Meeting Called Between the Pope and Artists

ROMA (Chiesa) - The announced meeting between Benedict XVI and artists will take place the morning of Saturday, November 21, 2009, in the Sistine Chapel.

The program of the meeting will be as follows. After a musical prelude, Archbishop Gianfranco Ravasi, president of the pontifical council for culture, will extend a greeting to those present in the name of the pope.

Then a few passages will be read from the �Letter to Artists� by John Paul II, from April 4, 1999. Finally, Pope Joseph Ratzinger will give his address. A second musical performance will close the meeting.

The Sistine Chapel is modest in size, so there will be at most five hundred artists present, from all over the world and from all disciplines: painters and sculptors, architects, writers and poets, musicians and singers, men of the cinema, the theater, dance, photography. The invitations were arranged by the pontifical council for culture.

In addition to the letter from John Paul II in 1999, another important precedent comes from forty-five years ago. It is the meeting between Paul VI and artists on May 7, 1964, which also took place in the Sistine Chapel.

The motivation for the new meeting is that �for some time the alliance between the Christian faith and the arts has been broken.� This is how Archbishop Ravasi spoke in announcing the event last September 10.

The alliance between faith and art is inseparable from the Church�s identity. Judaism prohibited sacred images. But faith in the incarnate God quickly prompted the Church to take Greek and Roman art as its own figurative language.

This genial marriage between the Church and art has periodically met with iconoclastic opposition. In the first millennium in the East, and in the second millennium in the West, first with Protestantism and today with the general anti-figurative tendency, not only in art but also in ecclesiastical patronage.

By meeting with artists in that supreme place of Christian art which is the Sistine Chapel, Benedict XVI intends precisely to arrest that decline and restart a dialogue, in the hope that a fruitful alliance between art and the Church may reemerge.

At a time when �in vast areas of the world the faith is in danger of dying out like a flame which no longer has fuel,� Pope Ratzinger may be thinking of what Saint John Damascene said in the thick of the iconoclast storm:

�If a pagan comes and says to you, �Show me your faith!�, bring him to church and show him the decoration with which it is adorned, and explain to him the series of sacred paintings.�

I of Ra, do you know any artists who have painted, sculpted, woven, written music, etc. for the Church? Then you would know that our faith is infused into those works of art for the glory of God. Like any profession, yes, we do need money to live, but there is a greater fulfillment when an artist is immersed in creating art for God, an uplifting of the soul in praise to the God of our talents.

I have talked with 'pagans' and have explained the art and why we do what we do. Do they convert on the spot? Not usually, but the seeds are sown nonetheless. And who knows? Down the road they may come home to the Catholic Church.

Mary Warren | 11/7/2009

The article was nice, until this;
"�If a pagan comes and says to you, �Show me your faith!�, bring him to church and show him the decoration with which it is adorned, and explain to him the series of sacred paintings.�
That shows the possible faith of others, or artists who had talent and needed money. There is no connection with faith. And a Pagan wouldn't ask you to show them your faith. If they do they are just as ignorant.
Things can be expressions of faith, but are certainly not evidence of faith.
If so what does that say about the Pyramids? Stone Henge? The Acropolis? The Nazca Lines? The Iliad? The Odyssey? Works by Pagan cultures that have stood the test of time and are still seen with awe. Does that prove faith?
One person painted the Sisten Chapel. Thousands over decades built the pyramids. What conviction must it have took to move the blue stones of the the Henge tens of miles without even the wheel?

The point is art can be an expression of one's faith, but not evidence.

I of Ra | 11/6/2009

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