Pope Francis welcomed 200 artists, filmmakers and writers into the Sistine Chapel to mark the 50th anniversary of the Vatican Museum’s contemporary art collection.

The Pope acknowledged that some in the crowd, like Andres Serrano, of “Piss Christ” fame; sometimes use confrontation to make people think. But he said they aimed to find harmony and beauty.

“You want to reveal reality also in its contradictions and in those things that it is more comfortable and convenient to keep hidden,” Francis said. “Like the biblical prophets, you confront things that at times are uncomfortable; you criticize today’s false myths and new idols, its empty talk, the ploys of consumerism, the schemes of power.”

Pope Paul VI first invited artists into the Sistine Chapel in 1964 in hopes of renewing the friendship between the Catholic Church and artists that, in past centuries, had resulted in such masterpieces as Michelangelo’s frescoed chapel itself.

That audience helped give birth, in 1973 with a concert conducted by Leonard Bernstein, to the inauguration of the Vatican Museum’s Modern and Contemporary Art collection. The collection, the youngest in the museum, is marking its 50th anniversary this year with an exhibit of some of its most recent acquisitions, including by artists invited to Friday’s audience.

In recent years, the Vatican has sought to relaunch the Holy See’s engagement with contemporary culture, participating in the Venice art and architecture biennales and, in the future, literary festivals.

In the audience at Sistine Chapel, were such figures as author Jhumpa Lahiri, director Abel Ferrara, whose recent film “Padre Pio” pays homage to the Italian saint, contemporary artist Anselm Kiefer and Italian actor Silvio Orlando, whose portrayal of a fictional Vatican secretary of state in “The Young Pope” and “The New Pope,” made him seem perfectly at home in the Apostolic Palace.

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