Writings and Statements from Popes and Prelates
Pope Francis
Address to Patrons of the Arts in the Vatican Museums (2013) Click here for the full text |
In every age the Church has called upon the arts to give expression to the beauty of her faith and to proclaim the Gospel message of the grandeur of God’s creation, the dignity of human beings made in his image and likeness, and the power of Christ’s death and resurrection to bring redemption and rebirth to a world touched by the tragedy of sin and death.
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Yet how many pictures or frescos, fruits of the artist’s faith, in their form, in their colour, in their light, urge us to think of God and foster within us the desire to draw from the source of all beauty. What Marc Chagall, a great artist, wrote, remains profoundly true: that for centuries painters have dipped their paintbrush in that coloured alphabet which is the Bible. Thus how often artistic expression can bring us to remember God, to help us to pray or even to convert our heart! |
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You are the custodians of beauty: thanks to your talent, you have the opportunity to speak to the heart of humanity, to touch individual and collective sensibilities, to call forth dreams and hopes, to broaden the horizons of knowledge and of human engagement. Be grateful, then, for the gifts you have received and be fully conscious of your great responsibility to communicate beauty, to communicate in and through beauty! |
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Those who perceive in themselves this kind of divine spark which is the artistic vocation—as poet, writer, sculptor, architect, musician, actor and so on—feel at the same time the obligation not to waste this talent but to develop it, in order to put it at the service of their neighbour and of humanity as a whole. |
Cardinal Christoph Schönborn
Archbishop of Vienna from the Preface of Christian Sacred Art for the Proclamation of the Faith (1999) Click here for the full text in German |
Art is made by human beings--human beings who live in a particular time, but who also seek a dimension other than the immediate actuality. For centuries, artists have been attempting to express the faith and testify to it in word and image, in architecture and music. Europe's culture still draws its life from this great Christian artistic heritage. Has this heritage simply become past, irrevocable history? |
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This world in which we live needs beauty in order not to sink into despair. It is beauty, like truth, which brings joy to the heart of man and is that precious fruit which resists the wear and tear of time, which unites generations and makes them share things in admiration. And all of this is through your hands. May these hands be pure and disinterested. Remember that you are the guardians of beauty in the world. |
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The function of all art lies in fact in breaking through the narrow and tortuous enclosure of the finite, in which man is immerged while living here below, and in providing a window to the infinite for his hungry soul. [...] The greater the clarity with which art mirrors the infinite, the divine, the greater will be its possibility for success in striving toward its ideal and true, artistic accomplishment. Thus, the more an artist lives religion, the better prepared he will be to speak the language of art, to understand its harmonies, to communicate its emotions. |
Pope Pius XI
Address at the opening of the Vatican Pinacoteca (1932) Click here for the full text in Italian |
Tante opere d’arte, indiscutibilmente e per sempre belle, come quelle che stiamo per passare ammirando in rassegna; opere nella quasi totalità così profondamente ispirate al pensiero ed al sentimento religioso, da farle sembrare, ora, come fu ben detto, delle ingenue e fervorose invocazioni e preghiere, ora dei luminosi inni di fede, ora delle sublimi elevazioni e dei veri trionfi di gloria celeste e divina... |