Pope Benedict XVI yesterday met with over two hundred artists in the Vatican's Sistine Chapel including architects, filmmakers and musicians and told the assembled guests to be "fully conscious of your great responsibility to communicate beauty."
Welcoming the 260 artists, seventy of whom had travelled from abroad, in the "sanctuary of faith and human creativity," the Pope told them, "Faith takes nothing away from your genius or your art: on the contrary, it exalts them and nourishes them."
He urged non-believers to "enter into dialogue with believers, with those who, like yourselves, consider that they are pilgrims in this world and in history towards infinite beauty."
The Pontiff posed the question: "What is capable of restoring enthusiasm and confidence, what can encourage the human spirit to rediscover its path, to raise its eyes to the horizon, to dream of a life worthy of its vocation - if not beauty?"
The meeting comes 45 years after a similar initiative by Pope Paul VI, who apologised for the Church's attitude towards artists.
It also follows Pope John Paul II’s letter to artists in 1999 in which he discussed the vocation of the artist, how art and the Word intersect and the use of art in worship.
