The secret schema for the Neocatechumenal Way’s 2017-18 Beginning of the Year Convivence just arrived in my inbox from a friend in Europe.  This Convivence occurs annually at the sect’s headquarters in Porto San Giorgio, Italy, and then is successively repeated throughout the world until the youngest of the Way’s communities celebrate it.  This year it was occurred from September 28 through October 1.

Kiko outdoes himself, I assure you.  Take, for example, his spiel on page 12:

With the Renaissance there was a fracture between the East and the West. The West has refused Christianity.   The dress that they all wore, of the Revelation of God about reality, has been taken away and now they believe in science, physics, chemistry, and no longer believe except in what they can touch. All right, the people of the countries continue to go to Mass, but there is a conflict between faith and science or faith and culture that will explode with Galileo and reach us with modernity: it is paganism, it is atheism, secularization, it is the apostasy of all Europe. They denied the medieval belief that there is a God Creator, that Christ came to the world, all these things. In the Middle Ages some nations all believed, all were Christians, and the thousand years of Christianity in Europe ended with the Renaissance. This is very interesting! Think about what the Orthodox say of the Florentine 400¹: they say it’s a horror. Because of this, western religious art dies, whereas before, the West presented art as a kerygma, as a proclamation, and said that all these things were not invented by the painter, but it was the tradition of the Church. All of this dies, there is a Raphael painting of the Madonna that is sweet and cute, but not religious. And I will not speak to you of Michelangelo with all his muscles! Or Beethoven’s genius … but the religious have nothing, because western religious art is dying. Do we have pictures today? The Virgin of Fatima? We have statues like this, sculptures, but really little or nothing in churches, we have no images that feed our faith. Art is very important. Courage, I do not want to give you a conference on art now.

Wow.  Everything from Galileo’s scientific inquiries to the artistic genius of Michelangelo, Raphael, and even Beethoven!

Kiko the artist must have forgotten about Raphael’s Transfiguration:

Or Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam in the Sistine Chapel:

Or Beethoven’s moving Missa Solemnis (1824).  

Will any members of the Way speak out against this crass and ignorant fundamentalist that refuses to acknowledge the true, the beautiful, and the good of the last millennium?

Notes

1 The “Florentine 400” to which Kiko refers is defined as the century of the Renaissance (the 14th century), the cultural movement that, with roots in Humanism, developed thanks to the patronage of the Medici family and, particularly in the second half of the 14th century, of Lorenzo the Magnificent.   Florence became the capital of the Italian culture in the fields of architecture, painting, sculpture, philosophy,  and poetry.