Sacred Art

by Cornelius Sullivan

The only really effective apologia for Christianity comes down to two arguments, namely, the saints the Church has produced and the art which has grown in her womb.

-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger -1.  

Pope Benedict the scholar has not cited the great intellectual tradition of the Church or a philosophical system, he names two places where the faith is en-fleshed. These two treasures still inspire pilgrimages. Pilgrims go to Assisi because Saint Francis was there. Back packing pilgrims for art go to the Sistine Chapel for art and in Rome and throughout Europe retrace the steps of pilgrims for the faith from centuries past.

Support for sacred art does not exist in any Catholic university. Blessed Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict have insisted that art should have a major role in the New Evangelization.

With a few exceptions, works of art in Catholic Churches today are ordered from the catalogs of furniture suppliers, the ones who provide the pews and the candle sticks. This is in spite of the clear urging of the Second Vatican Council almost a half a century ago for pastors to use local artists to create religious works. 

From the poet author of “The Hound of Heaven”, Francis Thompson:  

 The Church, which was once the mother of poets no less than saints, during the last two centuries has relinquished to aliens the chief glories of poetry, if the chief glories of holiness she has preserved for her own. The palm and the laurel, Dominic and Dante, sanctity and song, grew together in her soul: she has retained the palm, but forgone the laurel. … But poetry sinned, poetry fell; and in place of lovingly reclaiming her, Catholicism cast her from the door to follow the feet of her pagan seducer. The separation has been ill for poetry; it has not been well for religion. 2.

Catholic colleges and universities have preserved intellectual disciplines from earlier centuries with core classes in Theology, Philosophy, and the study of Literature, but they have shied away from any creativity in art. Instead they have embraced Reformation-like iconoclastic ideas. And art is partly to blame. As Thompson said “poetry sinned”. Art sinned even more. Art became autonomous, no longer serving, but always proclaiming its own newness and freedom from restraint and even freedom from relevance to people’s lives. The self referential stance of Modern Art inevitably had to lead to a complete break with any connection to the real, as most people view it, ending in Conceptual Art, art solely as an idea. So, art has become just an idea that man the creator generates. There is no acknowledgment that he is a creature and there is no realization of the truth of the Incarnation. The Church’s distance from music has not been so great because some consensus has been possible. Bad music hurts the ears. Bad art can be shrugged off and then it lingers somewhere in the back of the brain like a bad dream. The elitism of contemporary art is maintained.

Without the holy images, we are in danger of forgetting the face and thus the flesh of the Son of God. The mysteries of the life of Jesus fade from our minds. In the eight and ninth and sixteenth centuries, and again in our own time, Iconoclasm always tends towards Docetism. Robbed of the beauty of sacred art, the Christian can become blind to the beauty of Divine Revelation. And that is disastrous, for, when sundered from beauty, truth becomes correctness without splendour and goodness a value of no delight. 3.

The holiness of beauty is ordered to the beauty of holiness. Sacred art is intended to encourage saintly life. Both are transparent to Christ, radiate the splendour of His truth. Both, in their different ways, are gifts of God. - 4.

1. Joseph Ratzinger & Vittorio Messori, The Ratzinger Report, Ignatius Press, 1987.

2. Francis Thompson, frontispiece, The Beauty of Holiness and the Holiness of Beauty: Art, Sanctity and the Truth of Catholicism, John Saward, Ignatius, 1997. 

3. Saward, p. 25.  

4. Saward, p. 84