Mass to conclude the Carnivale Christi Festival

Celebrated by Archbishop Denis Hart
at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, Melbourne,
on Friday, 1st October, 2004, at 8.00pm

Introduction

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

As we come to the end of a remarkable Festival of music, drama, painting and sculpture, we celebrate the feast of a young woman, who captivated the world by her ‘little way of love’.

Saint Teresa of the Child Jesus died at the tender age of twenty-four and, although a contemplative, is regarded as one of the Church’s greatest missionaries, because of her way of love, which has captured the minds and hearts of succeeding generations. Her capacity for truth, beauty and authenticity was found in the vows she professed of poverty, chastity and obedience. Her search for holiness reflects the beauty of the people and the things that God has made.

This Festival, focusing as it does on truth and beauty, is a challenge to us to live a life that is authentic, that respects and uses the gifts that God has given us.

Let us call to mind our sins.

Homily

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

Throughout this wonderful week we have come to know that the glimpses of beauty in sculpture, painting, drama and music have helped us to be inserted in two thousand years of Catholic tradition and the contribution which our faith continues to make to the world.

Truth and authenticity linked with beauty lead us on to love. It was Saint John who said, “He who loves is born of God and knows God.” With the young, attractive personality of Saint Teresa we see how the saints love God. They know him and from their loving knowledge they teach us. Pope John Paul wrote in 1999:

“Every genuine artistic intuition goes beyond what the senses perceive and, reaching beneath reality’s surface, strives to interpret its hidden mystery. The intuition itself springs from the depths of the human soul, where the desire to give meaning into one’s own life is joined by the fleeting vision of beauty and of the mysterious unity of things. All artists experience the unbridgeable gap which lies between the work of their hands, however successful it may be, and the dazzling perfection of the beauty glimpsed in the ardour of the creative moment: what they manage to express in their painting, their sculpting, their music, their creating is no more than a glimmer of the splendour which flared for a moment before the eyes of their spirit.”

( John Paul II, Letter to Artists, No. 6)

Artistic beauty does not find this strange. It gives us a glimpse of the abyss of light, which has its original wellspring in God and this can leave the spirit overwhelmed so that it can only stammer in reply. Your reflections this week on Christian writers and artists are a clear indication of how people have sought to express the beauty in God’s created universe and themselves to reach out to God. Month by month and year by year this reflection is an important service which is rendered to our society and to creation.

We all know that there is a tendency in society, as in art, to try and prove an existence that has no need of God. Yet in our long history we know that God calls people to recognise that they are the crown of creation and by the intelligent service to beauty, truth and witness which we give, particularly through art, sculpture, literature and music, we can express the search for holiness, which is integral to all human beings and also to the contribution which we Catholics make to society.

Our Lord’s own call to holiness is, “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.” ( Matthew 5.48 ) This is further continued by the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council, who said, “all are called to sanctity as a fundamental requirement arising from the mystery of the Church, which Christ founded.”

The beauty that we see had its origin in medieval times, in the pictures with which our churches were adorned and the music which led us to worship God, so that we would have clear, human concepts, adequate though very small in comparison to the greatness of God, which would lead us on to him. Again in our own time, Pope John Paul II stresses that it is a personal relationship with Christ and a search for holiness, which is the instrument and preparation of our launching out into the deep of making our contribution to our society.

Carnivale Christi invites us to reflect on the Christian experience of art, literature and music and to see it as a filter through which the whole of life is to be examined in a way which is authentic and true.

The medieval Franciscan, Brother John of Fiesole, was the simplest of men, kindly and modest, a friend of the poor, who sought no dignity and had no care but to escape hell and to get closer to paradise. He believed that one who does the work of Christ must always cling to Christ and never took up his brush without first kneeling to pray and then he wept as he painted the crucified.

Fra Angelico depicts holiness, loving devotion to the passion, humility, purity and compassion for the poor with stunning authenticity because his own life radiated all these beautiful virtues.

Vassari even said, “the saints Fra Angelico painted have more the air and likeness of saints than those of anyone else”. From the fourteenth century, to the renewal of the Church in Fra Angelico’s time, we have a challenge that each of us must take up through our appreciation of beauty, to encounter God face to face and to share the wonders of his creation and its purpose.

Pope John Paul wishes for artists what I pray for you, that in Jesus you will have an especially intense experience of creative inspiration. May the knowledge of beauty, which you pass on to generations still to come, be such that it will stir them to wonder. Faced with the sacredness of life and of the human person and before the marvels of the universe, wonder is the only appropriate response.

My friends, may you be guided by the mystery of the Risen Christ and may Mary, who is all-beautiful, portrayed by countless artists, be to you as it was to Dante, “the joy in the eyes of all the other saints”. ( Dante, Paradiso XXXI, 134-5 )

+ Denis J. Hart,
Archbishop of Melbourne.