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POPE-ACADEMIES Nov-25-2008 (430 words) xxxi
Superficial beauty is fleeting, fails to inspire, pope says
By Cindy Wooden
Catholic News Service
VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Beauty that is only skin deep cannot last, cannot lead people to seek what is really true and good and cannot respond to the human longing for something that inspires genuine awe, Pope Benedict XVI said.
In a message to the joint session of the pontifical academies Nov. 25, Pope Benedict said the lives of individual Christians as well as the work of Christian artists, writers and poets should help people see that authentic truth, beauty and goodness are always intertwined.
The joint session of the pontifical academies, organized this year by the academy of fine arts and letters, focused on the relationship between "esthetics and ethics."
During the meeting Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, Vatican secretary of state, presented the academy's annual prize to Daniele Piccini, a 36-year-old poet and literary critic.
In his message, Pope Benedict said the prize was meant to identify new talent in various fields of scholarship and "encourage the commitment of young scholars, artists and institutions to dedicating their activity to the promotion of Christian humanism."
Pontifical medals were awarded to Giulio Catelli, a young painter, and to the Stauros Italian Foundation, which has opened a museum of contemporary sacred art in San Gabriele, Italy.
Pope Benedict's message said, "The necessity and urgency of a renewed dialogue between esthetics and ethics, among beauty, truth and goodness, comes up not only in contemporary cultural and artistic debates, but also in daily life."
When beauty is understood only as an exterior reality, "as an appearance to be pursued at all costs," then truth and goodness are left behind, he said.
Pope Benedict quoted the Gospel of Matthew, which urges believers to let their lights shine before all so that "they may see your good deeds and glorify your heavenly father."
In the passage, the pope said, the original Greek term translated as "good deeds" literally means "beautiful and good" at the same time.
"Our witness, therefore, must nourish itself with this beauty; our proclamation of the Gospel must be received as something beautiful and new. For this to happen, it is necessary to know how to communicate with the language of images and symbols," the pope said.
Every Christian action and every Christian work, he said, must allow "the beauty of the love of God" to shine through "in order to reach our contemporaries who often are distracted and absorbed by a cultural climate that does not always accept beauty in full harmony with the truth and goodness, but who always desire and yearn for a beauty that is authentic, not superficial and fleeting."
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