Michelangelo, Religious Tolerance and the 500th Anniversary of the Sistine Chapel ceiling

THE WASHINGTON POST
By Benjamin Blech

Pope Benedict XVI celebrates baptisms in the Sistine Chapel on Jan. 9, 2011 in Vatican City, Vatican.

VATICAN CITY---Four and a half centuries before the Second Vatican Council rejected religious intolerance in the mid-1960s, before Pope John Paul II acknowledged Jews as Christianity’s “older brothers and sisters” and, in 2000, placed a prayer into the Western Wall in Jerusalem begging God to forgive the Catholic Church for its mistreatment of the Jews throughout the centuries, Michelangelo found ways to express his commitment to religious open-mindedness as well as to convey his profound horror at the abuse directed at the people who were nothing less than the ancestors of Jesus. [link]