Who would have thought that a light show could cause such a stir! Archbishop Rino Fisichella, who oversees the Council on the New Evangelization, made the decision to use the façade of St. Peter’s basilica as a projection screen for a show about “our common home,” as Pope Francis termed the earth and the environment in his encyclical. The show was timed to coincide with the Paris climate change talks which continue to inch towards some hopeful agreement to reduce toxic emissions.
My colleague David Gibson at RNS has done most of the heavy lifting on the negative reactions, from traditionalist blog Rorate Caeli to the inimitable Fr. Zuhlsdorf. The charges against the show range from “sacrilege” to “profanation.” This sacred space, they argue, should not have been used to show images drawn from nature even though, obviously, the same God whom we worship inside the basilica is the Creator of all the images that were displayed in the show. Nor do I recall the critics raising any objection to what is, arguably, a true profanation of the façade of St. Peter’s, the name Borghese inscribed in large letters, a tribute to Pope Paul V who oversaw the construction of the façade. (The construction of the façade itself was a different kind of profanation, an architectural one, destroying Michelangelo’s original plan and obscuring the view of the dome from the square.)
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