Engagement with culture must be central to Catholic life, cardinal says

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Catholics cannot confine their faith to the liturgy but must fully engage and dialogue with the culture that surrounds them, said the cardinal responsible for the church’s engagement with the world of culture.

“We cannot close the Christian experience in a kind of parenthesis that is only the liturgy,” Cardinal José Tolentino de Mendonça, prefect of the Dicastery for Culture and Education, told Catholic News Service Feb. 14. “Culture cannot be at the margins of faith. We must live in culture, accompany it, inhabit it, seeking to build a unity with what we believe.”

Ahead of the Jubilee for Artists and the World of Culture, the cardinal told CNS that Catholics can often attend Mass on Sunday and then return to consuming secular culture in their ordinary lives “without building a bond between them” or developing “a unity of all aspects of life.”

“But the important thing is that Christianity and Catholic culture help to form mature people who are not afraid of life, who are capable of being serene judges, who are capable of creating dialogue,” he said.

The Jubilee for Artists and the World of Culture was scheduled to take place at the Vatican Feb. 15-18. However, Pope Francis’ meeting with artists and other figures from the cultural realm at the Vatican and his visit the Cinecittà movie studios in Rome were canceled when he was admitted to the hospital Feb. 14 with bronchitis.

Cardinal Tolentino de Mendonça, an artist in his own right who has published more than a dozen collections of poetry, was scheduled to celebrate Mass for the Jubilee in St. Peter’s Basilica Feb. 16.

Also included in the Jubilee schedule is a meeting of directors from some of the world’s most prominent museums, including the Louvre in Paris and the National Gallery in Washington, to reflect on the promotion and transmission of religious and artistic heritage. The Jubilee is expected to bring artists, writers, musicians and cultural figures from more than 100 countries to the Vatican.

Despite having a close relationship with artists for hundreds of years, for much of the modern period there has been a “reciprocal mistrust” between the world of arts and culture and the Catholic Church, he said. Many artists feared the church wanted to impose rigid standards while the many in the church wanted to distance themselves from artists producing work that could be seen as overly provocative.

That changed, he said, when St. Paul VI met with artists in the Sistine Chapel at the close of the Second Vatican Council in 1965 and, as pope, told them: “The church needs you and turns to you.”

During the Holy Year 2000 St. John Paul II called for a revival of the “fruitful alliance” between the church and art, and Pope Francis met with artists in the Sistine Chapel in 2023 to mark the 50th anniversary of the inauguration of the contemporary art section in the Vatican Museums.

The cardinal emphasized that the ongoing relationship could result in new forms of spiritual and religious expression, but he warned against religious art becoming merely a museum relic admired only for its aesthetic value rather than as a living expression of faith.

“In modernity, the beauty of Christianity and its expressions are somewhat ‘the beauty of the dead,'” he said. “It is in the museum because it is not in life.”

However, “the word of God and the Christian experience must remain alive, must bring forth questions, must challenge people with a concrete experience of conversion and transformation,” he noted.

For this reason, the cardinal said, the Jubilee aims to reinforce the living dialogue between the church and artists, ensuring that faith and art continue to inspire and challenge each other in meaningful ways.

“Theology, just as philosophy, is fundamental, but it only reaches a certain point, which is silence, because after all of the words God remains a mystery. After all the explanations and all the theology that can be written, God remains as a question,” he said. “What is the human discipline that inhabits questions and silence? Art.”

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