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Has the Vatican abandoned beauty?
The Cathedral Church of the Holy and Undivided Trinity in the Cambridge-shire market town of Ely is one of the supreme achievements of European Gothic architecture. Its octagonal tower lifts the eye to a sumptuously restored wooden lantern from which Christ looks down in majesty.
Who on Earth thinks faith can be awakened by seeing a crucifix floating in urine?
On the last Friday in June, his gaze fell on a congregation worshipping him at Evensong. Two hours later, as the Times reported, the cathedral was filled with ‘a very different crowd: 800 people [wearing headphones] attending a 1990s-themed silent disco. They wore diamanté strappy heels and leather trousers, carried glow sticks, drank chardonnay, yelled the words to Robbie Williams hits and twerked in the nave to Beyoncé. Three DJs stood at the altar’. The Dean, the Very Revd Mark Bonney, said he hoped some ravers would return as worshippers.
Bless! Where would the Church of England be without the risible naivety of its cathedral chapters? In 2019, Norwich Cathedral installed a helter-skelter in the nave as part of its ‘mission to share the story of the Bible’. In the same year, Rochester converted its central aisle into a crazy golf course to help visitors ‘learn about faith’.
Please don’t think I’m engaging in papist point-scoring. Although the ‘rave in the nave’, helter-skelter and crazy golf course were hideous misjudgments, the gullible cathedral authorities meant well. I wouldn’t say the same about the Vatican’s recent engagement with popular culture.
In 1987, the American photographer Andres Serrano produced his most famous work. Its title is ‘Piss Christ’. The photograph shows a crucifix plunged into a glass tank of the artist’s own urine. Christie’s, no less, describes it as a ‘legendary photograph’ exploited by ‘right-wing conservative Christians to justify restrictions on government funding of subversive art’.
But not all Catholics find it offensive. On 23 June, Serrano was photographed bumping fists with a Catholic bishop who used his other hand to give him the thumbs up. The venue was the Sistine Chapel. The bishop was Pope Francis.
Serrano was one of 200 artists invited to the Sistine Chapel to celebrate the Vatican’s collection of contemporary art. Francis congratulated them on their understanding of ‘the richness of human existence’. Another guest was the veteran British filmmaker Ken Loach, who in 2009 had this to say about anti-Semitism: ‘If there has been a rise, I am not surprised. In fact, it is perfectly understandable because Israel feeds feelings of anti-Semitism.’ Indeed, it was ‘founded on ethnic cleansing’.
In 2021 Loach was expelled from the Labour party because he belonged to an organisation, Labour Against the Witch-hunt, accused of anti-Semitism. The Vatican is well aware of this, just as it knows every detail of the ‘Piss Christ’ controversy. To quote Bishop Paul Tighe, Secretary of the Dicastery for Culture and Education: ‘I think we all just have to work on the presumption of good faith of the artist [Serrano] who is trying to say something, challenge something, and may sometimes have to resort to strong measures to waken us up.’
Who on Earth thinks faith can be awakened by seeing a crucifix floating in urine? Since I’ve met Bishop Tighe, I think I can answer that one: an ambitious Irish church bureaucrat of the Bono generation who doesn’t hide his distaste for the traditional worship loved by his (and my) Irish ancestors.
I spoke to two influential figures about this gruesome gathering. The first was one of the Catholic Church’s most admired artists, whose conservative theology excluded him from the guest list. The other was a priest-academic in Rome. Both, unprompted, made the same point: this is fundamentally a war on the beauty of the Traditional Latin Mass.
The artist told me: ‘I have seen thriving young congregations banished to church basements because they are attracted to tradition. Any artist who identified with that heritage is persona non grata. But blatantly anti-Catholic material is celebrated.’
The priest described a spirit of panic in the Vatican. Pope Francis is in an iconoclastic mood. He has just appointed Cardinal-designate Victor Manuel Fernández as head of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith. Fernández is an intellectually undistinguished Argentinian with radical views on sexuality. He is best known for a poetic reflection on the spirituality of kissing entitled ‘Heal Me With Your Mouth’ that employs revolting imagery: ‘How was God so unmerciful as to give you that mouth… There is no one who resists it, you witch.’
If the Pope is happy to make the author of those words the Church’s head of doctrine, then you can see why he might welcome ‘transgressive’ artists. But the whole situation is bizarre. Francis’s own artistic tastes are cultivated and conservative. In his spare time, he listens to Furtwängler conducting Beethoven, Clara Haskil playing Mozart and Knappertsbusch’s Bayreuth Parsifal, a work with which he is obsessed. Yet he shows no desire to beautify the liturgy. The music at papal ceremonies is execrable – inferior in every way to that of my local parish church.
No one is arguing that the Catholic Church should draw inspiration only from conventionally pious artists. Serrano is, it should be said, a photographer of enormous gifts; Loach’s best work is masterly. What sticks in the throat is the Vatican’s recent insistence that only ‘transgressive’ leftist art can open our minds.
Bishops’ conferences have embraced cheap modernist art and infantile fonts as their preferred style; the Scottish Church’s cod-Celtic images and music are an embarrassing example. And, unlike the Church of England’s silent discos and crazy golf courses, the style is almost inescapable.
Unless, that is, you take refuge in the banned Latin Mass. Young Catholic friends of mine are retreating, willingly, to the basements and tiny chapels where they can experience ‘the Mass of the Ages’ and there are no dad-dancing bishops ordering them to applaud the spectacle of their Saviour floating in urine. One day, perhaps sooner than you think, they will reclaim the Church.
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