We gather today to celebrate the presence of a Pavilion of The Vatican in a World’s Fair, and to reflect upon the significance of this unusual coming together of the religious and the secular.
Our century may be remembered in history by any one of several names -- some ominous and some hopeful. But whatever the final name, ours is certainly a century in which the nations have begun to speak to each other and to try to understand each other with an intensity of purpose and a sense of urgency unmatched in history.
It is also the century in which the various cultures of mankind try to speak to each other and learn from each other. And finally on that highest plane of human effort in the realm of faith and in the silence of prayer, it is more than any century we have known, an age in which men of all creeds are making the effort of mind and heart to understand their differences and to find their common ground. It was this dialogue to which John XXIII dedicated the Vatican Council, and it is this dialogue which Paul VI already has intensified - through the continuation of the Vatican Council, through the subtle but eloquent modern factions of liturgy (so that in a new sense it speaks in many tongues), through his pilgrimage to the East, and through just such silent testimonies as this Pavilion.
In its oldest sense a pavilion is a tent. It came from the word butterfly. Because in the way that it spread out, opened out, it suggested a butterfly’s wings. I think of this Pavilion as opening out on all the weathers of our age. In it, the ancient Church of Rome is present to the world of 1964 speaking to that world and understanding that world. Another remarkable aspect of this occasion is suggested by the exhibit that stands at the head of this Pavilion - undoubtedly the most valuable single exhibit in the entire Fair: the Pieta of Michelangelo.
To achieve the peace that goes beyond treaties, that goes beyond ideologies, a peace that binds hearts and creates a true community, we need the world of art to lift our spirits - we need the world of religion to give us a better standard than the things we see around us. Here is that standard, in the sorrowing mother, holding what was failure as the world goes, but which proved to be the greatest success of all time. It was successful because, as the Pieta reveals, it was a life of compassion. Michelangelo captured that compassion, which is what we need to see and what we need to understand if the world is ever to know true peace.
For the saints and sages of the great religions have always agreed that a peace that passes understanding can be reached only by compassion. This is the ideal that must illuminate, from the very center, all our efforts to bring a better life to our world, within our own country, or in the farthest reaches of the planet. And even in the deepest privacy of our lives in the prayer that each of us makes in his own tongue and by the dictates of his own heart, there will be no solitude so absolute that it would exclude this compassion.
Just as this masterpiece has crossed the Atlantic undamaged, unmarred -- no ocean can be wide enough to exclude the compassion that presides in this Pavilion, the silence of Michelangelo’s Pieta. It is only with that compassion that man can look upon man -- through the mask of many colors, through the vestments of many religions, through the dust of poverty, or through the disfigurement of disease -- and recognize his brother.
