In every age Christians have sought to give expression to faith’s vision of the beauty and order of God’s creation, the nobility of our vocation as men and women made in his image and likeness, and the promise of a cosmos redeemed and transfigured by the grace of Christ. The artistic treasures which surround us are not simply impressive monuments of a distant past. Rather, for the hundreds of thousands of visitors who contemplate them year after year, they stand as a perennial witness to the Church’s unchanging faith in the Triune God who, in the memorable phrase of Saint Augustine, is himself "Beauty ever ancient, ever new."
It was just a swift greeting, but I think it's a salutary reminder that renewal of the arts will come when Christians return to being patrons of the arts, rather than mere critics. (And buying tschotchkes from the "painter of light" does not count.)
Zenit has a full translation of yesterday's audience, which we might call "Peter, part II." Speaking of Simon's change to the name Peter, the Pope teaches:
With the exception of the nickname "sons of thunder," addressed in a specific circumstance to the sons of Zebedee (cf. Mark 3:17), and that afterward he would not use, he never attributed a new name to one of his disciples. He did so, however, with Simon, calling him Cephas, a name that was later translated into Greek as "Petros," in Latin "Petrus." And it was translated precisely because it was not just a name; it was a "mandate" that Petrus thus received from the Lord. The new name "Petrus" will return on several occasions in the Gospels and will end by replacing his original name, Simon. This detail is of particular importance if one keeps in mind that, in the Old Testament, a change of name announced in general the conferring of a mission
The remainder of the short talk goes through the numerous "clues" in the Gospel to Peter's primacy. One for your "where is that in the Bible?" files.
