, my mother used to take my brothers and sisters and me down to one of the roughest neighborhoods in San Francisco — to visit some animals that were gathered there.
This was the Tenderloin District, which attracted drug dealers, drug users and a sad number of homeless people.
Our destination was St. Boniface Catholic Church.
St. Boniface was established as a parish in 1860, according to the San Francisco Examiner, and its present structure was completed in 1908, after its predecessor was destroyed by the 1906 earthquake and fire.
It is run by Franciscan priests.
My mother, as this column has noted before, would bring us to that church as the first stop on our annual tour of San Francisco nativity scenes because the nativity scene at St. Boniface was the most impressive in the city. It featured not only live animals but also living human beings.
The Franciscan priests at St. Boniface were following in the footsteps of St. Francis, who not only founded their order but also the tradition of nativity scenes — with living creatures.
“St. Francis’ meditations on the life of Christ led him to create the first-ever Nativity scene in Greccio, Italy, in 1223,” reports the National Catholic Register. “… Francis asked his friend, Lord of Greccio Giovanni Velita, to prepare a cave with live animals and a hay-filled manger.”
In 1950, the Franciscans at St. Boniface started presenting their living Nativity scene.
A story that ran in the San Francisco Examiner on Christmas Eve in 1956 described the ritual.
“The colorful ceremony, conducted for the sixth consecutive year, began with a procession of brown-robed priests from the darkened church to the adjoining school yard where the realistic religious scene is located,” the paper reported. “There, against a background of fresh greens, straw and live animals, a capacity crowd of faithful knelt while a full-sized image of the Christ child was placed in the manger and blessed.”
“Additional realistic touches were shepherds moving around the stable scene, and by a pair of live sheep loaned by the Recreation and Park Department,” said the paper.
“The service was revived here in 1950 as part of a similar movement to ‘put the Christ back into Christmas,’” Father Alfred Boeddeker, the Franciscan pastor of St. Boniface, told the paper.
On Christmas Eve in 1960, the Examiner reported: “The huge outdoor Nativity scene has been erected again in St. Boniface schoolyard, adjoining the church at 133 Golden Gate Ave. Complete with life-sized images of the Holy Family and the visiting shepherds, it also contains live sheep and live shepherds.”
In 1967, the Examiner carried a schedule of the Christmas masses that would be held at St. Boniface that year. “During Christmastide, we again have a life-sized Crib occupying an entire schoolyard,” said a notice at the bottom of this schedule. “Here you see a replica of the Stable of Bethlehem, live sheep and live shepherd, beside an old California Mission.”
“It’s a San Francisco tradition,” said the notice.
Seventeen years after that, I had the privilege to see a much more compelling Christmas site. That was the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.
When I was living in Egypt in 1984, I traveled to Bethlehem for Christmas Eve — and visited the Grotto of the Nativity where Christ was born. While I was there, a group of Catholic bishops from Ethiopia knelt and prayed before that sacred site.
Back in Cairo, I lived on an island in the Nile in a neighborhood called Zamalek. This was a place where a good many foreign diplomats lived. Many of them attended the same Catholic church that I attended, where the congregation included people from all around the world.
These parishioners spoke many different languages and were loyal to many different governments — but they were joined together by one faith.
In 2005, according to a report by SFGate.com, St. Boniface Church in San Francisco became “a sanctuary for homeless people.”
“More than 100 homeless wanderers find slumbering solace every day at St. Boniface, a pink-and-yellow-walled fortress of spirituality amid the hardscrabble street scene on Golden Gate Avenue near Leavenworth Street,” SFGate.com reported. “It is believed to be the only place in America where this happens.”
From San Francisco’s Tenderloin to Cairo’s Zamalek, to neighborhoods all across the world, let this Christmas be a day of togetherness and peace.
Featured Image Credit: Noah Wulf
