WATCH: How Catholic Art Catechized Generations
Benedictine CollegeAuthor and essayist Elizabeth Lev came to Kansas from Rome to share a message about how beauty can save the world, even when it comes to the crisis of Eucharistic belief.
“Artists led the Church out of a Eucharistic crisis before,” said the author who teaches at the Angelicum in Rome.
And artists led us out of a worse Eucharistic crisis, too: The Protestant Reformation divided the Church along Eucharistic lines, along with other issues, she said. The Council of Trent led the Catechetics of the counter-reformation, but the new message found its biggest successes in the arts.
Church leaders such as St. Charles Borromeo and Pope Sixtus V brought a new spirit of imaginative catechesis to the project through architecture and art. “Art and the saints are the greatest apologetic for our faith,” Lev said, and illustrated the point with examples such as the papal chapel at St. Maria Maggiore and Caravaggio’s Entombment of Christ altarpiece painting.
