Olivier Py on the conclave: “It’s a photogenic moment” | EUROtoday

GRand Value of theater and operas, playwright, former director of the Avignon pageant at this time on the head of the Châtelet Theater in Paris, Olivier Py can be a training Catholic, who has a deep information of religion, of his historical past, his writing, his tradition.

We due to this fact needed to request it to provide us his studying of the ceremonies and rituals that resolve screens around the globe, because the dying of Pope Francis, his funeral, the overall congregations and the conclave the place 133 cardinals in purple garments have an appointment beneath the frescoes of Michelangelo to discover a successor to the Argentinian pontiff.

The level: As a training theater and Catholic director, how do you obtain the pictures which might be at present coming from the Vatican? Are you having fun with it?

Olivier Py: But the entire world is amazed by all this pontifical pump! Even if the pictures now we have in entrance of us are stuffed with paradoxes. Pope Francis fought for an easier, poorer church, and it’s this magnificence that jumps out and impresses us. Especially since all this splendor shouldn’t be on the service of nothing, it’s current to assist the formulation of symbols.Read too Conclave: France within the odor of holiness? The purple garments of the cardinals recall the sacrifice, the blood of Christ. It shouldn’t be an ornamental ingredient. It is crucial that the aesthetic energy carries the symbols. François needed a sober and stripped funeral, and his funeral was the event for a powerful aesthetic demonstration of Catholicity. Beauty is a conversion vector, Catholics should settle for it.

Beauty is a conversion vector, Catholics should settle for it.

They do not do it?

Not all. By going to Notre-Dame restored, I used to be confirmed in my religion, and never solely due to the great thing about the place, but in addition by the music performed by the organists Olivier Latry and Thierry Escaich, of the prodigious performers. This achievement of the human turns us in direction of transcendence, invitations us to a better aspiration than that of our easy situation of mortals.

To be Catholic is to just accept the power of the picture, since, as Marie-José Mondzain underlines, the nice thinker of iconology, the Church has chosen the multiplication of pictorial representations. Unlike the icons which repeat the identical illustration. Other religions, together with Christian, favor sobriety, austerity, iconographic poverty.

In Catholicism, there’s each the Cistercian cloister and the Gothic cathedral, due to this fact symbolic purity and majestic exaltation, Saint-Pierre de Rome, what! We are proper within the parable of Saint-Thomas: “I consider in what I see. Because this parable that reconciles religion and motive, we will have one other interpretation: what I additionally see converts me. It was on this that the financial system of Catholic imaging was based, to renew the evaluation of Marie-José Mondzain.

The Renaissance was born thus, breaking with the austere occasions of iconography. And the method is at all times at work. For Catholics, the picture shouldn’t be mounted, it may be reinvented. This is why, in passing, I level out that there may be up to date works that aren’t anti-theological, fairly the opposite: a nod to these in opposition to fashionable stained glass in Notre-Dame … The picture is a part of the historical past of Catholicism. A conclave is a photogenic second.

How do you assume?

First, as a result of it’s closed. He is dreaming. And the illustration of the our bodies holds a vital place there. It is usually stated that the Catholic faith is much from the physique, there isn’t any extra false interpretation. On the opposite: it reconciles the physique and the thoughts. When the cardinals lock themselves within the Sistine Chapel, they don’t attain one of the elegant decorations on this planet.

We should not in a sophisticated spectacle. Michelangelo’s frescoes carry the thoughts to the center of this solemn second. In a conclave, political, cultural, geographic points are at work. But you should always remember additionally a component that may be decisive and blur all of the calculations: the spirit breathes.

Would you dream of staging a conclave?

But I did it! Recently, for Henri VIII from Saint-Saëns to La Monnaie. There weren’t 135 cardinals on stage, however solely 80. And we had introduced girls. We have been extra, it is true, as a part of a synod. But these purple cardinals on the scene, in a scarlet gentle … what a magnificence!

I’d not like this anachronism of costumes and the vatican pump to make us overlook one factor: the church is tomorrow, that’s what comes, robust from what has been.

What picture has marked you probably the most throughout Pope Francis funeral?

First, a tragic picture: that of JD Vance with Pope Francis. By shaking his hand to this shabby man who’s twisting the gospels to serve his racist coverage, our good pope needed to say that he met with the uncooked state. This scene twists the center.

But there’s one other picture that I maintain, and this one is de facto overwhelming. That of those undocumented ones on the course of François, as soon as we handed the cardinals, accompanying him to his final dwelling within the Basilica Sainte-Marie-Majeure.

You who love Pope Francis, what is going to you bear in mind from his motion?

For me, he actually straightened the bar of the church within the route of navigation, placing the poor within the middle. Even if I feel that the opposition between progressives and reactionaries is hypertrophied within the eyes of Europeans on a world degree. There are different necessary points.

Which ones?

To uncover



The kangaroo of the day

Answer

The colonial difficulty, for instance. After François, the Catholic Church will now not be capable to take note of the Global South. This is why I’d now dream of an African pope, supplied that he’s not Robert Sarah. The ecological and liberal points, which might by no means be separated once more, are essential too. We at all times anticipate from the church that it contrasts the ethical questions of time.

But it is usually vital that the Church remembers pleasure, transcendence. And on this sense, the function of artists is crucial. Whether they’re believers or not. Le Corbusier was not a Christian, however he had identified find out how to use this superb symbolic machine which might be the Gospels by integrating them into his grammar. I’d not like this anachronism of costumes and the vatican pump to make us overlook one factor: the church is tomorrow, that’s what comes, robust from what has been. This is all that the following Pope must play.