Column: Beautiful Churches Matter

This weekend marks our first Sunday Masses in our new social hall and gymnasium. As most of you know, we are finally completing the painting and decoration of our worship space and upgrading our lighting and sound system while we have the scaffolding set up to do so.

St. Joseph Hall is a beautiful space, but it wasn’t made for worship. I am sure we will have challenges using this space for Mass in the coming weeks, and I ask for your patience and prayers. I am equally certain that, when our worship space reopens for Holy Week, it will all be worthwhile. I can’t wait to celebrate the Easter Triduum there with you!

Our church was beautiful to begin with, so you might wonder why we are doing more. The simple answer is that we received a very generous donation exclusively for this purpose. Our options were to beautify the church or refuse the gift!

But why do Catholics build beautiful churches to begin with? Why including gold, stained glass, icons, mosaics, and statues when a simple building could be adequate?  

As the dwelling place of the Lord, our temples ought to reflect His glory. In the Old Testament, God gives very specific instructions for the construction and decoration of the Ark of the Covenant and the Tabernacle. But more than this, the Lord’s House on earth should draw our hearts toward our heavenly home. Writing for The Imaginative Conservative website, Father Dwight Longenecker puts it this way:

We make the church beautiful because beauty is one aspect of a little Holy Trinity. Beauty is woven with Goodness and Truth as three cords in a rope. The rope is strong for having the three strands woven together. Unravel one and the others come undone. A church, of all our buildings, most needs to be beautiful because the church is not simply a place to hear sermons. It is a sermon. Because it is beautiful it is good, and if it is beautiful and good, then it is also true. Therefore, the religion that is practiced in the beautiful church needs also to be good and true, so that the little Holy Trinity reflects the larger Holy Trinity, which is the summit and source of all Truth, Beauty, and Goodness.

– from “A Little Holy Trinity: Why Churches Should Be Beautiful”

Bishop Robert Barron makes the case that in our modern world, where so many people agree on so little, the most effective means of evangelization is beauty. Beauty speaks to the heart through our eyes, and leads us to the good, and ultimately, to the true. Specifically, it leads us to the Truth of God’s great love for us—that He would create us in His image, come to us in the Incarnation and the Eucharist, and save us by His death and resurrection. And by making the Truth visible, we make it accessible to everyone.

Praise God for the great gift of our church and our ability to praise Him through it!

Father Brian Park
Pastor