Pope Francis says "I urge you to be singers of harmony between peoples...Our humanity is shaken by violence of all kinds, by wars..." FULL TEXT to Artists
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This morning the Holy Father Francis received the Delegation of the "La Diaconie de la Beauté" Movement in audience and delivered the speech reported below:
Speech by the Holy Father
Dear friends,
I meet you again on the occasion of your Symposium in Rome, and I rejoice with you on the tenth anniversary of these "Festivals" that you organize every year. I thank Monsignor Le Gall for his dedication to this association.
I would like to reflect briefly on the three dimensions that characterize it: spiritual, eventful and residential.
The first dimension is the spiritual one. Your vocation is to help artists create a bridge between heaven and earth. You want to awaken in them the search for truth, whether they are musicians, poets or singers, painters, architects or directors, sculptors, actors or dancers or anything else. Because beauty invites us to a different way of being in the world. It's about contemplation. In fact, «beauty makes us feel that life is oriented towards fullness. In true beauty we thus begin to feel nostalgia for God" (Speech to artists, 23 June 2023). Believing in God can only encourage the creature to overcome itself, to project itself into divine life through artistic inspiration.
The second dimension – with a Frenchism in the word – we call eventual. The Diaconia della Bellezza association helps artists to renew a fruitful dialogue with the Church, through meetings, shows, concerts and performances. It is a way for you to make the Church's closeness visible to artists by entering into dialogue with their culture and their lives, whether they are believers or not.
And the third dimension is the residential one. Thanks to your fruitful apostolate, your work multiplies with the creation of artists' houses around the world. The life of an artist is often marked by loneliness, sometimes by depression and great internal suffering. Your challenge is to bring out the beauty that is hidden in him or her, so that he or she in turn becomes an apostle of this beauty that generates hope and a thirst for happiness. A mission that contributes to enhancing the dignity of the artist who does not feel rejected, misunderstood, marginalized and excluded. Get on with this!
Brothers and sisters, I urge you to be singers of harmony between peoples, singers of harmony between cultures and religions. Our humanity is shaken by violence of all kinds, by wars, by social crises. In this context, we need men and women capable of making us dream of a different world, a beautiful world. Make people dream, so that they aspire to a life to the full!
Furthermore, today it is urgent for us to recreate harmony between man and the environment. The great climate crises require us to review our habits and behaviors. And art is a very powerful means of conveying the message of the beauty of nature. In fact, «taking care of the world that surrounds us and supports us means taking care of ourselves. But we need to constitute ourselves as an "us" that lives in the common home" (Enc. Fratelli tutti, 17). Let's ask ourselves: what is our contribution to building a harmonious world? It is a question that we must ask ourselves, each of us. The culture of beauty always gets us moving again. Encountering the beauty of God allows us to start again, to start again, on the path towards more human and more fraternal societies.
Dear friends, I thank you and wish you all the best for your "diaconia". I bless you from the bottom of my heart. And I ask you to please pray for me.
Speech by the Holy Father
Dear friends,
I meet you again on the occasion of your Symposium in Rome, and I rejoice with you on the tenth anniversary of these "Festivals" that you organize every year. I thank Monsignor Le Gall for his dedication to this association.
I would like to reflect briefly on the three dimensions that characterize it: spiritual, eventful and residential.
The first dimension is the spiritual one. Your vocation is to help artists create a bridge between heaven and earth. You want to awaken in them the search for truth, whether they are musicians, poets or singers, painters, architects or directors, sculptors, actors or dancers or anything else. Because beauty invites us to a different way of being in the world. It's about contemplation. In fact, «beauty makes us feel that life is oriented towards fullness. In true beauty we thus begin to feel nostalgia for God" (Speech to artists, 23 June 2023). Believing in God can only encourage the creature to overcome itself, to project itself into divine life through artistic inspiration.
The second dimension – with a Frenchism in the word – we call eventual. The Diaconia della Bellezza association helps artists to renew a fruitful dialogue with the Church, through meetings, shows, concerts and performances. It is a way for you to make the Church's closeness visible to artists by entering into dialogue with their culture and their lives, whether they are believers or not.
And the third dimension is the residential one. Thanks to your fruitful apostolate, your work multiplies with the creation of artists' houses around the world. The life of an artist is often marked by loneliness, sometimes by depression and great internal suffering. Your challenge is to bring out the beauty that is hidden in him or her, so that he or she in turn becomes an apostle of this beauty that generates hope and a thirst for happiness. A mission that contributes to enhancing the dignity of the artist who does not feel rejected, misunderstood, marginalized and excluded. Get on with this!
Brothers and sisters, I urge you to be singers of harmony between peoples, singers of harmony between cultures and religions. Our humanity is shaken by violence of all kinds, by wars, by social crises. In this context, we need men and women capable of making us dream of a different world, a beautiful world. Make people dream, so that they aspire to a life to the full!
Furthermore, today it is urgent for us to recreate harmony between man and the environment. The great climate crises require us to review our habits and behaviors. And art is a very powerful means of conveying the message of the beauty of nature. In fact, «taking care of the world that surrounds us and supports us means taking care of ourselves. But we need to constitute ourselves as an "us" that lives in the common home" (Enc. Fratelli tutti, 17). Let's ask ourselves: what is our contribution to building a harmonious world? It is a question that we must ask ourselves, each of us. The culture of beauty always gets us moving again. Encountering the beauty of God allows us to start again, to start again, on the path towards more human and more fraternal societies.
Dear friends, I thank you and wish you all the best for your "diaconia". I bless you from the bottom of my heart. And I ask you to please pray for me.
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