Latest / The Catholic Current / Ugly as Sin (Erika Ahern) 4/21/26

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Ugly as Sin (Erika Ahern) 4/21/26 · The Catholic Current

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This is The Catholic Current with Fr. Robert Metaig.
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The role of a teacher is an echo of Our Lady's fiat and her role in bringing this truth to
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be known in the world.
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Now that the word of the Father has become flesh and dwelt among us, it maddens me why
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Catholics are inclined to be coy about being specifically Catholic.
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Our Lord didn't say, go out into the world and tell everyone you meet, you do you.
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Praised be Jesus Christ, this is Fr. Robert Metaig of The Society of Jesus, your daily
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As always, let's start with prayer.
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Name of the Father, Son of the Holy Spirit, Almighty God, through the intercession of
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Saint Ignatius of Loyola, we ask that you pour forth your Holy Spirit upon us, a spirit
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of discernment, that might hear your voice and obey your command.
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Name of the Father, Son of the Holy Spirit, Amen.
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Well, friends, you know, regular listeners of the show know that I say that my favorite
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form of exercise is to leap from soapbox to soapbox, driving my menagerie of pet peeves
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before me, and one of my peevish peeves is ugliness in church.
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I have the very great privilege of working with a religious community where beauty and
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reverence are stated right up front in their constitutions.
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I find that very refreshing.
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I want to ask, where did the impulse, mania, desire, commitment to ugly churches come from?
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There are some obvious suspects and some hidden suspects, and my returning guest has quite
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a bit to say about that.
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She is an accomplished journalist, has written everywhere, and she is co-hope of The Loop
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Podcast.
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Erica Ahern, welcome back to The Catholic Current.
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Thank you so much for having me.
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It's my pleasure to be here again.
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Erica, we both know that trying to worship in an ugly church is pretty miserable, and
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the usual suspect for everything that we don't like in church life today is Vatican II, whether
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it's the spirit of Vatican II, the text of the Vatican II, the implementation of Vatican
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II.
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We just haven't been Vatican II-ing hard enough, but somehow all the roots go back
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there.
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The story behind that is a little bit more complicated, but let's start with the present.
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Make some observations about how widespread and deep ugly churches are, especially in
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the West.
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Yeah.
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I mean, I think it's so widespread that every listener probably has some experience, if
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not more experience, of an ugly box-like church or perhaps a church in the round than
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they do of a traditional, say, neo-Gothic or Romanesque architecture.
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And a lot of us, I think, growing up in – I grew up in the 80s and 90s here in the United
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States, and my experience was that the smaller parish churches especially tended to be these
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sort of barn-like shelters, sort of sculptural masses perhaps, with minimal interior decoration.
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And my experience of beauty in a church came from sort of more tourist attraction or major
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churches.
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If I ever made my way over across the pond, I could find some of those medieval structures
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where it was beautiful.
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Right.
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Or I went down to New York City and I saw New St. Patrick's is very beautiful.
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And so I think for a lot of American Catholics, this was a very widespread, you know, the
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old stereotype of the green carpeting, the whitewashed walls, no altar rails, theater
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in the round sort of structures in their churches.
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And unfortunately, something that many of us experienced, if not at our own parishes,
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when we went visiting was the removal of the tabernacle from a place of central worship
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in the church itself.
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So I think it's very widespread and a pain point perhaps even for many Catholics today.
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No, that is certainly true.
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I remember growing up in the 70s, there was a beautiful little Irish Gothic church in
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Belleville, New Jersey, St. Peter's, and there was a horrible fire and it was a restoration
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and people wondering what was going to go on.
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And someone from the diocese says, well, you know, obviously the first thing that needs
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to go is that marble altar rail.
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Now, fortunately, the pastor at the time was an auxiliary bishop and he had some weight.
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So rather than just put it out to die somewhere, the communion rail was removed, but it was
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cut up to be the basis of the altar, the pulpit, and the base for the tabernacle as well.
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Now I remember being told that the tabernacle had to be removed because it was a distraction,
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that the altar of repose should not be confused with the altar of sacrifice.
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And members of a certain religious community with which I had some familiarity would say
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things like that.
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And I say, look, you've been ordained longer than me.
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Put your hand on your heart before God.
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Has anyone ever said, hey, Father, get out of the way?
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We can't see the tabernacle.
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Has anyone ever said that to you?
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No.
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So what's this business about distraction?
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It seemed to me that there was a movement, and I want to choose my words carefully, to
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demystify the church.
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Does that sound like a good word for you?
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Yeah.
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Demystifying sounds like a process that the entire West was undergoing from about the
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time of the Reformation.
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One of the points I try to make in the video is that the experience that the American Catholic
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Church had with this uglification through the post-conciliar era, so the 70s, 80s, 90s,
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I'd say it peaked in the early 2000s, hopefully.
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Hopefully we're on the other end of it, and I think we can talk about that later.
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But that it goes much further back than when we actually experienced the manifestation
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of it.
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So I think demystifying is a nice way of saying the loss of faith in many of the church's
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teachings, dearest teachings, and the reality of the transcendent quality of all of the
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sacraments, that God is truly present in them.
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Because when you say demystifying, our faith is built on mystery.
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You think of the Holy Trinity as a mystery.
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The transubstantiation of the Eucharist is a mystery.
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And the move to demystify and to make the faith in that way more accessible actually
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cut us off from our true patrimony in the end.
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But I think that that process that you're describing is very accurate.
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Right.
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And I think, and part of the excuse making now, because in religious life for years,
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especially among women's community, they were talking about the grace of diminishment.
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And then eventually there was the grace of completion, which means they're going to die
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and there's no one to replace them.
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And I said, presumably you're followed by the grace of oblivion.
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And that just seemed like a lot of excuse making for me.
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And now the phrase is, well, we're getting to a, we're leaving Christendom behind and
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we're going to a more simplified and more truly apostolic church.
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And I want to say apostolic church, you mean the severe penances of the apostolic church?
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It seems to me that there's a movement to get people to a kind of institutional amnesia
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regarding our patrimony.
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What are your thoughts on that?
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Yeah, I do think that there's an element of that.
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And a lot of it comes from ignorance, because I find in talking with people who perhaps
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say that they like this more minimalist, brutalist church architecture.
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And like you said, this sort of explanation of, well, we like the purity and the return
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to the time of the apostles, that there's almost an embarrassment about the narrative
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that they've been sold about our church history that, you know, all of that time between say
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St. Augustine and Vatican II is sort of an embarrassing time for them.
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Like that's when we had things like Galileo and the Crusades.
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I mean, go through any like AP European history textbook today.
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And it is, it presents the church's role in Western civilization as a very negative one.
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And unfortunately, I think many Catholics, because we were raised with this sort of rise
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and fall of the Roman Empire narrative, that we find we need to excuse that whole period
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of our history, not understanding that that is part of our lifeblood and our patrimony
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and the great accomplishments that the Catholic faith allowed.
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For anyone who wants to, I would highly recommend Tom Holland, who's not a Catholic, but a high
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church Anglican, I would highly recommend his Dominion, if you need just sort of a rollicking
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historical account of all those years in between that we've forgotten as a church, as a culture.
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You know, it is certainly true that wherever the church has been, there have been sinners
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among them.
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I mean, I'm certainly a sinner myself.
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But what most people think they know about church history, about the Middle Ages, about
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Galileo, about the Inquisition, about the church and science, et cetera, et cetera,
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it's what they don't know.
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They've been given a lot of very bad mythology, some outright lies, and I, gosh, I just find
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it maddening.
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And there is a heritage, there is a wisdom that I think we dare not overlook.
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I remember reading someone's spiritual diary many years ago, and there was a line that
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stood out to me.
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It said, let me live my life such that people will point at me and say, if this be the servant,
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what be the master?
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When I walk into a great cathedral, I want to talk to the people who built it, but I
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also want to meet the one that the cathedral points to.
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I remember I was 18 years old walking into Sacred Heart Cathedral in Newark, New Jersey,
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which is a sublime, world-class instance of French Gothic architecture.
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And my eyes and my mind and my heart were immediately lifted up into heaven, and I knew
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that I was in the presence of the divine and the eternal, and I have never, ever had that
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similar experience walking into Our Lady of the Pizza Hut or Our Lady Help of Suburbia.
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And I think those differences need to be highlighted.
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Friends, we can back and continue our conversation with my returning guest, Erica Hearn.
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You can find her writing everywhere online, and she is co-host of the Luke Podcast.
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We're talking about why churches are ugly nowadays.
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My returning guest today is author and journalist Erica Ahern, and you can find her good work
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where she is co-host of The Loop Podcast.
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We're talking about, excuse me, The Loop Podcast, and we're talking today about why
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churches are ugly.
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Now Erica, there is a narrative that goes something like this, well, from Pentecost
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to 1965, everything was fine, and then some evil genius flicked a switch, and it all went
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sideways.
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If we just find the switch and flick it back, all shall be well again.
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But the roots of ugly churches go back prior to 1965, don't they?
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Yeah, the Catholic Church was actually kind of a latecomer to the uglification of the
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churches.
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They held out for much longer than some of our separated brethren did.
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So Duncan Stroik had an excellent article following this trajectory in Autoremus a few
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years ago, and he points to kind of three threads that happened.
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He pointed to the Protestant Reformation, then he said the French Enlightenment and
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German Idealism.
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And these three threads kind of all came together in what I call the spiritual, ideological,
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artistic, and physical bloodbath of the 20th century.
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So write that one down and say it ten times fast.
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Oh yes, indeed, yeah.
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So when we talk about the uglification of the churches, we're actually talking about
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one manifestation of this devastation that these three things brought about.
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We kind of already touched on the Protestant Reformation when you brought up the fact that
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many Catholic pro-brutalist architects, etc., they will point to, oh, we're getting back
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to the purity of the apostolic age.
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That's exactly the language that you would have heard in Zwingli in Switzerland and the
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Calvinist regions when they were having those iconoclastic movements, where violently, what
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we gave up peacefully in the 70s and 80s by whitewashing our churches of our own volition,
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those mobs were taking violently, and we ended up with very similar results, right?
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We ended up with structural old churches that were whitewashed without statues, etc., on
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the inside.
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So that was sort of that reformist thread there.
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But when it really came around to it, the root of this modernist architecture goes back
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to Descartes in the French Enlightenment, and he's one of many, but he was sort of the
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first to say, you know, in order to go forward in history, we need to start from zero.
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We need to doubt everything, reject everything from the tradition, everything from the, begin
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from zero, just the fact that I am, right?
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And it sounds like a very heady, this is very metaphysical or anti-metaphysical, if you
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will, philosophical claim, but it ends up having these very real world consequences,
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especially when it comes to art and the fine arts and architecture.
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So that thread of, you know, we have to start from zero, eventually becomes one of the principles
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of liturgical architecture in the 20th century.
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And in my piece on the Loopcast, I talk about this liturgy program at Notre Dame University,
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that there's a booklet published by this man named Father Reinhold, and in it, he directly
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ties these modernist principles of design to what Catholic churches should look like.
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And I think your listeners will see a lot of the same threads, you know, from that early
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Enlightenment principle, to the way that their own parish churches might have been constructed,
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including things like form follows function, which means that we can't have these things
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like vertical structures, like beautiful spires or domes or large doors, they're not functional,
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right?
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We need new decorations or, you know, start from zero, we need a completely unique form,
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which ended up being a Protestant barn, to be frank, I mean, and Frank Lloyd Wright,
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no pun intended, being one of the models of modern church architecture with the Catholics
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and this idea that the way that we construct our churches needs to have a social engineering
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element.
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And in the first segment, you were talking about demystification, there was a very deliberate
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move with Catholic church architecture, as we adopted this sort of social engineering
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aspect of modern architecture, that we needed to strip the transcendent in order to break
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down what they were calling the barriers between the spiritual and the material realms, which
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ends up, of course, just eviscerating the spiritual, and it's all material.
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So these threads happened long before Vatican II.
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And I think it's important to realize that, because then Catholics can realize what we're
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actually up against.
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It's not a bunch of churchmen in the 70s or the 60s who went bonkers, but this was the
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outgrowth and sort of the final manifestation of what had been going on for centuries in
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the West.
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Right.
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I wrote an article a couple years ago for Crisis Magazine called A Brief History of
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Our Annihilation.
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And so we have Martin Luther in 1517 rejecting the church, and then they have 1789, the French
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Revolution, well, let's reject Christ.
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And then we get to Marx and Darwin, let's reject the creator.
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And then we get to the 20th century, let's reject what is distinctively human.
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And part of what's distinctively human is enjoying beauty.
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And I know that World War I, I've been reading more about it in the past several years, it's
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an influential trauma that doesn't get enough credit.
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In the late 19th century, hey, now that we're smarter than God, we're just going to progress
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from glory to glory.
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Just you wait, technology is going to save us from everything.
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And then we had the first massively industrial-based war, and it turned Europe into a charnel
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pit.
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And it was an idea, gosh, maybe we were wrong about everything.
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Let's reject everything and rebuild from scratch.
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So not only were churches made barren, but cities were made barren as well.
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And we kind of absorb our surroundings.
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Isn't it bad for our souls to be around ugly?
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Yeah.
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And I think that I cannot overstate that World War I, the whole 20th century, that World
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War I trauma that you point to as sort of the catalyst for eventually the Catholic Church
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even sort of kowtowing to this uglification.
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Because human beings, like you said, we are made in the image of God.
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God is the three transcendence, the good, the true, and the beautiful.
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And for human beings to voluntarily and deliberately uglify their surroundings the way that we
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did after World War I, I think it speaks to an already a spiritual death that has already
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taken place, a cutting off from God.
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What we saw with World War I, coming out of that, you get the sort of like hedonism of
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the Roaring Twenties, but you also get the amping up of the supercharging of this modernist
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architectural movement.
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And there's one architect who did not make it into my piece.
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We were cut for time.
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This could have been a four hour podcast, right?
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Of course.
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Yeah.
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This was St. Engelbert's Church in Cologne, Dominicus Baum.
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And he was a Catholic who in the 1930s was bringing these principles into the Catholic
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churches.
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So this is even before the destruction of German cities.
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But after the bombing raids of World War II, where the United States went in and we fire
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bombed German cities, there was so much devastation, Cologne, two churches remained in Cologne,
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the beautiful Cologne Cathedral that we all think of when we're like, I'm going to go
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visit Germany.
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And St. Engelbert's Church, which is a brutalist lump of concrete, like on purpose.
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And what did the church in Germany decide to base its reconstruction of churches on?
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Not Cologne Cathedral.
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They chose the ugliness.
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And I think that a great deal of that was because of the spiritual devastation of the
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West following the great failures, not only of the World War I, the rise of fascism, but
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also the loss to the Bolsheviks and the communists.
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It was terrible.
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You think of the rebuilding of Warsaw in Poland, which was a beautiful medieval city.
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If you go visit it today, it's brutalist, socialist, Soviet architecture.
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And I think that there was a death of the soul.
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For people who respond better to poetry than to visuals, Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach,
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that poem for me, it sums up the loss of faith that then allowed us or pushed human
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beings to this point of, you know, we don't deserve good architecture.
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We are so broken, so animalistic, so brutal to each other that we get this ugliness.
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It's very tragic.
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I published an article a few years ago, I think in Alatea, called Worship in a Time
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of War.
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And there was a black and white picture.
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It was right at the very end of World War II, and it was a cathedral that was three
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quarters destroyed, but somehow the high altar remained intact.
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And somehow there were three Catholic clerics who somehow found the proper vestments, and
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they were offering a solemn high mass.
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And you can see all the wreckage in the background, and I'm sure you could smell the death and
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the gunpowder and the smoke.
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And there was the wisest thing that they could do, was to offer the holy sacrifice of the
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mass in the most beautiful way possible.
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And then Father Pedro Arrupe, long before he became the general of the Society of Jesus,
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he was, I think it was Hiroshima where he was stationed, and he was in a bunker and
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he came out after the bomb dropped, and they look at the devastation.
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He said, the very first thing we did was we offered mass.
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And that's the only thing to do.
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What might that suggest?
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Yes.
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I mean, it suggests that the only response to the darkest thing that human beings can
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do to each other is to reach out to God and to reach vertically, to reach for the transcendent,
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and that God himself still comes down to us.
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I mean, we're in the Easter season now as we're recording this, Father, so we just went
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through the Triduum.
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And to me, the devastation of church architecture, walking into an ugly church, it's like walking
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into a perpetual Good Friday with the stripping of the altars.
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But the promise there is that even there, God is coming down to us from heaven.
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He's reaching for us.
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He wants to be with us.
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And he will pull us back up, right?
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Yes.
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You know, I had the very great privilege this holy week of serving a community that prizes,
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prizes beauty and reverence.
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It's in their constitutions.
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And I know this community lived a very serious Lent, and they certainly lived a very beautiful
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and devout, and for me, really life-altering holy week.
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And as a consequence, on Easter Sunday morning, they were incandescent.
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They were ebullient.
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They were transformed.
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And I said, these are folks who encountered the mystery and were changed, and changed
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for the better as a result.
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They let God come to them through the arts, through their senses, through beautiful music,
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and through the experiences of worship that has formed saints and cathedrals for millennia.
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And part of what gives me hope, and I use the H word cautiously, as you can imagine,
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is that there are people who are waking up from their dragmatic slumber and says, oh
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gosh, we have an alternative to the ugly.
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Let's do that.
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That's what I want to talk about in the next segment.
25:30
Friends, we come back and continue our conversation with Erica Hearn.
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You can find her good work at the Loopcast.
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My returning guest today is author and journalist Eric Ahern.
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We're talking about why Catholic churches are beautiful, are ugly, and also why they
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can be beautiful.
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So there were some churches that underwent recovation, and there's some heartbreaking
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stories about that.
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But I'm seeing now online more and more before and after pictures.
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What's driving this movement to un-wreck these churches?
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I think that the irresistibility of beauty and the rediscovery of so many Catholics,
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especially in the last, I would say 20 to 25 years of our patrimony, there have been,
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I would say that the renovation of churches and sort of the reclaiming of liturgical beauty
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has been part and parcel of this concomitant rise with, for example, a rediscovery of the
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Bible.
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You think of the success of Father Mike Schmidt's Bible in a Year.
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The rediscovery of the church fathers, right?
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And also, I would say the last two years, the big story has been the shocking increases
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in adult conversions to the Catholic faith.
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And I think that this is all a sort of welling up of the fact that we are still made in the
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image of God.
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And no matter how far we got from that in the last 200 years, 150, 200 years, it's irresistible.
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And the stories of these churches that were either built to be modernist and subsequently
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refurbished to be beautiful, and churches that were wrecked during the 70s and 80s with
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the whitewashing and the carpeting over and taking out the altar rails and now being restored
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are part of that greater movement.
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It's sort of the little crocus bulb of that springtime of evangelization that John Paul
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II prophesied, right?
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Right.
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Well, you know, I think which Roman poet was, maybe it was Horace who said, you know, you
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can drive out nature with a pitchfork, but she keeps coming back.
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We have senses and we have hearts, and we are made for beauty.
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And you know, another soapbox for a moment, you know, we tell our young people, the Eucharist
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is the source and summit of our lives, and they don't believe us because we don't act
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like it.
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But the Eucharist is a source and summit of our lives.
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Not only are we tolerating ugly churches, which can be hard to fix, we tolerate banal
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music which can be easily, very easily fixed, and we tolerate my favorite peeve, sweat-stained
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polyester vestments from the 1970s.
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You don't have to go broke to have really decent, honorable vestments.
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I think a lot of folks are immersed in bad habits and don't know that there are alternatives,
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but our young people are watching.
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And if we are slovenly about worship, as it's just something we put up with, we, you know,
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we tolerate God interrupting our weekend, then young people are going to figure that
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out and not even pretend anymore.
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Now, I want to give a shout-out to my friend, Bishop Michael Olson, who's the Ordinary of
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the Diocese of Fort Worth, Texas, where he's building churches rather than closing them.
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And guess what?
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They look like churches.
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They don't look like Our Lady of Pete's Hut, and they're beautiful churches.
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So what advice would you give for a congregation that says, hey, you know what?
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I don't think we have to settle for this anymore.
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What do you think are the next steps?
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Yeah, I would say start gathering images of before and after.
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And there are so many of these available online now.
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I think that this is one of the gifts of the internet, right?
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Like we're not just stuck in our geographical locations anymore.
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So one of my sources, favorite sources for these is the Liturgical Arts Journal.
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So liturgicalartsjournal.com has been gathering these.
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They've been gathering these images for years now.
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We've been using them in the loop.
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People will be familiar with that.
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You can also go to some of these restoration artists, Duncan Stroik, his website, Canning
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Liturgical Arts, which is in here in the Northeast.
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But it can be done on a budget as well.
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So an example is St. Bridget's Church right here in Cheshire, Connecticut.
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It was built as a barn in the 1980s.
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In fact, I think it was intended to be a temporary fix for a new parish in Connecticut.
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And it was built to be eventually the gymnasium for the school.
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Well, you know, the population shrank, the churches are closing.
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So they've never gotten their beautiful church.
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But there are ways to use just paintwork and putting up wood paneling in a beautiful way,
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adding a baldacchino that can even transform these spaces on a budget for a smaller congregation.
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And you just have to get the right inspiration.
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And then, of course, to priests and pastors, very much encouraging that where these projects
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have been undertaken, the support has come out of the woodwork, not to, you know, pun
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intended there.
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But examples, one of my favorite examples that I highlighted in the video was in Ames,
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Iowa, St. Cecilia Catholic Church.
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And this was built as sort of a bunker, a concrete bunker where the Eucharist was off
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in a separate section of the church and the baptistry was like right in the middle.
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It was a very awkward church.
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And they were able in, I mean, this is not a wealthy area.
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They were able out in Iowa to rebuild, to raise the ceiling.
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And it's just an incredible story coming out of that parish.
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You know, I think, I mean, I grew up in the Archdiocese of Newark and their seminary was
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called Darlington.
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And the very beautiful chapel was built by the folks who had also built the very beautiful
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cathedral.
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And then top men, top men decided that we didn't need that stinking Gothic high altar
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anymore.
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And so they were going to do theater in the round, which would do violence to the obvious
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architecture of the chapel.
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And so to make sure that people wouldn't be tempted to look at the high altar at the
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end of the building rather than the table they had put in the middle, they took all
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the holy water fonts and stacked them on top of the communion rail and then filled them
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with overflowing vines and ferns to obscure the vision of that glorious, glorious high
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altar.
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So did you guys have no sense of irony, no sense of self-examination at all?
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I just don't get it.
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I don't understand why there was animus.
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It tracks so perfectly with the Eucharistic Congress couple or last summer, two summers
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ago where we had that and there were all these studies, yeah, all these studies that came
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out on the loss of faith in the Eucharist.
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It tracks perfectly with these kinds of recovations that happened and the removal of the Eucharist
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from the center of our churches.
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It was done after a loss of faith that this is Jesus Christ and he is the center, that
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is the purpose.
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The function of these buildings is not to house a human community or a meeting house,
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but to honor the living God.
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That loss of faith is exactly what you just described there.
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And you know, my soul trembles for the people who made these decisions.
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And like you said, a lot of it was very top down.
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The example of the cathedral in Los Angeles was very much at the top of the diocesan levels
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pursuing a brutalist and non-Euclidean geometric design for that cathedral.
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And the interesting thing there, of course, is that the loss of faith, it reached to the
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very height of the church.
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But fortunately, as you point out with Bishop Olson, as we're seeing now with renovations
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on the cathedral in the Diocese of Arlington, I also highlight that the power of the bishops
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and the clergy to move and to guide the faithful, it goes both ways, right?
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And that when there is truth and holiness there, so much fruit is born.
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And I think we're seeing that now, too, as we're coming out, I believe, of the worst
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of the modernist era.
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Well, gosh, I sure hope so.
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You know, and if a tree is known by its fruits, I helped give a retreat once at the mother
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house of a women's community, I don't need to mention the name.
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But it was obvious that the chapel at one time was strikingly beautiful and was rooted
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in tradition and so on.
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And someone spent a lot of money ripping things out and then had this altar table made out
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of basically parts of a tree stump.
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So someone, you know, for that noble simplicity, spent a ton of money destroying beauty and
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then installing ugly.
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And now the community is dead.
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They're trying to make money offering electric guitar lessons in their chapel.
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And look, who's going to learn how to play an electric guitar from an elderly nun anyway,
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and then in a chapel?
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I mean, know thyself, right?
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Well, yeah, yeah.
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Gosh, I feel like I'm in the middle of a Quentin Tarantino movie as I'm describing that.
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So, all right, so we are in the Easter season.
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I won't ask you whether or not you're overcome with paschal joy, but talk about the glimmers
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of hope that you're seeing.
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I think that's important for people to hear.
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Absolutely.
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I mean, we're coming up, there's just amazing reports of diocese where the Easter vigil
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this year, we're looking at 30%, 41% in Boston, 50% down in Florida, the Florida, was it
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Mount Venice in Florida?
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And these increases in adult conversions are just fascinating to track.
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So like I said, I think it's all of a piece with the springtime that John Paul II was
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taught.
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I gave a talk at a Legatus chapter up here a couple of weeks ago and said, you know,
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I feel like in college, I was in college when John Paul II was at the end of his papacy
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and he was prophesying a springtime of the faith.
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And what I thought is, aha, we are at Easter Sunday morning here in the West, it's going
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to be glorious.
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And then of course, like the next year, the scandals hit and then we just kind of, it
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was just awful, terrible devastation spiritually for the church.
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And I think that I mistook the prophecy for something that was imminent, but where we
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really were when John Paul II was, was sort of like the end of the Good Friday liturgy
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when we've put away Christ in the tomb and we're all just kind of looking around at each
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other like, where did he go?
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But maybe what we're seeing now with between the renovations of the churches, between this
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rise in adult conversions, the proliferation since that time of the Cardinal Law scandals,
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since that time of things like the Augustan Institute, Word on Fire, Catholic Vote, Zeal
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Media, this is the Easter, maybe it's the Easter vigil, maybe we're starting that.
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Maybe it's not Easter Sunday morning yet, there's still a long way to go.
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But I have such a firm conviction, not of optimism that I think I had with JP II, but
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of hope, which is what Benedict was speaking of, that this is the hope of a remnant, not
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the optimism of worldly dominance.
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Right.
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The idea of, well, we don't have to really do anything because gates of hell won't prevail.
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Take that gates of hell, let's kick back because Dances with the Stars is on.
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That's not going to work.
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I don't think that we should be tolerating that either.
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Are you speaking of yourself, Father?
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I can say with confidence I don't watch Dances with the Stars because I don't have a television.
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So there is that as well.
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But yeah, there are glimpses of hope.
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I know that people need beauty, that God deserves beauty, and Catholics don't have to scratch
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their head about what to do next because we've got such a rich, rich heritage.
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And the documentation in sight and sound of our rich Catholic heritage is infinitely available
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to us by virtue of the internet, and there's so many things to read.
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And I want to give a shout out to the wonderful Benedictine sisters in Gower, Missouri, who
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have a glorious monastery, a traditional life.
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They make beautiful vestments, and their music is exquisite as well.
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Erica Hearn, thank you for a fascinating conversation.
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God bless you.
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You're very good work, and I hope we can talk again before long.
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Yes, absolutely, Father.
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Thank you so much.
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I'm Jesuit Father Robert McTigge, your host every day at the Catholic Heron.
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Praise be Jesus Christ.
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This is Fr.
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Robert McTigge of the Society of Jesus, your daily host for the Catholic Heron, where we
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If you're listening to us from the Station of the Cross studios, your local radio station,
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Here we are.
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It is the last segment of a timely Tuesday.
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You know what that means, you and me sharing timely thoughts, reflecting what we've heard
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today.
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I was speaking with Erica Ahern about beauty, and in particular, why so many contemporary
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churches are ugly, and why it is that the human soul needs beauty.
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Of course, me being me, we're going to have to go through the dark valley first, and I'm
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going to try to end up on the other side where the grace and glory are.
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I want to start with a quote from Dr. James A. Patrick.
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He says this,
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The great French cathedrals, so full of beauty and interest, are now like whales washed up
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on an alien shore, the faith that built them a flickering light.
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Ouch, that's a punch in the throat right there.
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I remember reading, and I've mentioned this before, a spiritual journal where the author
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prayed,
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Lord, let me live my life such that people ask, if this be the servant, what be the master?
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And I think that's true of not only individuals and communities, but also of our architecture.
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When you walk in to a great cathedral, and they tend to be older, I said, my gosh, I
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want to meet the God who inspired this.
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So historian and cultural critic Arnold Lunn, writing in the early 1930s, and if I remember
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correctly, let's just say he had a spiritual odyssey, and I think eventually became Catholic,
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but listen to this.
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He wrote this in 1932.
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He says,
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A man writes himself down as a hopeless Philistine if he speaks with ignorant contempt of the
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faith which produced St. Francis, which inspired Dante, and which found expression in the canvases
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of Bellini and in the stones of Venice.
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Even if I believed Christianity to be a myth, I should still salute with melancholy respect
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the superstition which had inspired such supreme artists in song, and paint, and in stone,
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and should still find it difficult to understand how a mere superstition could take form in
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so noble a synthesis of spiritual and secular beauty.
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So even if you had no faith at all, when you look at great Catholic art, you'd have to
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say it can't be just human.
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There has to be some divine origin and purpose at work.
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And I want to quote a contemporary British philosopher, Roger Scruton, who I had the
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privilege of meeting once some years ago, who recently went to God.
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And he talked a lot about beauty.
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And he said,
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Beauty is vanishing from our world because we live as though it did not matter.
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But beauty does matter.
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And the church knew this.
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The church knew this and acted accordingly.
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And contemporary curmudgeon Dean Abbott said,
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Beauty reminds us that we are more than mere matter, and that we long for meaning from
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outside ourselves, and that is why modernity hates it.
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Now, if I were a cynical person, heaven forfend.
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If I were a cynical person, I'd say something like this.
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Look, we have to build churches because that's where Mass takes place.
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And we have to have Sunday Mass because that's where we take up the collection.
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But we certainly don't have to bother ourselves with beauty.
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And a lot of our churches were built that way, alas, alas.
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I want to wrap up with a quote from a Jesuit, Henri de Lubac.
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Don't often quote him, but when I do, I quote this.
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He says, There is nothing more demanding than the taste for mediocrity.
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Beneath its ever-moderate appearance, there is nothing more intemperate.
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It endures no greatness, shows beauty no mercy.
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When the ecclesiastical world is worldly, it is only a caricature of the world.
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It is the world not only in greater mediocrity, but even in greater ugliness, pow.
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So says Jesuit Henri de Lubac.
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And this is what I want to make clear, that the church is meant to be a sign of contradiction.
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It is meant to show the world that it is wrong about everything that is important.
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And it needs to show the fallen world that beauty can give us a running start towards heaven.
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So music, art, artistry, precision and gracefulness and worship all really matter.
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And it is a scandal.
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It is a sin.
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It is murderous to be careless in worship, to be indifferent to beauty.
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I've had the very, very great privilege to spend the past couple of Holy Weeks with a community that prizes beauty.
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Indeed, that puts beauty and reverence in its constitutions.
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And the way they do everything about the everything in worship testifies to that.
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The way they lay out the vestments so exquisitely before Mass, I feel like a vandal whenever I touch the vestments.
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I mean, look, for some reason in God's providence, I'm the guy that anything I touch, any cloth, immediately becomes wrinkled.
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And yet they lay out the vestments so gloriously.
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In terms of music, I can sort of kind of warble a marginally competent recto tono.
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And the music they sing a cappella will just turn you inside out.
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And when they intone a polyphony version of Tantum Ergo as I get ready for benediction,
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I'm not kidding, I want to throw myself on the floor of the sanctuary and sob and cry out,
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I hate my sin until I pass out.
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It is so beautiful.
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And it is a beauty that is still contained within this world.
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So think of the fracturing ache, the full ecstasies of being in the presence of beauty itself.
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And the limitlessness of heaven.
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The beauty for which we are made.
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The beauty who summons us to himself.
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That makes prayer and worship thrilling.
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I want to again and again have an experience of prayer and worship that is a glorious dress rehearsal for the ecstasy of heaven to which we are summoned.
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So let's resolve never ever ever to tolerate mediocrity, tchotchke, kitsch, banality.
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But let's insist on beauty as a testimony to the glory of God and a testimony to the heaven that we are destined for
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if we would only have the good sense to cooperate with the grace that has already made countless saints.
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Think on these things today.
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Take a prayer and talk about it with those you love.
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I'm Jesuit Father Robert McTague, your host here every day at the Catholic Current.
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Join us tomorrow for another episode of the Catholic Current.
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Great topic, great conversation, lively guests.
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Through the intercession of Our Lady of Mount Carmel in the mighty God bless you,
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Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, go in peace and please do pray for me for I am a sinner.