Cardinal José Tolentino de Mendonça, an award-winning poet, believes art can heal people, including prisoners, and can help them find the right path forward.
The cardinal, prefect of the Dicastery for Culture and Education, presented some of the Vatican’s contemporary art projects for the Holy Year 2025 and explained the choice to begin in Rome’s Rebibbia prison, where Pope Francis is scheduled to open a Holy Door 26 December.
While at the prison to open the door and celebrate Mass, the pope also will see the fruit of a collaboration between the Italian contemporary artist Marinella Senatore and some 60 men and women serving time at Rebibbia.
Titled, “Io Contengo Moltitudini” (“I Contain Multitudes”), the work is a structure more than 19 feet tall that resembles the baroque “luminaria,” a tower supporting a bonfire or fireworks. Shooting out from the main structure are rays on which phrases about hope are written in a variety of languages and dialects.
Senatore told reporters at the Vatican 17 December that this was the first time she ever asked a group to write phrases important to them and no one submitted a quotation from a poet, author, song or other person.
The structure was to be installed in the square in front of the Rebibbia prison church 21 December and stay there until mid-February. Pope Francis will see the work when he visits 26 December, but it also will be accessible to the guards, the inmates and to their family members during visiting hours.
In collaboration with the Jubilee for Artists 15-18 February, the dicastery also is commissioning artists to create installations at other prisons in Italy and around the world.
The first project, which the cardinal would not provide many details about, will be installed at Rome’s Regina Coeli prison, located less than a mile from the Vatican. The Chinese artist Yan Pei-Ming already has spent two days visiting prisoners and staff, said Cristiana Perrella, the project curator.
Cardinal Tolentino said the works will be placed outside the prisons so they can be seen not only by prisoners and staff but also by the public.
“The objective is to encourage and support experiences that help the detainees live their time in prison as a rehabilitation, a preparation for returning to society,” he said. “At the same time, and just as urgently, it has the aim of converting the spiritual and cultural views, the hearts and thoughts of society regarding prisons so people see them as places of rehabilitation and not simply punishment.”
Giovanni Russo, head of the Department of Prison Administration for the Italian Ministry of Justice, told reporters at the Vatican that much of the daily life, rhythms and rules in a prison—rules that are important for the safety of the inmates and the guards—can erode a prisoner’s culture, discourage reflection, view individuality as a problem and create obstacles to the search for beauty.
And while the prisoners at Rebibbia worked on the project together, Russo said, “there also was a very powerful process of valuing individuality. Each prisoner who was called to write, to risk contributing his or her own message or idea was basically given the right to be a person who is different from the others. And this is the sense of humanity that this project accomplished.”
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