Two Argentines from Buenos Aires, Jorge Mario Bergoglio and León Ferrari, are in
the news this week, but for different reasons. Bergoglio is drawing international
headlines for his travels through Brazil,
while Ferrari is the subject of obituaries, but the two men are inextricably
linked.
Bergoglio, a relatively spry 76-year-old better known as
Pope Francis, is touring South America's largest and most populous country in hopes of reinvigorating Roman Catholicism where it’s fading fast, despite having the largest nominal adherence
in the western hemisphere. Even given the difficulty
of obtaining foreign currency in Argentina, many Argentine Catholics are making
pilgrimages to their northern neighbor to view the first South
American pope.
Ferrari,
who died in Buenos Aires yesterday at the age of 92, is a good example of
why the church is struggling. His father built churches and painted their
frescos in Italy and Buenos Aires for a living, but the son assaulted religious
hypocrisy with gusto – his prize-winning masterwork La Civilización Occidental
y Cristiana (Western and Christian Civilization, pictured above) began as an almost topical protest against the Vietnam War in 1965, but in the
interim it’s become an enduringly eloquent statement about the contradictions of
political and ecclesiastical power.
So powerful was Ferrari’s work that in
2004, when the Centro Cultural Recoleta hosted a retrospective of his
portfolio, the then Cardinal Bergoglio filed a lawsuit against it and
protesting Catholics vandalized some of the exhibits; after a brief closure, it
reopened to record-breaking attendance. As the photograph above shows, the
lines outside were long - the exhibit rooms could not accommodate everybody at the same time.
I had the good fortune to meet Ferrari in his Retiro apartment
shortly thereafter, and he was amused by the controversy. Before I left, he
gave me a booklet of his poems which, unfortunately, I seem to have misplaced,
but I’ll be looking for it again today. Even if I had the opportunity to meet
Mr. Bergoglio one-on-one, I’m not sure I’d bother, but I’ll always be glad to
have met a gracious, good-humored and unassuming artist like León Ferrari.
Given his beliefs (or lack of them, in this case), “Adios” is certainly not an appropriate salutation, but he
deserves to be remembered and respected for his contributions to Argentine and global art and culture.
No comments:
Post a Comment