All Roads ...

In Rome last week, the Vatican welcomed visitors to one of the biggest and most patiently collected art exhibits of the year. It consisted of religious paintings and sculptures by native artists in 600 Roman Catholic mission centers around the world.

The show had been organized for Rome's Holy Year by Monsignor Celso Costantini, Vatican Secretary for the Propagation of the Faith, and himself for twelve years an apostolic delegate in China. Under his direction, the Church's missionaries had collected what they could from churches in their own mission districts, commissioned some works, and accepted a great many more from native artists who had heard of the project and wished to be represented. The Vatican hopes to keep the show together after Holy Year ends, exhibit it next year in Paris and Manhattan.

Prominently featured in the Chinese section were six paintings by a non-convert named Chang Chao-ho, who has been commissioned to illustrate the Church's first full translation of the Bible into Chinese. To him, as to Korean Sculptor Kim Chong Young, the Madonna was an almond-eyed lady in a flowing kimono. A Maori artist decked her in a long grass skirt. African carvers made her a Negro, often barebreasted, sometimes put heavy coils of beads round her neck. Indo-Chinese versions of the Madonna were apt to resemble the Buddhist goddess of Mercy, Kuan Yin.

To Monsignor Costantini, all that seems right and proper. European artists, too, had often represented the saints as being of their own race, place and period. The Buddhist goddess Kuan Yin, he explains, had many of the same virtues that Christians revere in the Madonna: purity, motherhood and the understanding of sorrows. He also approved of Hindu representations of Christ that looked like the god Siva, "because Siva is a highly spirtualized deity. But we do object to Christ being represented in the guise of Buddha, since Buddha is worshiped as a man, not God."

Critics and most visitors praised the show, but a few found it bewildering. Looking at a red-lacquered altar from Japan, a woman from Germany exclaimed: "I just couldn't pray properly before such a thing!" Since a Japanese might have equal difficulty at a Gothic altar rail, the objection pretty well illustrated Monsignor Costantini's point: that native art may serve faith better than the alien kind.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.