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The season of Lent has entered its fifth week and that means the Vatican has released another graffiti style painting from Italian street artist Maupal. The art releases, organized by the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, each feature Pope Francis taking part in activities that reflect on his 2024 Lenten theme: “Through the desert God leads us to freedom.”
Whereas previous vignettes released for Lent have featured bleak landscapes, this week we are shown a much more lush environment. On a grassy field, Pope Francis dances with a man, woman, and two children of diverse backgrounds, all joined in a circle while holding hands. The dancers revolve around a glass of clean water on a picnic blanket, suggesting that the dancers are celebrating the accessibility of clean drinking water.
Pope Francis’ artistic facsimile has had a very busy Lent so far. We’ve seen him push a wheelbarrow of faith through a desert of nails, stage a jailbreak to release prisoners from the shackles of “fear” and “hate,” present young migrant soccer players with a green card, and topple world currencies from their seat on the pillar of idolatry.
The fifth painting Maupal has released for Lent is a nod towards Pope Francis’ 2015 environmental encyclical Laudato Si, which directs the faithful to care for our common home. The missive, which references water nearly 50 times, states of drinking water:
“Access to safe drinkable water is a basic and universal human right, since it is essential to human survival and, as such, is a condition for the exercise of other human rights.”
With Easter around the corner on March 31, we are left with just three more weeks of Lent and only two more Maupal releases from the Vatican. Look for more paintings each Monday of Lent at the dicastery website, and visit Aleteia to see the artworks of previous weeks: Week 1, Week 2, Week 3, Week 4.
