Pawtucket & its Nativity scene:

...In the pre-Kennedy, pre-Vatican II era, Catholics were still regarded with some suspicion and disdain by their fellow citizens...

...The ACLU responded in effect that to spend even one penny would be unconstitutional: its attorney agreed, under questioning by the Supreme Court, that the logic of his position dictated that not even a single Christian Christmas tree ornament would be permissible...

...Why go to all the expense and trouble of taking an appeal from the District Court ruling to the Appeals Court and the ruling of the latter to the Supreme Court...

...It had the same mix of sacred and secular elements it has now: Santa and his reindeer (though Rudolph hadn't yet been introduced in those far-off days...

...To one who remembers Pawtucket in its heyday, the business district today feels like a ghost town...

...The proletarian pride of the FDR years lingered in cities like this long after it had faded in the nation at large...

...Yet, despite the unfortunate choice of words, the city's attorney had a point...

...What possible difference can it make to the children visiting- the display who holds legal title to the figures of the baby Jesus and his friends...

...The dissenting judge, Levin Campbell, argued that since Christmas is a constitutionally permissible holiday, the symbols essentially connected with Christmas, including religious symbols, must also be permissible...

...Pawtucket is still a city that does an effective job of providing that shelter...

...The city appealed, and on November 3,1982, the First Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Pettine's ruling in a two-to-one decision...

...shepherds, magi, angels, and elves...

...But in Pawtucket we had no sense of this, no feeling of inferiority...

...Though I fear I'll expose myself to the charge of insensitivity to the menace of creeping sacralism in American life, let me confess: I hope Pawtucket wins this one...

...The city is utterly devoid of elite amenities but abounds in proletarian comforts-most notably, good food and drink at cheap prices at the many family restaurants, neighborhood bars, and drink-and-sandwich spots that dot the city...

...The city has small but notable Greek, Armenian, and Syrian (both Catholic and Orthodox) communities...

...If you've ever been to Manchester, New Hampshire, or to Haverhill, Lowell, Lawrence, or Fall River, Massachusetts, then you've seen Pawtucket...

...IN HIS DISTRICT court opinion, Judge Pettine found that the Pawtucket creche violated all three parts of the triadic test used to determine infringement of the establishment clause of the first amendment...

...In those days it wasn't in its present downtown location...

...The city of course had the disadvantages of a ghetto as well, and it inflicted no small amount of pain and frustration on young persons of cosmopolitan instincts...

...ON OCTOBER 4, 1983, the United States Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of Donnelly v. Lynch, the question at issue being whether the city of Pawtucket, Rhode Island, has the constitutional right to erect and maintain a creche as part of its annual downtown Christmas display...

...It's doubtful there is even a single person among the 71,000 dwelling in Pawtucket who can legitimately claim upper-class status It has its occasional millionaires, to be sure, but their lifestyle is of middle-class or even working-class inspiration: rare the subscription to the Boston Symphony, common the trip to Las Vegas...

...Only after that differentiation had arisen could a deliberate decision be made either to link or not to link the sacred and secular...

...Its primary effect is the advancement of religion, since the creche, by virtue of the prominent place given to it in the city's Christmas display, "confers more than a remote and incidental benefit on Christianity...

...It seems harsh that constitutional scruples should deprive the few remaining downtown merchants of the little ghostly aid available to them...

...The three-member Court of Appeals upheld Pettine on a split vote...

...As I write, the Supreme Court has not yet announced its decision in Donnelly v. Lynch...

...The nativity scene is a focal point of our community...

...The differentiation of sacred and secular from one another was a relatively late development in human history...

...In our part of the world this differentiation has long since been accomplished, and during the last couple of centuries the decision has been made to keep the two realms separate from one another, especially in government and business...

...The point is: Do we have a right to carry on fifty years of community tradition...

...But virtually all the textile factories have long since deserted Pawtucket, and their abandoned buildings now house hundreds of small manufacturing concerns...

...Former mayor Lynch echoes Kinch's remarks...

...But we knew little or nothing of this...

...The suit had keen filed by Daniel Donnelly and other members of the Rhode Island affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union, against Dennis Lynch, then mayor of Pawtucket...

...The prevailing interpretation of the First Amendment's establishment clause presumes an already existing differentiation between sacred and secular, prohibiting state support for a differentiated sacred...

...I have no doubt it contributed both to my religious formation and to my affection for Pawtucket-an affection which abides even though I left the city a dozen years ago for the bright lights of Newport, thirty-five miles down the road...

...Frankly, I don't like the current display as much as the old Christmas display the city had when I was a boy growing up in Pawtucket in the forties and fifties...

...Among the city's Catholics, the Irish are most numerous, followed by the French-Canadians, with significant numbers of Italians, Poles, and newcomer Hispanics...

...a celebration of children, both our own children and the Christ Child who symbolizes their infinite worth...

...It created that air of sentimental solemnity which is perfect for a child's Christmas...

...But while it may have narrowed our intellect, at least temporarily, it never wounded our self-respect...

...With defenders like that, they felt, who needs enemies...

...a myriad of lights...

...Pawtucket is one of those places it's hard to love unless you were born and brought up there...

...And in the age of rapid middle-class-ification and suburbanization that followed World War II, the working class, after its brief exaltation during the New Deal era, fell into increasing disesteem, while working-class cities like Pawtucket were held by the upwardly mobile in positive contempt...

...To recognize that Christmas has something to do with the birth of Christ," said the Justice Department,' 'is not to 'prefer' Christianity over other religions, but simply to acknowledge its constituent meaning...

...Though of course I didn't realize it at the time, Pawtucket was a kind of protective ghetto when I was growing up...

...But this has not happened...

...The city made a de minimis argument, contending that the nativity scene is a minute portion of the city's overall Christmas celebration, accounting for only $20 of the $4,500 cost...

...Yet there are residues of the earlier, predifferentiated state of affairs, Christmas-the popular or "folk" Christmas, that is, not the Christmas of the churches-being the most notable of these...

...It does not have a secular purpose, for the use of a "patently religious symbol raises an inference that the city approved and intended to promote the theological message that the symbol conveys...

...But the working class still needs shelter, needs it rjnore than ever perhaps, in a society which in the last few decades has made it increasingly difficult, both financially and culturally, for workers and their families to be full-fledged participants in the national life...

...is a Rhode Island state senator who teaches sociology at the University of Rhode Island...

...So why bother...

...prior to that point the two realms were so inextricably mixed that they were not two at all, but one...

...From a material point of view little or nothing was altered as a result of Pettine's decision...

...English and Scottish Protestants remain a sizable though dwindling group...

...It is less clear that it must prohibit support for a residual pre-differentiated event like Christmas...

...Friend of the court briefs siding with the ACLU were filed by he American Jewish Committee and the National Council of Churches...

...Since those days Catholics have entered the mainstream of American life and don't need protective ghettos anymore...

...The point," says Pawtucket's current mayor, Henry Kinch, "is not how we can sneak around in the dead of the night to put up the creche...

...It is a working-class and lower-middle-class town, with the former more numerous than the latter...

...and loudspeakers playing "Silent Night" and "I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas" (in the old days preferably sung by Bing Crosby...

...instead it was at Slater Park, a large municipal park at the eastern edge of the city, miles from the downtown business district...

...Their influence on the city's distinctive cuisine however has not diminished: people from Pawtucket are still inordinately fond of pork pies and old-fashioned fish-and-chips, these latter sprinkled liberally with vinegar...

...It's an old textile city-once upon a time, in the golden days of the J. & P. Coats Company ("Coats's," as everyone in Pawtucket called it), the thread-making capital of the world...

...Pawtucket is a heavily Catholic city in a state which has a higher percentage of Catholics in its population (nearly 65 percent) than any other in the union...

...In the appeal to the Supreme Court the Reagan administration sided with Pawtucket, filing a friend of the court brief that stressed the difference between unconstitutionally "promoting" religion and constitutionally "acknowledging" it...

...But all that was in the good old days of the postwar era, before suburban malls and shopping centers-along with 1-95 to take you to them-had devastated Pawtucket's once-flourishing business district...

...Seuss: Kinch and Lynch versus the grinch that stole Christmas) agree that support for the city's stand is overwhelming among Pawtucket's citizens, Kinch estimating it may run as high as nine to one...

...In those days downtown merchants didn't need the help of the baby Jesus to draw plentiful supplies of Christmas shoppers...

...On November 10,1981, federal court Judge Raymond Pettine ruled in favor of the ACLU, finding that the creche violated the religious establishment clause of the first amendment...

...There are few blacks, many of them Cape Verdean Catho-lics.The Jewish community, while not large, is a very significant presence in one corner of the city...

...Everybody my age and older remembers falling asleep on summer nights to the noise of textile machinery, a monotonous but soothing music carried through the warm and otherwise rather quiet air from round-the-clock mills...

...But somehow-largely due to its location, remote from commercial activity, remote in fact from any activity at all except for families slowly driving by and stopping to show the nativity scene to their children- the old display worked better than the new one...

...The other two judges agreed with Pettine's findings on the religious purpose and effect of the creche, but disagreed with him on the entanglement question...

...Popular or "folk" Christmas remains what it has always been: a compound of religious, secular, even magical elements...

...Being Catholic, it seemed, was the most normal thing in the world...

...It kept us oblivious to the not very flattering judgments the world at large was inclined to make on people like us...

...Pawtucket is hardly a "folk community," a term which conjures up images of a peasant village, ancient and isolated, nestled in some Bavarian or Thuringian valley...

...Both Kinch and Lynch (the whole thing sounds like something out of Dr...

...Without that shelter, alienation, resentment, and disorientation flourish...

...And the potential for political divisiveness over this issue indicates there is unnecessary state entanglement with religion...

...Mary, Joseph, and the infant Jesus...

...The city sold the religious components of its display to a private group (headed by Lynch, no longer mayor, and his wife), which in turn erects the display in precisely the same spot where the city erected it, a privately owned park in the city's downtown business district...

...If the ancient popular Christmas had at some time spontaneously differentiated itself into two distinct festivals, one strictly sacred, the other strictly secular-a kind of winter carnival-there would be little question of the constitutional impropriety (not to mention the historical retrogression) involved in state support for the superimposition of religious elements onto the winter carnival...

...a remarkably durable and reassuring moment of primitivism in the darkest days of the year...

...Every community," he says, "has the right to continue its cultural traditions, and our community has clearly said it wants its Christmas tradition continued...

...When Pawtucket's attorney defended the essentially secular nature of the city's Christmas celebration as a "folk festival," he roused the ire of some religious leaders, who considered the offending expression to contain a vast theological impropriety...

...And strictly speaking, I suppose, the expression contains an anthropological impropriety as well...