@PONTIFEXCELLENT: On Art

The time Papa Frank quoted Dostoyevsky…

Last night in Rome, the Moscow Synodal Choir gave a concert in the Papal Basilica of St. Mary Major (the pontiff’s favorite – it’s the first he visited the morning after he was elected back in March). In Papa Frank’s message to the choir, read by Cardinal Leonardo Sandri, the Vatican’s prefect for the Congregation for Eastern Churches, he said, in part:

“‘Beauty will save the world’.” A quote from Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

The Pope continued: “Music, painting, sculpture, architecture is simply the beauty that unites us to grow in the faith which is celebrated, in prophetic hope and in witnessed charity”, he said. ““Looking back over the history of Christianity which spans thousands of years, we may observe that in spite of the separate historical events and different ways of understanding revelation, a deep unity has been maintained in art…art in all its forms, does not exist only for simple aesthetic enjoyment but because, through art the Church in every moment of history and in every culture, explains and interprets revelation for the good of the People of God. Art in the Church fundamentally exists for evangelization”.

“Today the Church can and must breathe with both lungs, the eastern lung and the western lung. Where we still do not completely do this, according to the measure of unity asked for by Jesus in the prayer to the Father, we can do this in many other ways.”

Like … say … art.