Pope Leo XIV addressed a group of directors of globally renowned museums on Saturday at the Apostolic Palace at the Vatican, underlining the Catholic Church’s “special affinity with the arts.”
The pontiff spoke to members of the Bizot group, also known as the International Group of Organizers of Major Exhibitions, whose member institutions include the Louvre in Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the National Gallery of Singapore, the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the British Museum in London, and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, among other world-class institutions.
Founded in 1992, the group takes its name from Irène Bizot, former director of France’s Réunion des Musées Nationaux, who was instrumental in its establishment. Rijksmuseum director Taco Dibbits is its current president. The organization’s members met in Rome and Vatican City, including at the Vatican Museums, for a meeting devoted to the theme of materiality.
“Art is the means by which persons, through their ingenuity, enhance and transfigure matter—that is, the creation in which they dwell as made in the image and likeness of God,” Pope Leo said in his address on Saturday. “The theme of your meeting, ‘Materiality,’ is therefore of particular interest, not only for exploring the relationship between an object and the interpretation of a work of art, but also for reflecting on the distinctive quality of matter as the place in which God chose to reveal himself.”
Quoting a 2015 letter from Pope Francis, the current head of the Catholic Church compared artists with Jesus, saying that Christ “worked with his hands, in daily contact with the matter created by God, to which he gave form by his craftsmanship.” Matter is also memory, said Leo, adding, “The works preserved in museums bear witness to a history that speaks to every person, from one generation to the next. Museum objects thus offer to the present the wisdom of the past.”
“I therefore congratulate all of you for your efforts in directing and administering the museums to which you devote yourselves, safeguarding a heritage that belongs to all humanity,” he concluded his remarks.
The address to museum directors came just days after the pope spoke to artists and curators, saying that the Church needs them, adding, “This is especially true in this age of artificial intelligence, in which we urgently need to distinguish human art from what is produced by machines.”