Pope makes first papal visit to Venice’s  “Biennale” festival to offer stirring message to artists and young people

Pope Francis made a day trip to Venice on Sunday to attend a famed annual cultural event, during which he spoke out about the important role of artists and gave a rallying cry to young people to live their lives to the full and not be ensnared by the digital world.

Pope Francis travelled to Venice on 28 April for the city’s annual “Biennale” festival, which features various works of art, architecture, cinema, dance, music, theatre and more. It marked the first time a pope has ever attended the Biennale, which began in 1895 and is one of the largest annual cultural events in Europe. During his visit the Pope emphasised the role that art can play in shaping culture for the better and the importance of maintaining joy and hope amid the vicissitudes of life.

Despite recent health challenges for the 87-year-old pontiff, after arriving by helicopter from Rome the Pope appeared engaged and energetic throughout his itinerary – though he made use of a wheelchair and a motorised buggy – which included taking a boat ride through the famous city of waterways that is known as the “impossible city” due to its remarkable setting. Francesco Moraglia, Patriarch of Venice, accompanied the Pope throughout his visit.

In his brief speech to artists, the Pope said the world needed them, and highlighted the role of art as a tool of inclusion opposed to various forms of violence and discrimination.

Art itself, he said, is “a city of refuge, a city that disobeys the regime of violence and discrimination in order to create forms of human belonging capable of recognising, including, protecting and embracing everyone. Everyone, starting from the last.”

“It would be important if the various artistic practices could establish themselves everywhere as a sort of network of cities of refuge, cooperating to rid the world of the senseless and by now empty oppositions that seek to gain ground in racism, in xenophobia, in inequality, in ecological imbalance and aporophobia, that terrible neologism that means ‘phobia of the poor’,” he said.

Behind each of these attitudes, he said, is a “refusal of the other” and a selfishness that leads people to become isolated, pursuing individual interests. He closed pointing to several female artists whose work he said has something to teach humanity, such as Frida Khalo, Corita Kent and Louise Bourgeois.

“I hope with all my heart that contemporary art can open our eyes, helping us to value adequately the contribution of women, as co-protagonists of the human adventure,” he said.

In his meeting with 1,500 young people in front of Venice’s Basilica of Santa Maria della Salute, which he reached by taking one of Venice’s famed motoscafi, or waterborne taxis, Pope Francis told them they were made for heaven, and that they must “rise to stand in front of life, not to sit on the couch.”

“Get out of bed and accept yourself as a gift,” the Pope urged. “Remember that for God, you are not a digital profile, but a child, that you have a Father in heaven and therefore you are a child of heaven,” adding that they must let themselves be picked up in a world that often wants to pull them down.

Francis noted that God worked wonders with the weakness of many characters in the Bible, and that despite whatever feelings of inadequacy they might have, young people can be encouraged by this, because for God, beauty and fragility often go together.

“He is our Father and, when we are down, he sees children to lift up, not evildoers to punish. Trust in him!” he said, telling young people to keep standing “when we feel like sitting down, letting go, or giving up. It is not easy, but this is the secret”.

“Take life into your hands, get involved; turn off the TV and open the Gospel; leave the cell phone and encounter people!” he said, explaining that they could keep the cell phone, but only if they made a point of encountering those around them.

He told them to be “creators of new things! Be creative with gratuitousness; bring to life a symphony of gratuitousness in a world that seeks profit! Then you will be revolutionaries.”

In making his trip, not only was the Pope visiting one of the most fabled and romanticised cities in the world, as well as making his first trip outside of Rome in seven months, he was confronting a stark example of the struggle of Catholicism in its traditional heartland, not to mention a spot once hailed by another pope as a “hunter’s snare for vocations”, reports Crux.

In the surrounding region of Veneto, which is divided into nine dioceses, fifty years ago there were more than 6,000 priests, both diocesan and religious orders. By the year 2004 that number had dropped to 4,800, and today it stands at 3,700.

In the city of Venice itself, there were 714 priests in 1969, shortly after the close of the Second Vatican Council. According to the most recent count, which dates from 2022, the total now stands at 266.

Emblematic is the case of Casoni, a small town of roughly 2,500 people in the Veneto region. It was once hailed as having the highest percentage of its sons and daughters in religious life of any spot on earth; a local historian told the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera  that between the 19th century and today, Casoni produced 71 priests, five religious brothers, 76 nuns, and three consecrated laypersons, in addition to two seminarians who died before they could be ordained.

Today, however, Father Alessandro Piccinelli, the local pastor, said that the last person from Casoni to take vows was six years ago, and that today while the weekly Sunday Mass is still relatively well-attended, it’s overwhelmingly made up of elderly persons.

According to the most recent national survey, only 18.7 per cent of the population of the Veneto region attends Mass on a regular basis, which is below the national average.

Between 1984 and 2013, the percentage of couples in Veneto who elected to marry outside the Church rose from 11 per cent to 61 per cent, according to government statistics. The overall number of marriages each year also has dropped, from roughly 19,000 per year in 2004 to 14,000 today, and one out of four of those marriages is a second marriage.

According to some estimates, almost 30 per cent of children born in the Veneto today are not baptised, and the share of school-age children electing to take a voluntary religion course is also falling.

“Our priests are ever more exhausted, stressed and depressed, forced to run from one parish to another and to deal with everything that has to be done there,” said local journalist Andrea Priante.

“At times, the only thing they can do is raise a white flag,” Priante said. “In every diocese of the region, on average two or three priests every year ask to take some time away with a sabbatical period.”

In that context, the hope is that the first-ever visit by a pope to the famed Venice Biennale, an annual cultural festival where the Vatican has hosted its own pavilion since 2013, might help galvanise local Catholicism. Francis is the fourth pope to visit Venice since 1972, following Popes Paul VI, John Paul II and Benedict XVI.

The Pope closed his visit to Venice’s “Biennale” festival with Mass in the square in front of the city’s famed Basilica of Saint Mark, where the remains of Mark the Evangelist, author of one of the four Gospels, are buried.

During mass he reflected on the role of Christians in fighting global challenges through the pursuit of solidarity, justice and genuine community.

He took his cue from the biblical passage from the day’s Gospel reading that states: “Whoever remains in me and I in him will bear much fruit.”

“While the metaphor of the vine expresses God’s loving care for us,” the Pope said, “it also warns us that if we sever this connection with the Lord, we cannot produce fruits of good life and risk becoming dry branches, which will be cast aside.”

What matters, the Pope explained, is to “remain in the Lord”. This is not a passive or static attitude, he emphasised, but is rather an invitation “to move” and to enter into conversation with God and with scripture, and to follow Jesus “on the path of the Kingdom of God”.

Alluding to the image of the vine and branches, Pope Francis said the fruit of joy and hope that comes from God is what believers are called to bear in their daily lives, even in the face of challenges.

He pointed to issues of local concern in Venice such as climate change, the weakening of the structure of the fabled “floating city”, and inadequate management of tourism amid an overwhelming influx, among other things.

“All that these realities risk generating [problems] in terms of frayed social relations, individualism and loneliness,” he said, adding that Christians can help combat these things by bringing “the fruits of the Gospel into the reality we inhabit”.

“We need our Christian communities, neighbourhoods and cities to become welcoming, inclusive and hospitable places,” the Pope said.

“Venice, which has always been a place of encounter and cultural exchange, is called to be a sign of beauty available to all, starting with the last [person], a sign of fraternity and care for our common home.”

The outing to Venice marked Pope Francis’s first excursion out of the Vatican in 2024. He’s currently scheduled to make other day trips within Italy, to Verona on 18 May and Trieste on 7 July, ahead of a major international trip to Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, East Timor and Singapore in September.

Photo: Pope Francis arrives to lead a mass at St.Mark’s square in Venice, 28 April 2024. (Photo by ALBERTO PIZZOLI/AFP via Getty Images.)