Malaga, Picasso and the Spirit of the Vatican Council

Malaga, the capital of Andalusia, stands as a gateway airport to Spain Costa del Sol. Most people hurry through it to Marbella or Estopona. Yet lingering a while in Malaga leads one to discover a city which dates back to the Phoenicians and which has a long cultural heritage. It is of course the birthplace of Pablo Picasso who lived there until he was 19 and then left never to return. The Picasso museum now contains a number of his work donated by his daughter and is well worth a visit.

As a boy Picasso would have been taken by his mother to the great baroque cathedral at the heart of the town where overblown statues of the Madonna can be seen in his later depiction of the women in his life. He once said of God- God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant and the cat. He has no real style, He just goes on trying other things.

Here Pablo touches on something deep within the nature of God, he just goes on trying, he never gives up and always seeks after something new, in a way he is a God of novelties. It is another way of saying that God is never boring; he is the creative force of the universe par excellence. People however can make him appear boring through a failure to grasp his true nature, a failure in imagination.

The Second Vatican Council fifty years ago tried to make a great leap in imagination to read the signs of the times and bring God into the everyday lives of people. Out of it came a huge impetus towards the Ecumenical movement which has healed divisions between Christians and made the Church of Christ more the sign of unity in the world which it was always intended to be.

The challenge for the future is to bring this spirit of radical imagination to bear into the life of the Church in the world today and for generations to come.

Fr. Peter O’Reilly