The Pope, the Jews and the Vatican Museums
FORWARD
By Michael Satlow
VATICAN CITY - The Vatican Museums receive 20,000 visitors a day and offer an unparalleled opportunity for the church to educate and extend its mission. Yet to visit the Vatican Museums is to enter a vision of Christianity that not only fails to acknowledge the complicated and tortuous history between the church and the Jews, but also seems to deny the very theological connection to the Jews upon which the official Vatican statements insist. In room after room of magnificent art, art that portrays important scenes from the New Testament, there is a strange absence of Jews. The problem extends to the few Jewish objects that the museums do display. A series of ancient Jewish catacombs around Rome has been excavated and has yielded a large number of beautifully inscribed epitaphs. A collection of these inscriptions is housed within the museum complex in what is known as the Gregorian Profane Museum. This adjoins the Pio-Christian Museum, where Christian art from antiquity is displayed. [link]
By Michael Satlow
VATICAN CITY - The Vatican Museums receive 20,000 visitors a day and offer an unparalleled opportunity for the church to educate and extend its mission. Yet to visit the Vatican Museums is to enter a vision of Christianity that not only fails to acknowledge the complicated and tortuous history between the church and the Jews, but also seems to deny the very theological connection to the Jews upon which the official Vatican statements insist. In room after room of magnificent art, art that portrays important scenes from the New Testament, there is a strange absence of Jews. The problem extends to the few Jewish objects that the museums do display. A series of ancient Jewish catacombs around Rome has been excavated and has yielded a large number of beautifully inscribed epitaphs. A collection of these inscriptions is housed within the museum complex in what is known as the Gregorian Profane Museum. This adjoins the Pio-Christian Museum, where Christian art from antiquity is displayed. [link]
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