Church
MEETING WITH ARTISTS 

He Has Called Us friends
Two of those invited to the Pope’s meeting with artists in the Sistine Chapel recount their experiences in that room whose walls portray our destiny.  They tell of “the most important and most forgotten” words, spoken in an atmosphere different than the usual worldliness–no theories, no borders, just the offer of a road to travel together: the “road of beauty.” Excerpts from the Pope’s speech are published on page 46. 

DONINELLI
Beyond all
expectations
“An essential function of genuine beauty, as emphasized by Plato, is that it gives man a healthy ‘shock,’ it draws him out of himself, wrenches him away from resignation and from being content with the humdrum–it even makes him suffer, piercing him like a dart, but in so doing it ‘reawakens’ him, opening afresh the eyes of his heart and mind, giving him wings, carrying him aloft.”
“Too often, though, the beauty that is thrust upon us is illusory and deceitful, superficial and blinding, leaving the onlooker dazed; instead of bringing him out of himself and opening him up to horizons of true freedom as it draws him aloft, it imprisons him within himself and further enslaves him, depriving him of hope and joy. It is a seductive but hypocritical beauty that rekindles desire, the will to power, to possess, and to dominate others; it is a beauty which soon turns into its opposite, taking on the guise of indecency, transgression, or gratuitous provocation.”
These are two key passages in Benedict XVI’s speech to 260 artists gathered from all over the world in the Sistine Chapel on Saturday, November 21st. During the reception after the encounter, I spoke with many famous artists and I was profoundly struck by their need to review and comment on what the Pope had just said. Usually at receptions, people speak of other things, but not here. Not only that, with my CL-member bias, I expected to hear a few ironic jabs or ridicule, but nothing of the kind was said. They were all happy about what they’d heard, as if for a long time they’d desired to hear again the most important and the most forgotten words. Many pointed out the fact that the Pope spoke of art, but even more so of beauty as an experience common to all. For too many decades, aesthetics has traveled a different road, where the mesh of provocation and business suffocates and distracts from what was the true beginning of the journey for each artist. I listened with great joy to the words of artists who come from human experiences very different from my own. Deep down, good little son of Fr. Giussani that I am, I could have thought of myself as one of those who already knew and shared the Pope’s words. How sad to be one of those who’ve already understood everything! There’s always been, and there always will be this temptation! Instead, I was surprised to learn anew those same things from the mouths of people whom I’d always considered very far from me. Evidently, artists are tired of all this transgression, all this provocation, all this show business that produces money (okay, everybody likes money) but that can’t bring us closer to happiness.
An affection, a fondness was in the air that Saturday. Now, something has to be done so that day doesn’t become too distant, doesn’t weigh anchor and set sail toward memory, regret, the unreachable past. It was lovely–but what now? There was need for a gathering like this one, and this event met it beyond all expectations. Now there’s a need that the occasion not be defined only as a (however pleasant) meeting of glitterati, and not end as such. It’s up to the Church to invent new occasions of collaboration, giving artists–with patience–the chance to return to creating according to what their hearts have never stopped desiring.

RONDONI
My heart trembled
There, before the silent whirling explosion of the Sistine Chapel, falling silent or murmuring, listening to the words like fresh leaves in the mouth, or like ancient secrets shared by mysterious friends, or strangers there becoming immediately close. “Look…” Or, “There, those bodies…” “The colors...” Michelangelo… but also Botticelli and the others who seem to fade away before the power of the images seen thousands of times and still to be discovered, like the two hands of beloved ones that almost touch in the Creation, in that gesture which has become an emblem, as the French say, “poncif,” something that, as soon as you see it, you think of a certain meaning, a culmination of artistic power. On the phone the next day, Roberto Benigni commented, “I read in the newspaper that the Pope said that faith takes away nothing, but instead exalts talent. Where but in the Sistine Chapel could he say it better?”
Thus was the encounter with Benedict XVI, which I was honored to attend together with 260 artists from throughout the world, a gesture of friendship offered in a place that was already in and of itself highly eloquent of the reason for gathering.
The Pope didn’t outline a theory of art, delineate presumed and useless borders between Christian and non-Christian art, or even give moral recommendations to artists. He said: seek beauty. He said: you know by experience what the wound and the attraction of beauty is.
The Church is the friend of those who seek an authentic experience of beauty, one that doesn’t lead into the tunnel of craving for possession, but that introduces one to wonder at Being. He offered, once again, a friendship, not a theory to adhere to. Archbishop Gianfranco Ravasi, a friend of many artists, knows this well. Fr. Giussani knew this well, as friend, father, and companion of many artists, but many other priests, many other Catholics don’t know it at all. In fact, they don’t have and they don’t offer any education to beauty. If anything, maybe some mother-in-law-style nagging.
There’s much to be done in Catholic art education. Claudel understood this in the beginning of the 1900s. The Church loses the gusto of art when she loses the awareness of being the most important historic point for human destiny. Julius II, who sought Michelangelo (and who wasn’t exactly a model of sanctity himself), and other popes of the kind had many faults, but they knew that the Church was Christ in history, and couldn’t be treated like a meeting hall for consolatory gatherings or mumbled mawkish verses.
The artist pope, John Paul II, knew this well. My heart trembled like a magpie in the winter. In my chest, there surged like the sea between reefs the echoes and voices of the many encounters that,through the magnanimity of Fr. Giussani and the Movement, my miserable and lost person has had in these years and that have been the secret motor of every step that brings me around the word, in all kinds of contexts, accepting all sorts of invitations.