Cardinal Suhard celebrates a Pontifical Midnight Mass at his
Cathedral of Our Lady of Paris (Notre-Dame de Paris), Christmas 1948
Cathedral of Our Lady of Paris (Notre-Dame de Paris), Christmas 1948
[First televised Mass - Source: Institut national de l'audiovisuel, France]
The work of art is the fruit of human creativity, which questions the visible reality, trying to discover its deep meaning and to communicate it through the language of shapes, colours, sounds. ...
One example of this is when we visit a Gothic cathedral; we are enraptured by the vertical lines that shoot up towards the sky and draw our eyes and our spirits upwards, while at the same time, we feel small, and yet eager for fullness ... Or when we enter a Romanesque church: we are spontaneously invited to recollection and prayer. We feel as if the faith of generations were enclosed in these splendid buildings. Or, when we hear a piece of sacred music that vibrates the strings of our heart, our soul expands and helped to turn to God. A concert of music by Johann Sebastian Bach, in Munich, directed by Leonard Bernstein, again comes to my mind. After the last piece of music, one of the Cantate, I felt, not by reasoning, but in my heart, that what I heard had conveyed something of the faith of the great composer to me and pressed me to praise and thank the Lord ...
But how many times have paintings or frescoes, the fruit of the faith of the artist, in their forms, their colours, in their light, encouraged us to direct our thoughts to God and nourish in us the desire to draw from the source of all beauty. What a great artist, Marc Chagall, wrote remains true, that for centuries painters have dipped their paintbrush in that coloured alphabet that is the Bible. How many times, then can artistic expressions be occasions to remind us of God, to help our prayer or for the conversion of the heart! Paul Claudel, a poet, playwright, and French diplomat, in the Basilica of Notre Dame in Paris, in 1886, while he was listening to the singing of the Magnificat at Christmas Mass, felt God's presence. He had not entered the church for reasons of faith, but to in search of arguments against Christians, and instead the grace of God worked in his heart.
Benedict XVI
General Audience [transl. Asianews]
August 31, 2011
[Note: this passage of the life of Paul Claudel is quite famous; one cannot be sure it would have happened in quite the same way if a man of his same sensibility were to visit Notre-Dame de Paris one century later, in 1986... We had some of his words posted here in Rorate in 2010: the traditional Roman Liturgy was an essential part of his conversion.]
