Pope Francis called on artists on Friday to interpret the “silent cry” of the poor during a meeting with 200 authors from around the world, including seven Portuguese, in Vatican City.
“Don’t forget the poor, who are Christ’s favorites, in all the ways people are poor today. The poor also need art and beauty,” Francisco said.
The request was made at the end of a meeting in the Sistine Chapel in which the Portuguese artists Pedro Abrunhosa, Joana Vasconcelos, Vhils, Rui Chafes, José Luís Peixoto, Gonçalo M. Tavares and Marta Braga Rodrigues participated.
The Pope said that many poor people “experience very harsh forms of deprivation of life”, for which they need art even more.
“Normally they do not have a voice and you can be the interpreters of their silent cry,” he said, quoted by the Spanish news agency EFE.
Francisco invited artists to flee from “false cosmetic beauty”, which he said “is often an accomplice to economic mechanisms that generate inequalities.”
Still, he thanked the artists for being “also sentinels of the true religious sense, sometimes trivialized or commercialized.”
“I feel that you are allies in so many things that are dear to me, such as the defense of human life, social justice for the little ones, care for the common home, the feeling that we are all brothers,” he said. .
The head of the Catholic Church defended that art does not anesthetize consciences and that artists usually remember that there is not always light when they explore the underworld of the human condition.
“Help us to glimpse the light, the beauty that saves,” he asked.
At a time he described as “an era of ideological colonization by the media and lacerating conflicts,” Francis also called on artists to cultivate “the principle of harmony.”
The meeting with painters, sculptors, architects, writers, poets, musicians, directors and actors marked the 50th anniversary of the inauguration of the Collection of Modern and Contemporary Art of the Vatican Museums.
The first meeting of this type dates back to 1964, when Paulo Vi called for a renewed friendship between the Church and artists.
In addition to the Portuguese, the Brazilian singer Caetano Veloso and the Angolan Pulo Flores, the Spanish writer Javier Cercas, the Indo-British artist Anish Kapoor, the Italian pianist Ludovico Einaudi and the North American conductor Abel Ferrara, among others, participated.
Source: TSF
