Christoph Cardinal Schönborn (born 1945) is an Austrian Dominican friar, theologian, and prelate of the Catholic Church. He served as the Archbishop of Vienna from 1995 until his retirement in 2025, during which time he became a highly influential global voice. A student of Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI), he is renowned for serving as the principal editor of the Catechism of the Catholic Church and for his extensive work promoting pastoral dialogue and ecclesiastical reform.
Genuine Poetry
Christoph Cardinal Schönborn, the editor of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, shares this on art, the true and the beautiful:
“Art, therefore, does not deal only with what is externally beautiful and harmonious, although this is rightly considered to be its primary end (CCC 250I). Gertrud von le Fort, one of the greatest Catholic authors of our [just-completed] century, says of writing (and similar things can be said also of the other arts) that it shares with the Christian faith the ‘irresistible inclination to embrace the ostracized and the condemned, even the guilty who are condemned, to accompany on their confused path to the abyss those who have gone astray, to draw the failing and the dying to its heart. […] Genuine poetry remains, unflinchingly, the great lover of the guilty and the lost.’”
Perhaps the words of this author will help us to understand better some of the ways of contemporary art and to see more clearly where today’s artists, in their often bewildering quests, are on the trail of the Savior’s truth.
— Living the Catechism of the Catholic Church, Vol. III: Life in Christ.
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