Opinion

ROME, September 27, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The gallery said in a media release, “They were just innocent kisses on the lips,” and called it, “An intimate work, on a universal love.” What could be nicer than that?

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The photos, of same-sex couples kissing in front of the altars at some of the more colourful of Rome’s Baroque basilicas, were splashed all over the Italian press. But when I arrived yesterday afternoon at the tiny Galleria L’Opera, on Rome’s Via di Monserrato – the same street as the Venerable English College, Rome’s ancient seminary for Englishmen – the photos had already been taken down, their purpose amply achieved.

As I walked in, I was handed a media release explaining that the photographer, Gonzalo Orquín, a Spaniard who is also a painter, is a “practising Catholic,” and the invisible photos were “an act of love for the Holy Roman Church.” The pictures were taken, Orquin said, “first thing in the morning, often with empty churches, so we would not bump up against anyone’s sensibilities.” (Isn’t that thoughtful?) “However no pastor noticed anything and we never had any problem.”

With absolutely no ulterior, political motivation whatsoever, the gallery released the photos to La Reppublica the day before the exhibition’s opening, and by yesterday afternoon the gallery’s Facebook page had collected thousands of “shares” and “likes” on social networks.

This prompted the predictable response from the Vicariate of Rome, the City’s diocesan chancery, who, the gallery’s press release informed me, had issued “a formal notice” asking that the photos be removed. Which the gallery, no doubt shocked and dismayed that they had inadvertently given offense, immediately did.

In response, Gonzalo Orquin protested, “God is love, and this I learned in church. And much more on this occasion, I, not only as an artist but as a Christian, quote the Holy Father, Francis: ‘The Church is the home of everyone; it is not only a small chapel that can contain only a handful of people.’”

My hat is off today to the orchestrators of this rather complicated and undoubtedly expensive media stunt. The Church certainly took the bait very obligingly, and the message was sent, received and publicised. The mantra of the homosexualist movement’s propaganda, that, “It’s all about love, and that wicked old controlling Church is only interested in forcing everyone to adhere to its meaningless, outdated rules and regulations,” has been effectively broadcast, with no meaningful opposition, yet again.

If only those who want the world to understand the message of the Catholic Faith – that the culture that is busy indulging its every sexual whim is destroying itself – were half as clever, media-savvy and resourceful.

For the last few months, the Italian press has been buzzing with news about homosexualists and their efforts to bring in the anti-homophobia law that Christian critics have denounced as a blunt instrument to shut down opposition to “gay marriage”. Homosexuality, which is not at all widely accepted by the general Italian population, is hot news.

But where is the Church? There is a small cadre of Catholic journalists, professors, lawyers and one or two Deputies who are opposing the bill, mostly on the grounds that its real intention is to make sure there will be no possible public objection to the plans (already afoot in Parliament) to install same-sex “marriage”.

But where are the high-profile interviews with clerics, prelates or Catholic philosophers, explaining and defending the Catholic teaching itself? In this country, there is a well-funded and high-profile Catholic media, and the secular media features the Catholic side in debates regularly. So this time we cannot complain of the media “blackout” that shuts down opposition in North America.

Why did the Vicariate of Rome not organise an appearance on a television talk show, perhaps with this “artist” himself? Why have we not heard any Vatican personality explaining that the Church’s teaching is, in fact, all and only about love? About the love of God for people with homosexual temptations that has as an inseparable aspect His urgent desire that they live chaste, happy, healthy, holy and long lives?

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Why, when every June thousands of homosexualists and their supporters, take off most of their clothes and march down the hill from the Piazza della Repubblica, past the Imperial Forum and down to the Piazza Navona, is there not a peep from the Vatican’s Press Office? No prelate, as far as I have seen, is yet to be quoted pleading with these people to stop harming themselves and others with sinful and self-destructive behaviour.

Significant, isn’t it, that Mr. Orquin quoted Pope Francis, who has lately been praised by abortionists and homosexual apologists for his statements that we do not need to “obsess” over the Church’s moral teachings, that the young people already know what they are. No need to go on and on about it.

Isn’t there?

I went to the gallery on the opening day of the exhibition, and I perhaps should not have been surprised that Mr. Orquin was not there to answer questions by journalists directly. I was carrying my camera, notebook and voice recorder, the universal badge of journalists, and I was handed a glass of wine and given a tour of the tiny gallery and invited to take pictures. The first thing that greeted me was a large, and frankly very beautiful, “hyper-realist” portrait of a young woman… dressed in the Roman collar of a priest.

I was very politely introduced to another artist, the only one present for the opening, Mauro Maugliani, a painter, born in Tivoli and living in Rome. Being a student of realist painting myself, I admired the skill of the work, and said, truthfully, that it was beautiful. 

I asked if his painting were intended as a protest, and I think he was sincere when he insisted that it was not. “My work is my memory, my religion, my questions. It is not a protest.”

He told me that he is a Catholic and practices the Faith. “I am Christian, Catholic. Very Christian and Catholic. When I have children, I will teach them this.”

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I asked him if he went to Mass, as the Church teaches he is obliged to do, and he said, “Oh yes.”

“Every Sunday?”

“Oh no. Not every Sunday!”

I was invited to view an “installation”. A little booth, resembling a confessional, had been constructed, decorated with the red brocade wall covering, traditional in Italian Baroque churches, and a prie-dieu, painted with the tourist slogan “I (heart) Jesus”. I was invited by the artist to kneel down and put on a pair of headphones and watch the video on the iPad attached to the wall.

I was expecting irony, the usual sneering, but the video was poignant, nostalgic and rather sad. Filmed in the style of an old movie newsreel in grainy black and white, it featured long walking shots through churches and the beautiful and romantic Protestant Cemetery of Rome. The theme of Mr. Maugliani’s work was “Sisters” and the camera zoomed in on gravestones featuring faded photos of Catholic nuns in traditional habits.

Mr. Maugliani told me, “No. No. It’s not a protest.” Speaking in a combination of halting English, French and Italian, he said, “My project is only to relay my memory, my nostalgia” for the faith of his childhood.

“But all my works, including this project, is my memory. My childhood with my grandmother. I remember walking with my grandmother in the city. I know the sisters, the priests.”

The faith, he said, “is a great mystery.”

He told me that in the many hours he spent working on the painting, he listened to recordings of the Rosary, sung by nuns. “My own vision as an artist, I open my mind and ask about my own truth, my own reality. In this video, the music was not Gregorian chant. It is of the Rosary. Which is a mantra. My works are this mantra. For me, in my mind while I was painting, was the Rosary.”

I asked him then, why the painting of a woman in clerical dress. “This is my question [to the Church]. Why, this woman, very beautiful and spiritual, who is called to give life,” cannot be ordained.

“It is not a protest, but a question. I think my woman asks something inside: why not? Just for me, I think a woman is the same as a man, and I ask, for the celebration, [of the Mass] why not?”

I could not shake the impression that it was an honest question. I detected nothing here of the usual veiled hostility of the professional anti-Catholic protester, no sneering or snide tone. And there was no sign of the worse thing that I have often seen in those who have been taught to hate the Faith, the shredded and stunted emotional development, the wrenching sadness of a damaged soul. I could see perfectly clearly that he meant what he said.

I asked him then if anyone had ever explained the Church’s position: “If I were Catholic, and wanted to know something about this, if it were important to me, I would ask someone. Or look it up for myself. I would get books and study the question, since it is important. Have you done this?”

He simply said, “No”. Had anyone, a priest perhaps, or his grandmother, explained it to him? “No.” Had he ever heard it explained in church? “No.”

Before I thanked him for his time and took my leave, he drew me over to another work, titled “Sweet, sweet cross”. It resembled one of the many reliquaries one sees in Roman churches. It was a sculpture of a plaster cast of a woman’s hand holding a Rosary. Mr. Maugliani told me he had sculpted the Rosary’s beads and Crucifix out of sugar.

“The Credo is very profound,” he said. “It is very strong, and very sweet”.

“I think for the sisters, it is not a matter of sacrifice. For sisters, [their life] is not a sacrifice; it is sweet. Your life is very sweet.”