Nativity Scene Faithful to Christmas / Church Historians Say Christ Was Born in a Cave

By Pauline Masson

Pacific’s nativity scene in the bluff is unique as outdoor manger scenes go. I mean where else would you see a cave half way up a big white mountain, except maybe in the Holy Land?

And that brings me to the conclusion I have harbored for some years – that our nativity scene is a more likely representation of where Christ was born than the popular barn and stable that we see everywhere.

What we know for sure about Jesus’ birth comes from Matthew and Luke in the Bible. Luke tells us, “And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in swaddling cloths and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.” 

The manger was the traditional feeding trough for animals, which were kept in the lowest level of the house, more often than not, a cave. Luke also tells us that angels came to nearby shepherds to tell them of the humble birth.

Matthew does not describe the birthplace. Instead, he gives us the star moving across the night sky and the three wise men following it to worship the arrival of the newborn king.

Early Church fathers, seemed to follow Luke’s depiction of the humble birth. Justin Martyr (150 A.D.), Origen (250 A.D.), Jerome (325 A.D.) all wrote that Jesus was born in a cave. In 335 A.D, Emperor Constantine approved the cave as the traditional site of Jesus’ birth and his mother Saint Helena built a church over the cave where it was believed Christ was born. The site, the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, can be visited today by stooping low to enter the doorway about four feet high.

The first known public nativity scene goes back to St. Francis of Assisi on Christmas Eve 1223, because he wanted to make the extraordinary experience of the first Christmas more accessible to ordinary people. He set the scene in a cave just outside Greccio, Italy that featured a wax figure of the infant Jesus, costumed people playing the roles of Mary and Joseph. Nearby shepherds watched over their sheep, just as shepherds in Bethlehem had watched over sheep on the first Christmas. 

Pacific’s tradition of the snnual statues in the bluff started 70 years ago when a group of Catholic ladies, like St. Francis, wanted to help Christians experience the first Christmas.

Queen’s Daughters, a St. Bridget lady’s sodality, was formed in Pacific 1914, as a chapter of a religious and charitable society of the same name founded at St. Louis 25 years earlier. 

The mission of the Pacific chapter was to bring Catholic sisters to teach at St. Bridget Elementary School. The school had been started in 1885, but after the turn of the century lay teachers were hired. The parish mothers banded together as Queens Daughters and attracted the School Sisters of Notre Dame to teach in Pacific.

But, this organization’s most lasting contribution to the community has to be the nativity scene in the bluff that now serves as a once-a-year rite.

It was 1950 when the Queens Daughters conducted a citywide fundraising effort to buy statues to place in the old mining cave halfway up the face of the white sand bluff on Osage Street that faced St. Bridget School.

The mayor at the time reluctantly gave his okay for the project – so the story goes –  because he didn’t believe those little ladies would ever be able to get statues as big as they were up into the cave opening. What the mayor didn’t reckon on was that the community would take the idea to heart.

Little fundraising activities sprang up all over the city, there were bake sales and quilt raffles, children collected pennies and total strangers reached into a pocket and handed the ladies a dollar or two.

The first statues the organization purchased were true life sized, larger than the present figures. The mayor was right about one thing, the ladies could never have carried the status up a ladder. But as luck would have it several ladies had young healthy sons, who muscled the figures up the ladder and set them in the opening in an arrangement that resembled a picture in a Christmas card.

Ed Buscher, a leader in the Father Edward Berry Knights of Columbus Council went to his property south of town and cut a dozen cedar trees to arrange behind the statues.

The whole community funded the project and the community took ownership, turning out to stand at along Osage as the 15 statues were carried up the ladder – including Mary, Joseph, the infant Jesus, an Angel, the Three Wise Men and eight animals.

In 2005, a group of downtown business owners spent a month working a miracle cure to save the religious statues that were beginning to crumble. 

Art restoration and auto body experts pooled their know-how, using auto body filler, welded metal rods, acrylic paint, boat lacquer, a new pair of wings bought at a party supply store, and “a couple of hundred hours of free labor,” to give new life to what had grown to the eighteen pieces of statuary that make up the annual Nativity scene displayed in the bluff face. When the statues were replaced, a couple of shepherds were added, some sheep and a cow.

Over the years the annual project has been organized by a variety of caretakers, from the Knights of Columbus to the volunteer firefighters. It was discontinued for a couple of years when a slap of stone fell in the display area. But after numerous appeals the city approved the display but said the city public works department would handle the statues. Later the Chamber of Commerce took over the task then a group of individual volunteers using a power lift. For the past ten years, the St. Bridget Men’s Club has put the statues up and taken them down again.

But it was the women in Queens Daughters who conceived the idea and made it come to life.