Originally published at crisis magazine
If the Church is to continue to transform and humanize the world, how can she dispense with beauty in her liturgies, that beauty which is so closely linked with love and with the radiance of the Resurrection?
—Cardinal Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI)
This question, asked by the future Pope Benedict XVI, is purely rhetorical. The answer is that the Church cannot continue to transform and humanize the world if she dispenses with the beauty of the liturgy. “Without this,” Cardinal Ratzinger continued, “the world will become the first circle of hell.” Restoring the beauty of the liturgy is, therefore, saving the world from Hell itself.
For Benedict XVI, beauty is inseparable from holiness and truth. As he reminds us, “[t]he only really effective apologia for Christianity comes down to two arguments, namely the saints the Church has produced and the art which has grown in her womb.” It was, he added, the “splendor of holiness and art” which bore the best witness to the Lord.
If this is true of the beauty of art in general, it is especially true of the beauty of the liturgy, which is not merely a work of human art but is the divinely ordained way in
