Szczecin, Poland, Jul 29, 2019 / 11:03 am (CNA).- A Catholic priest was severely beaten in an attack by three men in the sacristy of St. John the Baptist church in Szczecin on Sunday, in what was reportedly an attempted robbery.
Fr. Aleksander Ziejewski, 68, was attacked July 28 shortly before the 6 pm Mass. He had responded to a call for help from the sacristan, who said three men had entered the sacristy and were trying to take a chasuble, claiming they needed it to celebrate Mass, according to the priest.
According to Radio Szczecin, the men, who had also demanded other religious goods, intended to rob the church.
Ziejewski told EWTN Poland that he entered the sacristy and asked the men to leave, when “one of them got angry, started to blaspheme,” and pushed both the sacristan and the church’s security guard, who was also present.
The same man then beat the priest before all three fled. Ziejewski said he believes the man, when he hit him, used a rosary around his hand in the manner of brass knuckles. The rosary was taken from the sacristy. The priest described his face as “flooded with blood.”
According to the Szczecin police, the three men, ranging in age from 27 to 53 years old, were caught and held for questioning Monday.
A spokesman for the Archdiocese of Szczecin-Kamień said Monday the priest will need surgery due to the severity of his wounds.
The spokesman said the attack could have been motivated by anti-religious sentiment, because the men entered the sacristy during the day, close to the start of an evening Mass, when it would be expected that someone would be present.
“We recommend offering [prayers for] the victims of this brutal beating, as well as praying for the conversion and repentance of the perpetrators,” the spokesman said.
The attack took place just over a month after another priest, Fr. Ireneusz Bakalarczyk, was stabbed in Wrocław. Bakalarczyk has recovered after he was hospitalized and underwent surgery for internal injuries in his chest and abdomen that he reportedly sustained during the June 10 stabbing.
Bakalarczyk was on his was to celebrate Mass at the church of the Blessed Virgin Mary on the Sand, in the city center of Wrocław, when a 57-year-old man approached him and started a conversation about the sex abuse scandals in the Catholic Church, before allegedly pulling out a knife and stabbing the priest in the chest and abdomen, according to local news channel TVP Info.
If you value the news and views Catholic World Report provides, please consider donating to support our efforts. Your contribution will help us continue to make CWR available to all readers worldwide for free, without a subscription. Thank you for your generosity!
Click here for more information on donating to CWR. Click here to sign up for our newsletter.
A close-up of the copy of Michelangelo’s Vatican Pietà, usually kept at the Vatican Museums. / Ela Bialkowska/OKNO studio.
Rome Newsroom, Mar 7, 2022 / 04:00 am (CNA).
As war rages in Ukraine and the pandemic lingers, Michelangelo’s celebrated Vatican Pietà — and two lesser-known figures he also sculpted — can be deeply meaningful to a pain-wracked world, says a priest and art historian.
Michelangelo Buonarotti’s Pietà depicts a larger-than-life Virgin Mary as she mourns her crucified Son, Jesus, lying limp in her lap. The masterpiece, carved out of Carrara marble, was finished before the Italian artist’s 25th birthday.
Over the course of more than 60 years, Michelangelo created two more sculptures on the same theme — and a new exhibit in the Italian city of Florence brings the three works together for the first time.
The Three Pietà of Michelangelo exhibit at Museo dell’Opera del Duomo in Florence, Italy. Museo dell’Opera del Duomo
The exhibit opened at the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo on Feb. 24, and includes the Florentine Pietà, also called the Deposition, which Michelangelo worked on from 1547 to 1555, and exact casts, or copies, of the Vatican Pietà and Milan Pietà — which could not be moved from their locations.
Msgr. Timothy Verdon, the director of the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, told CNA by phone that the gallery wanted to do something to show its solidarity with a Feb. 23-27 meeting of mayors and Catholic bishops.
“The images of suffering that the Pietà always implies I think will deeply touch people. I think that visitors will be moved to see these works,” he said. The image of the Pietà evokes “the personal suffering of mothers who hold their children not knowing if their children will survive.”
A close-up of the copy of Michelangelo’s Vatican Pietà, usually kept at the Vatican Museums. Ela Bialkowska/OKNO studio.
The 75-year-old Verdon is an expert in art history and sacred art. He was born in Hoboken, New Jersey, but has lived in Italy for more than 50 years.
“So many of the issues that face the Mediterranean world today are forms of suffering,” he said, “and so this ideal series of images of the God who becomes man [and] accepts suffering, and whose Mother receives his tortured body into her arms, these are deeply meaningful.”
“All human situations of suffering and exclusion invite a comparison with the suffering of Christ, the death of Christ. And [the Pietà] condenses and concentrates a devout reflection on that,” the priest said.
The lesser-known Pietàs
Many years after Michelangelo completed the Pietà displayed in St. Peter’s Basilica, he began his Florentine Pietà, which depicts Nicodemus, Mary Magdalene, and the Virgin Mary receiving the body of Christ as it is removed from the Cross.
The 72-year-old Michelangelo worked on the sculpture for eight years before eventually abandoning it in 1555.
Michelangelo’s Florentine Pietà, part of the permanent collection at the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo in Florence, Italy. Museo dell’Opera del Duomo in Florence, Italy.
He probably began the Rondanini Pietà, which is in Milan, in 1553. Michelangelo continued to work on the piece until just days before his death in 1564.
According to a press release from the city of Florence, “near his own death, Michelangelo meditated deeply on the Passion of Christ.”
One way this is known is because shortly before his death, Michelangelo gave a drawing of the Pietà to Vittoria Colonna, the Marquess of Pescara, on which he wrote: “They think not there how much of blood it costs.”
The line, from Canto 29 of Paradiso, one of the books of Dante’s “Divine Comedy”, is also the subtitle of the Florence exhibition.
A perfect cast of Michelangelo’s unfinished Rondanini Pietà, on display at the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo in Florence, Italy. Museo dell’Opera del Duomo
Bringing the three Pietàs together into one exhibit gives the viewer the chance to see “the full range of Michelangelo’s reflection on this subject across 60-some years,” Verdon explained.
Not only is the Renaissance artist’s stylistic evolution on display, but also his spiritual development.
“We know that [Michelangelo] was a religious man,” Verdon said. “His interpretation of religious subjects, even in his youth, is particularly sensitive and well informed.”
According to the priest, Michelangelo seems to have had a range of theological influences.
“His older brother was a Dominican friar and in Michelangelo’s old age we’re told that he could still remember the preaching of Savonarola,” Verdon said.
Girolamo Savonarola was a popular Dominican friar, preacher, and reformer active in Renaissance Florence. He spoke against the ruling Medici family and the excesses of the time, and in 1498 he was hanged and his body burned after a trial by Church and civil authorities.
According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, “In the beginning Savonarola was filled with zeal, piety, and self-sacrifice for the regeneration of religious life. He was led to offend against these virtues by his fanaticism, obstinacy, and disobedience. He was not a heretic in matters of faith.”
“That’s an interesting page in cultural history,” Verdon said, “because the early Pietà is done in effect shortly after the Savonarola period, or in the Savonarola period.”
“So we’re talking about an artist to whom this subject means a great deal, and which he is also equipped to treat.”
The Three Pietà of Michelangelo exhibit at Museo dell’Opera del Duomo in Florence, Italy. Museo dell’Opera del Duomo
The artist’s last Pietàs were created, instead, in the context of the Counter-Reformation.
The council, he explained, “had to rebut the heretical ideas of Protestant reformers, and so it insists, in a decree on the Eucharist published in 1551, that indeed in the bread and wine, Christ’s Body and Blood are truly present.”
“So Michelangelo, who was personally religious, and who, especially in his later period, worked exclusively for the Vatican, was therefore very close to the changes occurring in Catholic thought, Catholic theology, Catholic devotion,” Verdon said.
The exhibit “really gives us the opportunity to gauge the evolution of a theme from one time to a very different one, from the end of the 15th, to the mid- 16th century.”
The St. Peter’s Basilica Pietà
Verdon said that the Vatican Pietà is the only one of the three to remain in the place it was intended for — above an altar in St. Peter’s Basilica.
The sculpture was originally created for the 4th-century Constantinian basilica, the “Old St. Peter’s Basilica,” which was replaced by the Renaissance basilica standing today.
In Michelangelo’s Pietà, the Virgin Mary holds her Son as she did at his birth. . Paweesit via Flickr.
Viewing art in a church is not the same as viewing it in a museum, the art historian noted.
“Obviously it is different, especially for the fact that the Vatican Pietà has remained on an altar, above an altar, and so the body of Christ depicted by Michelangelo would have been seen in relation to the sacramental body of Christ in the Eucharist.”
“This was true of the first situation in the Old St. Peter’s, the work was on an altar, and it’s true of the present collocazione [position],” he said.
“And actually,” the priest continued, “the same thing was true of both of the other Pietàs. They were intended by Michelangelo to go on an altar in a chapel in a Roman church where he expected to be buried. We think the church was Santa Maria Maggiore.”
“So the relationship of the image of Christ’s body with the Eucharistic Corpus Christi is very important,” he said.
The Three Pietà of Michelangelo exhibit at Museo dell’Opera del Duomo in Florence, Italy. Museo dell’Opera del Duomo
The copies of the Vatican and Milan Pietàs are on loan from the Vatican Museums, and will be in Florence for the Three Pietàs exhibit through Aug. 1.
“And in our museum, in the Florence Opera del Duomo Museum, we have put the Pietà, our Pietà, on a base that evokes an altar, as the very specific Church meaning [of an altar] has to do with the Sacrament,” Verdon said.
Rome, Italy, Aug 29, 2021 / 07:54 am (CNA).
Pope Pius XII was not silent in front of the Shoah nor inactive. He was, instead, very much committed to saving Jewish families, spoke out constantly against the Nazi Regi… […]
One of 100 ancient churches identified for preservation by France’s Patrimony Foundation, this church is in Cachen, located within the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region of southwestern France. / Credit: Wikimedia Commons
CNA Staff, Jun 4, 2024 / 06:00 am (CNA).
The danger that has been threatening France’s religious heritage for decades is becoming a matter of concern to the authorities and the general public.
As experts estimate that the country loses a religious building every 15 days, the country’s leading historical preservation nonprofit “Fondation du Patrimoine” (“Patrimony Foundation”)has launched a campaign aimed at restoring a thousand buildings, the vast majority of which are Catholic, in rural areas of the country.
This is the first time that the nonprofit organization, founded in 1996 to promote French heritage, has launched such a major campaign to raise awareness and preserve religious monuments. As part of the campaign, the foundation released a list of the first 100 sites to benefit from renovation funding.
The grants are aimed primarily at religious buildings in municipalities with fewer than 10,000 inhabitants in mainland France and fewer than 20,000 inhabitants in the French overseas territories, which cannot be protected by the French state as historical monuments.
Since the French Revolution (1789), which nationalized clergy property, and the 1905 law separating church and state, most religious heritage has belonged to municipalities, which are often unable to meet the costs of maintaining the sites. The preservation of historic places of worship also tends to be at the bottom of their budget priorities.
Of the 45,000 Catholic sites in France, only 15,000 are classified as historical monuments, as the president of the French Religious Heritage Observatory pointed out in a 2021 interview with CNA. For its part, the Patrimony Foundation estimates that some 5,000 religious monuments are currently directly threatened with extinction.
This list of the 100 sites selected by the foundation — spread throughout the French territory and most of which required urgent work — represents just the first ambitious move in a vast project to rehabilitate some 1,000 religious buildings over the next four years. The aim is to raise a total of 200 million euros (about $218 million) through corporate and individual donations.
The first subscription, which runs until the end of 2025 and includes special tax deductions, currently stands at just over 2.6 million euros ($2.8 million), thanks to the participation of some 14,000 people.
While this sum is still a long way short of the 15 million expected for the first 100 monuments awaiting renovation, Patrimony Foundation officials are noticing a new awareness on the ground, which is tending to become more widespread as the need grows to enhance the value of rural life and all that can represent anchoring and rallying points for communities.
“Even if they no longer go to Mass, [the French] are attached to their monument, to the steeple that gives them their identity, that establishes a landmark in space. People don’t want us to do just anything with their church,” Guillaume Poitrinal, president of the Patrimony Foundation, told the weekly Le Point.
He also pointed to a “Notre-Dame effect” in this growing public awareness of the decay of France’s heritage, of which religious monuments form a substantial part. Following the fire at the famous Paris cathedral in 2019, the images of which stunned and moved the whole world, some 40 million euros ($44 million) had been donated via the same Patrimony Foundation by 236,000 different donors.
If the campaign achieves its objectives, it could pave the way for additional large-scale initiatives, marking a real turning point in mindsets and heritage preservation policies.
Leave a Reply