["L'Espresso", December 9, 1999] There are secret Vaticans, and only the pope can show you the most secret one of all. It is in the second loggia of the Apostolic Palace, a few steps away from the Sistine Chapel and Raphael's frescoes. There one finds a door bearing the inscription "Redemptoris Mater," Mother of the Redeemer. For those who enter, it's like eighth heaven.
John Paul II was also enchanted the first time he visited it, on November 14, 1999. He exclaimed, "But these are visions from Revelation."
These marvels are accessible only to the pope's most intimate guests, those he invites to his morning Mass. This is because "Redemptoris Mater" is the name of the pope's second private chapel, the larger of the two, the one in which he celebrates morning Mass once or twice a week, when his guests number a few dozen and cannot fit into the other chapel.
Up until 1996, the chapel was an anonymous rectangular room, with tapestries on the wall. But then came the astonishing metamorphosis. The cardinals had donated a sum of money to the pope for the fiftieth anniversary of his priestly ordination, and the pope decided to spend it for the complete remodeling of the chapel. He had a dream in mind: to create a monument of art and faith in the Vatican that would be a symbol of the union between the East and the West, between Byzantium and Rome. And to whom would he entrust the realization of his dream? To two Jesuits who had done more than a little to set it aflame.
The first, Tomas Spidlik, from Moravia, had been his Lenten preacher in 1995, and is a front-ranking scholar of Eastern theology. The second, Marko Ivan Rupnik, from Zadlog in Slovenia, is also a theologian who looks to the East, but he is, in the first place, an artist. He directs the Ezio Aletti Study and Research Center, in a small building near the basilica of St. Mary Major in Rome, a meeting place for scholars and artists from Eastern and Western Europe. In 1993, John Paul II had expressed admiration for two of his paintings, remarkable for their equilibrium between Byzantine iconography and ancient and modern Western art.
Rupnik was at the time already a painter of genius. But he had never tried decorating the 600 square meters of a church with mosaics. He transfered his studio to within the four walls of the Vatican chapel and created something like a medieval workshop, with male and female assistants who had come from central Europe and had been trained at the Aletti Center. He called in other artists as a sort of chorus, enlisting a Russian Orthodox, Alexander Kornoukhov, to paint the heavenly Jerusalem in a pure Eastern style, ancient and dreamy, behind the altar; and a mosaic artist from Spilimbergo, Rino Pastorutti, to create the arched vault, with the icon of Christ the Pantokrator – but everything followed the outline of the unifying vision conceived by Rupnik and his master Spidlik.
They even took their working methods from the old workshop. They used tiles hand-cut one by one, millions of them, even bringing them from distant places, from Val Camonica, from the Julian Alps, from rivers and beaches, including pebbles and seashells. They used enamel made in Spilimbergo and Venetian gold and gold leaf. They wanted to make the stones speak in their natural striations and tonalities as well, and in their various dimensions, from two millimeters to twenty-five centimeters.
And what a visionary explosion meets the eye in the three mosaic walls that Rupnik not only designed, but also executed personally! Nothing interrupts the "continuum" of shapes and colors – red, blue, gold, ivory – all setting the stage for the story of the Son of God who comes down among men so that men may return to the Father, arriving at the transfiguring fulfillment of all in the second coming of Christ and in the final resurrection of the body. The vision is pure and rarefied theology. But there is nothing like the biblical story to render it concrete, vibrant, and lively.
On the wall that features the descent of God, the Nativity is a delicate burial of the divine infant in a shroud of swaddling clothes and in the tomb of a crib, a prophecy of his death burial. And the baptism in the Jordan shows Jesus, posed as if upon the cross, being immersed in the watery abyss of human sin. The scene proceeds to the descent among the dead, but which is also the resurrection of Jesus, and with him of Adam and Eve and the forerunners, brought forth from the kingdom of death, with all the tombs uncovered by the earthquake made by the Risen One. Eve is making the same movement as she did when she plucked the fruit of death in Eden, but now her hands reach out to caress the hand of Christ.
Everything around this descent of God into the world is a whirl of flaming petals, the cosmic flower that the Risen One brings to bloom. And there are images of the salvation that comes to every sinner. Jesus sits at table with them, intent upon the sinful woman who is anointing his feet with perfume. He himself washes the feet of the disciples. He sets the table for the pagan woman who asked him only for the crumbs. On the cross, he reveals himself as the Son of God to the centurion, also a foreigner, faceless like all outcasts, but watched, recognized, and loved by Mary.
The front wall shows the return of man to God. This is also a great blaze of light and form, the Pentecostal rain of fire that covers the earth and makes it bloom. Joachim and Anne seem almost to dance as they are drawn by God into a whirlpool of nuptial love. The Good Samaritan and the wounded man (see photo) now have the same face, and a single halo encircles them. The drops of flame return to God through martyrdom: that of St. Paul and that of the Jewish Edith Stein, with the barbed wire of Auschwitz wrapped around the burning bush, the symbol of Moses and of monasticism.
But the most moving section of all is the entrance wall, which depicts the last times. The figure of Christ the Judge leaps to the fore of the rose-hued heavenly gyre as the priest of the eternal liturgy of paradise, with Adam and Eve, who find again the tree of life – lost to them in primeval Eden – in the cross that graces the ethereal altar. And surrounding the Christ of the end times is the flow of the penultimate times, recapitulated in him. Moses parts the Red Sea. Noah in the ark saves the animals from the flood. Jonah is there with the giant whale that plunges into the waves after casting him back up into life. There are the ranks of martyrs with their names written in the language of each one, both Catholics and those of other confessions, like the Lutheran Elizabeth von Tadden, killed by the Nazis, or the Orthodox Pavel Floreskij, a victim of the Soviets. And then there are the resurrected who lack a name and fame, but are now all marked by the "tau" of salvation, in a land gleaming with sunlight: a child with a ball, a painter with his palette, an engineer with a computer. In one corner, John Paul II emerges with a model of the church in his hand: a worthy commissioner.
At the bottom of the corner opposite that of the flood is the Last Judgment. But where are the damned? The archangel Michael leans with his hand on the scale to give more weight to good works. And only one black demon is falling into the red stain of the abyss. Farther down there is a curtain. It's impossible to see who's back there. Are there one hundred thousand of them? Just one? Nobody? Christ is Judge insofar as he is Savior: the Savior of those who reach for his proferred hand. Regarding those who refuse the offer there are only silence and mystery. More than just an artistic milestone, this amazing mosaic is a great theological masterpiece.
When Theology Becomes Ecumenical Art