What to do with a nativity set created by a pedophile?
cobaltnine: Er, maybe that won’t work as it’s a nativity. Still, I vote for breaking as a theraputic technique. Okay, I will admit it. I don’t understand this mindset. You have a set of religious icons which were created by some unnamed individual (or, more likely, company). They were painted by a local priest who was (later, I assume) convicted of child molestation. Both you and the poster seem to feel that a natural impulse would be to smash up a religious set, not created by but painted by a molester who didn’t actually molest the owner of said religious set. I am at a complete loss as to how this would be therapeutic. He wasn’t her molester. It won’t hurt him or any other molester including her own. What am I missing? mrgoldenbrown: Really, sell it somewhere where it won’t be known that this priest did this and don’t make an issue out of it. Take the money from the sale and send it to the cause she’s interested in fund
I am sure there are some details that are going to be missing from my suggestion, as this idea is still forming in my head, but here it is: Put away the nativity for this year. Before the Advent/Christmas season next year, paint the figurines white (or strip the paint off of them). Then have a Christmas party for local Christian kids or Christian kids at a local children’s hospital or something like that, and make it a “painting party” for the nativity scene. Of course, this will take a bit of planning, you will have to decide if you want to tell the parents why you are doing it, and it won’t look as good as it does now. Yet, considering how this crime take so much from children (and I say this as a clergyman who has spent the better part of nine years training congregations to prevent child sexual abuse), this could be a cool, but very subtle way to let kids kind of take something back from this abuser. What is more, it might give you a new way to look at and enjoy this nativity, or y
I think she should do whatever she is most comfortable with. Terrible answer, I know, but people have strong feelings about pedophilia and I can see how the feelings can get transferred to an inanimate object. If it makes her feel better to smash it, then do it. Perhaps down the road she could explore her feelings about it, or not. I guess I don’t have as much of a visceral anger reaction to sex offenders anymore since I began treating them. I guess I realized by talking to them that they aren’t “monsters”. They’re people who have a bad problem and who did something (or a bunch of things) terrible that profoundly victimized others. Personally I’d probably keep the set – and then get involved in the prevention of child sexual abuse in a manner that might actually reduce its frequency. Smashing it certainly won’t make that happen.
I want to thank everyone for answering. To answer some of the questions brought up: The friend doesn’t believe the set itself is evil, but she wants it out of the house because she is creeped out by it being there. Sure we all probably have something in the house created by a criminal. But we don’t know what thing, or who it was created by. This was created by a priest in her church, and the thought of touching something he touched, with hands that touched others in horrible ways, is too much for her to handle. She didn’t spend time figuring out who it was. She just noticed some initials and a year carved into the bottom of a piece, and the information just clicked. I think the idea of selling it on ebay, to someone who won’t know what the initials on the bottom stand for is the best solution.
