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Group seeks new site for creche
Tuesday, March 16, 1999 By Timothy McNulty, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Not to be lost in the millennial frenzy this December is the fact that Jesus is due for a whopper of a birthday party - he'll turn the big 2,000 next year.
The city's Christian Leaders Fellowship hasn't forgotten and plans to celebrate by building a new, life-size creche in honor of the occasion.
The fellowship is a group of 10 bishops and other leaders from the city's Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant churches that has erected the Gateway Center creche Downtown and run a Christmas Festival for the last three years. This year, it plans to build a creche similar to one erected annually at the Vatican, and has already begun scouting locations Downtown.
Fund raising starts next week to hire the Italian craftsman who built the Vatican's creche figures to build some for Pittsburgh, said the Rev. Ronald Lengwin, spokesman for the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh. The craftsman has already built three life-size figures for the fellowship - Jesus, Mary and Joseph - and the fellowship hopes to raise $50,000 for perhaps seven more, of shepherds and wise men.
Lengwin, who is a staffer for the fellowship, said letters are being sent to 50 prospective donors next week asking them to pledge $1,000 each. The craftsman won't be able to build all the figures this year even if the money is raised, Lengwin said, but they're hoping he can produce a few shepherds before December.
The money will also pay for a stable. The stable wouldn't have fit in Gateway Center, so Lengwin has been looking for a new location Downtown for the creche tableau.
Lengwin said the city hadn't notified him of its decision to close the site next week to all signs and displays, including the creche and a sign by the Pittsburgh Area New Direction Alternative, a political action committee. But he said the decision was not a surprise, as city officials warned him last year that it was coming.
"There was always going to be a different process this year. The PANDA sign isn't what caused this," he said.
Wherever the creche is placed, Mary and Joseph should feel at home - 2,000 years after they couldn't get a room in the inn, they'll be displaced to at least their third Downtown site in 10 years.
The Supreme Court banished the creche from the gallery of the county Courthouse in 1989, ruling that the display amounted to an unconstitutional endorsement of religion.
In 1996, Commissioners Larry Dunn and Bob Cranmer dropped a plan to bring the creche back to the Courthouse after threats of another legal battle. Since then, it has been in Gateway Center.
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