By David G. Bonagura, Jr.
What do you suppose was the favorite place in Rome for most of a group of twenty-six college students visiting for the first time? St. Peter’s Basilica and the Vatican Museums? The Colosseum and the Forum? The Trevi Fountain and the Spanish Steps?
It was the Jesuit Church of the Gesù, the pinnacle of Baroque ecclesiastical architecture. Its gilded opulence; its astonishing frescoed ceiling of the “Triumph of the Name of Jesus” that draws viewers toward Heaven; its magnificent dome; its extravagant twin side altars dedicated to St. Ignatius of Loyola and St. Francis Xavier. It is unlike anything last-generation American Catholics of Generation Z have ever seen, whether in person, on screen, or even generated by AI.
These students encountered real beauty for the first time and were overwhelmed by it—so much so that subsequent visits to other sites, however fabulous they all were, failed to displace the Gesù as their favorite. They were not merely impressed; they had an existential experience. “Art moves us because it is beautiful,” wrote Sir Roger Scruton, “and it is beautiful, in part, because it means something.”
Catholics often point out that beauty should take the lead in evangelizing a culture impoverished by the mundane, the functional, and the ugly. Yet we struggle to translate this discourse into practice. We should not have to travel to Rome to experience beauty in architecture, painting, sculpture, decoration, or, for that matter, in music or at Holy Mass.
We know all too well that, immediately after the Second Vatican Council, Church leaders—both clergy and laity—made the conscious decision to reject the beautiful and impose the ugly. In the name of a false renewal, beautiful churches were destroyed so widely—stained-glass windows and high altars removed, golden tabernacles replaced and relegated to the margins, marble covered with wood paneling—that the term wreckovation was coined to describe the phenomenon. The same process of removal and replacement destroyed liturgical music and undermined the celebration of Holy Mass.
The last two decades have witnessed a kind of renaissance, as some pastors have raised funds to restore splendor to their churches and their liturgies. But although some Church leaders now recognize the failures of the post-conciliar wreckovation movement, most Catholics still encounter only the ugly and the banal in their local parishes.
Why does this happen? I propose two interrelated reasons.
First, Catholic leaders of the baby boom generation, even if dissatisfied with the status quo, are largely unable to shake the prejudice they imbibed or inherited—ironically, from many pastors of an earlier generation who carried out the stripping of the altars—against pre-conciliar expressions of beauty. This explains their rejection of or apathy toward the Traditional Latin Mass, Gregorian chant, high altars, and ornate liturgical vestments. Consequently, they do not permit these things in their parishes, or they allow them only in limited quantities: an Agnus Dei, a Salve Regina, or a Tantum Ergo at Benediction, but nothing more.
This leads to the second reason. Our experiences of beauty (or ugliness) within religious contexts are usually filtered through sources of authority. They choose the designs of churches, the decorations, the music, the vestments, and they tell us what is beautiful or what we should consider beautiful.
In their defense, boomers are not unique in their prejudice against an earlier artistic expression: one generation typically reacts against the tastes of its immediate elders—the eighteenth-century neoclassical movement summarily rejected the ostentation of the Baroque and Rococo; Cubist painters rejected the whimsical moments captured by their Impressionist predecessors; or, closer to home, today’s late Generation X and millennials are rejecting the wreckovations they grew up with in favor of nineteenth- and twentieth-century ecclesiastical artistic and architectural expressions, through which they hope to encounter the divine.
Naturally, each of these groups thinks its preferred style is the best; its preference often includes efforts to stifle rival expressions it deems inferior. Here, too, there is a disconnect between rhetoric and action: the Church rightly boasts of its diversity of expressions (artistic styles, apostolic rites of worship, religious orders, methods of prayer), but in practice it often imposes strict uniformity in dioceses and parishes.
In a sense, beauty is necessarily imposed by leaders: once a church design is chosen, for example, later generations are stuck with it, for better or worse. Beyond this, however, pastors should leave room for legitimate expressions of beauty as desired by priests and laity. What makes beauty in the Church legitimate? The fact that it has been expressed within the long tradition of the Church, both in the West and in the East. What Pope Benedict XVI wrote about the Traditional Latin Mass applies to all the Church’s art and architectural forms: “What earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred and great for us too, and it cannot be all of a sudden entirely forbidden or even considered harmful.”
In Beauty: A Very Short Introduction, Roger Scruton continues: “No one who is responsive to beauty, therefore, lacks the concept of redemption: of a final transcendence of mortal disorder into a ‘kingdom of ends.’ In an age of declining faith, art bears enduring witness to the spiritual hunger and the immortal longings of our species. Hence aesthetic education is more important today than at any previous period in history.”
At a time when non-practicing Catholics outnumber practicing ones by a ratio of 4 to 1, Church leaders should encourage any legitimate expression of beauty in the Church that might inspire faith, even if a particular form is not exactly to their liking. For if beauty awakens us to redemption and transcendence, it leads us to God, as Pope St. John Paul II promised the young people at World Youth Day 2000: “It is Jesus in fact that you seek when you dream of happiness; he is waiting for you when nothing else you find satisfies you; he is the beauty to which you are so attracted.”
About the Author
David G. Bonagura, Jr. is the author, most recently, of 100 Tough Questions for Catholics: Common Obstacles to Faith Today, and translator of Jerome’s Tears: Letters to Friends in Mourning. An adjunct professor at St. Joseph’s Seminary and Catholic International University, he serves as religion editor of The University Bookman, a book review founded in 1960 by Russell Kirk. His personal website is here.