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Restoring the Beauty of the Liturgy, by Joseph Pearce – Brown Pelican Society of Lousiana

Restoring the Beauty of the Liturgy, by Joseph Pearce

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By Joseph Pearce, Crisis Magazine, Dec.15, 2024

Joseph Pearce is Visiting Professor of Literature at Ave Maria University and a Visiting Fellow of Thomas More College of Liberal Arts (Merrimack, New Hampshire). The author of over thirty books, he is editor of the St. Austin Review, series editor of the Ignatius Critical Editions, senior instructor with Homeschool Connections, and senior contributor at the Imaginative Conservative and Crisis Magazine. His personal website is http://www.jpearce.co.

The Church cannot continue to transform and humanize the world if she dispenses with the beauty of the liturgy.

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. …