2 hours ago
2
“If you’re here to confess your sins, press one …”
That’s the message awaiting callers to a special hotline from Thursday. But it’s not a digital Catholic church initiative for the Easter weekend: instead, it’s the latest intervention of the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, who scandalised some with his 1999 sculpture La Nona Ora (The Ninth Hour), which showed a lifesize Pope John Paul II being struck down by a meteorite.
To mark the 21st anniversary of John Paul’s death this month, Cattelan has made a limited edition of miniatures of his famous sculpture.
Alongside this, he is inviting callers from around the world to “confess their sins” directly – via a freephone US number or WhatsApp voice note for those elsewhere. Cattelan will then choose some callers to take part in a livestreamed event on 23 April, in which he will play the part of the priest and “absolve” callers from their sins.
So is this an attempt to scandalise? Absolutely not, he said. “I don’t see it as absolution. It’s not religious authority, it’s a shared gesture. Confession exists in different forms everywhere – even outside religion.”
Far from intending to insult the papacy with his 1999 work, he said he had been “interested in showing fragility”. Some people, including some Catholics, saw the sculpture as representing the pope’s burdens; others believed it referenced the abuse and other scandals in the Catholic church’s recent past, and when it appeared at a museum in Warsaw, it was denounced as an attack on the church.
Cattelan is known for creating blunt, almost cartoonish pieces – from a functional gold toilet installed at the Guggenheim in 2016 called America (later stolen while on display in Blenheim palace) to a banana duct-taped to a wall at Art Basel in Miami in 2019, titled Comedian.
Some of his work can seem sacrilegious, but he said his ambitions were much more ambiguous. He told the Guardian: “Catholicism is something you grow up inside, even if you try to step out of it. It’s belief, theatre, control, comfort – all at once. I’m not trying to defend it or attack it. I’m interested in the images it produces and the tension they carry. If someone feels offended, it probably means the image is still alive.”
Certainly, the Vatican seems not to have regarded him as a threat: in 2024 he was commissioned by the Holy See to create an artwork for its Venice Biennale offering. Cattelan painted a giant mural of soles – the feet kind – on the exterior wall of the women’s prison where the Vatican’s art exhibition was housed. “The fact that Pope Francis came to see the work … is more than a comment,” said Cattelan.
Mazdak Sanii is chief executive of Avant Arte, the company marketing Cattelan’s pope miniatures. He said the confession idea is all about trying to reach new audiences: “We’re trying to make art more accessible both in terms of collecting art, and involving a wider public.” The miniatures, 30cm long and 12.5cm high, are made of hand-painted resin, and the papal staff is metal: each will retail for €2,200.
Photograph: Peter Parks/AFP/Getty Images
There’s another provocation in the number of copies of the sculpture being made: it’s 666, which in the bible is associated with evil. “I like working with symbols people think they understand, and then shifting them slightly,” said Cattelan.
The release of the edition is carefully timed: the sculpture’s title, The Ninth Hour, references the moment Christ died on the cross, which Christians across the world will mark this week on Good Friday. It is a time when Catholics traditionally go to confession: so what does Cattelan think callers will confess to on his hotline? He said he is expecting “a mix … some will play, some will be serious. The interesting part is when the two overlap: you don’t know if someone is performing or revealing something.”
What, then, would his own confession be? “That I trust doubt more than certainty,” he said. “And that irony is sometimes just a way to get closer to things without pretending to own them.”
