Archbishop Gänswein echoes Pope Benedict XVI’s warning on ‘dictatorship of relativism’

CNA Staff, Oct 19, 2020 / 01:00 pm (CNA).- An Italian newspaper claimed Monday that it had gained access to a secret audio recording of a meeting between three central figures in the Vatican’s controversial London property deal.

In a report publ… […]

Madrid, Spain, Aug 15, 2018 / 10:33 am (ACI Prensa).- Guadalupe Ortiz de Landázuri, a Spanish member of Opus Dei who is moving toward beatification, teaches us that sanctity can be found amidst chemistry books and classrooms, said a priest leading her cause.

Spanish priest Fr. José Carlos Martinez de la Hoz, who is responsible for the canonization causes of Opus Dei members in Spain, said that Guadalupe’s life contains a simple message: “Holiness is in the ordinary.”

“She became holy giving chemistry classes, being a good professor, and this tells the rest of us that we can achieve the same in an ordinary life,” he reflected.

“Guadalupe lived dedicated to her chemistry students, dedicated to souls and especially her mother who died a half hour after her. She lived dedicated to God and others, despite her serious heart disease which at the end of her life really slowed her down.”

In June, Pope Francis authorized the Congregation for the Causes of Saints to publish the decree approving on a miracle attributed to Guadalupe’s intercession.

The miracle involved a 76-year-old man suffering from a malignant skin tumor near his eye. After praying to Guadalupe in 2002, the tumor instantaneously and inexplicably disappeared.

In addition to this recognized miracle, Martinez de la Hoz said “there are many favors from people who start to lose hope and Guadalupe has given them back peace, thanks to the patience that she had.”

Guadalupe was born in Madrid in 1916. She studied chemical sciences and was one of five women in her graduating class.

She met St. Josemaría Escrivá, the founder of Opus Dei, in early 1944. According to Martinez de la Hoz, “one Sunday in 1944 when she was at Mass in the church of the Conception on Goya Street in Madrid, she became distracted and heard the voice of God inside telling her that although she had a boyfriend, he had something else prepared for her. She left Mass impacted by this and knew that was God’s call.”

“On the tram going back home after Mass, she met Jesús Hernando de Pablos, a family friend, and she asked him if he knew of any priest she could talk with. He gave her St. Josemaría’s contacts and she started to go to him for spiritual direction,” the priest said.

St. Josemaría Escrivá taught her that Christ can be found in professional work and ordinary life.

“I had the clear sensation that God was speaking to me through that priest,” Guadalupe would later say.

Martinez de la Hoz noted that “when Guadalupe discovered her vocation at 23, she had a boyfriend, was a chemistry teacher and lived with her mother. From that time on, she was in good spirits because of the intimate conviction of doing what God wants.”

On March 19, 1944, Guadalupe joined Opus Dei as a numerary, committing to celibacy and complete availability for the work of the prelature. Numeraries normally live in an Opus Dei center. However, she did not go to live at a center, but settled into an apartment with her mother, who needed care due to her advanced age.

During her first years as an Opus Dei member, Guadalupe worked primarily in the Christian formation of young people in Madrid and Bilbao. She was later sent to Mexico to begin the apostolic work of Opus Dei there.

In 1956, she settled in Rome, where she worked with St. Josemaría in the administration of Opus Dei. After two years, because of health reasons, she moved back to Spain, where she again took up teaching and scientific research. She then finished her doctoral thesis in chemistry.

Martinez de la Hoz said that what stood out about Guadalupe was “her smile, her good humor, her laughter…She was a woman who preferred to not dwell on the negative, and who completely trusted in God.”

The priest emphasized that what really brought Guadalupe to sanctity was her patience as a chemistry professor.

At the same time, she continued to work in Christian formation in Opus Dei. In all her actions, she reflected her strong desire to love God in her work, her friendship and with a deep joy that radiated peace and serenity, he said.

Guadalupe died of heart disease in Pamplona, Spain on the feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel in 1975. She was 59 years old and at the time of her death held a reputation of sanctity. Favors attributed to her intercession were quickly reported.

Her beatification cause was begun in the Archdiocese of Madrid in 2001, and was sent on to Rome in 2006.
 
 
This article was originally published by our sister agency, ACI Prensa.  It has been translated and adapted by CNA.

 

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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 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.”

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.

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.

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 artist’s last Pietàs were created, instead, in the context of the Counter-Reformation.

The Florentine Pietà was carved during the same period as the Council of Trent, when the Catholic Church issued its decree concerning the Holy Sacrament of the Eucharist, Verdon pointed out.

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.

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 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.

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