VATICAN CITY, 25 NOV 2008 (VIS) – Benedict XVI has sent a Message to Archbishop Gianfranco Ravasi, president of the Pontifical Council for Culture, to mark the annual public session of the Pontifical Academies. The Pontifical Academy of Fine Arts and Literature “dei Virtuosi al Pantheon”, which is organising the event this year, has chosen the theme: “The universality of beauty: a comparison between aesthetics and ethics”.
“We are reminded of the urgent need for a renewed dialogue between aesthetics and ethics, between beauty, truth and goodness”, the Pope writes, “not only by contemporary cultural and artistic debate, but also by daily reality. In fact, at various levels, there is a dramatically-evident split … between the two dimensions: that of the search for beauty – understood however in reductive terms as exterior form, as an appearance to be pursued at all costs – and that of the truth and goodness of actions undertaken to achieve certain ends.
