Umberto Eco Laments the Ignorance of Catholic Religion

This article bemoans as enthusiastically as the decadent Southern European soul can, the gap in the education of young Italians toward understanding the patrimony of what enlightened people everywhere who flock to museums on Sunday's instead of Church call "great" masterpieces, created by a disinterest in religious subjects; never mind the actual cause, professore. Three of these students he finds to his discouragement, don't know who the Three Kings are.

It demonstrates something that is painfully apparent that religious faith might be an important part of history and worthwhile in order to understand the great souls who were forced for need of bread to depict those scenes on canvas, but believing in it, that's another story.

It brings to mind Paul VI's fashionable Milanese meetings he held which drew large crowds and spawned a famous book, a dialogue between he and Umberto Eco, called Belief and Unbelief. It is a kind of model for the engagement of the Church with the modern world, often well-attended, attracting even people who would otherwise not attend Church at all. For all of the talking, which approaches the kind of chatter of inter religious dialogue and neo-ecumenism today, it's hard to say what it has done for Intellectuals like Eco.

Well, in this recent Op-Ed piece in the New York Times, he seems to be very much the same. Advocating for the kinds of things one of the post-religious heroes his novels might have advocated, a kind of areligious, religious humanism. He really shouldn't lament it too much, it's a situation men like him have encouraged and helped to create.

His half-hearted attempt to keep himself out of the camp of Catholic (even non-believing) partizans by encouraging the study of world religions is almost doctrinaire neo-Marxism. Bravo professore!

New York Times

by Umberto Eco

Almost by chance I recently happened to witness two similar scenes: a 15-year-old girl who was engrossed in a book of art reproductions, and two 15-year-old boys who were enthralled to be visiting the Louvre.

The parents of all three were nonbelievers and the teens were raised in secular countries; that lack of religious background clearly affected their ability to appreciate the art they were viewing.

The teenagers could understand that the hapless individuals in Theodore Gericault’s “The Raft of the Medusa,” had just escaped a shipwreck. And they could recognize that the characters portrayed by Francesco Hayez in “The Kiss” were lovers.

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h/t: Against the Grain