The Vatican will celebrate Pope Benedict’s 60th anniversary of
priestly ordination with a month-long exhibition featuring 60 artists
from around the world.
Details of the month long exhibition entitled ‘The Splendor of Truth, the Beauty of Love’ were unveiled in Rome.
“We wanted to think of a very fluid and generic theme closely
connected to the papacy of Benedict XVI – on the one hand truth and on
the other charity,” explained the Pontifical Council for Culture’s head
Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi.
“It’s almost like a card of congratulations addressed to the Pope,” he said to CNA.
The event will begin on July 4, when the artists and their work will
be presented to the Pope himself. A wide range of art forms will be
represented, including painting, sculpture, architecture, photography
and music from globally renowned composers such as Ennio Morricone, Arvo
Part and James McMillan.
“I was overjoyed and proud to have been invited to participate in
this marvelous festival,” McMillan commented. The Scottish composer
wrote much of the music to accompany Pope Benedict’s visit to the U.K.
last year.
McMillan said he is very appreciative of the guidance Pope has given
the Church, “even in his priestly years before becoming our Supreme
Shepherd.
“His advice and direction in liturgy and music have been especially inspiring to musicians like me.”
A similar reaction has come from all those artists asked by Cardinal Ravasi to participate.
“The response from the artists invited has been overwhelmingly
positive,” said Richard Rouse of the Pontifical Council for Culture.
“They’re all encouraged, they take this as a good opportunity to
reopen a dialogue of works rather than just words. And that’s something
that the artists continue to say to us – finally it’s not just words
it’s also pictures, it’s also music.”
The event is in some way a spin off from the first meeting Pope
Benedict had with artists in the Sistine Chapel, back in 2009. At the
time, he promised that they would meet again.
“Pope Benedict, as everybody knows, is a man who’s interested in
truth, he’s interested in dialogue, in charity. And we thought that
having already had that meeting with artists in 2009 of reaching out
again in this dialogue,” Rouse explained.
Amongst the 60 contributions, the Pope will receive a musical
arrangement of the Our Father, written by the Estonian composer Arvo
Part. It will be sung by a boy treble with Part himself at the piano.
The man behind the music to films like the Mission and the
Untouchables, Italian composer Ennio Morricone, has donated a new score
which, when viewed as a musical manuscript, depicts a cross.
And the Italian sculptor behind a controversial contemporary statue
of Pope John Paul II recently unveiled in Rome, Oliviero Rainaldi, will
also produce a new work for the occasion.
The event will run until September 4.
Those artworks being displayed
will be exhibited at the atrium of the Paul VI Audience Hall in the
Vatican. Opening hours are Monday to Saturday, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Pope Benedict was ordained to the priesthood, along with his brother Georg, in the Bavarian town of Freising on June 29, 1951.