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The very illustration for the brochure of the Met exhibit betrays a completely secular view of what the show is about. Detail of an evening ensemble by John Galiano for Dior,
2000-2001 collection, taking off from a papal ensemble complete with miter.
All the photos I've seen so far of the 'celebrity' appearances at the opening night for the Metropolitan Museum of Art's new exhibit fancifully called ‘Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination’ are appallingly atrocious - not just for the utter lack of taste in what most of them chose to wear, but in the obvious delight of those whose garments represented the ugliest, most outre spoofs of Catholic symbols one can think of despite the gold and gems, tulle and taffetta and lace, out of which the gowns were confected...
The exhibit being a project of the Met's Costume Institute, not surprisingly the bulk of it appears to be Catholic-'inspired' creations by name dress designers of the past several decades. Which, of course, tends to overshadow the actual historical pieces lent by the Vatican to curator Andrew Bolton, who made 12 trips to sell his idea and then to choose the 42 items from the Vatican Sacristy that would provide the 'actual' substantiation for his theme.
Bolton is quoted as saying: "The heart of Catholicism is a storytelling tradition, so I wanted the show to unravel a series of stories and conversations, which to me is part of the Catholic imagination. It is meant to stimulate discussion. It is not meant to resolve thousands of years of Catholicism. But it is meant to show an aspect of the Catholic faith which is all about extraordinary beauty" and goes on to quote Benedict XVI about how the way of beauty could be, for many, a starting path for religion. The artifacts Bolton chose may do that, but not, it seems, the creations that are supposedly Catholic-'inspired'.
Bolton's Vatican picks ranged from a papal tiara with 19,000 gems, of which 18,000 are believed to be diamonds, to something as simple and prosaic as a pair of red shoes that belonged to John Paul II (who is represented in the exhibit with papal garb of cape, white cassock and zucchetto, plus the shoes.) A fashion commentator said of the shoes that they "helped earn him the nickname 'the Prada Pope'", in which I think she got her popes mixed up. No one ever made a big deal out of papal red shoes until the secular press chose to use it as a mocking symbol for Benedict XVI, about whom they soon established the myth that his red shoes were custom-made by Prada, a whopper that also cleverly embodied the idea of the now-famous saying that 'the devil wears Prada'.
Left, Pius IX dalmatic, 1845-1861; right, papal red shoes that belonged to St. John Paul II [that's a Class I relic on exhibit!]
Left to right: the exhibit catalog; papal tiara of Pius IX, 1854; chasuble of Pius XI, 1926.
About a chasuble of Pius IX, which took 15 women 16 years to embroider, Bolton said, "It's better than anything you see in the Lesage atelier in Paris. It's just extraordinary. I think that one's faith, no matter what faith you adhere to, generates an extraordinary creativity. That is what I would love people to come away with. It's not always Catholic. To reflect on their own faith and whether that has impacted their own creative development and whether that generates or fuels one's creative development. I find that really fascinating — how faith has created such extraordinary works of art, whatever it is."
Anyway, here are two commentaries on the show...
Make Catholicism weird again
May 8, 2018
In 1904, during a debate in France over the anticlerical government’s takeover of church property, a young Marcel Proust wrote an essay for Le Figaro inviting readers to imagine a future in which the Catholic Church vanished completely from his country’s memory, leaving only the bones of French cathedrals as its monuments.
Then he further imagined the cultured elites of some future France rediscovering the texts and chants and rubrics of Catholic liturgy, and in a spasm of enraptured aestheticism, restoring the cathedrals and training actors to recreate the Tridentine Rite Mass.
In his vision, like devotees of Wagner making pilgrimage, “caravans of swells make their way to … Amiens, Chartres, Bourges, Laon, Rheims, Rouen, Paris,” and inside France’s Gothic churches, “they experience the feeling they once sought in Bayreuth … enjoying a work of art in the very setting that had been built for it.”
But of course the recreated Catholic liturgy and revived Catholic aesthetic would never be the real thing; the actors might know their roles, and the incense might waft thick, but attendees could “only ever be curious dilettantes; try as they might, the soul of times past does not dwell within them.”
Proust’s essay, lately translated by Catholic traditionalists, came to mind while watching the beautiful and blasphemous spectacle at the Met Gala on Monday night, where a parade of stars and fashionistas swanned about in costumes inspired by the aesthetics of Catholicism, while a wide variety of genuinely Catholic articles, from vestments to tiaras, were displayed in a Met exhibit titled “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination.”
Like Proust’s “caravans of swells” attending liturgical performances, the attendees at the Met were paying a cultural homage to the aesthetic riches of the Roman Church — when, of course, they weren’t sexing them up for shock value. But the spectacle was not exactly Proust’s prophecy come to life, because unlike in his thought experiment, Catholicism today remains a living faith — weakened but hardly gone, with as complicated a relationship to its own traditions as any lapsed-Catholic museum curator or celebrity dressing up as the Maid of Orleans.
This complication is apparent in the Catholic response to the Met Gala itself, which consisted of an institutional blessing for the spectacle — not just Cardinal Timothy Dolan opening the museum exhibit, but the Sistine Chapel Choir performing for the swells and starlets in the evening — followed by an angry Catholic social-media backlash against the evening’s various impieties. When a living faith gets treated like a museum piece, it’s hard for its adherents to know whether to treat the moment as an opportunity for outreach or for outrage.
But the complexity runs much deeper, because to the extent that part of the Proustian prophecy has come true, to the extent that elements of the Catholic tradition have turned into archaic curiosities to be rediscovered by aesthetes and donned lewdly by Rihanna, the choices made by the church’s own leaders have played as much of a role as the anticlericalism of Proust’s era.
It was the church’s own leadership that decided, in the years following the Second Vatican Council, that the attachment to the church as culture had become an impediment to the mission of preaching the gospel in the modern world.
It was the leadership that embraced a different approach, in which Catholic Christianity would seek to enter more fully into modern culture, adopting its styles and habits — modernist and even brutalist church architecture, casual dress, guitar music, a general suburban and Protestant affect, etc. — in order to effectively transform it from within.
It was the leadership that decided that much of what Proust depicted as Catholicism’s cultural glory — the old Mass above all, but also a host of customs and costumes and rituals — needed to be retired in order to reach people in a more disenchanted age.
This idea was hardly absurd in theory; from Roman Empire days through missionary efforts, Christianity had often advanced through inculturation, importing a consistent religious message into varying cultural forms.
But Catholicism’s attempt to do the same with modern culture since the 1960s has largely seemed to fail. The secular culture welcomed the church’s Protestantization and demystification and even secularization, praised the bishops and theologians who pursued it, and then simply pocketed the concessions and ignored the religious ideas those concessions were supposed to advance. Meanwhile, that same secular world maintained a consistent fascination, from “The Exorcist” down to, well, the Met Gala, with all the weirder parts of Catholicism that were supposedly a stumbling block to modernity’s conversion.
This failure, and how exactly Catholics should interpret it, helps frame the debates roiling the church in the age of Pope Francis. One theory is that the evidence of the last 50 years suggests that modern culture is inherently anti-religious or anti-Catholic in some abiding way, which means the attempt to adopt its cultural forms and “accompany” its denizens will inevitably end in dissolution for the church itself.
Thus the only plausible approach for Catholicism is to offer itself, not as a chaplaincy within modern liberalism, but as a full alternative culture in its own right — one that reclaims the inheritance on display at the Met, glories in its own weirdness and supernaturalism, and spurns both accommodations and entangling alliances (including the ones that conservative Catholics have forged with libertarian-inflected right-wing political movements).
The other view is that in fact inculturation has not gone far enough, that the church may have changed its liturgy and costumes, but it’s still held back by its abstract dogmas and arid legalisms, and that one final great leap into modernity, a renewed commitment to accompaniment and understanding and adaptation, is necessary for the church to gain what it sought when it began its great demystification project 50 years ago.
As pontiff, Francis has been on both sides of these debates. The radicalism of his economic and ecological vision, often portrayed as simply liberal, actually represents a kind of left-leaning pessimism that arguably points backward to the strenuous critiques of modernity issued by 19th-century popes. [Whoa!!!! Really???]
And at times this radicalism has been matched by his willingness to join conservative members of his flock in culture war — as recently in the Alfie Evans case in England, where the pope ended up in a public conflict with the more culturally accommodating sort of Catholic over whether to defer to medical professionals and deprive a brain-damaged toddler of oxygen because his life was judged no longer worth sustaining. [I thought Bergoglio's belated me-too-ism on the Alfie Evans case was, in many ways, an attempt to make up for his, in effect, couldn't-care-less attitude in the Charlie Gard story. Maybe the next time we have a similar story, I propose he immediately declare the ailing baby and its parents Vatican citizens, board a special papal flight to wherever the ailing baby is, visit him at the hospital, then walk out back to his car with the baby in his arms and the parents following, and on to the papal plane back to Rome! Do you think that will earn him the Nobel Peace Prize from the anonymous Oslo judges, or would such a counter-cultural attack earn him their lasting disapproval and forever bar him from Nobel consideration? ]
But only at times; on many other fronts, the Francis era has been a springtime for accommodation and inculturation, and especially for the secularizing and Protestantizing German Catholicism that helped forge the original revolution of the 1960s, and whose leaders believe that only further modernization can refill their empty churches.
Under German influence, but with the pope’s implicit blessing, Catholic rules on divorce and now perhaps intercommunion may be joining the Latin Mass and meatless Fridays on the altar of sacrifices to the culture of the modern world.
Meanwhile in the case of the opulent style of Catholic fashion on display at the Met Gala, it is very clear where Francis stands. As Tara Isabella Burton points out in an astute piece for Vox, it’s the pope’s traditionalist adversaries who are more likely to don the sort of “heavenly” garb being feted and imitated at the Met — while from his own simple choice of dress to his constant digs at overdressed clerics and fancy traditionalists, the pope believes that baroque Catholicism belongs in a museum or at a costume gala, and that the church’s future lies in the simple, the casual, the austere and the plain.
For this, as for his doctrine-shaking innovations, Francis has won admiring press. But as with the last wave of Catholic revolution, there is little evidence that the modernizing project makes moderns into Catholics. (The latest Gallup data, for instance, shows American Mass attendance declining faster in the Francis era.)
Instead, the quest for accommodation seems to encourage moderns to divide their sense of what Catholicism represents in two — into an Old Church that’s frightening and fascinating in equal measure, and a New Church that’s a little more liked but much more easily ignored.
Francis and other would-be modernizers are right, and have always been right, that Catholic Christianity should not trade on fear. But a religion that claims to be divinely established cannot persuade without a lot of fascination, and far too much of that has been given up, consigned to the museum, as Western Catholicism has traced its slow decline.
Here the Met Gala should offer the faith from which it took its theme a little bit of inspiration. The path forward for the Catholic Church in the modern world is extraordinarily uncertain. But there is no plausible path that does not involve more of what was displayed and appropriated and blasphemed against in New York City Monday night, more of what once made Catholicism both great and weird, and could yet make it both again.
Mattthew Schmitz gives us a further idea of the Vatican pieces on loan to the Met for this exhibit - but I doubt that any of the pertinent facts he brings up about
each of the popes represented by the artifacts would be familiar even to most Catholic museum-goers!
A few hours before the Met Gala began, Cardinal Dolan stood opposite the Temple of Dendur and proclaimed Christ. He was there for the press preview of the new exhibit “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination.” He had neither planned the exhibit nor authorized it. Men in Rome had done that, sending the sacred relics of several holy popes for display in the midst of Vanity Fair. Already there were competing attractions. Cameramen mobbed Donatella Versace and Anna Wintour, while Fr. James Martin, SJ, and a woman in a black moiré biretta each attracted small crowds.
When the press conference ended, the fashionistas spilled into the galleries. Men in Thom Browne suits and women with Chanel handbags admired a bondage mask draped in rosaries and gawked at mannequins dressed in papal drag, before going to view the sacred clothes worn by the successors of St. Peter.
According to the organizers, this display of papal vestments and various tasteless, indecent, and blasphemous fashion items is meant to illustrate “the Catholic imagination.” Whenever someone uses the phrase — or its close cousin, “the sacramental imagination” — I know that I am about to hear a tedious disquisition on Flannery O’Connor, or an account of Catholic belief that muddles error and truth. In this regard, the exhibition does not disappoint.
At the press conference, a curator read from a book by Andrew Greeley: “Catholics live in an enchanted world: a world of statues and holy water, stained glass and votive candles, saints and religious medals, rosary beads and holy pictures.” And what faith do all these things express? According to Greeley, a kind of bourgie pantheism: “These Catholic paraphernalia are merely hints of a deeper and more pervasive religious sensibility that inclines Catholics to see the Holy lurking in creation.”
In the exhibition catalogue, David Tracy dilates on this idea. “It has become increasingly difficult for persons outside or even inside Catholicism to describe, much less define, what distinguishes Catholic Christianity.” Unwilling to refer to traditional ecclesiological and dogmatic claims, Tracy decides that Catholics are united by a set of clichés. They “believe (like Albert Camus) that there is more to admire in human beings than to despise.” They believe that “humanity is on the whole trustworthy.” [Well, at least, those are some benevolent cliches!]
This is a way of talking around the actual content of the faith.[Does one really expect a secular mind to talk about 'the actual content of the faith'? What would he know about it that is authentic, to begin with?]
What the sacramental imagination should mean, first of all, is actual belief in the sacraments: Marriage is indissoluble and ordained by God; Christ is present in the Eucharist and must be revered. My Catholic grandparents, who feared for my soul because I was not baptized as a child, were better exemplars of the sacramental imagination than every ex-Catholic designer combined.
The Catholic imagination only really exists where it expresses, affirms, conforms to sacramental reality and dogmatic truth. My favorite authentic expression of it appears in a letter Pope Innocent IV wrote in 1245 to Guyuk Khan, whose men had been ravaging the Catholic lands of Poland and Hungary. The pope rebuked the khan for disrupting the harmony God had established in nature:
Not only men, but also unreasoning beasts, nay even the material elements of the earth that go into the building of the universe, are as if through a natural bond united with one another, and bound together, after the example of heavenly spirits: for all these traces the Creator of the world has exhibited in all things, so that a lasting and irrefragable bond of peace surrounds all the different orders of being.
This is a beautiful vision, but as its invocation in a diplomatic document should indicate, it had profound religious and political implications. Visitors to the Met exhibit would be foolish to overlook them.
Begin with the jewel-studded clasp worn by Benedict XIII, whose sacramental imagination led him in 1725 to rule that no confession could be sacramentally effective without the intention to sin no more.
Then look at the white silk tafetta mantle that belonged to Benedict XIV, who in 1743 rebuked the Polish bishops for allowing the dissolution of marriages without due cause.
And here is a diamond-studded ring, which the Bourbon princess Marie Adélaïde Clotilede gave to Pius VI in 1775. Pius’s resistance to the French Revolution stemmed from his Catholic imagination, which saw society as a matter of carefully ordered hierarchy. He believed that social order “is like harmony, which derives from the agreement of many sounds.”
Now on to a fiddleback chasuble with flashing gold tinsel worn by Pius VII, whose Catholic imagination led him in 1821 to condemn those who “hold in contempt the Sacraments of the Church … and treat with derision the Mysteries of the Catholic Religion.”
There is a dazzling diamond clasp given to Leo XIII by Maria Cristina, queen regent of Spain. Leo’s Catholic imagination led him not only to challenge the inhumanity of the Industrial Revolution but also to condemn in 1880 “the baneful heresy obtaining among Protestants touching divorce and separation.”
Here is the aquamarine pectoral cross that Leo XIII gave to Giuseppe Sarto, who became Pius X. In 1907 Pius issued the encyclical Pascendi, which warned that “For the Modernists the Sacraments are mere symbols or signs.”
Or here is a cope of Benedict XV, that great lover of peace, whose understanding of the sacramental priesthood compelled him to rule in 1916 that “images of the Blessed Virgin Mary wearing priestly vestments are not approved.”
And here is a gold chasuble of Pius XI, stitched with scenes of crusade. His sacramental imagination obliged him in 1930 to issue Casti Connubii, which condemned “those wicked parents who seek to remain childless, and failing in this, are not ashamed to put their offspring to death.”
Catch the glint of a ring worn by Pius XII, who asked the nations to “follow our peaceful King who taught us to love not only those who are of a different nation or race, but even our enemies.”
And look at the red shoes of John Paul II, who in 1993 issued Veritatis Splendor, which affirmed “objective norms of morality valid for all people of the present and the future, as for those of the past.”
We should attend to the real Catholic imagination and not its sentimental counterfeit. The same faith that gave rise to these beautiful baubles proposed views on sexuality and social order that are contrary to the spirit of the age.
It is foolish to suppose that either the Church’s teaching or its relics are mere artefacts that now have lost their power. These beautiful copes, stoles, clasps, and rings still move men — still have the power Leo XIII acknowledged in Testem Benevolentiae when he advised priests in America to spread the faith “by the pomp and splendor of ceremonies” as well as “by setting forth that sound form of doctrine.” In the Met's carnival atmosphere, their splendor seems all the more radiant.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 10/05/2018 14:47] |