My term “engine of evangelization” might have created some confusion. Let me clarify.

God knows, the art world is mission territory. To be sure. But that is not the purpose of Vatican City’s pavilion at the Venice Biennale. No one proposes to proselytize the money changers with a lagoon view at the Hotel Danieli. The Vatican seeks to become a player on the contemporary art scene ostensibly to counter the wider, prevailing drift toward secularization. As Newsweek phrased it, the Vatican “hopes to revive its cultural side” with new interpretations of “tired spiritual art.” Put more candidly, the Vatican is making itself a supplicant, soliciting secular affirmation of the Christian vision from the proxy gods of our time.

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Bound together, they rose and left the stage.” width=”460″ height=”276″ /> Sky Piece to Jesus Christ (1965), Yoko Ono. Performed at Carnegie Hall, the piece consisted of members of the orchestra being wrapped in gauze as they played. As the wrapping thickened, the musicians could no longer play. Bound together, they rose and left the stage.

Going by Cardinal Ravasi’s words to journalist Kamila Kocialkowska in the New Statesman this past October, you too are the object of this aesthetic evangelization.  The cardinal is quite clear about it :

Today our problem is to get ordinary people to welcome this type of art. We need to help them to understand that art is part of the spirit.

It would be nice to think that this is a misquote, a cobbling together of the cardinal’s comments in a shallow approximation of his meaning. Unhappily, we are left with what appeared in print. As is, it bespeaks wondrous condescension toward his intended audience, those still in the pew no less than those long gone. In the light of the gospels, and under the sign of original sin, cardinals are ordinary people,too. Just like the rest of us. More to the point, there are more pressing problems in our post-Christian era (e.
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g. the implacable slouch toward barbarisms large and small) than conversion in taste to contemporary art.

Yes, we can say art is part of the spirit. But which one? The spirit of the age? Of Screwtape, Pangloss, Moloch?

An ear for cant remains a more critical—and creative—aid to the kingdom than an eye for products of the international art trade. Art is thoroughly of this world. It is not revelation, as litanies of appreciation pretend. It can oblige any purpose, soothe any heart, demonic or blessed. And the spectrum of man’s creativity is hardly exhausted in the arts.

Romano Guardini’s prescience in The End of the Modern World, written a full six decades ago , has application here:

The cultural deposit preserved by the Church thus far will not be able to endure against the general decay of tradition.

It is worth considering to what extent the Vatican’s Venice caper, simultaneously pious and market driven, reveals the smiling face of materialism in our time. There is high risk that it will spread belief in nothing more compelling than contemporary art.