Rome Newsroom, Jun 23, 2023 / 10:15 am (CNA).
Pope Francis addressed approximately 200 prominent artists and other creative people from more than 30 countries in the Sistine Chapel on Friday.
Among the participants was the U.S. photographer Andres Serrano, creator of the controversial 1987 “Piss Christ” image, a photograph of a plastic crucifix submerged in urine.
The meeting with Pope Francis in the Sistine Chapel was organized by the Vatican’s Dicastery for Culture and Education to mark the 50th anniversary of the inauguration of the Modern and Contemporary Art Collection in the Vatican Museums.
Other guests included contemporary painters, sculptors, architects, photographers, writers, poets, playwrights, musicians, actors, and directors.
The pope said the Church has a great friendship with the arts, which can bring much-needed hope to the world through beauty, harmony, and truth.
“Often, as artists, you attempt to plumb the depths of the human condition, its dark abysses. We are not all light, and you remind us of this,” the pope said June 23.
“At the same time, there is a need to let the light of hope shine in that darkness, in the midst of our selfishness and indifference,” he added. “Help us to glimpse the light, the beauty that saves.”
There were nine creatives from the United States, including Abel Ferrara, who directed the recent Padre Pio film starring Shia LaBeouf.
In his speech, Pope Francis said art and faith are alike in that they can both be troubling. “Neither art nor faith can leave things simply as they are: They change, transform, move, and convert them. Art can never serve as an anesthetic; it brings peace, yet far from deadening consciences, it keeps them alert,” he said.
The pope also reflected on art’s connection to beauty.
“As Simone Weil wrote: ‘Beauty seduces the flesh in order to gain entrance to the soul. Art touches the senses in order to enliven the spirit, and it does so through beauty, which reflects things that are good, just, and true,” he said.
“Beauty,” he continued, “makes us sense that life is directed towards fullness, fulfillment. In true beauty, we begin to experience the desire for God. Many today hope that art can return more and more to the cultivation of beauty.”
Pope Francis decried a kind of superficial, or “cosmetic beauty,” and said a way to recognize true beauty is through the presence of harmony.
“True beauty is always the reflection of harmony,” he said. “If I may say so, harmony is the operative virtue of beauty, its deepest spirit, where the Spirit of God, the great harmonizer of the world, is at work.”
He added: “As artists, you can help us to make room for the Spirit.”
Serrano’s works
Serrano has often received intense backlash for his works, which often incorporate bodily fluids, human feces, or photos of corpses.
His photo “Piss Christ” has been criticized as blasphemous and has been the subject of controversy since the late 1980s. U.S. Sens. Al D’Amato and Jesse Helms expressed outrage that the artist received $5,000 from the taxpayer-funded National Endowment for the Arts in 1986.
Cardinal George Pell, when archbishop of Melbourne, tried and failed to receive a legal injunction to prevent the National Gallery of Victoria from displaying the photo in 1997. The show was later canceled when someone tried to remove the work from a wall and two teenagers attacked it with a hammer.
A print of the image was also damaged in 2011 by Christian protesters when it was displayed in an exhibition in a contemporary art museum in Avignon, France.
Serrano has defended the photograph against accusations of blasphemy, calling it “an act of devotion” from someone born and raised Catholic who is now a practicing Christian.
Other invited artists
Poet Patricia Lockwood, writers Enuma Okoro and Jhumpa Lahiri, Korean-born American playwright Young Jean Lee, photographer Bill Armstrong, artist Daniel Arsham, and sculptor Barry X Ball also represented the United States.
One of Ball’s more recent works is a portrait sculpture of St. John Paul II, a figure he said had fascinated him since his early 20s.
In a description of the work, Ball said despite being raised as a strict fundamentalist Protestant Christian, after he was introduced to art history in college, he “developed a particular affinity for the art of the Church, an almost exclusively Roman Catholic art.”
The sculptor said he was inspired to start taking classes to convert to Catholicism, though he never followed through with it.
“Although I ultimately did not convert, I have continued to spend time in Catholic churches, taking opportunities as they arise during my travels, to look at the art they contain and to bask in their palpable spirituality — so different from the severe white Protestant ‘boxes,’ devoid of art, where I worshiped during my Southern California childhood,” he said.
South Korean pianist Yiruma, Italian pop rock singer-songwriter Ligabue, and Ukrainian singer and actress Tina Karol were also in attendance.
During the event, Italy-based cellist Issei Watanabe performed a song on a cello built with pieces of wood from migrant boats.
The pope also urged the creatives to not forget the poor, “those especially close to the heart of Christ, those affected by all of today’s many forms of poverty.”
“The poor, too, have need of art and beauty,” he said.
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Of course Seranno was among those invited. He’s homosexual and probably a stand-in for poster-child James Martin who hasn’t done any artful thing like Seranno’s “piss-Christ” since messing his diapers. https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100456295;jsessionid=EF5A76D5ABFD1C2D0D099145291A9EF5?print
“Serrano has defended the photograph against accusations of blasphemy, calling it “an act of devotion” from someone born and raised Catholic who is now a practicing Christian.”
What gobbledygook! Are we supposed to feel sympathetic for the poor guy? Francis is wasting Christ’s precious time with these “types.”
We read “As Simone Weil wrote: ‘Beauty seduces the flesh in order to gain entrance to the soul. Art touches the senses in order to enliven the spirit, and it does so through beauty, which reflects things that are good, just, and true,” he said.”. This is one of the reasons why Latim mass attracts so many people. The Gregorian Chant, incense and silence reminds us that we are partaking in something that is both human and divine. It reflects things which are good, just and true.
The Bergoglio papacy exhibits a marked fascination with the cult of celebrity.
CWR should commission a story about that uncomfortable but undeniable fact.
Brineyman, I would only add that what Bergoglio and his Vatican apparachniks celebrate is the cult of the almighty SELF!
I’ve said it before many times and I’ll say it again, Bergoglio is far too over-exposed. I just wish he’d spend 60% of his time in prayer; the Church would benefit immensely.
The Pope should spend about 30 minutes looking at The Pieta.
The POPE should retire and God should grant us a GOOD and HOLY Man to represent him on earth!!!!!!!
I honestly do not know how much longer I can hold on with Catholicism. The Pope is obsessed with the opaque he clouds every issue. Even his ridiculous comment about abortion and hit men which only seeks to obscure the issue. There is no anonymous hit man the killer is known intimately to the child. But he would never say that since he is obsessed with being chums with everyone and friend to no one
If you’re counting an individual pope’s failures as marks against the Catholic Church, you’re making a terrible mistake. The Church is the truth, she is Christ’s Body, His bride. And her value, her legitimacy, is not measured by the sins of men. Look at Christ’s original Apostles, one of whom betrayed Him and got Him arrested, tortured, and crucified. Even the one whom He appointed as leader, and gave the highest authority, denied Him three times and abandoned Him in His Passion. If you’re going to leave the Church – and therefore leave Christ – because one of His representatives has done horrible things, then you were never here for the right reasons to begin with, and no one should have followed Christ from the beginning. But that’s absurd, of course, because we don’t follow Christ on account of His representatives being saintly – we follow Him because He is God. The Church has had far worse popes than Francis, and there will likely be far worse in the future, but the Church remains the pillar and bulwark of truth, the Ark of God, the Body of Christ, and we should be faithful to her through good times and bad, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, as long as we both shall live.
Ah . . . the expansion (and destruction) of the sensus fidelium . . . all so in keeping with the “aggiornamento” progressivist “church”. The barque of Peter is hurling headlong into the rocks. Seek out and start attending a Latin Mass – it’s your lifeboat.
Alice, most of us faithful Catholics are familiar with how you feel about “… how much longer we can hold on with Catholicism”, bu the solid fact is that Pope Francis is not Catholicism, Jesus-God is. Hold on to Jesus-God and your Catholic Faith will thrive in the middle of the worst, like all of our illustrious and holy ancestors did for 2,000 years. Catholicism is not Buddhism and we don’t look for a kumbaya-delusional-nirvana on sinful Earth as it is now.
Jesus-God turns our crosses and our losses into infinite gains, starting now. Jesus-God did not run from suffering and trials and neither should we when we hold on to him and not to any personality or celebrity, even traitorous Catholic ones.
Artists are blessed with the potential to be ethically constructive worldbuilders. We need to pray for their health and wellbeing.
How about praying for their actual turning back to Christ?
Thanks Ram,
Look, Christ is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.
Turning back, sideways, forward, and reverse offers some food for thought.
How about praying that artists don’t produce more anti-Catholic filth such as the “Piss Christ”. A monstrous insult to the Son of God that the current pope ignores and invites.
I find this papacy as tiring as the American and Canadian govt.
True Catholicism comes from God Alice not the Pope
How does the Pope view the pornographic mural in the Italian cathedral that an archbishop appears in, naked?
How does any narcissist react to anything whose ego is obsessed with constantly trying to prove superior enlightenment to all those he’s been reducing to caricatures of progressive hatred for years including those he’s supposed to shepard?