Arts News

VATICAN CITY - After years of discussion and at least one failed attempt, the Vatican will open a pavilion at the 2013 Venice Bienniale, a major international contemporary art exhibition.

TORONTO - Religious persecution, whether by mob violence, popular prejudice or state-imposed restrictions on religious practice, is significant in 163 countries, according to the Pew Research Centre’s Forum on Religion and Public Life, with Christianity being the number one target. The world’s 2.2 billion Christians face significant state or popular persecution in 130 countries, says the Pew Forum, while Aid to the Church in Need estimates 150,000 Christians are killed annually because of their faith.

TORONTO - When Toronto artist Viktor Mitic began his Bullet Proof collection, he started with the most iconic image of the past 2,000 years: Jesus Christ.

TORONTO - Holy Week is always a busy time for students of St. Michael’s Choir School, but four-hour rehearsals this year are not just for their requisite masses at St. Michael’s Cathedral. On Easter Monday, 180 boys from the choir school will board a plane and head to Italy for a series of musical engagements, and the opportunity to sing for Pope Francis.

Matthew Teitelbaum, the director and CEO of the Art Gallery of Ontario, calls Revealing the Early Renaissance: Stories and Secrets in Florentine Art “the greatest exhibition of Italian art ever to come to Canada.”

TORONTO - Regis College has a new resident. “Jesus the Homeless,” a sculpture cast in bronze depicting Christ as a homeless man, was installed outside the Jesuit school of theology at the University of Toronto on Feb. 23.

TORONTO - Cardinal Thomas Collins is joining thousands who want Vision TV to remain on basic cable so that its religious programming continues to be available to the widest possible audience.

TORONTO - In his new play, The De Chardin Project, actor and writer Adam Seybold draws a line in the sand — or rather two lines in sand — on the stage floor. Playing the pioneering 20th-century scientist theologian and Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Seybold dramatically lays down the central fact of de Chardin's life: the cross.

TORONTO - Each year, across the Toronto Catholic District School Board, Grade 2 boys take part in a yearly ritual, as adjudicators from St. Michael's Choir School visit their classrooms and listen carefully to the small, unformed voices that may one day make up the ranks of one of the finest music schools in the world.

MISSISSAUGA, ONT.  - St. Marcellinus Secondary School in Mississauga is planning to build what may be the biggest stained glass window of the resurrected Christ in Canada.