least among us—will become the cornerstone, and a solid, welcoming common home will emerge on the earth, where love and faithfulness will finally meet, and righteousness and peace will embrace (cf. Ps 85:10)” (No. 16).
“Human dignity does not depend on a person’s abilities, wealth, or position in life, nor on the right or wrong choices made; instead, it is a gift that precedes and transcends each person, endowed by God as an expression of his unfailing love” (No. 50).
“Among these ideologies, I consider particularly insidious the one that suggests that every person must earn or justify his or her own worth, to the point of attributing greater value to those who are more efficient or effective” (No. 51).
“No sin, failure, humiliation, or exclusion can diminish the profound value of a human life that God has willed and called into being” (No. 52).
“Solidarity demands that decisions regarding data, algorithms, platforms, and artificial intelligence take into account not only the immediate benefit for a few, but also the impact on all peoples and on future generations” (No. 76).
“For an algorithm, an error is a flaw to be corrected; for a person, however, an error can be a catalyst for profound change. A person’s future is not calculable, but depends on one’s freedom—elevated by the inexhaustible grace of God—and on the relationships cultivated” (No. 128).
“Having a personal mobile device at too early an age and using it without adult supervision can exacerbate young people’s vulnerabilities, foster addiction, and expose them to isolation, bullying, and cyberbullying, as well as to pressures to share intimate images or sensitive information” (No. 141).
“Even in the darkest nights, the Lord raises up men and women who refuse to give up, who persevere in doing good, who protect the vulnerable and open pathways to reconciliation. The memory of the saints, righteous people, and the oft-forgotten peacemakers, show us that grace does not magically eliminate conflict, but instead it inspires active resistance to evil and an astonishing creativity in doing good” (No. 211).
“The civilization of love will not arise from a single or spectacular gesture but from the sum total of small and steadfast acts of fidelity that serve as a bulwark against dehumanization” (No. 213).
“‘Let us disarm words and we will help to disarm the world.’ Words have enormous power, something we experience in our daily interactions; for example, spoken words can change our mood for better or for worse” (No. 214).
“No computational system, however sophisticated, can create a heart that gives itself, or a conscience that discerns good from evil. Even when machines excel in efficiency, a human face that asks to be gazed upon remains the center of our history. This human face is the fullness toward which history is moving” (No. 233).
“Let us remain faithful to the truth! Living amid incessant flows of information, opinions, and images, we know how easy it can be to influence decisions and preferences through increasingly sophisticated algorithms. In this context, it is imperative to cultivate hearts that love the truth, prefer what is right despite the most appealing content, and pursue wisdom rather than immediate results” (No. 237).
Families Gather for Eucharistic Procession in Washington, D.C.
By Gemma Flores
EWTN—Along K Street in Washington, D.C., amid a humid morning on June 6, Catholics from across the area gathered to adore the Eucharist as it processed through the nation’s capital.
Despite the heat and humidity, many parents and grandparents packed their little ones into strollers or baby carriers and brought them out to view the Eucharistic pilgrimage as it made its way through D.C. The local procession was a partnership between the Catholic Information Center and the National Eucharistic Pilgrimage.
“I really like taking my kids to the Eucharistic processions for Corpus Christi,” Theresa Campbell said while pushing Augustine, three years old, and Rowena, nine months, in a stroller in the procession. “I think practical things really help them understand the significance of what is going on.”
Campbell, who lives in the Capitol Hill neighborhood, took her children to the Catholic Information Center procession last year. Though she wasn’t raised going to processions or adoration regularly with her family, Campbell said the tradition was important to her as she raises her own children so that they can better come to understand the Church.
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“Children have a very natural orientation towards liturgy, and I think that the reverence that everyone has in the tradition actually does most of the teaching,” Campbell said. “And then, you know, we do explain that it is the body and blood of Christ and that the procession is for Corpus Christi, and we try to tie that into the liturgical year.”
Maria and Pedro Estrada of Reston, VA, practice similar worship habits with their four children. The couple moved to the United States from Argentina six years ago and grew up attending similar events with their families.
Estrada said she and her husband take their children to adoration regularly and practice family prayer to get them interested in Jesus and the Church.
“At home, we pray a lot,” Estrada explained. “We pray the rosary in front of our kids, and they see us and they try to imitate us. They’re very interested in Jesus and his love for us, and we explain that all the things we have, and the way we are, is because of Jesus, and because he loves us. And it’s nice to him that we, you know, give him some of the love he gave us.”
Julie Enzler of Alexandria, VA, helped take her 15-month-old granddaughter through the procession while her daughter volunteered with the Catholic Information Center.
“What I appreciate about the procession through the city is the witness that we can give to the whole world of our Eucharistic Lord present in the midst of us, and to bring the power of his love to the streets,” Enzler said. “It’s something we try to do in person every day, hopefully, but just to make him present in the lives of people who wouldn’t necessarily find him.”
Enzler said that all her grandchildren are being raised in the Catholic Church and attending Corpus Christi processions, even though she herself did not growing up. This, she hopes, will help them to orient their lives toward God.
Enzler said she knows how valuable it is to bring Christ with you wherever you go, whether that be spiritually or in actuality.
“Because the Church is the body of Christ, we all need each other,” Enzler explained. “We all need the witness of new life in the body. And the children need the witness of adults doing things that might be uncomfortable.”
“For old people, it’s uncomfortable on your knees,” she continued. “And for other ages, maybe it’s uncomfortable to be seen practicing your faith or witnessing to your faith in the Eucharist, which is something that’s not obvious without faith.”
Enzler said that she feels the United States is poised to accept Christ at this moment, and that showing the next generation of Catholics what faithful adoration looks like can help spread this.
“I’m really grateful to the [Catholic Information Center] for offering this opportunity and for the word of hope that this event brings to the streets of Washington, D.C. at a time where the country seems particularly open to the practice of faith and the witness of faith,” she said.
“I know there’s a lot of prayers begging more and more graces, so I’m grateful,” she said. “There’s always the grace that we can count on, but we can’t see or quantify.”
DDWDS Promulgates Latin Third Edition of Martyrologium Romanum
From the March 2026 Newsletter of the USCCB Committee on Divine Worship
On January 6, 2026, the Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments promulgated the Latin third typical edition of the Martyrologium Romanum (Prot. n. 10/26), expanding the entries of saints and blesseds since its last edition in 2004 and making other adjustments for greater ease of liturgical use.
The contents of the third edition were originally approved by Pope Francis in December 2024, but it was subsequently decided also to add the saints and blesseds proclaimed during the Jubilee Year 2025, resulting in the final book being approved for promulgation by Pope Leo XIV last November.
On All Saints Day, the Holy Father recalled, “The lives of the saints teach us that it is possible to live passionately amidst the complexity of the present, without neglecting the apostolic mandate to ‘shine like stars in the world’ (Phil 2:15). [...] Life shines brightly... when we discover within ourselves the truth that we are called by God, have a vocation, have a mission, that our lives serve something greater than ourselves.”
Each day’s order of entries has been reorganized slightly from the first and second editions: saints in the General Roman Calendar are given first, followed by saints in chronological order, and ending with blesseds in chronological order. The three categories are separated by red lines, facilitating easier reference; while the first two categories are always proclaimed, only blesseds from the final category who have been inscribed on particular calendars at the national, diocesan, or parish levels are proclaimed, omitting the others. Finally, the end of every entry in the Martyrologium now includes the year or century of the saint or blessed’s death.
Aside from the entries of new saints and blesseds from 2004 to 2025, there is included a selection of saints celebrated in common with other Christian communities (for example, the 21 Coptic Orthodox saints martyred in Libya in 2015, whom Pope Francis ordered added to the Martyrology in May 2023). For feasts of Christ, Mary, the apostles, and other saints associated with revelation history, Old and New Testament abbreviations—“OT” or “NT”—are added to better indicate the related Scriptural references. Entries to devotional feasts of the Blessed Virgin Mary now record the date on which each title was recognized by the Popes.
While other vernacular language editions of the postconciliar Martyrologium Romanum have been printed since the first edition in 2001—including in Spanish, approved for Spain and used throughout the Spanishspeaking world—a similar English Roman Martyrology has never appeared in print nor been used in the liturgy. As reported in the April 2023 Newsletter, the International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL) completed a first draft translation (“Green Book”) of the second edition Martyrology in 2022, and worked diligently to prepare the final draft (“Gray Book”) before they were notified of a pending third edition. ICEL will now work to rearrange the book as required and translate the new entries and other elements of the third edition.
The canonical vote of the USCCB and confirmation by the Holy See must also take place before the Roman Martyrology, Third Edition can be implemented in the United States.
“Here is the endurance of the holy ones who keep God’s commandments and their faith in Jesus” (Rev 14:12). These words begin the decree of promulgation for the third Martyrologium Romanum. It not only summarizes the contents of the rich volume of the Church’s cloud of witnesses, it also testifies to the patience both editors and faithful have had to practice. Once published and implemented, the Roman Martyrology will enrich the celebration of the Liturgy of the Hours and other occasions.
All holy men and women, Saints of God, pray for us!
he United States is marking a significant milestone this year—250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the birth of the nation. No doubt this will come with countless civic speeches and events, backyard barbecues, and, of course, fireworks. The celebrations surrounding the semiquincentennial express something fundamental about human nature itself: our need to remember, celebrate, give thanks, and situate ourselves within a reality larger than ourselves. Such civic rituals reveal humanity’s enduring desire for shared memory, belonging, gratitude, and purpose—desires that find their fullest meaning and fulfillment in the sacred liturgy.
Human beings naturally mark significant moments in time such as birthdays, annual traditions, and major anniversaries. We gather for meals, recall the past, and exchange gifts. These observances connect people to their origins, identity, and aspirations for the future. When we celebrate a birthday (an event of the past), we blow out candles and make a wish (for the future). On a national level, we recall founding ideas and figures from the past, we celebrate in the present with civic gratitude, and we turn with fresh resolve to the future. These realities are expressed and reinforced through a rich language of shared symbols—parades, fireworks, flags, patriotic songs, and public ceremonies—all of which help shape a common identity and cultivate a shared sense of belonging, continuity, and participation in a common civic inheritance.
These civic practices arise from deeper realities rooted in human nature itself—realities that come from the hand of God and that the Church does not reject, but rather purifies and elevates in the sacred liturgy. At the heart of such commemorations lies the significance of time itself. Time, as a gift from the Creator, profoundly shapes human experience as we journey from a past we cannot recover toward a future we cannot fully see. For Christians, though, who confess that God has entered history, time is significant because it bears sacramental weight. “The liturgical year,” said Pope Pius XII, “devotedly fostered and accompanied by the Church, is not a cold and lifeless representation of the events of the past, or a simple and bare record of a former age. It is rather Christ Himself who is ever living in His Church” (Mediator Dei, 165). In the liturgy, time itself becomes the privileged place of encounter with the living Christ; history becomes salvation history.
In the liturgy, past, present, and future are gathered into the mystery of Christ who is the center of all history.
Readers’ Quiz: Summer Sanctoral Stumpers
Summer in the Church’s calendar is crowded with apostles, monks, martyrs, mystics, and even saintly families. From St. Benedict’s “Work of God” to the Transfiguration’s mysterious August date, these questions explore the history, theology, and surprising details hidden in the sanctoral cycle. Test your knowledge—and pick up a few fun facts along the way.
1. On July 11 the Church celebrates St. Benedict, whose Rule not only shaped Western monasticism but profoundly influenced the Church’s liturgical life. Which aspect of St. Benedict’s Rule became one of the defining patterns of Western liturgical prayer?
a. The requirement that the whole Psalter be prayed each week in the Divine Office
b. The composition of the Roman Canon
c. The introduction of vernacular readings at Mass
d. The creation of the Ember Days
2. What liturgical change did Pope Francis establish for the celebration of St. Mary Magdalene?
a. Her memorial was removed from the General Roman Calendar
b. Her feast was transferred from July 22 to Easter Monday
c. Her memorial was raised to the rank of feast
d. Her celebration was made a universal solemnity
3. According to the 2016 decree issued at Pope Francis’s direction, why is St. Mary Magdalene especially proposed to the faithful as a model in our own time?
a. Because she founded one of the Church’s first Christian communities
b. Because she was the first woman formally commissioned by the Apostles to preach the Gospel
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Through liturgical anamnesis, the past saving deeds of God are not merely recalled but made sacramentally present. In the sacred mysteries celebrated in the present, we participate in Christ’s dying and rising while already experiencing a foretaste of the glory toward which the liturgy is ordered. Above all in the Eucharist, “the memory of his Passion is renewed, the soul is filled with grace and a pledge of the life to come is given to us” (Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC), 1402). All of this is mediated through an intricate tapestry of sacramental signs and symbols—things like water, bread, wine, oil, chant, incense, and processions. Given these parallels, a sociologist may see in the liturgy merely one more instance of human ritual action, reducible to the categories of any other social phenomenon. With the eyes of faith, however, we can see that the liturgy reveals the full reality of which our natural, civic celebrations are only an echo.
Human experience such as the American semiquincentennial vividly reveals that all people long for shared memory, thanksgiving, symbolic ritual, and common purpose. Modern society, however, often struggles to
c. Because her life demonstrates the importance of contemplative silence in an age dominated by technology and distraction
d. Because her witness speaks to the dignity of women, the New Evangelization, and the mystery of Divine Mercy
4. Which St. James is celebrated by the Church on July 25?
a. James the Less, son of Alphaeus
b. James the Greater, son of Zebedee and brother of John c. James, the “brother of the Lord” and first bishop of Jerusalem
d. James, father of Jude the Apostle
5. Which saints are now celebrated together by the Church on July 29 following a 2021 decree of Pope Francis?
a. Martha and Mary
b. Martha, Mary Magdalene, and Lazarus
c. Martha, Mary, and Lazarus
d. Peter, Paul, and Mary
6. One might reasonably expect the Feast of the Transfiguration to fall in Lent since the Gospel accounts place the event in close relation to Christ’s Passion. Why is the Feast of the Transfiguration celebrated in the summer rather than during Lent?
a. Because the feast predates the development of Lent
b. Because Lent avoids feasts connected to Christ’s glory
c. Because the date was shifted out of Lent after the reforms of Vatican II
d. Because August 6 falls 40 days before the Exaltation of the Holy Cross
7. Pope Callixtus III extended the Feast of the Transfiguration to the universal Roman Calendar in 1457 in thanksgiving for what?
a. The dedication of the basilica on Mount Tabor
b. The victory at Belgrade over the Ottoman Turks
c. The victory at Lepanto over the Ottomans
d. The canonization of St. John of Capistrano
transmit memory and purpose meaningfully across generations. We have countless ways to store information, but fewer shared practices for passing on and receiving wisdom. The Church, though, responds to this human need by preserving a richer understanding of tradition than modern culture can sustain on its own—a living continuity carried not merely through information, but through worship, ritual, prayer, and sacramental life. This is possible because the Church and her liturgy cannot be reduced to any other human institution or activity. The Holy Spirit acts as the living memory of the Church, recalling the mysteries of Christ to the faithful and making him manifest in the liturgical assembly (cf. CCC, 1092, 1099).
In a culture of fragmentation and immediacy, liturgical worship becomes a school of communion and sacred memory. Perhaps this helps explain why many have noted recently an increase in the number of people being drawn to the Church. And if they come seeking transcendence, continuity, and sacred memory, what should they find?
They should find a liturgy rooted deeply in the Church’s memory, not a celebration improvised according to passing or personal tastes. They should find sacred signs allowed to speak with clarity, beauty, and reverence. They should find music, language, gesture, and silence directed toward the expansive horizon of divine worship rather than reduced to the narrow confines of self-expression. They should find not a facile attempt to uncritically mirror the surrounding culture, but a liturgy that shines forth with the splendor of the future glory in which it already participates.
As the nation looks back over 250 years, Catholics should give thanks for every genuine good in our civic inheritance. But the deepest renewal of any people begins not in civic enthusiasm or political programs, but in right worship. Civic celebrations can awaken our awareness of how deeply human beings need memory, sign, ceremony, and shared purpose. But the liturgy reveals what these realities are ultimately for. In the liturgy, the Church remembers the saving mysteries of Christ, participates sacramentally in his divine life, and anticipates what will endure when every earthly kingdom has passed away. The liturgy purifies our loves and orders our gratitude because it trains us to see all earthly realities in relation to God and his Kingdom. In this way, Christians learn to love their earthly homeland rightly—not as an ultimate end in itself, but as something properly ordered toward the heavenly Jerusalem.
8. The Church celebrates the memorial of Pope St. Pius X on August 21. Why is Pope St. Pius X often called “the Pope of the Eucharist”?
a. Because he established perpetual adoration in every cathedral and restored Communion under both kinds
b. Because he encouraged frequent Holy Communion and reasserted the practice of administering First Holy Communion at the age of reason
c. Because he reserved Holy Communion to Sundays and major feast days in order to increase reverence
d. Because he required Catholics to memorize the entire catechism before receiving Holy Communion
9. What is distinctive about the Roman Calendar’s celebration of Sts. Monica and Augustine?
a. They are celebrated on consecutive days as mother and son, with Monica on August 27 and Augustine on August 28
b. They share a single joint feast day on August 28
c. They are the only parent-child pairing that appears on the Roman Calendar
d. Augustine’s conversion is celebrated on the memorial of St. Monica, separately from his episcopal ministry
10. What makes the liturgical observance of St. John the Baptist especially distinctive in the Church’s calendar?
a. He has more feast days than any Apostle
b. He is commemorated during every liturgical season
c. He is honored liturgically for both his Nativity and his Passion
d. He alone has a vigil in Ordinary Time
11. The Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary (August 15) celebrates not only a privilege granted to Mary, but also a mystery at the heart of Christian hope. What does Mary’s Assumption especially foreshadow?
a. Christ’s bodily return at the end of time
b. The restoration of the Kingdom of Israel
c. The general resurrection of the faithful in Christ
d. The reunification of the Body of Christ among the Eastern and Western Churches
As Catholics give thanks for every genuine good in our civic inheritance, the liturgy teaches us to love our earthly homeland rightly—as ordered toward God and his Kingdom.
Adoremus Bulletin, July 2026
expression and meaning. It offers a training in discernment . . . .”9 The importance of this addition is considerable, for Francis here shifts attention away from literature’s didactic role in imitating virtue and vice and places it more squarely on the discernment or contemplation of aesthetic form. He directly recognizes that works of art are not indifferent media serving as vehicles for a separate content, but that the “how” of their expression—the nature of their form as form—is of intrinsic value. Instead of teaching, literature opens us to “the infinite grandeur of being” and the “leisure and freedom” we find when we “look and see” or contemplate a form for its own sake.10 Fourth and finally, Francis indicates the way in which the form of literature or any work of art can lead the invisible and ineffable to become visible and intelligible to us.11 Literature in this respect is not primarily imitative of the already imaginable shapes of human action but is rather symbolic or sacramental, insofar as it manifests in aesthetic form mysteries that are in truth beyond all form. The “how” of aesthetic form is thus of value in itself as an object of contemplation, but it can become also a mode of revelation.
Friedrich Schiller
Francis is correct not to discard in via any of these accounts of the role of literature. We have good reason to suspect that art and literature gain their significance and effect in multiple ways and that these are not simply separate paths or diverse phenomena in which one aspect of a work of art might have its effect on one person in one way, and on another person in another way. To explain what I mean, it will be helpful to consider two great modern figures in the philosophy of art and beauty.
The first is Friedrich Schiller. Schiller’s letters On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795) drew on the philosophy of his master, Immanuel Kant, in order to make a specific claim about the potential role of art in human life. Human beings have two native tendencies within them, says Schiller, one toward the senses and one toward
“ The form of literature or any work of art can lead the invisible and ineffable to become visible and intelligible to us.”
the intellect, which latter impulse Schiller classifies under the rubric of “form.”12 We are born with the tendency to the sensuous predominant, but we may grow, or mature, in such a way that the life of the intellect will become primary. We begin, you might say, as bodily creatures consumed with the life of the body, but our native tendency to “form” is always present and may eventually come to predominate within us. When the tendency to form is more fully realized, human beings become “autonomous” insofar as they gain the capacity to practice reason and morality.13
In order to pass from the life of the senses to the life of “form,” however, the individual person must first pass through the “aesthetic,” by which Schiller means the contemplation of works of fine art. In the work of fine art, the senses are engaged but they do so under the mastery of the work of art as a form. It is as if the intellect and spirit danced about and gave shape to the crude matter of the body: “In a truly beautiful work of art the content should do nothing, the form everything.”14 Artworks are material entities where the intellect shines out by way of form. The contemplation of form-in-matter as Schiller gives it is neither a purely intellectual act nor is it—and here he departs from the tradition we described above, which begins with one account of Plato and Aristotle—a moral or didactic activity. The contemplation of the form of a work of art has no specific knowledge or moral content (truth or goodness). It merely awakens us to our capacity for form, to our liberation from a life purely mired in the senses, and so our potential for spiritual freedom.15 As we contemplate aesthetic form, we become aware for the first time of our autonomy, our natural, emergent, and self-governing capacity to know the true and to do the good.
With Schiller, a newly articulated appreciation of the arts appears in history, one which explicitly does not identify the value of the work of art with its capacity to communicate moral content, but with its capacity to awaken us to the spiritual freedom that we exercise when we contemplate a form in itself. Let me underscore: this understanding of the arts is only new in the sense that Schiller makes it explicit. A patient and more attentive reading of Plato and Aristotle would show that it was present all along and so dates from classical antiquity. Such a reading would also show, I propose, that the ancient account of aesthetic education is in fact richer and more satisfactory than Schiller’s, but my aim in this essay is not to make that historical argument, but merely to provide an adequate account of aesthetic contemplation. Schiller argues in a most uncompromising fashion that the capacity to contemplate form is essential to the realization of human nature and that any such contemplation entails an aesthetic phase that will attend to the contemplation of the forms of works of fine art. To grasp the nature of this sort of contemplation, it will be helpful to turn to a second figure, the great Catholic philosopher, Étienne Gilson.
Étienne Gilson
In Gilson’s The Arts of the Beautiful, he takes Schiller at his word that “form is everything.” The central argument of Gilson’s book is that poiesis (artistic making) consists only of the act of making and does not essentially involve knowledge. It is the act of making in order to bring into existence the new individual unity of a form, and that form for the sake of beauty.16 That’s it. Everything else we may discern in a work of art, including the didactic subject matter that Basil recommended to all Christians, is either necessary but outside the essence of the work of art, or a distortion of the true nature of art and so an occasion of “philistinism.”17 The term “Philistine” some centuries ago came to refer not to an ancient people but to any person of a small and illiberal mind. Gilson is thus being very bold in claiming that any attempt to describe the nature of art in terms of knowledge (the work’s subject matter, its moral content, its “aboutness”) rather than in respect to its form will run afoul of a proper understanding of art and so will lapse into philistinism. He regrets the possible insult to the ancient Philistines, but he is most anxious that we should see works of art for what they really are: forms to be contemplated for beauty’s sake.
This criterion applies only to the fine arts. Gilson in effect creates a radical distinction between the fine arts and the sacred arts, by which he intends all those works of art that are made for the purposes of divine worship.18 Gilson has nothing to say about the form of the sacred arts save that, if the forms should be too beautiful, they may become a distraction from the work’s essential, sacred function.19 If a work of sacred art is too wonderfully realized as a work of fine art, form may undermine “content.” Gilson then defines the function of sacred art by way of his intellectual master, St. Thomas Aquinas. Thomas teaches that the purposes of the sacred arts are three: to instruct, to commemorate, and to enthuse the worshiper.20 The fine arts involve the contemplation of form, whereas the sacred arts serve primarily to instruct us about their subject matter and to guide our feelings about it as well.
“For Gilson, we should see works of art for what they really are: forms to be contemplated for beauty’s sake.”
Aquinas has solved the problem, Gilson proposes, and nothing more need be said. Fine art is for contemplation, sacred art is for moral communication. But more does in fact need to be said. While Aquinas is a venerable authority indeed, he is not the most ancient of authorities on this matter. One of the great virtues of Joseph Ratzinger’s modern classic, The Spirit of the Liturgy, is that it takes us back further into the history of Christian worship and shows us that, from the time of the early Church, the role of the sacred arts was not primarily didactic but sacramental. The forms of sacred architecture, visual art, and music were means that belong properly to the liturgical action as a whole and which allow us to participate in the heavenly worship of God by all the angels and saints. Through the aesthetic form of works of sacred art, we come to participate in the cosmic liturgy.21 Even in the sacred arts, formal contemplation is primary, while moral communication is only secondary. Schiller and Gilson were therefore correct to explain the significance of the fine arts in terms of the contemplation of form. Schiller offers no account of anything except the natural life of reason and morality lying beyond this contemplation of the work of art. Gilson plainly does have a vision of activities and realities that go beyond this aesthetic contemplation. Indeed, in contrast to Schiller, he does not even contend that aesthetic contemplation is very important in itself. But, for Gilson, the function of sacred art lies so far beyond the fine arts that he sees no significant connection between the two besides a possible competition. Furthermore, for Gilson, the sacred arts are defined in terms of their material purpose, their content, not, as we noted, their form.
Joseph Ratzinger
Ratzinger shows us, however, that the contemplation of aesthetic form as Schiller describes it actually continues beyond the meditation on the natural work of art into that transcendent mode of contemplation that is the sacred liturgy. In saying this, he helps us put into proper order the four uses of literature and art that are indicated in Francis’s letter. The arts are primarily a contemplation of form. Within that form, we may discern the moral forms of human action, and also the experience of, and empathy for, others, while, in some cases, we will discover that the form of the work of art can even manifest to the senses and the mind that which transcends them, the great mystery of God. But these three functions take place within the act which is most essential, the contemplation of the form.
If this is true, then Schiller was correct that the fine arts awaken us to spiritual freedom and prepare us for an autonomous life. What Ratzinger helps us to appreciate is that the true condition of autonomy is that we submit our being to the order of true worship. It is only out of the proper contemplative worship of God that our intellectual and moral life begins.22
The ancient authors are therefore valuable to us not only because, here and there, they may give us images of virtue or help us to discern the difference between good and evil. They are valuable because they offer aesthetic forms that reorient us to live always in the contemplation of being. Works of art are in this sense a preparation for the sacred work of the liturgy; the contemplation of the beauty of art prepares us for an infinitely greater species of form and beauty, that of God’s revelation to us through right worship.
A properly lived human life will entail a development or maturation not too far from that which Schiller describes: we will move from the life of the senses alone, to the unity of matter and form that is the provenance of the fine arts, and on to the arts of the sacred, where the visible is directly in the service of the invisible,
Continued from CONTEMPLATION, page 1
In Plato and Aristotle, the classical tradition offers more than moral instruction through art; it also begins to disclose the importance of contemplating form.
AB/RAPHAEL, PLATO AND ARISTOTLE,
the finite in the service of the infinite, the material in the service of the spiritual. As Ratzinger argues, it is only within this highest contemplation of form—liturgical form—that our life of freedom for truth and goodness can properly begin. This is precisely why the ancient Israelites had to seek the promised land, for only there could they realize the freedom for the true worship of God. Such a specifically formal education the ancient world knew well. Indeed, all ancient ideas of education understood such education as leading to our spiritual transcendence of our material condition.23 They even understood the sacramental or incarnate dimension of reality, wherein the material participates in the spiritual and vice versa. But, lacking the form of the liturgy, our pre-Christian ancestors articulated their understanding of the contemplation of form in ways many readers down the centuries have missed or misrepresented, including even St. Basil.
Athens and the New Jerusalem
The contribution of the classical world to the life of the Christian is therefore far richer than Basil’s letter suggests. Even so, that world was still lacking something crucial. Through the Incarnation of Christ, we are called to participate even now in
“ The contemplation of the beauty of art prepares us for an infinitely greater species of form and beauty, that of God’s revelation to us through right worship.”
the everlasting, and everything, no matter how ostensibly small, finite, and trivial, is redeemed in that act of participation. Further, that redemption is possible not primarily through any initiative of our own, but through God’s first initiative in entering into his creation and saving it by his self-emptying grace. Indeed, this brings the proper life of contemplation and worship into even more urgent focus. God is the great actor in all things, including in human history. What would otherwise be a story of tragedy, futility, and sorrow becomes, through his initiative, an occasion for the work of love that brings all things to everlasting joy. The only original contribution and offering we can make within this divinely orchestrated drama is the free gift of our thought, which is something we offer to God every time we cease for a moment in the buzz of our active life and rest within the contemplation of form.24
The fine arts are a central human testimony to this call to contemplation, but they are more than that. As Schiller’s account of “aesthetic education” suggests, the contemplation of the form of the fine arts anticipates and prepares us for that more fundamental mode of contemplation that may occur within the form of the liturgy. We should note in closing that it also does something more: the contemplation of aesthetic form reminds us that the liturgy is itself an essential contemplative act and that it is by participating in such liturgical contemplation that we are most fully realized as human beings.
James Matthew Wilson is Cullen Foundation Chair in English Literature and Founding Director of the MFA program in Creative Writing at the University of Saint Thomas, Houston, TX.
1. Pope Francis, “On the Role of Literature in Formation,” letter, July 17, 2024, 12–13.
2. For one answer, see James Matthew Wilson, “The Catholic Artist in a Neo-Pagan Age,” Notre Dame Church Life Journal, March 16, 2020 (https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/the-catholic-artist-in-a-neo-paganage/).
3. Basil the Great, “Address to Young Men on the Right Use of Greek Literature” (https://www.tertullian.org/ fathers/basil_litterature01.htm), 4.
4. Plato, Republic, 377a-b.
5. Aristotle, Poetics, 1448a and 1451b.
6. Francis, “On the Role of Literature in Formation,” 9-11.
7. Francis, “On the Role of Literature in Formation,” 20, 36.
Continued from NEWS AND VIEWS, page 2
Pope Leo: Vatican II Did Not Change Only ‘the Rites’ of the Liturgy
By Victoria Cardiel
EWTN—Pope Leo XIV said on May 20 that the liturgy occupies a central place in the life of the Church, since it “touches the very heart” of the mystery of Christ—because it is “at once the space, the time, and the context” in which the Church receives from him “her very life.”
The liturgy, he said at the general audience in St. Peterʼs Square, is where “the work of our redemption is accomplished,” which makes us “a chosen lineage, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people whom God has acquired for himself.”
On May 20, the pontiff began a new series of catechesis about the Second Vatican Councilʼs constitution on the sacred liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium.
The conciliar text marks a shift in emphasis in the understanding of the liturgy: Whereas the Tridentine Mass prior to Vatican II focused primarily on the sacrificial dimension, the conciliar liturgical reform placed at the forefront Christ acting in the liturgy, setting at the center the paschal mystery—his passion, death, resurrection, and glorification—which is made sacramentally present in every celebration.
The pope explained that the council fathers at Vatican II sought not only an external reform of the rites but also a broader spiritual deepening: “In drafting this constitution, the council fathers sought not only to undertake a reform of the rites but to lead the Church to contemplate and deepen that living bond which constitutes and unites her: the mystery of Christ.”
The pontiff thus affirmed that “every time we take part in the assembly gathered ‘in his name’ we are immersed in this mystery,” stressing that Christ continues to act in the Church as “he who is present in the proclaimed word, in the sacraments, in the ministers who celebrate, in the gathered community and, in the highest degree, in the Eucharist.”
Referring to St. Augustine, Pope Leo recalled that in celebrating the Eucharist, the Church “receives the body of the Lord and becomes what she receives,” thus becoming the body of Christ and “a dwelling place of God in the Spirit.”
The pope also insisted that the liturgy is not an isolated act but “the summit toward which the activity of the Church is directed … the font from which all her power flows.” Pope Leo highlighted the missionary and universal dimension of the liturgy, which “represents a sign of the unity of the entire human race in Christ,” and, quoting Pope Francis, recalled that “the world still does not know it, but everyone is invited to the supper of the wedding of the Lamb.”
Through the Incarnation of Christ, we are called to participate even now in the everlasting, and everything, no matter how ostensibly small, finite, and trivial, is redeemed in that act of participation.
8. Francis, “On the Role of Literature in Formation,” 3, 33. Cf. Josef Pieper, Only the Lover Sings: Art and Contemplation (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990) and Simone Weil, “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God” in Waiting for God (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 57-66.
9. Francis, “On the Role of Literature in Formation,” 26.
10. Francis, “On the Role of Literature in Formation,” 32.
11. Francis, “On the Role of Literature in Formation,” 21.
12. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, trans. Reginald Snell (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 2004), 65.
13. Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, 31, 46-48.
14. Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, 106.
15. Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, 107-110.
16. Ètienne Gilson, The Arts of the Beautiful (n.p.: Dalkey Archive Press, 2000), 15.
17. Gilson, The Arts of the Beautiful, 145.
18. Gilson, The Arts of the Beautiful, 160.
19. Gilson, The Arts of the Beautiful, 172.
20. Gilson, The Arts of the Beautiful, 166.
21. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000), 139, 166, 207.
22. Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy, 34-35.
23. Plato, Republic, 490a, 517b.
24. See Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Major Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 290-291; T.S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral (New York: Harcourt, 1963), 21, 49, 86.
The pontiff concluded by inviting the faithful to allow themselves to be transformed by the liturgical action. “Let us allow ourselves to be shaped inwardly by the rites, symbols, gestures, and above all the living presence of Christ in the liturgy,” he said.
His Holiness Aram I, Catholicos of the Holy See of Cilicia, the head of the Armenian Church and one of the most important figures in Eastern Christianity, was also present during the general audience. The pope said the fraternal visit by the Armenian Orthodox leader “represents an important opportunity to strengthen the bonds of unity that already exist between us, as we move toward full communion between our churches.”
This story was first published by ACI Prensa, the Spanish-language sister service of EWTN News. It has been translated and adapted by EWTN News English.
By Thomas Neal
ICor ad Cor Loquitur: Sacred Polyphony in the Roman Rite
n the Latin Church’s musical tradition, plainchant—an umbrella term for all forms of Western liturgical chant—has always occupied a prime position as the ideal and officially sanctioned form of sacred music, repeatedly defined in the magisterium as the liturgical music par excellence Across two millennia of ecclesial teaching and practice, plainchant has been upheld not merely as one option among others, but as the normative musical expression of the Roman Rite. As Pius XII put it: “The Gregorian chant which has been used in the Church over the course of so many centuries, and which may be called, as it were, its patrimony, is gloriously outstanding for this holiness” (Musicae sacrae, 42).
Plainchant is the Church’s liturgical song not as a matter of taste or historical sentiment, but because it developed alongside the liturgy, growing in step with its form and content (hence William Mahrt’s characterization of “the musical shape of the liturgy”). It is a monodic song that safeguards the primacy of the sacred text; it betokens a certain musical asceticism, devoid of Affektenlehre (the idea that music evokes specific emotions) and therefore wholly suited to public ritual; and it embodies a manner of recitation long described as “speech raised to prayer”—for some, even the ideal of Christian prayer. Pope St. Pius X could therefore assert in Tra le sollecitudini (1903) that plainchant is the “supreme model” of sacred music precisely because it unites holiness, true art, and universality. Later documents—from Pius XI’s Divini cultus (1928) to Pius XII’s Mediator Dei (1947) and Musicae sacrae (1955)—reaffirmed the foundational role of plainchant in the liturgy.
Plainchant does certain things supremely well: it forges unity in a single voice in union with the Church of all ages; it helps safeguard an orthodox reading of scripture and celebration of the liturgy; and it provides the liturgy with a ritual stability that resists both sentimentality and theatricality. At the same time, these strengths also impart a particular aesthetic character. The disciplined sobriety of chant, so perfectly suited to the steady, normative articulation of the Church’s prayer, speaks with a noble simplicity that is not meant to exhaust every symbolic or ceremonial possibility of the rite. In fact, quite the opposite is true. Its perfection as a unified, text-centered, and ritually stable form leaves open—within the Church’s own tradition—the question of how the same liturgical text and action might at times be clothed in a fuller sonority.
The Development of Polyphony
From its beginnings in the ninth century as simple forms of voice-leading added to plainchant, polyphony developed steadily into one of the central achievements of Western music. An important early witness to liturgical polyphony is the Musica enchiriadis, the author of which explained how consonant intervals could be used to compose or improvise organum, an early style of note-againstnote polyphony, in which an added voice unfolds alongside a pre-existing chant melody. These early polyphonic compositions did not replace plainchant but grew directly out of it, decorating and amplifying the ancient melodies. Over time, such practices gave way to more flexible and rhythmically articulated forms, such as those of the Notre Dame school in the late 12th and early 13th centuries, when Léonin and Pérotin famously expanded both the scale and structural ambition of multi-voice composition. In the following centuries, composers’ drive for increasing subtlety and complexity— through the discovery of new techniques to control texture, rhythm, and sonority—shaped the language of the so-called Ars nova, exemplified by the music of Philippe de Vitry (1291–1361), Guillaume de Machaut (c.1300–1377), and Francesco Landini (c.1325–1397). Philippe de Vitry’s triple-texted motet, In arboris/Tuba sacre fidei/Virgo sum, wonderfully encapsulates the techniques and sound world of the ars nova
“Plainchant
is the Church’s liturgical song not as a matter of taste or historical sentiment, but because it developed alongside the liturgy, growing in step with its form and
content.”
This evolution reached a new level of technical and expressive sophistication in the 15th and early 16th centuries with the Franco-Flemish school, when composers forged musical idioms grounded in imitative counterpoint, careful control of sonority, and large-scale formal coherence, culminating in the achievements of figures such as Jacob Obrecht (c.1457–1505), Pierre de la Rue (c.1452–1518), and Josquin des Prez (c.1450/55–1521). Josquin’s finely wrought imitation and subtle manipulation of textures in the Agnus Dei from his Missa L’homme armé demonstrate the achievements of his generation.
In the decades that followed, composers such as Cristóbal de Morales (c.1500–1553), Tomás Luis de Victoria (1548–1611), and Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (c.1525–1594) distilled and refined these achievements, producing a body of sacred polyphony that quickly came to stand as a model of clarity, proportion, and ceremonial propriety at a crucial moment in the Church’s history. Even among the many important polyphonic works of the late 16th century, Victoria’s polychoral motets, Palestrina’s 104 surviving settings of the Mass, and William Byrd’s monumental setting of the Propers
“Polyphony endures not as a concession to artistic taste, but as a treasured art capable of clothing the Church’s public prayer in a manner worthy of the sacred mysteries.”
of the Mass (Gradualia, published 1605) were landmark achievements.
In the late 17th and 18th centuries, the flourishing musical cultures of the Habsburg lands— particularly in Vienna and Salzburg—gave rise to a distinctive repertory of Mass settings that combined the so-called stile antico (based on a Romanticized image of Palestrina and his music) with the stylistic clarity and theatrical vitality of the emerging Classical idiom. Composers active at the imperial court in Vienna, including Johann Joseph Fux (1660–1741) and Antonio Caldara (1671–1736), cultivated a synthesis of contrapuntal techniques
with the concertato style, while in Salzburg figures such as Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber (1644–1704), Michael Haydn (1737–1806), and the young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) produced Masses that, to varying degrees, balanced liturgical function with symphonic breadth and expressive immediacy. In Vienna, this tradition reached new prominence in the late 18th and early 19th centuries with the monumental settings of Joseph Haydn (1732–1809), whose Masses for the Esterházy court represent a high point of Western culture, and with the more expansive and rhetorically charged sacred works of Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) and Franz Schubert (1797–1828). Haydn’s Missa Sancti Nicolai and Schubert’s Mass in E-flat demonstrate the scope and ambition of these composers. Across these generations, the “Viennese” or “Salzburg” Masses reveal how sacred polyphony adapted to new aesthetic priorities and absorbed the elegant rhetoric, symphonic scope, and heightened expressive ambition of the period.
By the 19th century, however, liturgical music had largely lost its social and artistic prestige. While composers continued to write for the Church, sacred music was overshadowed by the public triumph of opera, which now served as the chief arena for musical innovation and emotional expression. Romantic religiosity, favoring subjective sentiment over ritual order, found fuller embodiment on the theatrical stage than within the confines of the liturgy. Many of the century’s most enduring sacred masterpieces—such as Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, Rossini’s Petite messe solennelle, and Verdi’s Messa da Requiem—found success not in the sacred liturgy but in concert performances. The enduring popularity of these works underscores the paradox of 19th-century “sacred” music: it survived most vividly outside the Church.
The Problem of Polyphony
The coexistence of plainchant and polyphony has generated a recurring tension: polyphony has been celebrated as a culmination of sacred musical art, while at the same time it has been the subject of severe regulation, attracting suspicion for its potential to overshadow the liturgical action and obscure the intelligibility of the texts. This paradox invites several fundamental questions. Why has the Church, while affirming chant’s normative primacy, also preserved and promoted polyphony within the liturgy? What does polyphony contribute to the Church’s prayer that chant alone does not? And why, if its value has long been acknowledged, has it so frequently stood in need of justification?
The Church has retained and encouraged the performance of polyphony within the liturgy not as a concession, but as an organic development from plainchant. The same magisterial tradition that has affirmed the normative status of chant has
Plainchant does certain things supremely well: it forges unity in a single voice in union with the Church of all ages; it helps safeguard an orthodox reading of scripture and celebration of the liturgy; and it provides the liturgy with a ritual stability that resists both sentimentality and theatricality.
also explicitly commended classical polyphony as a venerable and legitimate form of liturgical music, born out of the same tradition. In his 1958 instruction De musica sacra, Pius XII further clarified this position by identifying chant and sacred polyphony as the primary musical forms proper to the Roman liturgy. Polyphony thus endures not as a concession to artistic taste, but as a treasured art capable of clothing the Church’s public prayer in a manner worthy of the sacred mysteries. Undoubtedly polyphony adds to the solemnity of the liturgy, whether helping to celebrate a particular feast or marking out a particular moment or aspect of the liturgy. But at its best, polyphony extends the contemplative ethos of plainchant into a richer sonic architecture, enabling multiple voices to illustrate— even illuminate—the sacred text from alternative perspectives. Through the manipulation of harmony, counterpoint, and the techniques of musical rhetoric, the composer’s work has the potential to heighten the affective and persuasive force of the liturgical texts. Indeed, the best liturgical polyphony adorns and amplifies the words of the liturgy with enhanced solemnity, contemplative depth, and the force of rhetorical expression. In this sense it “speaks to the heart”—engaging both intellect and emotion, thus disposing souls to devotion. Like an eloquent homily rendered in music, polyphony amplifies and interprets the liturgical text, fostering a deeper encounter with the liturgy, and drawing the faithful toward greater assent and participation in the sacred mysteries.
Which well-disposed soul, kneeling in adoration of the Real Presence of our Lord on the altar, could resist the affective power of the Benedictus from Palestrina’s Missa Papae Marcelli, and not be drawn into a deeper love of the Word Made Flesh? Which true child of the Church cannot be stirred by Byrd’s emphatic repetitions in the Credo of his Mass for Four Voices, “Et unam sanctam catholicam et apostolicam Ecclesiam”? And which soul, attending the Office of Tenebrae in Holy Week as though it were the burial office of their Divine Savior, could fail to be captivated, and yet disturbed, by Victoria’s setting of the disciples’ words after the Crucifixion, “Recessit pastor noster, fons aquae vivae…”? These texts, already beautiful in themselves, attain in the hands of these composers a force and immediacy that press their meaning upon the heart with renewed urgency.
Indeed, traditional forms of sacred music continue to unnerve members of the Church’s hierarchy precisely because music possesses such expressive potency, and so the very artistic power that enables polyphony to edify has also required sustained ecclesial discernment. Music’s capacity for complexity, expressive richness, and subjectivism can, if left unchecked, obscure the liturgical action and draw attention to itself, turning prayer into performance. For this reason, the Church has repeatedly articulated criteria to ensure that polyphony remains the servant, rather than the rival, of the liturgy. As Pius XII observed in Musicae sacrae, the Church does not legislate aesthetic techniques as such but vigilantly safeguards sacred music from anything that might lessen its dignity
or compromise its liturgical purpose. The recurrent need to justify polyphony, therefore, does not reflect ecclesial ambivalence or a performative moralism, but prudence: a reminder that every authentic development in liturgical art must continually demonstrate its conformity to the spirit of the liturgy and its subordination to the norms and aims of divine worship.
Such vigilance has deep roots; criticisms of elaborate liturgical music are not a modern
“Liturgical music exists not to challenge or impress, but to lead hearts and minds more deeply into the sacred mysteries.”
phenomenon. In the fourth century, St. Basil the Great (330–379) warned against forms of music capable of morally subversive influence; in the fifth century, St. Jerome (c.342–420) sharply condemned “theatrical” styles of music that imported secular
placing the liturgical text.
display into the sacred rites; and in the sixth century, St. Nicetius of Trier (c.525–c.566) voiced similar concerns about forms of music that distracted from the public prayer of the Church. Later interventions—from the Council of Toledo (1566) to Pope Benedict XIV’s encyclical Annus qui (1749)—reiterated three perennial anxieties: the obscuring of the liturgical texts, performer-centered virtuosity, and the infiltration of secular music into the sanctuary. In more recent times, there has been a widespread fear that choir-led classical music might erode the participation of the faithful. Yet such concerns are founded on a false notion of what constitutes participatio actuosa and betray a lack of understanding of how music works on the ear and the brain. Far from excluding the faithful, the sheer
beauty and emotive power of classical polyphony can be a source of profound consolation, spiritual enrichment, and devotion. Properly understood and applied, the Church’s treasury of polyphonic music actually increases full, conscious, and active participation in the liturgy.
Throughout its history, the Church’s musical life has followed a recurring pattern of flourishing and correction. Periods of remarkable artistic vitality have been accompanied—sometimes swiftly, sometimes after excess—by clarifying interventions from ecclesiastical authority. Such documents have not sought to stifle creativity, but to safeguard the purpose, integrity, and beauty of the sacred liturgy. The repeated cautions addressed to composers and choirs reveal not an opposition to art, but a pastoral discipline and a reminder of the church musician’s vocation: a determination that sacred music remain ordered to the beauty of the liturgy, and the edification and sanctification of the faithful. Criticism, in this light, is not rejection but refinement. It is the Church’s way of ensuring that every flowering of musical expression remains rooted in the soil from which it sprang.
Principles for Polyphony Today
This rich history suggests practical implications for today’s church musicians. Repertoire should be chosen in continuity with the Church’s artistic heritage and in accord with the aesthetic aims of the liturgy, not personal preference or novelty. The music must lie within the capabilities of the choir, whose members should be formed not only in good vocal health and technique, but in an understanding of their role and the significance of the sacred texts they sing. Careful attention should also be given to the circumstances of performance: the types of voices available, the position and presentation of the choir, the architecture and acoustics of the building, the qualities of the organ and the competence of the organist—all of which should serve the liturgical action rather than distract from it or draw undue attention to performers. Finally, repertoire should be selected with sensitivity to local custom and culture, and to the way each community receives and understands the music. Liturgical music exists not to challenge or impress, but to lead hearts and minds more deeply into the sacred mysteries. Thus, the Church’s sacred song, in whatever legitimate form it takes, fulfills its highest purpose.
Thomas Neal is a musicologist, teacher, and conductor. He read Music at Clare College, Cambridge, England, and since 2018 has served as Director of Music at New College School, Oxford, one of the UK’s leading choir schools. As an organist and church musician, Neal has more than 15 years’ experience providing music for the traditional Latin liturgy. His research explores the intersection of music, liturgy, and culture in late 16th-century Rome, with a particular focus on the life and works of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina. He was co-editor, with Galliano Ciliberti, of Sicut in caelo: Sacred Music in Early Modern Italy (Brepols, 2025); he is currently editing Palestrina at 500: Sources, Analysis, Reception (Brepols, 2027) and authoring a book on Palestrina’s Missa Papae Marcelli.
Palestrina’s sacred polyphony came to stand as a model of musical clarity, proportion, and ceremonial propriety, adorning and amplifying the Church’s prayer without dis-
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By Jan C. Bentz
AOxford Movement Approaching 200: The Tractarians and the Curious Hunger of Today’s Students
s the 200th anniversary of the Oxford Movement approaches, one suspects that St. John Henry Newman, John Keble, and Edward Bouverie Pusey—the principal architects of the Oxford Movement—would look upon the state of modern Christianity with the same expression they wore in 1833—somewhere between astonishment, alarm, and possibly resignation. Yet if they could stroll through Oxford today, dodging electric bicycles and undergraduates dressed in the latest forms of cultivated carelessness, they might also permit themselves something they were not especially known for: hope.
For a strange thing is happening. Not only in Oxford but across the English-speaking world, a new generation is rediscovering the very realities the Tractarians fought to uphold: reverence, doctrine, beauty, sacramentality, and the supernatural character of the Church. Unlike their Victorian predecessors, however, today’s youth have endured not the fading embers of a Christian culture, but the long aftermath of liturgical minimalism, doctrinal vagueness, and a social world aggressively allergic to transcendence. They have been formed not by the cadences of the Prayer Book, but by the algorithm. And paradoxically, that deprivation has awakened in them an instinct the Tractarians would recognize at once: a sense for the sacred—or rather, for its absence
The Oxford Movement itself began in 1833 as a renewal movement within the Church of England, seeking to recover the Church’s apostolic identity, sacramental life, and continuity with the early Church. Its leading figures—Keble, Pusey, and Newman—responded to what they perceived as the erosion of ecclesial authority and doctrinal seriousness in a rapidly changing religious and political landscape.
A New Sensibility in Oxford
As a lecturer in philosophy at Blackfriars, working closely with both Catholic students and neighboring Anglican students and colleagues, I encounter this sensibility repeatedly in tutorial and liturgical life. Students—Catholic, Anglican, and vaguely “spiritual” alike—often possess a remarkably sharp instinct for reverence. They know when the liturgy has weight, and they know when it has been hollowed out. They have little patience for ceremonies performed as though the celebrant were anxious not to miss his train. They notice when beauty has been displaced by didactic utilitarianism, and when sanctuaries begin to resemble functional meeting spaces more than places ordered to divine worship.
But when these same students encounter a Mass that takes the liturgy seriously—whether the Dominican Rite, a solemn Mass at the Oxford Oratory, a festive celebration with full choir, or the usus antiquior—something in them stirs. A recognition. A homecoming. As one student put it with delicious understatement: “Finally, a liturgy that truly centers around the mysterious and the divine. God is present.”
Not only do they react to elevated aesthetics, but something more fundamental happens: they recognize that the liturgy is not primarily something we construct, but something we receive. It is not an expression of our mood, but an action of Christ and his Church into which we are drawn. As the Second Vatican Council teaches, the liturgy is “the summit toward which the activity of the Church is directed” and “the font from which all her power flows” (Sacrosanctum Concilium, 10). That objective reality—prior to preference, personality, or trend—is precisely what many students seem instinctively to rediscover.
This instinct is not limited to Catholics. Many seekers arrive with almost no doctrinal formation at all, yet they still intuit what the Church teaches: that in worship heaven touches earth. They have
inhabited a world flattened of mystery, a digital environment where transcendence is replaced by stimulation and where meaning is often indistinguishable from branding. No wonder they are drawn to liturgy that dares to look upward. A world of permanent distraction has prepared them, however unwillingly, to recognize the gravity of adoration.
Oxford itself still bears the imprint of the Movement. The very fact that this ancient university now possesses such a strong Catholic presence—multiple churches, robust student groups, frequent talks by Catholics, and confession lines that sometimes resemble queues for a fashionable product launch—may be seen as part of the Tractarian inheritance. Keble, Pusey, and Newman did not labor in vain. Their restoration of seriousness, beauty, and sacramental conviction did not end with their own generation. It simply awaited another generation capable of noticing what had been lost.
The Tracts: Yesterday for Today
The Tracts for the Times—published between 1833 and 1841—constituted a sustained theological intervention aimed at recovering the Church’s apostolic authority, reaffirming the objective efficacy of the sacramental life, and reasserting the continuity of Anglicanism with the undivided Church of antiquity. One of the more striking features of the Oxford Movement is the almost disconcerting contemporaneity of the Tracts. To read them alongside present ecclesial controversies is to experience something like the rediscovery of an earlier form whose contours, far from being obsolete, have quietly re-emerged with renewed relevance.
Consider Tract 45, with its warning that a Christianity reduced to what can be strictly proven from Scripture alone eventually produces a cold and exacting skepticism. Newman laments the spiritual mentality that accepts only what stands in broad daylight and cannot hear the “still small voice” by which God so often speaks. The target is not reason as such, but a rationalism incapable of receiving mystery. What the Tractarians saw with startling clarity was that once Christianity is reduced to what can be managed, demonstrated, and explained, reverence soon evaporates. We know this tendency well. It appears whenever doctrine is treated as negotiable, whenever tradition is regarded as a burden, whenever liturgy is made to justify itself by utility, accessibility, or immediate intelligibility. The result is flattening. Worship loses
altitude. The sacramental imagination weakens. The Church ceases to appear as the place where divine life is mediated through visible forms, and begins instead to resemble a religious service provider with occasional vestments.
Keble’s famous Assize Sermon, “National Apostasy,” sharpened the same diagnosis in another register. Drawing on the history of Israel, he warned that when a nation ceases to acknowledge God’s authority, it does not become neutral; it becomes disordered. Indifference to doctrine, the erosion of ecclesial authority, and the substitution of tolerance for truth were, for Keble, not signs of enlightened maturity but symptoms of spiritual decline. One need not follow him into every political conclusion to recognize the force of the principle. A society—or a church—that forgets the supernatural does not thereby become freer. It simply becomes thinner, louder, and less capable of worship.
Modern problems, then, are seldom merely modern. They are perennial distortions of permanent things. And for that very reason, the Tractarians remain unexpectedly contemporary. They understood that the deepest crisis of Christianity would never be a matter of external style alone. It would be a crisis over whether the Church still believed herself to be the bearer of divine mysteries.
At heart, the Tractarians were making a simple but demanding claim: Christianity is not something we construct out of opinions, but something given—something that takes concrete form in doctrine, sacrament, and worship in continuity with its origins.
Objective Supernatural Order
What the Oxford Movement sought to recover was not simply dignified ceremonial or a preference for Gothic architecture, though both had their place. At its heart lay what historian Christopher Dawson has called the “Catholic conception of an objective supernatural order.” That phrase is worth lingering over. For the Tractarians themselves insist—again and again—that Christianity is not a matter of private judgment or religious sentiment, but of divine realities entrusted to the Church and mediated through visible forms.
From the outset, the Tracts for the Times frame the Church as a divine society. Tract 5, for instance, reminds its readers that the Church is “that body which He framed for the reception of the first gifts of His Almighty Spirit, and for the transmission of those precious gifts, from age to age, to the end of time,” endowed with authority and continuity, not dependent upon the shifting opinions of
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The Oxford Movement’s leading figures—including St. John Henry Newman—responded to what they perceived as the erosion of ecclesial authority and doctrinal seriousness in a rapidly changing religious and political landscape.
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The Oxford Movement lives on—in the chapels of Oxford, in flourishing Newman Centers, in Ordinariate parishes, in confession lines, in sung Vespers, in student converts searching for permanence, and in the rediscovery of the liturgy as participation in the worship of heaven.
individuals. The entire Tractarian project rests upon this conviction: that grace is a received gift. Consequently, Tract 76 (Newman) compiles historical Anglican testimonies to emphasize that the sacraments are not symbolic gestures of human devotion, but “means of grace,” objective channels through which God “acts upon the soul.”
This is why the Tractarians resist so strongly any reduction of Christianity to what can be immediately grasped or demonstrated. In Tract 45, Newman warns against the tendency to accept only what is clearly revealed in a narrow and superficial sense, arguing that such a mentality inevitably erodes reverence and dissolves the authority of tradition. Scripture, he insists, does not present itself as a system reducible to propositions, but as a living voice that must be received within the Church. He writes: “The doctrine is in it, not on it; not on the surface,” and he criticizes the “proudhearted intellectualist” and the “stubborn spirit” that “will not see except in broad day-light.” To demand that every element of Christian life be justified by explicit textual proof is already to misunderstand the nature of revelation itself.
In this light, the liturgy assumes its proper place as a stable anchor for the soul. It is the privileged site where a supernatural order becomes tangible, resisting the shifting whims of the age. As Tract 3 insists in its urgent defense of the Prayer Book against contemporary alterations, the traditional forms of worship are not arbitrary arrangements to be edited by a “taste for criticism,” but secure bearers of doctrine—embodying truths that shape the soul precisely because they are received in faith rather than subjected to human reason. Newman warns that allowing the unstable or worldly to treat the services with a fastidious, modern temper threatens to destroy their true purpose. Liturgical language must not be reduced to mere legal propositions; it is a “divine voice supplied by the Church for their need,” intended to be prayed, sung, and lived in reverence.
This point matters immensely today. For the hunger one observes in students is not simply a reaction against banality, though it is certainly that. It is more deeply a response to ontological starvation. They have grown up in a world that doubts that things possess intrinsic meaning, that symbols mediate anything real, or that institutions bear authority beyond consent. And then they encounter a liturgy in which gestures matter, silence matters, vesture matters, kneeling matters, and words are not endlessly improvised but received. Suddenly they are confronted with a world in which form is not arbitrary, because reality itself is not arbitrary.
That is why beauty evangelizes: it reveals order. The young often grasp this more quickly than their elders. They may lack the vocabulary to articulate it, but they recognize when a liturgy is oriented toward God and when it has turned back upon the community. They know when music serves prayer and when it merely fills silence. They know when the sanctuary signifies mystery and when it has been reduced to functionality. And when they discover worship that is unapologetically sacred, they cling to it with a seriousness that is often more theological than the strategies designed to attract them.
The End of the Via Media
If St. John Henry Newman returned today, he would surely be astonished by many things—some delightful, some tragic, some merely absurd. He would be moved, perhaps, by the number of young people who still find their way to adoration, confession, silence, and serious liturgical life. But he would not be surprised by the inability of Anglicanism, in its modern form, to sustain a coherent sacramental and doctrinal identity. The seeds of that instability are already visible in the Tracts for the Times themselves. Again and again, the Tractarians insist that the Church is not a federation of opinions but a divinely constituted body, possessing authority through apostolic succession and entrusted with definite doctrine. Tract 45 warns explicitly that to view doctrine through a narrow, rationalistic lens is to dissolve the very idea of a docile faith, while Tract
4 insists that separating from apostolic authority leaves a minister with no objective grounds for his credentials, inevitably leading to fragmentation. Most forcefully, Tract 90 argues that the ThirtyNine Articles—the foundational doctrinal statements of the Church of England, often read in a Protestant sense—are not a comprehensive system of theology, but must be interpreted coherently within the broader and authoritative tradition of the universal Church.
What, then, was the Via Media that Newman and his fellow Tractarians sought to defend? It was not intended as a compromise in the modern sense, nor as a pragmatic balancing act between extremes. Rather, it was conceived as a principled recovery of the Church of antiquity: a claim that the Church of England, rightly understood, stood in organic continuity with the apostolic and patristic Church, preserving the fullness of Catholic doctrine without what Newman then regarded as later accretions, and avoiding the doctrinal reductions of Protestantism. In the Tracts for the Times, this vision appears again and again as an appeal to the Fathers, to apostolic succession, and to the sacramental life as the visible expression of divine grace.
What Newman would later call a “paper theory” is already under pressure here. The Via Media could be articulated with brilliance, but it depended upon an authority the Church of England could not, in fact, exercise. Its weakness was not merely theoretical, but liturgical and doctrinal. Where there is no stable authority to preserve the form of worship and the content of belief, the result is not comprehensiveness but diffusion—a plurality that gradually loses its center.
This is one reason why the Ordinariate carries such symbolic force. It represents not simply a pastoral provision, but the resolution of a Tractarian tension: the desire to preserve the riches of the Anglican patrimony within a Church capable of sustaining doctrinal and sacramental unity. Newman himself might have recognized in it not a contradiction, but a kind of completion—an answer, at last, to the problem he had already begun to perceive.
America’s Newman Moment
Across the Atlantic, Newman Centers in the United States are quietly witnessing something remarkable. In Nebraska, Illinois, Minnesota, Arizona, Texas, and beyond, students are entering the Church in striking numbers. Others are returning to confession after years away. Bible studies are full. Adoration chapels remain occupied late into the night. The atmosphere is not one of religious trendiness but of seriousness.
These young people are not joining the Church because she enjoys social prestige. She manifestly does not. They are not joining because Catholicism has adapted itself successfully to modern tastes. If anything, the opposite is true. They are drawn because they have encountered something solid, beautiful, and trustworthy: Jesus Christ sacramentally present in his Church.
Here again the Tractarian instinct proves prophetic. The most fruitful centers are often those that take the liturgy seriously, preach clearly, hear confessions generously, and refuse to apologize for the supernatural claims of Christianity. Students speak of peace in adoration, of beauty in the Mass, of the relief of hearing doctrine spoken plainly, and of discovering genuine friendship in a sacramental world. They are drawn not by novelty but by permanence; not by informality but by gravity; not by religious self-expression but by worship.
The Tractarians understood that when society loses sight of the sacred, the Church must become more visibly sacred, not less. That insight is no less true now than it was in 1833.
Hope in an Unlikely Place
So what is one to say as the bicentenary of the Oxford Movement comes into view? At the very least this: the Tractarians were right about more than many of their critics cared to admit. They believed that doctrinal clarity attracts, that beauty reveals truth, that reverence converts, and that the liturgy is not an aesthetic accessory but a theological declaration. They believed that the Church must resist being dissolved into the spirit of the age. They believed, astonishingly enough, that young people crave holiness. Nearly two centuries later, there is growing evidence that they were right.
The Oxford Movement lives on—in the chapels of Oxford, in flourishing Newman Centers, in Ordinariate parishes, in confession lines, in sung Vespers, in student converts searching for permanence, and in the rediscovery of the liturgy as participation in the worship of heaven. What the Tractarians defended against liberal reduction and ecclesial uncertainty was, finally, the supernatural character of Christianity itself.
Keble might call the present moment providential. Newman might call it ironic. Pusey might call it the slow vindication of first principles. We may simply call it hope.
Dr. Jan C. Bentz is a lecturer and tutor in philosophy at the Studium of Blackfriars, University of Oxford, where he is also an Associate Member of the Faculty of Theology and Religion. He also teaches for Memoria College, contributing to its classical liberal arts curriculum. Born and raised in Germany, he completed his secondary education in St. Louis, MO, as a foreign exchange student. He went on to study philosophy, comparative religion, and sacred art and architecture in Rome, where he later taught before relocating to Oxford. In addition to his academic work, Dr. Bentz has an extensive background in journalism and media. He has produced video features for EWTN and has written for Inside the Vatican, The Catholic Herald, Catholic News Agency, Judische Rundschau, and CATO. He also previously worked as a docent guide in Rome and the Vatican.
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Keble College, Oxford, bears the name of John Keble, whose “National Apostasy” sermon helped launch the Oxford Movement and warned that a society or church that forgets the supernatural becomes less capable of true worship.
By Andrew TJ Kaethler
IAlexander Schmemann and the Eucharistic Universe
grew up in an Evangelical Protestant context, shifted direction to Canterbury, where I spent over a decade, and crossed the Tiber in 2015. There were many people and books that helped me cross the river into the Catholic Church. One of the crucial figures was the Orthodox liturgical theologian Alexander Schmemann (1921-1983). He helped baptize my imagination, teaching me to think sacramentally. I owe Schmemann a debt of gratitude and I am not the only one. For example, Aidan Kavanagh, OSB (1926-2006) and David Fagerberg, two key Catholic liturgical theologians, are deeply shaped by Schmemann’s thought. As both Kavanagh and Fagerberg would attest, the East has much to teach the West; “the Church must breathe with her two lungs!”1
Schmemann is a liturgical theologian in the proper sense of the term. He did not write dogmatic treatises about liturgy, nor did he write systematic theology that simply mined the liturgy for theological examples. Rather, participation in the Orthodox Divine Liturgy inspired and shaped Schmemann’s theological reflections: lex orandi, lex credendi (the law of what is prayed is the law of what is believed). The liturgy is theologia prima (primary theology) and systematic theology is theologia secunda (secondary theology). Fagerberg writes, “Theologia prima guides theologia secunda because the primary theologian is witness to the Paschal Mystery from within, where he or she learns the oldest of all the languages of the Church.”2 Schmemann is a primary theologian who can help us see who God is and, in light of this, who man is. This is what the liturgy does; it gives us vision. “It is not reform, adjustments and modernization that are needed so much as a return to that vision and experience that from the beginning constituted the very life of the Church.”3 Too often we get caught up in specific details concerning rubrics and do not see the forest for the trees. Schmemann is the perfect guide to lead us past the outlying trees into the depths of the forest. In what follows, I will set out three major emphases in Schmemann’s work: sacramentality, eschatology, and gratitude. All three are eucharistic.
Man Is What He Eats
In 1973, Alexander Schmemann opened his work For the Life of the World with these thought-provoking lines: “‘Man is what he eats.’ With this statement the German materialistic philosopher Feuerbach thought he had put an end to all ‘idealistic’ speculations about human nature. In fact, however, he was expressing, without knowing it, the most religious idea of man.”4
“Man is what he eats” is the phrase that sits behind all Schmemann’s writings. It expresses what is at the heart of the liturgy and is “the source and summit of the Christian life” (CCC, 1324), i.e., the Eucharist. Every catechized Catholic knows this and quite likely could quote this line, but few understand the fullness of it. It is difficult to bring liturgy and life together. As Schmemann would argue, this difficulty stems from the fact that we fail to recognize that the Eucharist is epiphanic—in both senses of the word. It is a manifestation of divinity, and it is a moment of revelation or insight. The first sense is obvious; in the Eucharist man encounters the risen Christ. The second sense is more elusive. Beyond the moment of reception at Mass, in which Christ is personally revealed, what does the Eucharist insightfully disclose?
The Eucharist reveals to us that reality is sacramental. The whole world is meant to be a form of communing with God. Water was always meant to give us life in the fullest sense. All bread and wine should have “naturally” been communion with God. The loss of this is the original sin. The Fall of man is from a eucharistic world to a non-eucharistic world: “The world is a fallen world because it has fallen away from the awareness that God is all in all. The accumulation of this disregard for God is the original sin that blights the world. And even the religion of this fallen world cannot heal or redeem it, for it has accepted the reduction of God to an area called ‘sacred’ (‘spiritual,’ ‘supernatural’)—as opposed to the world as ‘profane.’ It has accepted the all-embracing secularism which attempts to steal the world away from God.”5 Fallen man fails to see the world as sacramental. Matter is no longer recognized as symbolic, as something that reveals God and is a participation in God.
The danger is that by holding too tightly to our definition of transubstantiation, epiphany in the first sense, we fail to see that the Eucharist is not sui generis (absolutely unique) but rather is the fulfillment or the apogee of what all matter was intended to be. Translating his insight into a Catholic tenor, transubstantiation is not meant to solve the mystery as if it is a problem, but should extend the mystery. To put it differently, transubstantiation is a way into the mystery.
What Schmemann insightfully and poetically reveals to us is that the universe is eucharistic and that
Schmemann is a primary theologian who can help us see who God is and, in light of this, who man is. Too often we get caught up in specific details concerning rubrics and do not see the forest for the trees. Schmemann is the perfect guide to lead us past the outlying trees into the depths of the forest.
you and I are meant to be eucharistic. If the universe is eucharistic, then everything is a sign, a means of encountering God. Matter matters. “Man is what he eats.” If he eats dead things he dies, but if he eats life himself he will live forever. If he consumes the Eucharist, he becomes eucharistia
What does this reveal to us about the liturgy? The liturgy is an expression or a manifestation of the eucharistic world that we live in. Liturgy is not some sort of ritualistic protocol externally imposed upon life. Its rich symbolism is a magnified vision of the world as it is meant to be. Liturgy is supposed to give us the eyes to see the world in its eucharistic shape. In the same way that the Eucharist is not sui generis, the liturgy is not something set apart from the world. It is the world as the world is meant to be done. The world is unusual, not the liturgy.
Liturgy Is Eschatological
The world is broken. Sin limits our ability to commune with God, each other, and the world. “Man is what he eats,” yet in this life our sacramental participation is limited. Hence, Schmemann argues that “liturgical theology has as its proper domain or ‘object’ eschatology itself, which is revealed in its fullness through the liturgy.”6 The eschatological balances out the sacramental or, to put it differently, in this life the sacramental is always eschatological. The world was meant to be communion with God, but sin has broken this and now we only have sacramental glimpses of how things will be For example, baptism reveals what water was intended to be and what one day it will be. Nevertheless, in this life it is only baptismal waters that are truly life-giving.
At this point it is worth clarifying what Schmemann means by eschatological. There are two aspects that need to be highlighted. First, eschatology concerns the end: Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done. The eschaton is when God will be all in all. Second, Jesus Christ is the Kingdom in person. From a Catholic perspective, Schmemann’s approach overemphasizes the first aspect. According to Schmemann, by rejecting Christ and crucifying him we gave up our second chance of having Christ reign on earth—our first chance was lost in the Garden of Eden. Now Christ reigns in heaven, and to encounter him we must “leave” this world, the old aeon, and encounter him in the new aeon. The Eucharist is our passage into the new aeon. In contrast, the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation reveals that Christ comes to us; he descends into our midst. The Kingdom is present at Mass. Nevertheless, Christ’s presence is sacramental and thus eschatological. We do not see him face to face. His presence is veiled under the appearance of bread and wine. And because it is sacramental, it is an encounter that fills and nourishes but at the same time increases our desire for him. “O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water” (Psalm 63:1). The sacraments are a space of real encounter and yet they remain signs pointing to what is to come. “And the Spirit and the bride say, Come. And let him that heareth say, Come. And let him that is athirst come. And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely” (Revelation 22:17).
Liturgy is the foretaste of the feast to come. The liturgy is the path that we walk as we climb up Mount Tabor. It reminds us that we are the pilgrim Church, the Bride of Christ who moves toward her Groom. The journey is long but beautiful. The Christian life is one of anticipation: “We proclaim your Death, O Lord, and profess your Resurrection until you come again.”
Liturgy in the Key of G
The Eucharist reveals to us that the world is eucharistic and that we live in the reality of the here but not yet. There is one other major overarching element at play in Schmemann’s work that sounds simple but is immensely important. The Eucharist literally means thanksgiving. At the altar the once-and-for-all sacrifice of Jesus Christ is offered to the Father. This is a thanksgiving offering. Jesus gives himself to the Father in perfect gratitude. When we go forward and receive the Eucharist, our gratitude is bound up in his gratitude.
For Schmemann, “Eucharist—thanksgiving, adoration, worship—is truly the ultimate and total expression of his [man’s] whole being. Man was created for Eucharist… Eucharist is the Divine element, the Image of God in us.”7 With this in mind, ingratitude is the great sin that tarnishes our identity. Ingratitude is the anti-Eucharist.
Putting this into perspective, the apogee of the liturgy is the Eucharist. The entire liturgy is preparation for receiving the Eucharist. Everything is preparing us to eucharistically participate in Christ’s gratitude. Even our processing out of the Church is a eucharistic act, for we are to bring our gratitude out to the world. Notice that the priest says, “Go forth, the Mass is ended,” and the parishioners respond, “Thanks be to God.” Liturgy is always in the key of Gratitude.
While liturgical rubrics are important, the spirit of the liturgy is more important. There is a reason that Romano Guardini and Joseph Ratzinger both wrote books titled The Spirit of the Liturgy. The liturgy is not pageantry but a means of divine encounter. An encounter requires reception. What is the posture of reception? What is the spirit of the liturgy? Gratitude. In the form of the Eucharist we are shown this. The Son of God humbly descends into our midst so that we can participate in his thanksgiving. He gives himself into the priest’s hands and then into our mouths. He hands himself over to us so that we can gratefully give ourselves over to him. In the liturgical life there is the constant interplay of Christ’s gratitude and ours. By gratefully receiving the Eucharist—Christ’s thanksgiving—we are transformed and become eucharist. The path of holiness leads to an ever-increasing gratitude as Christ transforms us in every Mass, making us capable of thanksgiving. “Everyone capable of thanksgiving is capable of salvation and eternal joy.”8
Thanks
The Eucharist reveals to us that the universe is sacramental. The liturgy is a manifestation of this sacramentality, which offers us an eschatological glimpse of what will be when God is all in all. Through the liturgy we are drawn into the future where our hope lives, increasing our thirst for the living water. In the midst of it all is thanksgiving. “Thanksgiving is the ‘sign’ or better still, the presence, joy, fulness, of knowledge of God.… Just as it is impossible to know God and not give him thanks, so it is impossible to give him thanks without knowing him. Knowing God transforms our life into thanksgiving, and thanksgiving transforms eternity into life everlasting.”9
Andrew TJ Kaethler, PhD, is Executive Vice President and the Benedict XVI Chair of Theology at Catholic Pacific College in Langley, Canada. Kaethler specializes in theological anthropology, particularly in the work of Joseph Ratzinger and Alexander Schmemann. He has published in various journals including Modern Theology, New Blackfriars, Pontificia Academia Theologica, Humanum Review, and Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture. With Sotiris Mitralexis he has coedited Mapping the Una Sancta: Eastern and Western Ecclesiology in the Twenty-First Century (2023). His most recent monograph, The Eschatological Person: Alexander Schmemann and Joseph Ratzinger in Dialogue, was published with Cascade Books in 2022. Kaethler lives in Langley with his wife and six children.
1. Pope John Paul II, Ut Unum Sint, 54.
2. David Fagerberg, Liturgy Outside of Liturgy (Hong Kong: Chora Books, 2018), 78.
3. Alexander Schmemann, The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom, trans. Paul Kachur (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1987), 10.
4. Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1998), 11.
5. Schmemann, For the Life of the World, 19.
6. Alexander Schmemann, Liturgy and Tradition: Theological Reflections of Alexander Schmemann (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003), 143.
7. Alexander Schmemann, Liturgy and Life: Christian Development Through Liturgical Experience (NY: Department of Religious Education: Orthodox Church in America, 1993), 53.
8. Alexander Schmemann, “Final Words,” The Orthodox Church 20, no. 2 (1984), 1. 9. Schmemann, The Eucharist, 176.
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1. a. — The requirement that the whole Psalter be prayed each week in the Divine Office.
St. Benedict’s lasting contribution to the Church’s liturgical life was the disciplined ordering of the Divine Office, which he called the Opus Dei, the “Work of God.” In Chapter 18 of his Rule, he insists that the full Psalter of 150 psalms be completed each week and begun again every Sunday. Benedict famously commands that “nothing is to be preferred to the Work of God,” meaning that all labor, study, and daily activity yield to the Church’s liturgical prayer. His Rule thus established a vision of life fundamentally ordered around divine worship. (Fun Fact: The Rule of St. Benedict devotes a remarkable number of chapters to liturgy, psalmody, and the sanctification of time. For Benedict, the Divine Office was not one activity among many, but the very rhythm around which monastic life—and eventually much of Western Christian culture—was ordered.)
2. c. — Her memorial was raised to the rank of feast.
In 2016, Pope Francis raised the celebration of St. Mary Magdalene from an obligatory memorial to a feast. This change gives her liturgical celebration a rank similar to that of the Apostles and underscores her distinctive role in the proclamation of the Resurrection. The decree presents this elevation as an act of fitting recognition for the woman who first encountered the risen Lord and was sent to announce him to the Apostles. (Fun Fact: In the Roman Rite, a feast is celebrated with greater solemnity than a memorial and normally includes the Gloria at Mass. The decree retained the existing Mass and Office texts for the day while adding a proper Preface to the Mass, further emphasizing St. Mary Magdalene’s unique role as witness to the Resurrection.)
3. d. — Because her witness speaks to the dignity of women, the New Evangelization, and the mystery of Divine Mercy.
The decree raising Mary Magdalene’s celebration to a feast explains that the Church today is called to reflect more deeply on three realities: “the dignity of Woman,” “the New Evangelization,” and “the greatness of the Mystery of Divine Mercy.” Mary Magdalene uniquely embodies all three. Having encountered the mercy of Christ, she becomes the first witness of the Resurrection and is sent to proclaim the Easter message to the Apostles. (Fun Fact: The decree describes Mary Magdalene as the woman “who loved Christ and who was greatly loved by Christ.” It also recalls two famous traditional titles: St. Gregory the Great called her a “witness of Divine Mercy,” while St. Thomas Aquinas called her the “Apostle of the Apostles.” Older devotion often emphasized Mary Magdalene chiefly as a penitent sinner, partly because she was identified with other women in the Gospels. The 2016 decree instead highlights her biblical identity as disciple, witness, and herald of the risen Christ, proposing her as a model of women’s role in the life and mission of the Church.)
4. b. — St. James the Greater, the son of Zebedee and brother of St. John the Evangelist. He is called “the Greater” to distinguish him from James the Less, likely because of his greater prominence among the Apostles or possibly his older age. James belonged to the inner circle of disciples privileged to witness events such as the Transfiguration and Christ’s Agony in the Garden. According to Acts 12:2, he became the first Apostle to suffer martyrdom. (Fun Fact: St. James became one of the most beloved pilgrimage saints in Christianity because of the famous shrine at Santiago de Compostela in Spain. Throughout the Middle Ages, pilgrims traveled the “Way of St. James” from across Europe. The scallop shell associated with him became a symbol of pilgrimage itself and is still widely recognized today.)
5. c. — Martha, Mary, and Lazarus. In 2021, Pope Francis directed that the July 29 celebration be observed in honor of Sts. Martha, Mary, and Lazarus together. Before this change, the Roman Calendar celebrated only St. Martha on that date. The decree expanded the memorial to include the whole household of Bethany, whose friendship with the Lord is presented in the Gospels as a privileged place of hospitality, listening, faith, and love. (Fun Fact: The change also reflects greater biblical clarity in the Roman Calendar. Earlier liturgical tradition sometimes blurred Mary of Bethany with Mary Magdalene, but the present celebration allows the Bethany siblings to appear together in their own Gospel setting.)
6. d. — Because August 6 falls 40 days before the Exaltation of the Holy Cross.
The summer date is not accidental. The Transfiguration falls 40 days before the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross on September 14, linking the glory revealed on Mount Tabor with the saving mystery of the Cross. (Fun Fact: The Catechism teaches that the Transfiguration prepared the disciples for Christ’s Passion. In Lent, the Gospel of the Transfiguration is always proclaimed on the Second Sunday of Lent because the event follows immediately after Jesus’ first prediction of the Passion, strengthening the disciples for the road to Calvary. Thus, the Roman liturgy gives the mystery both a Lenten setting and a fixed summer feast to proclaim the same truth: the glory of Tabor cannot be separated from the victory of Calvary.)
7. b. — The victory at Belgrade over the Ottoman Turks.
Although the Feast of the Transfiguration is far older than the 15th century, Pope Callixtus III extended it to the universal Roman Calendar in grateful memory of the Christian victory at Belgrade in 1456, which checked the Ottoman advance. The pope’s action universalized an ancient celebration already cherished in the East and known in parts of the West. (Fun Fact: The news of the Christian victory at Belgrade reportedly reached Rome on August 6 itself—the Feast of the Transfiguration. This providential timing helped strengthen the association between the feast and the Church’s thanksgiving for divine assistance in a moment of grave danger for Christian Europe.)
8. b. — Because he encouraged frequent Holy Communion and reasserted the practice of administering First Holy Communion at the age of reason.
Pope St. Pius X earned the title “the Pope of the Eucharist” largely through two reforms. In Sacra Tridentina Synodus (1905), he encouraged the frequent and even daily reception of Holy Communion by properly disposed Catholics in a state of grace. Then, in Quam singulari (1910), he restored the earlier discipline that children should ordinarily receive First Confession and First Holy Communion once they reach the age of reason, usually around the seventh year. At a time when some Catholics received Communion only a few times a year and children often waited until adolescence for First Communion, these reforms profoundly reshaped ordinary Catholic parish life and devotion. (Fun Fact: Pope St. Pius X’s personal motto was Instaurare omnia in Christo—“To restore all things in Christ.” His Eucharistic reforms reflected his conviction that renewing the Church meant bringing Catholics more frequently and intimately into contact with Christ in the Blessed Sacrament.)
9. a. — They are celebrated on consecutive days as mother and son, with Monica on August 27 and Augustine on August 28. Rather than combining them into a single observance, the Church celebrates them on back-to-back days, allowing each memorial its own distinct liturgical and theological emphasis: Monica as the model of persevering prayer and maternal faith, and Augustine as the converted sinner who became one of the Church’s greatest bishops and doctors. Monica’s witness and prayers are remembered immediately before Augustine’s feast, underscoring the spiritual fruitfulness of her fidelity. (Fun Fact: Several saintly family groupings are celebrated together during the liturgical year. Sts. Joachim and Anne share July 26, and Sts. Martha, Mary, and Lazarus share July 29. More recently, Sts. Louis and Zélie Martin—the parents of St. Thérèse of Lisieux—became the first married couple canonized together as spouses, and their joint feast is celebrated on July 12, the anniversary of their wedding day.)
10. c. — He is honored liturgically for both his Nativity and his Passion.
The Church celebrates the Solemnity of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist on June 24 and the Memorial of the Passion of St. John the Baptist on August 29. This unusual liturgical honor reflects John’s unique role in salvation history as the forerunner of Christ. Together, the two observances frame John’s entire life—and death—as completely ordered toward preparing the way for the Messiah. (Fun Fact: Christians have long connected St. John’s June 24 Nativity, celebrated near the summer solstice, with his words about Christ in John 3:30: “He must increase, but I must decrease.” In the Northern Hemisphere, daylight gradually diminishes after John’s Nativity, while it begins to increase after Christmas, the Nativity of Christ.)
11. c. — The general resurrection of the faithful in Christ.
The Solemnity of the Assumption celebrates the singular grace granted to the Blessed Virgin Mary, as well as the destiny promised to the whole Church. Mary’s Assumption reveals in advance the destiny awaiting all the faithful who share in Christ’s Resurrection. The liturgy of August 15 consistently places the feast within the mystery of Easter: Mary’s glorification is entirely the fruit of her union with the risen Christ and his victory over death. For this reason, the Church sees Mary as the first complete realization of the redeemed Church. (Fun Fact: The Roman liturgy and ancient Christian tradition often compare Mary to the Ark of the Covenant, since she bore within herself the incarnate Word of God. The readings and prayers for the Assumption are filled with biblical images of heavenly glory, victory, and divine presence. Before Pope Pius XII’s 1955 simplification of the Roman calendar, the Assumption was also celebrated with an octave extending its observance across eight days, underscoring its importance as one of the Church’s greatest Marian feasts.)
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Mary Magdalene. Detail from the Burne-Jones mosaic in the apse of St. Paul’s Within the Walls in Rome.
Saint Augustine and his mother, Saint Monica.
New Book Models How Praying with Sacred Art Can Help Us Encounter God
By Father Lorenzo Penalosa, OSB
Praying with Sacred Art: Pondering the Mystery of Redemption through Visio Divina by Derek Rotty. Manchester, NH: Sophia Institute Press, 2025. 240 pp. ISBN: 979-8-88911-222-8. $19.95 Paperback.
When Catholics think about praying, we often think about using words and gestures. For instance, our prayers usually begin and end with the Sign of the Cross, which involves both speech and physical action. In the sacramental life, however, the Church acknowledges that there are other components beyond words and actions that help us enter more deeply into the mysteries of our faith, such as sacred music, architecture, art, and time.
Derek Rotty’s book, Praying with Sacred Art: Pondering the Mystery of Redemption through Visio Divina, highlights the importance of encountering God through iconography and artistic depictions of biblical themes. Rotty, a convert to Catholicism, freelance author, husband, and father of five, provides thoughtful examples of how to apply the ancient monastic practice of lectio divina (a four-step method of praying with Scriptures or spiritual texts) in reading sacred art. This adapted method he calls visio divina
The book comprises 228 pages, consisting of an introduction, six parts based on the liturgical year and themes centered on the life of Christ, and an epilogue. It features 30 short essays that serve as meditations on artistic portrayals of scriptural events or mysteries. Rotty narrows the scope of these art pieces to paintings due to a practical limitation—“simply because of the two-dimensional format of a book”—while acknowledging that three-dimensional art, such as sculpture, could also serve as objects for meditation using visio divina (6). Each of these essays is between four and six pages in length. Rotty’s expressed goal in writing them is “to allow the piece of art to serve as a window into the viewer’s soul” (6).
Encountering God
In his introduction, Rotty takes as his starting point Pope Benedict XVI’s emphasis on the priority of encountering God. Rotty states, “To foster this necessary and beautiful encounter, we must believe that God continues to speak” (3). He enumerates four ways in which God communicates to us even in our time: through the Church, the scriptures, our desires, and through beauty.
While we often associate art with the last of these— beauty—Rotty admirably appeals to all four ways in his reading of sacred art. Moreover, the depth of his writing demonstrates a very personal component, as he states, “This book is the result of my own visio divina, my own practice of gazing on art and prayerfully asking God to change my soul through the window of my sight” (7).
The book is divided into six parts, following the liturgical seasons and important events in the life of Christ. Part One deals with Advent (10-44), Part Two with Christmas and Jesus’ childhood (46-74), Part Three with Lent and Holy Week (76-116), Part Four with Easter (119-158), Part Five with Jesus’ public ministry (160-189), and Part Six with Jesus’ parables and miracles (192-214). Each of these parts consists of four to seven artwork-centered essays. The book concludes on an eschatological note with the epilogue, meditating on an image of Christ Pantocrator (“Ruler of All”) surrounded by saints in heaven.
All of these sections highlight the primacy of the liturgy in Rotty’s choice of artwork. In fact, each part features paintings and icons corresponding to certain lectionary readings from various liturgical seasons. While the works of art themselves take center stage, Rotty attentively reads them in the context of the season and always with their corresponding scriptural texts, ensuring a robustly canonical interpretation. At times, Rotty even provides relevant passages from magisterial documents, such as conciliar texts and papal writings. These additions underscore the fact that we do not meditate on sacred art (or the passages upon which they are based) merely in a personal way but as members of the Church, with the guidance of the Magisterium. Indeed, Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition form one sacred deposit of the word of God, committed to the Church (Dei Verbum, 10), and this reality also applies to the reading of biblical portrayals.
God Is in the Details
Praying with Sacred Art strikes a good balance between looking at the big picture of salvation history and the liturgical year while also paying attention to the small
details of the artwork. Indeed, Rotty points out subtle visual elements in the paintings and icons that can easily go unnoticed, such as details in the background, the use of colors, the direction of people’s gaze, and the composition of the pieces.
Rotty uses his admirable attention to detail to nudge the reader to ponder deep questions. He demonstrates how each aspect of the paintings can provoke selfexamination regarding our relationship with God, the Church, and society in general. The author thus helps us understand that each depicted scriptural event remains relevant today and demands crucial life choices from us. Rotty’s careful consideration of sacred art, then, is not ordered toward mere artistic appreciation but toward the rediscovery of the transforming power of God’s message. The very first chapter, “The Eve of the Deluge,” exemplifies this point by jolting the reader to wake up from passive stupor to prepare for the Lord’s coming—a reality that is not only true during Advent but every day of our lives.
One of the biggest strengths of the book is its appeal to sacred art from various eras, styles, and provenances. Taking from both the East and the West, the book features Byzantine icons as well as paintings from the Renaissance, Baroque, Romantic, and other periods.
Rotty has also carefully chosen artists from different places of origin, including Spanish (Juan Fernández de Navarrete, Goya, and Bartolomé Esteban Murillo), Danish (Carl Bloch), Dutch (Gerard van Honthorst, Rembrandt, and Matthias Stom), Flemish (Peter Paul Rubens, Philips Immenraet, and Anthony van Dyck), Italian (Mattia Preti, Lavinia Fontana, Orazio de Ferrari, Caravaggio, and Raphael), French (Philippe de Champaigne, Irma Martin, and Jacques Tissot), Scottish (William Bell Scott), and American (Henry Ossawa Tanner and Benjamin West). While the works that appear in the book could be more varied, it is clear that the author has taken great care in choosing the pieces of sacred art that can help him (and us) to pray and see our place in salvation history.
A Matter of Application
Rotty’s use of sacred art from various times and places highlights the fact that praying with iconography is not new in the life of the Church. However, since today’s society is barraged and overstimulated by images from the internet, more and more of which
are AI-generated, it is very helpful to see a Catholic writer model ways we can slow down and enter more deeply into the saving events of our faith by meditating on real, human-made, and prayer-filled iconography, in conjunction with scriptural texts and magisterial writings.
Praying with Sacred Art thus serves as a good beginner’s guide on how “to do” visio divina. Rotty does so by providing examples, though a more explicit explanation of the steps and methods would have been helpful. Lectio divina, the prayerful reading of Scripture or spiritual texts, usually involves four “steps.” It would also have been useful to hear about the steps that one can take in “reading” sacred images and icons, as well as how to choose suitable artwork for meditation.
While determining what counts as “sacred art” is undoubtedly a large topic, some guidance on this matter, however brief, could be of greater help to readers in evaluating the spiritual value of biblical depictions. Indeed, Eastern iconography is known to have clearer canonical and traditional standards for the depiction of Christ and the saints, while in the West, there has been greater freedom and variety in religious artistic portrayals, which means that not every biblically-themed painting is appropriate for use in prayer and worship.
Overall, Rotty provides a very thoughtful and prayerful book with sublime images and numerous questions that draw readers into the saving events of our faith. It can be used to enter more deeply into the Church’s cyclical liturgical seasons. As with lectio divina, Praying with Sacred Art is meant to provide a way to pray—and should be relished slowly and without rush—a reminder in our frenetic world to be generous with our time in praying and encountering the loving God who continues to communicate with us.
Father Lorenzo Penalosa, OSB, SLL, is a Benedictine monk and priest of Saint Meinrad Archabbey in Indiana and is a doctoral candidate (STD in Liturgical Studies) at The Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. His research interests include both written (liturgical books and orations) and unwritten (church art and architecture) sources of liturgical theology. As a visual person, his hobbies include photography, video editing, sketching, and calligraphy.
