by Paul Elie
from Georgetown University

At the Vatican, Art Does the Talking

        At Easter we don’t usually think of the pope as a patron of the arts.  Other papal roles are in mind.  Buttwo developments this Easter season called attention to the arts-enabling aspect of the job.

The other day Pope Francis arranged for a group of homeless people in Rome to tour the Vatican Museums and visit the Sistine Chapel – and met them afterward.  It was an invitation as obvious – obvious, after the fact – as it was overdue.   It put in mind the story about the priest who thought he would please Dorothy Day by criticizing the sumptuous beauty of a Catholic church.  How wrong he was!  First, Day pointed out that all that beauty had been paid for with the nickels and dimes of the poor parishioners who had supported the building of the church.  Then she pointed out that poor people have has much of a right to beauty, and as great a need for it, as anybody else – and the beauty of churches consists in part in the fact that they are there for people of all walks of life to behold.

Over the weekend public television stations aired a documentary focused on Sir Gilbert Levine’s concert marking the joint canonization of Pope John Paul II and Pope John XXIII, co-hosted by Georgetown and the archdiocese of Washington last spring.   Levine, an American conductor, became friends with John Paul in the early Eighties while he – Levine – was conductor of the Cracow Symphony.  In the decades to follow John Paul called on Levine again and again to lead concerts involving interreligious dialogue, such as the groundbreaking concert in memory of the Shoah.  Since then Sir Gilbert has traveled and led concerts meant to bring out the kinship in religious dialogue among John XXIII, John Paul II, and Francis.  I hope to post about the documentary again soon. 

John Paul sought to make use of music as a universal language.  This week in Rome Pope Francis put the visual arts to something like the same purpose.  Maybe the next thing is for Pope Francis to invite leaders from other religions to tour the Vatican Museums – and there review their common history.   And then everybody could meet in the Sistine Chapel afterward.  

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