Abstract
Pope Paul VI considered the role of the artist in opening the Catholic Church to the world so important that he specifically addressed artists at two critical moments during the Second Vatican Council: in the first year of his pontificate and in a December 1965 closing address. A lifelong supporter of the arts, he lamented the breech between art and the Church in the twentieth century and sought ways to rectify it, founding the Collection of Modern Religious Art in the Vatican Museums in 1973. The Collection is an impressive assembly of surrealist, cubist, post-impressionist, and expressionist works featuring Christian symbolism and religious themes, none of which were commissioned for any liturgical space or interest. While the Collection has been criticized by art historians as too limited in scope, this chapter’s argument refers to the Collection, and Paul VI’s statements on modern aesthetics, as indicative of a conversation between modern art and the Catholic Church as not only possible but vitally necessary, toward creating an environment in which new forms of theology may emerge.
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Notes
- 1.
Pius XI, Address, October 27, 1932, Acta Apostolica Sedis 24 (1932): 335.
- 2.
L’Osservatore Romano (June 24, 1973): 1–2.
- 3.
Cynthia Freeman, in: But is it Art? An Introduction to Art Theory, writes, “Art’s language isn’t literal […]. You understand its meaning because of your knowledge, and art requires knowledge of context and culture […]. A good interpretation must be grounded in reasons and evidence, and should provide a rich, complex, and illuminating way to comprehend a work of art. Sometimes an interpretation can transform an experience of art from repugnance to appreciation and understanding,” (Oxford University Press, 2001): 150.
- 4.
Michel Foucault’s extensive historical work argues that after the “age of reason,” the creation of binary opposition between “sane” and “insane” translated into the creation of the asylum in “The Great Confinement”: “We must describe, from the start of its trajectory, that ‘other form’ which relegates Reason and Madness to one side or the other of its action as things henceforth external, deaf to all exchange, and as though dead to one another,” Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage Books, 1988), ix.
- 5.
Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1989), 93.
- 6.
Jean-François Lyotard, “What is Postmodernism?” in The Postmodern Condition, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979), 79.
- 7.
See William Eaton, “Guston, Shapiro, Rosenberg … Dialogue,” Zeteo July 2016 at: https://zeteojournal.com/2016/07/13/dialogue-guston-schapiro-rosenberg-schimmel-eaton/#_ftnref29 (accessed September 9, 2020).
- 8.
Pope Pius XII, Mediator Dei (1947), article 195.
- 9.
Marie-Alain Couturier, O.P., Sacred Art (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press and the de Menil Foundation, 1989), 154.
- 10.
L’Osservatore Romano, October 11, 1953, p. 5.
- 11.
Yves Congar, Priest and Layman (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1967), 237.
- 12.
Pope John XXIII, Princeps Pastorum (November 1959), §36.
- 13.
See Grete Refsum, “The French Dominican Fathers as Precursors to the Directives on Art of the Second Vatican Council,” (Dissertation, Kunsthogskolen Oslo, National College of Art and Design, 2001), 25.
- 14.
Paul VI, “The Friendship of Artists and the Church,” The Pope Speaks (Huntington, IN: Our Sunday Visitor, 1964), vol. 9, No. 4, 392–93.
- 15.
Paul VI, Address to Artists at the Closing of the Second Vatican Council at: http://www.vatican.va/content/paul-vi/en/speeches/1965/documents/hf_p-vi_spe_19651208_epilogo-concilio-artisti.html (accessed February 23, 2020).
- 16.
Paul VI, “The Friendship of Artists and the Church,” 393.
- 17.
Paul VI, “Address to Artists,” op. cit.
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Babka, S.P. (2021). Making the Spiritual World Accessible: Paul VI and Modern Art at the Close of Vatican II. In: Chapman, M.D., Latinovic, V. (eds) Changing the Church. Pathways for Ecumenical and Interreligious Dialogue. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53425-7_11
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