Vatican plumps for Global Lifestyle Brand as Mascot for "The Holy Year 2025"
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00:00Hello and welcome to Catholic Unscripted. I'm Catherine Bennett.
00:20I'm Gavin Ashkenson.
00:21How are you, Gavin?
00:22Oh, that's very kind of you to ask. I'm slightly taken aback. I wasn't expecting that one.
00:28You weren't expecting such kindness from me.
00:30I find myself in a state of joyful equilibrium.
00:35Which is not a bad state to be in at all, is it?
00:39No, it's not, Catherine. It's very good.
00:42No, it's not, Catherine. It's very good. There's no delay at my end. Is there a delay at your end?
00:49No.
00:54OK, without further ado, we thought we might talk about beauty today, Gavin. How about that?
01:01Shall we talk about beauty?
01:03Catherine, it would be a splendid thing to do.
01:07So to talk about beauty, Gavin, I thought, what better to turn to than this work of the Veopol Crotudinus,
01:17The Way of Beauty from the Dicastery for Culture and Education in 2006, when dear Pope Benedict XVI was Pope.
01:25And I'd like to just draw out a few paragraphs from this document.
01:31It's so good, Gavin. It's so good. Here we go. Right.
01:38In speaking to the artists in the Sistine Chapel, 7th May 1964, Pope Paul VI denounced the divorce between art and the sacred that characterised the 20th century
01:50and observed that today many have difficulty treating Christian themes due to a lack of formation and experience of the Christian faith.
01:58The ugliness of some churches and their decoration, the desacralisation, is the consequence of this divorce.
02:06A laceration that needs to be treated in order to be cured.
02:11There is a need to resolve the widespread ignorance in the faith.
02:15Sorry, in the field of religious culture to let the Christian art of the past and present open up for all the Veopol Crotudinus.
02:25Nice words. And then we go on just a few more paragraphs and it goes on.
02:31It is a matter of using an appropriate pedagogy to initiate people into the language of beauty, to educate them, to seize the message of Christian art.
02:40This is what makes works beautiful and above all favours in them a meeting with the mystery of Christ.
02:48Awareness is growing in this domain and there is a visible return of interest in the study of sacred Christian art,
02:55which is now better known by those who are responsible for Christian formation.
03:00Faced with widely spread atheistic and ideological interpretations,
03:06the need is felt for a major work of theoretical reformulation of the teaching of sacred art based on an authentic Christian vision.
03:15And to finish, one last paragraph. Get this.
03:19And then this, which I think is really pertinent today about the liturgy and the importance of beauty in the liturgy.
03:25Superficiality, banality and negligence have no place in the liturgy.
03:30They not only do not help the believer progress on his path of faith,
03:35but above all damage those who attend Christian celebrations and in particular the Eucharist.
03:42In the last few decades, some people have given too much importance to the pedagogical dimension of the liturgy
03:49and the desire to make the liturgy more accessible, even for outsiders, and have undermined its primary function.
03:57The liturgy lets us immerse ourselves completely in the salvific action of God in his son, Jesus, which makes it missionary.
04:06Essentially, turned towards God, it is beautiful when it permits all the beauty of the mystery of love and communion to manifest itself.
04:15The liturgy is beautiful when it is acceptable to God and immerses us in divine joy.
04:24Well, aren't they just I know it's quite long, but they're just just three really powerful paragraphs from that via pulchritudinus,
04:32the way of beauty there in 2006, when Benedict XVI was Pope, showing us, I think, revealing how important beauty is and how malformed we have become.
04:45I do. I think there's a very close link between sanctity and goodness and beauty.
04:51It's a tricky relationship because, as so often in the spiritual life, it's easy to get drawn into worshipping the means rather than the end.
05:04So beauty is not an end in itself, but it is a reflection of holiness.
05:09I often think of nuns' faces. I think nuns' faces are some of the most beautiful things you could ever see.
05:15But also music and architecture and other people, apart from nuns, they're not the only ones.
05:21But the reason I mention them is because there's a purity in them. Again, beauty, like love, gets mixed up by people.
05:30You can call somebody beautiful and you might be talking about eroticism, but the kind of beauty we're talking about goes bone deep.
05:39I think one of the things we also realize is that when there's no goodness and no holiness, what you get is ugliness and distortion.
05:46To some extent, aesthetic beauty is an indication of the proximity of goodness as a first measure.
05:57And so it's really very important. And that's one of the reasons why I think Benedict was saying in the liturgy, it's so important and that any degradation towards the banal is a sign that you're offering that there's something gone wrong.
06:13Yeah, absolutely. So the transcendentals, the truth, beauty and goodness, and these are paths that direct us to God himself, who is truth himself.
06:24What do you think you might want to do then? What might be one way of making sure that people couldn't access Christ and wanted to turn them away?
06:33What sort of things might you do, do you think, Gavin?
06:37Well, there's been a great criticism in the last 50 years of how modernism has produced ugliness and buildings particularly have been made ugly and uncomfortable.
06:50And some art has become uglified and uncomfortable.
06:55So I think one of the things the Church has to be careful of, and it's extraordinary that our age seems to be incapable of understanding the importance of aesthetics, is to avoid uglification.
07:07Yeah, it becomes ugly, concrete, we've seen it in architecture, we've seen it in art, we've even seen it in sacred art.
07:14And music too.
07:17And music too, of course, yeah. And it's, it is banal. It's, you know, we heard there in the Via Polk, the way of beauty about the banality of some art.
07:28And spaces, especially in architecture, I think you see that these are spaces that point us towards the transcendent and all too often they seem to have a functionalism, don't they, like a utilitarian kind of functionalism.
07:43How many people can we shove in a high rise block, a square block, a room, without the thought, without any thought of beauty. So we definitely see this erosion around us in society, in our culture.
07:55But we also see it in the Church, don't we Gavin? And just today, we have seen something that we at first thought, well I won't speak for you, but I at first thought was a joke.
08:06No, I thought it was a joke.
08:09Well, unfortunately, it is not a joke. But this was announced as, unveiled as the official mascot of the Holy Year 2025.
08:20Tell us about this really very, very ugly mascot, Gavin, that has just been announced in the USCCB here on their website.
08:31I think my first sight was that it's infantile. And presumably it's the kind of thing that Anglicans would produce as an advertisement for messy church.
08:42If you want to get children under five interested, that's the kind of thing that they would play with. So five year olds and under would like that very much.
08:51But there's something slightly, slightly, it's not threatening, disturbing, alien-esque. I don't know what it is. My hackles rose and I thought, this is not, I don't know, there's something about this, I don't like it.
09:07Interestingly enough, I looked it up when I first saw it and discovered that it's designed by a man called Simon Legner, who's the creator of Tokidoki.
09:21I don't know what Tokidoki is, but it sounds infantile. He highlights his Italian Catholic heritage. He's proud of being Italian.
09:30And his company is particularly well known for promoting Pride Month. So there's a level of disorder. There's a celebration of disorder in their aesthetic aspirations. And it shows, I think.
09:52It really does make one think, doesn't it? Bishop Strickland, when he was removed from his position and faced lots of difficulties last, was it last year? It might only have been last year, but relatively recently for speaking truth.
10:10And he was cancelled and others who seemingly overtly undermine the faith aren't cancelled. So you start to think, well, he spoke when he was cancelled about worldly forces at work.
10:26And you wonder about these worldly forces and definitely they're demonic. But, you know, my mind goes to the Freemasons who have the origin of their name is the Stone Masons, isn't it?
10:42And you can see this connection between Acts 4.11. You know, Jesus is the cornerstone who has been rejected. And then this idea of these masons trying to set up their own temple, not of God.
10:57And if you imagine what that might look like, it might very well be that you end up with something like Clifton Cathedral and that hideous figure. Because if you were a group of people, let's say, who rejected Christ, who didn't really want to draw people towards Christ and instead wanted to set up a temple to man, that looks very much like the way you might go about it, don't you think?
11:24Yes, I think I do. Well, again, I'm not sure if it's causal or symptom, but certainly that kind of ugliness is a symptom of something wrong. One of our fellow Catholic YouTubers won't use the name you've just used because he thinks that the internet is looking out for it and won't accept any criticism. He calls them stone cutters. I don't know if that's too hypersensitive.
11:50But he's so convinced that the globalist forces who control media censorship are inspired by the stone cutters that he doesn't want to set off the alarms in whatever algorithmic oversight is taking place. And that may be wise or maybe paranoid, I've no idea.
12:16But he's certainly convinced that they have a strong hand in the degradation of the Catholic faith and the freedom of Western society.
12:23Yeah. Oh, okay. Perhaps I'm a little naive. I thought that was generally considered to be the case and nothing new. But there we are. Well, we'll soon see if we're booted off.
12:36I don't think it's naivety. I think it's one's trying to gauge a situation that's moving all the time. The fact is people get censored, channels get censored for a number of things. They get flagged up if people complain or if the scrutinizing algorithms pick things up, then you get cancelled. So it's a matter of just how careful you want to be, I think.
13:02But you're very brave and courageous, Catherine. So perhaps it's a matter of seeing them off with raw courage.
13:09Well, we'll see. I can always hide behind you and Mark anyway.
13:15Physically, you certainly can. Morally, not so much. Electronically, not so much. Physically, for sure.
13:24We do see it as well. You won't be so aware of this, but when I worked in education for quite some time, a lot of the educational materials that are used in schools are unnecessarily cartoonish and, you know, just what's the word, like pathetic, weak, not beautiful, ugly.
13:46They're all of those things. And I'll put a few images up here for people to see. There's no reason why children from a very young age can't be exposed to the beauty of Catholic architecture, sacred art.
13:59Why we have to substitute with ridiculous cartoons seems to me totally unnecessary. And yet this is what's happening in education.
14:10And again, you think, well, what's the connection there? We have poorly formed children, poorly catechised children going out into the world, abandoning their faith, falling away.
14:24It might be time to start looking at some of the reasons for that and saying, well, what are we feeding them? We're feeding them garbage, cartoons, nonsense, shallow, worldly things that we think might please them because they're little.
14:37But they don't need to have cartoons just because they're little. I remember when I, I don't know about you with your children, but when my children were little, I'd take them to Mass and they'd be offering Sunday school during the liturgy.
14:51And we didn't want to take them in because when all the children brought in for Sunday school were just colouring in pictures, just, oh, here's Jesus. Let's colour in a picture of Mary. Has anyone got a blue? And they're not learning anything. It's all just to keep them occupied, to distract them.
15:05And it's not edifying in any way. And I don't think that's needed just because they're little.
15:12I saw a comment somebody else made, which I thought I'd steal and pretend I'd invented it.
15:18But what they said was, I wonder if you want to attract the young, whether it'd be more effective to offer them the Latin mass rather than creepy banality.
15:32And I thought creepy banality was just the right phrase for this thing. And it was also a very good point because one of the extraordinary things is as a reaction to the superficiality and instrumentalism of our culture, the young seem to have a real appetite for the beautiful, particularly liturgically in the Latin mass.
15:51So whoever thought up this rather odd mascot, I think all kinds of worrying things about their judgment and their soul.
16:03Yes, well, it's hard to know what else we might think because it certainly doesn't look like it's going to draw in anyone except maybe a pornified, gamified, artificial culture of people who are completely at home and comfortable with that.
16:20But what we should be doing is saying that. And the irony is just this week, Pope Francis has issued Dilexit Nos and speaks quite beautifully here about the importance of the natural world and against artificial intelligence and AI and artificiality.
16:42And then they produce this horribly artificial mascot. He says, All of us feel, whatever our age and wherever we live, when we recall how we first used a fork to seal the edges of the pies that we helped our mothers or grandmothers to make at home.
17:00It was a moment of culinary apprenticeship, somewhere between child play and adulthood, when we first felt responsible for working and helping one another. Along with the fork, I could also mention thousands of other little things that are precious parts of everyone's life.
17:16A smile we elicited by telling a joke, a picture we sketched in the light of a window, the first game of soccer we played with football, with a rag ball, the worms we collected in a shoebox, a flower we pressed in the pages of a book, our concern for a fledgling bird fallen from its nest, a wish we made in plucking a daisy.
17:38All these little things, ordinary in themselves, yet extraordinary for us, can never be captured by algorithms. The fork, the joke, the window, the ball, the shoebox, the book, the bird, the flower, all of these live on as precious memories kept deep in our heart.
18:00I thought that was quite nice, actually. A nice nod to those things that can't be computerised and artificialised and gamified, and just little moments of relationship between one another and between us and the natural world.
18:24That was very beautiful.
18:26Yeah, so quite odd then that we have this horrible, horrible mascot. So yes, I think it's time to pay attention to the via pulchritudinus and restore beauty in schools, in our education, in church, in the liturgy, because it demonstrably is drawing people closer to Christ.
18:47And one has to wonder at the mind of those who seek to use images and art that will push people further from Christ.
18:58And especially bad music.
19:00And music, yeah, gosh, yeah, we haven't even started on music. There's a lot to be said there, we'll save that for another day. But for now, thank you for watching, and do join us again next time.
19:12Visit our website, catholicunscripted.com, and take a look at the button below where you can pick up a membership and see the perks available with that.
19:21For now, I'm Catherine Bennett.
19:23I'm Gavin Ashton.