Annual Nativity Festival opens Friday at Chiara Center – The State Journal

The 12th annual Franciscan Nativity Festival opens Friday at the Hospital Sisters of St. Francis’ Chiara Center on the northeast end of Springfield and features 127 different depictions of Jesus’ manger scene from around the world.

Dan Frachey, program director for the center, says the festival began when the spiritual Center opened and is symbolic of the faith’s historic and religious history.

“The nativity is attributed to St. Francis of Assisi’s creation. Francis was a very theatrical saint. In 1223 in Greccio, a little Italian town in central Italy, he wanted to recreate that narrative of the story from the Gospels in physical form. He got animals, straw, people and staged it and put himself in as a proxy for humanity, who is still a part of that story.”

Each year the festival features different nativities loaned by people throughout the country, including many locals. The sets are displayed in the center and the adjoining St. Francis of Assisi Church, where visitors see a large, clay nativity the Hospital Sisters of St. Francis commissioned from an artist who traveled to Assisi, Italy, for inspiration.

Creativity abounds in the nativity sets on loan. They run from 1 inch to several feet in size and are made of a wide variety of materials: a coconut, a safety pin and beads, paper, glass, wood and more. Some of the sets are homemade, including a painting and a collage. Others feature well-known characters like Snoopy and Charlie Brown or Winnie the Pooh. There’s a pop-up

Article source: https://www.sj-r.com/news/20181127/annual-nativity-festival-opens-friday-at-chiara-center