Our Catholic culture is so rich that Juventutem youths have no difficulty finding in it substantial help for the development of their human sensitivity, for their apostolate and for their moral edification.
As an example, "Italian Renaissance" is the latest volume in the "Art for Souls" series of CD-Roms on classical Catholic paintings (directed by the Ecclesiastical Assistant of Juventutem). Whereas this CD-Rom is available in English, two other volumes (so far available in French language only) present paintings by Georges de La Tour and Caravaggio. These CD-Roms were projected on a screen for the youths of Juventutem in workshops on Catholic culture.
Please visit the Art for Souls website for full description of the "Italian Renaissance, Art for Souls" CD-Rom (English language).
CD-Rom Foreword :
Letter from Cardinal Paul Poupard, President of the Pontifical Council of Culture
Dear Father de Malleray,
I have received the third volume of your “Art for souls” series of CD-Roms on Christian art and I thank you for it.
After Georges de La Tour and Caravaggio, you are now presenting three masterpieces from the Italian Renaissance : The Wedding of the Virgin by Raphaël, The Entombment by Michelangelo and Noli Me Tangere by Titian, as a form of three-fold meditation on the Body of Christ: before birth, after the Descent from the Cross, and on the morning of the Resurrection.
Current culture provides the men and women to-day with all the manifold elements of a cult of the body, portrayed as a “fleshless” ideal, where the mere outer appearance purports to gratify all possible desires. At the same time, television news unceasingly broadcasts images of mutilated bodies, of corpses hacked through in circumstances of hatred and terror and in an atmosphere of chaos and despair.
Your meditation on the body is in direct opposition to such a counter-culture. You present the works from the Renaissance because they insist on the material dimension of the body and express its supernatural vocation. Even when injured by pain and death, the flesh, as the Temple of the Spirit, retains the dignity of its supernatural vocation. As I wrote in Faith and Cultures (C.L.D., 2001, p.44): “The jaded anthropocentrism of today’s culture was unthinkable [during the Renaissance]. Man had a place in the universe which God had reserved for him out of love, the first in the order of creation! Humanly speaking, such an anthropology bestows dignity and is a source of peace”.
With my encouragements for this magnificent initiative to evangelise through culture and beauty,
Yours devotedly in Our Lord,
PAUL CARDINAL POUPARD.
Vatican City, 1st June 2004
