Showing posts with label Archbishop Conti. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Archbishop Conti. Show all posts

Friday, January 23, 2015

Historians Organize Petition to Inter Richard III with Catholic Rites

Edit:  Why not the Sarum Rite?  We were one of the first, if not the first, to suggest that a Catholic Bishop say the Sarum Rite to reinter Richard III. Archbishop Conti is familiar with the Sarum Rite.

Petition is organised by historians whose efforts led to the discovery of the king's remains
Three thousand people have signed a petition calling for Richard III to be given a Catholic burial.
The petition, addressed to Cardinal Vincent Nichols, the Archbishop of Westminster, is being organised by the historians whose efforts led to the king’s remains being found under a car park in Leicester.
Under present plans Richard III, who died in the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, before the Reformation, will be buried at the Anglican cathedral in Leicester on March 26.
But Philippa Langley, leader of the Looking for Richard project, said the burial should take into account Richard III’s Catholic faith.
She said: “It seems this former king and head of state is to be treated as a scientific specimen right up to and including the point at which he is laid in his coffin.”
Dr John Ashdown-Hill, a historian who worked to identify the bones, has also called for a Catholic burial, saying: “There is a lot of evidence that Richard III had a very serious personal faith. If Richard III had not have died, maybe the Anglican church would never have existed.”
However, a joint statement by Leicester Cathedral and the Catholic Diocese of Nottingham said these concerns were “fundamentally misplaced”.
The statement said: “There is no requirement in the Catholic tradition for prayers to be said at the coffining of human remains, including those of a monarch. The arrangements agreed between the university and the cathedral have the full support of the Catholic Church.”
Ecumenical services will surround the event, with Cardinal Nichols preaching a service of compline on the day the king’s remains are received into the cathedral.
The cardinal will also celebrate a Requiem Mass the next day at a nearby Catholic parish.

Link to Catholic Herald...

Link to Petition....

Link to Ashdown-Hill's page on Richard III....

Wednesday, December 2, 2009

Glasgow's Archbishop criticizes Modern Art

Modern art is paganised and increasingly reflects a culture of death, Archbishop Mario Conti of Glasgow has said.

He was speaking a day after the Pope met more than 250 artists at the Sistine Chapel in Rome, urging them to embark on a "quest for beauty".

Archbishop Conti said in his homily at a Mass for artists in Glasgow that a lot of modern art was "incoherent and dispiriting".

He said: "If we can legitimately speak of a culture of death, much art reflects it: the body is defaced; the marital act prostituted; gender dissembled."

In particular he cited a play portraying Jesus as a transsexual, called Jesus, Queen of Heaven, and an exhibition displaying a Bible with abuse written on it. He has said it was "disgraceful" that both events received public funding.

He compared the offence they caused to Christians to the apparent offence given to a Finnish woman by the display of crucifixes in Italian classrooms - a complaint upheld by the European Court of Human Rights.

Archbishop Conti said the image of the crucified Christ was deemed offensive because it had become a challenge to secular society.

He quoted an editorial in L'Osservatore Romano which predicted a time when public places were stripped of religious symbols "for fear of offending others' sensibilities".

In Europe, he said, "the very foundations of our Christian civilisation are being disturbed", and modern art, as an expression of culture, reflected that.

The archbishop concluded his homily by urging Christian artists to use their work to bear witness to Christ, "and so countering all that obscures his beauty".

His appeal closely echoed that of Pope Benedict XVI in his meeting with 262 leading arts figures in the Sistine Chapel on Saturday.

Guests, who included artist Anish Kapoor, composer Ennio Morricone and Gomorra director Matteo Garrone - though not U2 singer Bono, who was invited but could not attend - sat underneath Michelangelo's Last Judgment and heard a choir sing music by Palestrina.

Pope Benedict told them that they had a "great responsibility to communicate beauty".

True beauty, he said, forced people to encounter reality and pointed them to the mystery of existence and, ultimately, to God.

The Pope appropriated the language of modern art criticism, saying beauty "gives man a healthy 'shock', it draws him out of himself, wrenches him away from resignation and from being content with the humdrum". He said it may even make the onlooker suffer, "piercing him like a dart".

He then distinguished between superficial beauty, which "rekindles desire, the will to power, to possess", and true beauty, which "unlocks the yearning of the human heart, the profound desire to know, to love, to go towards the other, to reach for the beyond". He said: "If we acknowledge that beauty touches us intimately, that it wounds us, that it opens our eyes, then we rediscover the joy of seeing, of being able to grasp the profound meaning of our existence, the mystery of which we are part."

The Pope said that beauty, whether in nature or in art, by pointing beyond ourselves, and "bringing us face to face with the abyss of infinity, can become a path towards the transcendent, towards the ultimate mystery, towards God".

The Pope urged artists to "enter into dialogue with believers". He said that faith "takes nothing from your genius or your art. On the contrary, it exalts them and nourishes them".

Zaha Hadid, an Iraqi-born architect, said afterwards that the audience "was quite an emotional experience". The American architect Daniel Libeskind described it as an "amazing step". Bill Viola, an American video artist, told the New York Times that artists had struggled for centuries "walking that fine line between creative freedom, between bending the rules" and breaking them. But he said the audience had "real potential for something interesting".

Archbishop Gianfranco Ravasi, director of the Pontifical Council for Culture, organised the event. He has suggested that the Vatican should have its own pavilion at the next Venice Biennale art exhibition in 2011 as well as at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

Link to article...