coordinated by the Fraternità Sacerdotale dei Missionari San Carlo Borromeo

“See, today I appoint you over nations and kingdoms to uproot and tear down, to destroy and overthrow, to build and to plant …” So said God to the young Jeremiah, announcing his fearful and apparently contradictory plan: to bring Israel closer by throwing it out of its land.
A sensitive man, the prophet Jeremiah lived this contradiction personally. He suffered deeply because of the distasteful task which God had given him and yet at the same time trusted in Him, accepting that there is no greater good than following His will. And so he shouted before kings and populace: “Heed the voice! Return to me!”. But his appeal was ignored: like Jesus, Jeremiah suffered because of the persecutions of the people he wanted to save, a people that simply mocked him. Jeremiah’s prophecy came true and Israel was defeated and exiled. But just as everything seemed about to end, God lit a fire of hope in the heart of the prophet and his people: “God says: I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore with loving kindness have I drawn thee. Again I will build thee…They will come with weeping; they will pray as I bring them back!”
The exhibition on the prophet Jeremiah is not a conventional exhibition. It is a combination of theatrical action, films and images. There are no posters, but moving images, sounds and colours only. Visitors are involved as protagonists in the explanations and feel more and more transported into the heart of one of humanity’s most dramatic stories.
The exhibition is staged in two rooms: in the first, set up like an amphitheatre, some of the key moments in Jeremiah’s life are reproduced as if for the stage. The off-stage voice of God shakes the actor-Jeremiah, and through their dialogue, God’s burning and violent love is revealed along with the call that makes Jeremiah a prophet for his people. During the course of a short representation, the room changes appearance through light effects realized by moving images on the floor.
After this direct contact with the word of God, the public is introduced into the second room, set up to recall the desert. Here the guide covers the fundamental stages in the prophet’s life using short films and images. The face of Jeremiah and the personality of God, first made out in the stage dialogue, acquire new outlines. Jeremiah’s voice becomes increasingly more the voice of the spectator, and God’s voice is revealed as that which, hidden and manifest, angry and gentle at the same time, pervades the lives of us all.