Young Edoardo Santini, considered “the most handsome man in Italy,” has decided to leave his promising career as a model and enter a seminary to become a priest.
Dancer, swimmer, actor — these were a few of the dreams of Santini, a 21-year-old Italian who in 2019 when he was 17 earned the title of the most handsome young man in his country after winning a national contest.
This award opened the doors to the world of fashion, and his future seemed clear: He was destined to become a big star. However, God’s plans were different. Santini was going to continue shining, but away from the spotlight and catwalks.
A courageous first step
In a video posted on social media Nov. 23, Santini explained that he is on his way “to become, God willing, a priest.”
He says that during these years he has met people who, “by showing me what it means to ‘be Church,’ have given me the strength to investigate this question that I had been carrying around since I was little” but which, he says, “I didn’t delve into because of fear.”
In January 2020 he discovered “the real Church,” and that was when on social media he began to talk about God and the call he felt.
“Living in God doesn’t mean locking yourself inside the church but rather living one’s life more fully,” he told his more than 11,000 followers on Instagram.
He also mentioned the opposition of his grandmother, who “expected something else” from her grandson. However, he stressed that he didn’t feel “alone” in his decision and that he was “tired of satisfying the will of others and posting photos where I am apparently secure and happy.”
The young man from the Tuscany region took “a first step” and last year he went to live with two priests, which he described as “the most beautiful experience of my life.”
Sharing his daily life with the priests allowed him to “find in everyday life the answer that I hoped for, which has come to me from above.”
“At the end of the year, it was natural for me to ask the bishop to enter the preparatory course, the year preceding life in the seminary. And here I am, studying theology and serving in two parishes of the Diocese of Florence,” he said in his video.
He also shared that he was slow in taking the first step “for fear of not being accepted” and that making this decision was something “that terrified him” although, he said honestly, “I built more walls for myself than there were.”
Experience at World Youth Day in Lisbon
Santini also shared on Instagram his experience during World Youth Day in August in Lisbon, Portugal.
Through different videos, he showed how this gathering of young people marked a before and after in his life.
Between “laughter, dancing, jumping up and down,” and new friendships, Santini discovered that “the Church is beautiful.” Now, at the age of 21 and after having dared to say “yes” to the call of the Lord, he said he feels really “happy.”
This story was first published by ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.
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Belfast, Northern Ireland, Jul 21, 2021 / 06:00 am (CNA).
A pro-life group said on Tuesday that it is “ready to go to court within hours” over the commissioning of abortion services in Northern Ireland. The Society for … […]
Michelangelo’s The Creation of Eve, from the Sistine Chapel ceiling, c. 1510. / null
Denver, Colo., Nov 15, 2022 / 09:00 am (CNA).
Michelangelo’s artistic masterpiece in the Sistine Chapel broke new ground in portraying the dynamic creative acts of God, but his work also depicts the combined importance of men and women through all of sacred history, art historian Elizabeth Lev has said.
“The spirit of artistic adventure led the artist to experiment with a completely new vision of creation,” Lev said Nov. 12. “He took a book that had been painted, sculpted, mosaiced, and illuminated over and over again in the history of art and created something completely new.”
She spoke at the closing keynote Saturday evening at the fall conference of the University of Notre Dame’s de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture. Lev teaches at the Rome campus of Duquesne University and the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas. Her speech, “Creation, Complementarity, & St. John Paul II in Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling,” focused on one of the key artistic treasures of Vatican City.
The 16th-century Florentine artist Michelangelo was commissioned by Pope Julius II to paint the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling and the upper section of its walls. This was the artist’s focus from 1508 to 1512. He later finished the Last Judgment above the chapel altar from 1535 to 1541.
The ceiling frescoes show the creation of the heavens and the earth, the creation of Adam and Eve, their expulsion from the Garden of Eden, the great flood, and the rebirth of humankind through Noah.
Lev cited St. John Paul II’s description of Michelangelo’s work in his poem “Meditations on the Book of Genesis at the Threshold of the Sistine Chapel.”
“It is the book of the origins — Genesis,” the pope said. “Here, in this chapel, Michelangelo penned it, not with words, but with the richness of piled-up colors. We enter in order to read it again, going from wonder to wonder.”
Lev reflected on the first three panels depicting the creation of the world. These show “the mighty dynamic figure of God the Father at work.”
“It’s not what God creates, it’s that God creates,” she said. Michelangelo broke ground in portraying God as “physically engaged in creation.” For Lev, this offers “a preview of the Incarnation.”
Turning to Michelangelo’s famous depiction of the Creation of Adam, Lev noted that the artist depicts “just God and the creature formed in his likeness.” Adam is shown as “somewhat listless” in contrast with God’s energy. Adam is “sentient and awake but he has no will or strength or purpose to rise,” she said. “He looks completely passive and dependent despite that incredibly beautiful form.”
“It’s God who reaches towards man,” she continued. For Lev, the outstretched finger of God makes the viewer “almost lean forward in his seat waiting for that final Act of Creation, the divine spark, the Breath of Life that will release that latent energy and allow Adam to take his place as the greatest of creations.”
“This is the joy in humanity that permeates the Renaissance,” Lev said.
Michelangelo’s The Fall and Expulsion from Paradise from the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel (1508-12).
There is academic debate over a female figure shown in the Creation of Adam. As God the Father stretches out one arm to Adam, his other arm curls around a female figure. Some have identified this figure as Wisdom, some as Mary.
Lev suggested it is best to identify this figure as Eve, both because the figure provides visual balance to Adam and because her gaze “connects her more intimately with Adam.”
The creation of Eve from Adam, depicted next on the chapel ceiling, shows Eve emerging from Adam’s side with her hands clasped in prayer, an image of the Church and the personification of Mary, the “Second Eve.”
Lev cited St. John Paul II’s 1999 homily inaugurating the newly restored Sistine Chapel, after centuries of grime and soot were removed. The pope called the chapel the “sanctuary of the theology of the human body,” alluding to his catecheses offered from 1979 to 1984. The pope suggested that Michelangelo allowed himself to be guided by the Book of Genesis’ depiction of mankind in Eden: “the man and his wife were both naked and they felt no shame.”
Before the fall, Lev commented, Michelangelo depicted Adam and Eve in the state of grace as “two of his most beautiful figures.”
“They are filled with dynamism. They’re buoyant. They’re luminous,” Lev said, adding that their bodies “suggest immortality.” After the fall, however, both of their bodies “lose their luminosity” and appear heavier, like a burden. Adam’s shoulder seems to force Eve into the background, “subjugating her.”
For Lev, the artistic depiction of the genealogy of Jesus Christ also deserves attention. The portrayal of the ancestors of Jesus Christ shows “a genealogy of men and women struggling from generation to generation.” These figures seem “more approachable” and “much more similar to candid family photographs.” Even though 22 women in Jesus’ genealogy are not named, Michelangelo pairs them with their husbands.
Lev noted that Michelangelo broke with artistic convention both by including mothers and by showing them as busy, everyday women “tending to toddlers, toilettes, and tasks.” His style of painting them with “incredible immediacy” adds observations of human nature: Eleazar’s wife holds the purse strings and the key to the house, and her husband looks “startled” as she surveys their son. Other depictions are “tender and intimate,” like the portrayal of the wife of Manasseh, who cradles a swaddled son while rocking an infant’s cradle.
Here, Lev drew on John Paul II’s 1995 “Letter to Women.” He wrote that womanhood and manhood are complementary at the physical, psychological, and even ontological level.
“It is only through the duality of the masculine and the feminine that the human finds full recognition,” the pope said. “To this unity of the two, God has entrusted not only the work of procreation and family life but the creation of history itself.”
Lev noted that the passing of generations “necessarily emphasizes the begetting of children.” This means that the complementarity of the sexes is essential for a population to form and for creation to continue.
In Michelangelo’s portrayal of the Last Judgment, the artist still looks back to creation but also breaks new ground. He placed Mary next to Christ, as “a foil to Christ’s sternness.”
“She is the picture of mercy gazing down towards the elect, placed by the wound in Christ’s side whence the Church sprang,” Lev said. “Mary is transfigured into the Bride of Christ, for whom he gave his life and to whom he cannot say no. She is the conduit to Christ, as Eve was the link between God and man in the creation of woman.”
For Lev, the Sistine Chapel shows the “incredible gift of creation” from the beginning of the world down through the generations, “through which all of us today are a part of that continuation of creation.”
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To bend low to uplift the lowly is a major grace. It takes courage to answer a call. All the best.
And then there’s the opposite case of one Michael Edwards…
…who, after Elvis Presley had died, spent some six years with Priscilla. After that time of genuine affection, distraction, and then a tragic abortion (Edwards held himself responsible for not preventing it), this handsome and one-time clothing model wrote about it. But then added a postscript protesting that he was not really as stupid as this former behavior:
“Our perpetual, unremitting love life had been the devil’s making. We’d become like two animals snared in a trap—snarling, eyes bulging and berserk, twitching and jerking. Our world was completely out of kilter [….] The big house, fine cars, tennis court, pool, people attending us around the clock—none of this could get you the moon. . . .Or even a little bit of serenity [!]. That, I now realized, was what I wanted.”
Serenity! Recalling his one fleeting moment of serenity, in his youth and in a church, Edwards writes,
“. . . Above the organ was a life-sized crucifix, and if I stared at Jesus long enough, he came to life and smiled at me. I was filled with a warm feeling of love and understood the meaning of the words ‘My cup runneth over’” (“Priscilla, Elvis and Me: In the Shadow of the King,” New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988).
Just in case your references to Vatican II mean that you hold that the Novus Ordo Mass came from Vatican II, the Vatican II document on the liturgy doesn’t even hint at the Mass composed by Bugnini.
To bend low to uplift the lowly is a major grace. It takes courage to answer a call. All the best.
Dear anti-Pope Francis and anti- Vatican II doomsday bashers: Here is a sample of a Pope Francis and Vatican II seminarian.
And then there’s the opposite case of one Michael Edwards…
…who, after Elvis Presley had died, spent some six years with Priscilla. After that time of genuine affection, distraction, and then a tragic abortion (Edwards held himself responsible for not preventing it), this handsome and one-time clothing model wrote about it. But then added a postscript protesting that he was not really as stupid as this former behavior:
“Our perpetual, unremitting love life had been the devil’s making. We’d become like two animals snared in a trap—snarling, eyes bulging and berserk, twitching and jerking. Our world was completely out of kilter [….] The big house, fine cars, tennis court, pool, people attending us around the clock—none of this could get you the moon. . . .Or even a little bit of serenity [!]. That, I now realized, was what I wanted.”
Serenity! Recalling his one fleeting moment of serenity, in his youth and in a church, Edwards writes,
“. . . Above the organ was a life-sized crucifix, and if I stared at Jesus long enough, he came to life and smiled at me. I was filled with a warm feeling of love and understood the meaning of the words ‘My cup runneth over’” (“Priscilla, Elvis and Me: In the Shadow of the King,” New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988).
Just in case your references to Vatican II mean that you hold that the Novus Ordo Mass came from Vatican II, the Vatican II document on the liturgy doesn’t even hint at the Mass composed by Bugnini.