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Archives > The Top Ten People of 2006: #9 & #10
Top Ten People of 2006: #9 & #10
JESUS COLINA #9
BY LUCY GORDAN
Sometimes the right man gets the prize. In this case, the right man is Jesus Colina-Diez, a 36-year-old Spaniard with a winning smile, a good-humored disposition and a work ethic which astonishes his journalistic colleagues at Inside the Vatican and around the world. For Colina, almost single-handedly, has "moved mountains" in the Catholic media world, creating a world-spanning Internet news agency (Zenit) while, at the same time (and more importantly) calmly and lovingly raising, along with his charming French wife, Giselle, three small, energetic children (Yann, Miriam and Stefan, who recently fell and broke his arm) all the while "on deadline." For his journalistic creativity and his exemplary witness as a husband and father, we are proud to include Jesus Colina among our "Top Ten" people of 2006.
Photo: Jesus Colina-Diez, a leader in Catholic media worldwide
The Permanent Observer Mission of the Holy See to the United Nations was officially established on April 6, 1964. For 42 years, the Mission has played an active role in the advancement of peace and justice in the international community, serving as a vehicle for promoting the teachings of the Catholic Church. To extend its humanitarian and conciliatory activities beyond the strictly diplomatic parameters of the Mission to the UN, the Path to Peace Foundation (located at 25 East 39th Street, New York, New York 10016-0903, tel. 212-370-9614) was established in 1991 by then-Archbishop Renato R. Martino, the apostolic nuncio and Permanent Observer of the Holy See to the United Nations. (Archbishop Celestino Migliore is the current president.) The Foundation works independently, but in collaboration with the Holy See Mission, to spread the message of peace by which the Catholic Church, through the words and activities of the Pope and the Holy See, strives to "guide our steps into the path of peace" (Luke 1:79).
Since 1994, the Foundation has bestowed a Servitor Pacis ("Servant of Peace") Award. In 2006, "in recognition of his service to the Church in disseminating its teaching on peace and the dignity of the human person, and for covering the work of the Holy See at the UN," the Servant of Peace Award was bestowed on Colina.
Born in Miranda de Ebro, Spain, not far from Burgos, Colina studied with the Legionaries of Christ in Mexico as a teenager, then in Rome, where he earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy at the Pontifical Gregorian University, and in Madrid, earning a bachelor's degree in communications from Complutense University.
Colina has worked in Rome as a journalist since 1991. He was the editor-in-chief of Proyeccíon Mundial, a monthly Catholic magazine published in Mexico for Latin America, and an associate editor of Catholic World Report (USA), and Le Temps de l'Eglise (France). Since 1994, he has been the Rome correspondent for the Spanish weekly supplement Alfa y Omega, distributed by the Spanish daily newspaper, ABC. He also writes for other publications like Avvenire (the newspaper of the Italian bishops' conference) and the National Catholic Register in the USA.
In 1997, Colina founded Zenit, an independent, non-profit internet news agency committed to spreading the Catholic Church's message, especially the wealth of the Church's social teaching. With 52 collaborators from 14 countries, Zenit is available in six languages and has 400,000 subscribers.
In 1998, he became responsible for the contents of the Digital Network of the Church in Latin America, a project of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications and the Latin American Bishops' Council. He is also cofounder and co-director of Periodismocatolico.com, the largest network of Catholic journalists in Spanish.
In mid-October at the first World Congress of Catholic TV worldwide (estimated at 2,000 stations) held for three days in Madrid, Spain, Colina presented a new television service called H20 News (http://www.h2onews.org), developed in cooperation with the Pontifical Council for Social Communications. He is one of H20's four founders.
In his presentation, Colina said that H20, scheduled to start transmitting in the near future in cooperation with the Vatican Television Center, will offer Catholic television stations short video clips in various languages, and a news program in seven languages.
"Its name is the chemical formula of a vital element, water," Colina said. "The news service is water for the user: renewing information which springs from the source of the Gospel and vivifies the receiver. Our motto is: 'H20 News TV, Your Good News Source.' H20 News emanates from Rome, the center of Catholicity and source of information for the life of millions of Catholics." For more information about its founders, its mission, its editorial line, and how to subscribe, click on http://www.h2onews.org.
On November 26, the Holy Father appointed Colina one of the 19 new consultors of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications. American appointees are Monsignor Owen F. Campion of the diocese of Nashville, director of Our Sunday Visitor; Carl Albert Anderson, Supreme Knight of the Order of the Knights of Columbus; and Anthony Spence, director of the Catholic News Service.
The last time we met Colina, just before Christmas in Rome, we had just enough time to talk about this profile and drink half a cup of coffee. Then Colina looked at his watch: "I have to go," he said. "Giselle has been preparing today's daily news report, and I promised I would be back to help her." And, as good as his word, he got up, paid for the coffee, and went back to work.
FERNANDO BOTERO #10
BY THIERRY CAGIANUT
We chose Fernando Botero of Colombia as our 10th "Person of 2006" because he has placed his artistic vision against the cruelty of war in his native Colombia and around the world. In so doing, he has become a powerful defender of the innate human dignity of every person, and a powerful voice on behalf of peace.
Photo: Fernando Botero, Colombia's most famous painter,and one of his paintings of a prisoner being tortured
Botero, Latin America's best-known living artist, is famous for his big, chubby bronze sculptures and paintings.
But he shocked the art world in 2004 when he broke sharply from his usual depictions of small town life to reveal works that depicted Colombia's drug wars in horrific detail. Then, in 2005, Botero, 74, who lives in Paris and New York, took on an even more explosive topic: the torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Graib.
Shocked by the reports of the torture, he prepared about 80 paintings and sketches of prisoners attacked by dogs, dangling from ropes, beaten by guards. (They were first exhibited in Rome at the Palazzo Venezia Museum in June 2005.)
When I saw the paintings I was immediately reminded of an exhibition of Goya's famous "Disaster of Wars" series which I had seen at the Met at the height of the Bosnia War in 1995. Goya's prints executed from 1810 to 1820 showed the horrors of the war between France and Spain in a timeless manner, making them a meditation on the cruelty humans can inflict upon one another. 170 years later, Goya's timeless testimonial amidst the horrors of the war in Bosnia was more pungent than any other contemporary commentary. (Not surprisingly, Botero says Goya was one of his inspirations).
"These works are a result of the indignation that the violations in Iraq produced in me and the rest of the world," Botero said at the time. "I didn't invent anything."
He says he painted directly from, and with fidelity to, descriptions he read in official reports about the torture.
His aim, he said, was to brand the images on the conscience of the world, in the way that Picasso's Guernica preserved forever the memory of how innocent civilians were bombed during the Spanish Civil War.
Had Picasso not produced Guernica, Botero said, the town would have been another footnote in the Spanish Civil War.
"Some years ago, I rethought my idea of what to paint and that permitted me to do the war in Colombia, and now there's this," Botero said. "And if there's something else that compels me in the future, then I will do it."
Botero, citing the Impressionists and the many works of a favorite of his, Velásquez, said he had once thought art should be inoffensive, since "it doesn't have the capacity to change anything."
But with time, Botero said, he became convinced art could and should make a statement.
Botero describes himself as an admirer of the United States (one of his sons lives in Miami). Are his Abu Graib paintings "anti-American"?
No, not in a fundamental sense. Many Americans, including many leading American Catholics, have condemned what happened at Abu Graib, arguing that the torture of prisoners is itself "anti-American" because it is not in keeping with traditional American values.
Botero himself reflected this conviction when he described his reaction to the news of the torture: "As I'm an avid reader, I started to read everything I could about what happened, and I was shocked because Americans are supposed to be the model of compassion."
He added: "The things that happened in the Iraqi cells were serious, very serious. And especially because they flouted completely the conditions imposed by the Geneva convention concerning the treatment of prisoners of war."
So it would be wrong to see Botero's Abu Graib paintings as an anti-American political statement in the narrow, ideological sense.
Indeed, the American prison guards are never explicitly represented as such; no identifying flags or insignia appear in any of these works. The perpetrators are often faceless or are represented only by a hand or a boot coming in from the margin of the painting.
No, these paintings transcend politics, just as Goya's do. They are a cry against torture itself, against man's inhumanity to man -- especially in the terrible situation of war and terrorism, when the temptation to resort to torture is strongest.
Who today can distinguish the French and Spanish perpetrators and victims of the atrocities Goya represented?
And who in another 200 years will not look at Botero's work with a profound sense of sadness at what human beings, created in the image of God, can do to one another in time of war?
These are paintings which make a powerful, dramatic case for not entering into war, for avoiding war, for using every possible avenue to to find a way to keep peace before launching a war.
The strongest images are ones in which the subject has passed through anguish into resignation, which strongly suggests the visual tradition of Christian martyrdom.
What I felt seeing the paintings was best put into words by Roberta Smith in her review in the New York Times: "They (the paintings) restore the prisoners' dignity and humanity without diminishing their agony or the injustice of their situation." There is something Christ-like in the suffering of the victims.
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Inside The Vatican (ISSN 1068-8579) is a Catholic news magazine, published monthly except July
and September, with occasional special supplements.
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