The Catholic Creation of Hollywood's Golden Age, or How the Church Saved the Movies, Part One

Those with a general understanding of the motion picture industry and its history will already know that Catholics have been extremely influential as directors and actors. A variety of directors like Alfred Hitchcock (Vertigo and North by Northwest), John Ford (Stagecoach and The Searchers), Frank Capra (It's a Wonderful Life and Meet John Doe), Leo McCarey (Duck Soup and The Bells of St. Mary's), Martin Scorsese (Raging Bull and The Departed), and Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather and The Conversation) represent the broad range of the Catholic experience in America, representing those Catholics of Irish, Italian, and English ancestry. Their films cover all the great genres of cinema, from horror and Western to romantic comedy and melodrama. Many commentators have explored the Catholic themes in these men's films, with Catholic understandings of family and community, struggle and redemption, and moral liberty and free will painted on celluloid.

Yet Catholic thought reached the American public beyond these men and their movies, especially during the time period known today as the “Golden Age of Hollywood," a period from roughly 1935 to 1960. The Catholic Church nurtured cinema as an art when it was only considered an industry by the American Government. The Catholic Church helped guide the creation of some of the greatest movies ever made, using subtlety instead of directness; symbols rather than graphic imagery. Lastly, the Catholic Church used the motion picture industry to help integrate Catholics into mainstream American society, going from the Papist "other" to the next-door neighbor. Sadly, apart from several (largely negative) works written over the past two decades, the Church's role nurturing the creation of motion picture industry has been largely forgotten. Over the next few weeks, I will make a series of posts exploring these points and related topics so one can gather a greater understanding and appreciation of the Catholic heritage of American film, why the Church's role should be viewed as a positive influence in the creation of this art form, and the power cinema had and continues to have on our society as a whole.

The Catholic Church has always known the power of art. As Pope Pius XI wrote, "The essential purpose of art... is to assist in the perfection of the moral personality, which is man, and for this reason it must itself be moral." Additionally, nos. 2500 and 2501 of the Catechism state, "The practice of goodness is accompanied by spontaneous joy and moral beauty... To the extent that it is inspired by truth and love of beings, art bears a certain likeness to God's activity in which he has created. Like any other human activity, art is not an absolute end in itself, but is ordered to and ennobled by the ultimate end of man."

Typically though, art has become almost an archaic term, especially in talking about movies. The term "art" instantly conjures up thoughts of museums, classrooms, and, in absence of a more appropriate term, Rastafarian relics of the 1960s. Instead, many people today consider film "entertainment," immediately creating a picture of escape and abandonment. This distinction in modern society leads to a lesser understanding of the power of film as an art form, a truth the Church has known since the advent of moving pictures. Even though the Catholic Church considers film as a form of art, the American government has not always been so enlightened.


(Directors, from top left clockwise, Alfred Hitchcock, Leo McCarey, Frank Capra, Francis Ford Coppola, John Ford, and Martin Scorsese)

Beginning in the first decade of the twentieth century, local censorship boards sprouted up across America, especially in the mid-west, cutting and splicing scenes from the new "moving pictures" in order to protect public morals and decency on the assumption cinema was not covered by the free speech guarantees of the American Bill of Rights. These boards were typically branches of the local police department, made up of individuals with little to no training in art. There was no philosophical underpinning to the methods of these local boards, leading to differing standards in different communities. Moviegoers in New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago could see three different versions of the same film, all of different lengths, depending upon how much the local censorship board objected to in the film. It was a very slow, ineffective, and confusing system.

The film industry fought back. Going all the way to the United States Supreme Court, motion picture producers stated their product was protected as a form of free speech. In this case, Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio, 236 U.S. 230 (1915), the Supreme Court disagreed. As the Court stated in its unanimous decision, "…the exhibition of moving pictures is a business, pure and simple, originated and conducted for profit… not to be regarded, nor intended to be regarded by the Ohio Constitution [and, thus, the United States Constitution], we think, as part of the press of the country, or as organs of public opinion."

This decision led to more state censorship boards being established and the threat of the Federal government censoring movies for public consumption. The film industry tried to deal with this new reality in creating the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), made up of the nation's largest studios. William Hays, a Presbyterian and Postmaster General under President Warren G. Harding, was placed in charge, with the hope that his contacts in the federal government would help relieve its threats of censorship. To help achieve this goal, several codes of self-regulation, the most famous of which was the "don'ts and be carefuls," a random list of what things were and what things were not allowed in the motion pictures, were agreed to by the major studios.

However, while they were agreed to, there was no enforcement mechanism in the studio system to make sure they were following these regulations. The situation only got more pressing with the advent of talking pictures in the late 1920s. At this point, federal regulatory agencies were proposed to deal with immorality in film, similar to how the FDA regulates the quality of meat. The film industry had to do something, and that is when the Catholics were called in, leading to the salvation of the film industry.

In my next post, I will write of three influential Catholics who shaped the film industry in America for two decades: Father Daniel A. Lord, S.J., Joseph I. Breen, and Martin J. Quigley and the creation of the Motion Picture Production Code.

~TNT

Film is one of the three universal languages, the other two: mathematics and music.
Frank Capra

Part two is available here.

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Beauty in the Conversion of Dorothy Day

Dorothy Day often said “it is by little and by little that we are saved.” Her own conversion to the Catholic faith involved many small realizations that brought her closer and closer to the Church. One of the unique features of Dorothy Day’s writing is her descriptive and concrete approach to things, including her conversion. She starts out with events and experiences. She tells the story of the common working person and the struggle to provide for the family. Her social consciousness of class struggle impelled her to become involved in Marxist and communistic causes. Young Dorothy was a social rebel and formally non-religious except that she saw a beauty in everyday things which drew her to the possibility of Christ and his Church. She would always continue to be a social rebel but came to embrace the Catholic Church and then later, once she was aware of them, the social justice principles of the Church. Her conditioned aversion to religion was embodied in the comment of Marx that called religion the opiate of the masses. The beauty and sacredness of the everyday broke her from this perspective. For the rest of her life she would proclaim indwelling of God in the world as the “sacrament of the present moment.”

Dorothy Day writes of her long conversion in From Union Square to Rome and The Long Loneliness. Her intention was to disclose an honest account of her journey to God and His Church, how God continually blessed her despite her sins and shortcomings. One of the interesting things I find in her conversion is the constant role of beauty opening her up to the prospect of the Gospel. She attributes her love of the poor as one of the redeeming qualities that kept her open to heed the Lord’s voice. “Because I sincerely loved His poor, He taught me to know Him.” She sees her own narrative journey infused with grace. She recognizes her desire for God and how that desire was sometimes wasted on selfish endeavors.

What I cannot do in this bit of writing is describe the role of beauty in Dorothy Day’s conversion any better than she did herself. Her reflection richly describes the movements of her soul corresponding to pivotal points of her life. Where applicable I include her own descriptions of her journey.

Those who are sincere and humble can come to God not merely through positive experiences of beauty, truth, and goodness but also through negative experiences of sin, suffering, and a series of disgust that indicates our limitations while affirming our affinity for God. Dorothy Day is one of those souls who traveled the depths of the suffering before willfully giving her life to God.

While it is often true that horror for one’s sins turns one to God, what I want to bring out in this book is a succession of events that led me to His feet, glimpses of Him that I received through the many years which made me feel the vital need of Him. I will try to trace for you the steps by which I came to accept the faith that I believe was always in my heart...Though I felt the strong, irresistible attraction to good, yet there was also, at times, a deliberate choosing of evil. How far I was led to choose it, it is hard to say. How far professors, companions, and reading influenced my way of life does not matter now. The fact remains that there was much of deliberate choice in it. Most of the time it was “following the devices and desires of my own heart.” Sometimes it was perhaps the Baudelariean idea of choosing “the downward path which leads to salvation.” Sometimes it was of choice, of free will, though perhaps at time I would have denied free will. And so, since it was deliberate, with recognition of its seriousness, it was grievous mortal sin and may the Lord forgive me. It was the arrogance and suffering of youth. It was pathetic, little, and mean in its very excuse for itself. – From Union Square to Rome

Dorothy grew up without a religious affiliation. She wrote, “In the family, the name of God was never mentioned. Mother and Father never went to church, none of us children had been baptized, and to speak of the soul was to speak immodestly, uncovering what might better remain hidden.” But she did have joyful experiences of community in times of disaster and uncertainty. Dorothy recalls a generally happy childhood. Mindful of the varieties of her experiences, Dorothy spent a great deal of time torn between the hopelessness of the human condition and intimations of something infinitely greater that can lift the human spirit. She had genuine compassion for others and felt called to serve others. This desire found momentary fulfillment in the political radicals of her day who sought to better the condition of workers.

When what I read made me particularly class-conscious, I used to turn from the park with all its beauty and peacefulness and walk down to North Avenue and over west through the slum districts, and watch the slatternly women and the unkempt children and ponder over the poverty of the homes as contrasted with the wealth along the shore drive. I wanted even then to play my part. I wanted to write such books that thousands upon thousands of readers would be convinced of the injustice of things as they were. – From Union Square to Rome

In college Dorothy felt utterly alone when separated from the comfort of her family. Reading Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, she felt compelled to believe in God but also felt alienated from the Christians around her. Reflecting on the conditions of others less fortunate than herself, she learned about Marxism and class struggle. For the most part she was open to religion until she came to see religion as a crutch for the feeble minded.

It seems to me that I was already shedding that faith when a professor whom I much admired made a statement in class—I shall always remember it—that religion was something which had brought great comfort to people throughout the ages, so that we ought not to criticize it. I don’t remember his exact words, but from the way he spoke of religion the class could infer that the strong were the ones who did not need such props. In my youthful arrogance, in my feeling that I was one of the strong, I felt then for the first time that religion was something that I must ruthlessly cut out of my life. I felt it indeed to be an opiate of the people, so I hardened my heart.
– From Union Square to Rome

By twenty-five years of age, Dorothy had a list of political activist’s credentials as she worked with left-wing journals, joined the International Workers of the World that attempted to unite workers to overthrow the employing class, participated in pickets that resulted in jail time, and dabbled with communism. The first time she was imprisoned, Dorothy recalls meditating on Psalm 130 while in solitary confinement which created in her an experience of profound solidarity with those who were oppressed and suffering from their own sin and the sins of others. Her second arrest came during a raid where police were looking for communist radicals as a part of Palmer’s red scare. Dorothy was in the building to help nurse a friend back to health when police barged in, arrested her, and wrongfully accused of her of being a prostitute.

It was as ugly an experience as I ever wish to pass through, and a useful one. I do not think that ever again, no matter of what I am accused, can I suffer more than I did then from shame and regret, and self-contempt. Not only because I had been caught, found out, branded, publicly humiliated, but because of my own consciousness that I deserved it. – The Long Loneliness

Shortly after the incident, she reflected:

I could get away, but what of the others? I could get away, paying no penalty, because of my friends, my background, my education, my privilege. I suffered but was not part of it. I put it from me. It was too much for me. I think that for a long time one is stunned by such experiences. They seem to be quickly forgotten, but they leave a scar that is never healed. – The Long Loneliness

Such experiences of solidarity fueled Dorothy Day’s passion for the poor. The dramatic experience of shame for Dorothy allowed her to realize her own capacity to become lost, even if only temporarily, in despair with resigned acceptance of injustice. However, she was able to leave the circumstances while many others had no clear way out. Dorothy had long since been committed to justice and speaking for the rights for others who cannot speak for themselves. In her college years and shortly thereafter, her idea of injustice reflected a worldview that directly conflicted with the Catholic Church. By way of practice and belief, much separated Dorothy from the Church. She lived a Bohemian lifestyle, wrote passionately about free love, had had two common law marriages and procured an abortion. Of course none of these kept her from continually seeking the truth and her spiritual awakening was just the beginning.

In 1925 the twenty-eight year old Dorothy day found out she was pregnant again. During this time Dorothy enjoyed a certain “dull contentment” in her common law marriage with Foster and her joyful anticipation for a new born child. Her time spent walking up and down the beaches in New York filled her with gratefulness for the beauty of nature. Dorothy began to pray more consciously at this time in a spirit of thanksgiving for her blessings.

I am surprised that I am beginning to pray daily. I began because I had to. I just found myself praying. I can’t get down on my knees, but I can pray while I am walking. If I get down on my knees I think, “Do I really believe? Whom am I praying to?” And a terrible doubt comes over me, and a sense of shame, and I wonder if I am praying because I am lonely, because I am unhappy.

Then I think suddenly, scornfully, “Here you are in a stupor of content. You are biological. Like a cow. Prayer with you is like the opiate of the people.” And over and over again in my mind that phrase is repeated jeeringly, “Religion is the opiate of the people.”

“But,” I reason with myself, “I am praying because I am happy, not because I am unhappy. I did not turn to God in unhappiness, in grief, in despair—to get consolation, to get something from Him.”

And encouraged that I am praying because I want to thank Him, I go on praying. No matter how dull the day, how long the walk seems, if I feel low at the beginning of the walk, the words I have been saying have insinuated themselves into my heart before I have done, so that on the trip back I neither pray nor think but am filled with exultation. – From Union Square to Rome

Her words speak to the reality that the heart has reasons unknown to the mind as Blaise Pascal mentions. Dorothy became discouraged whenever God became merely a thought of her intellect, yet her heart longed for communion. During this time, Dorothy began attending Mass regularly on Sundays, and this put a tension in her relationship with her husband. Foster was greatly skeptical of all religious institutions and notions of the supernatural. As a biologist he loved nature passionately, but as a absolute anarchist, he rebelled against institutional notions of family, government, and religion. Foster opposed economic inequality and escaped through his love of the outdoors. Dorothy believed her love for Foster opened her up to recognize God. The very things that satisfied Foster made Dorothy hungrier for truth. Foster opened Dorothy’s eyes to the mystical quality of creation and this beauty drew Dorothy out of herself and into contact with something greater.

His [Foster’s] ardent love of creation brought me to the Creator of all things. But when I cried out to him, “How can there be no God, when there are all these beautiful things?” he turned from me uneasily and complained that I was never satisfied. We loved each other so strongly that he wanted to remain in the love of the moment; he wanted me to rest in that love. He cried out against my attitude that there would be nothing left of that love without faith…

I could not see that love between man and woman was incompatible with love of God. God is the Creator, and the very fact that we were begetting a child made me have a sense that we were made in the image and likeness of God, co-creators with him. I could not protest with Sasha about “that initial agony of having to live.” Because I was grateful for love, I was grateful for life, and living with Foster made me appreciate it and even reverence it still more. He had introduced me to so much that was beautiful and good that I felt I owed to him too this renewed interest in the spirit of things. —The Long Loneliness

Dorothy struggled with her spiritual identity, but she could not speak to Foster about it. She became more and more convinced of God’s presence. They interpreted the same everyday beauty very differently. Once Tamar Teresa was born, Dorothy Day resolved to have her baptized in the Catholic Church. However, real fear surrounded her relationship with Foster:

A woman does not want to be alone at such a time. Even the most hardened, the most irreverent, is awed by the stupendous fact of creation. Becoming a Catholic would mean facing life alone, and I clung to family life. It was hard to contemplate giving up a mate in order that my child and I could become members of the Church. Foster would have nothing to do with religion or me if I embraced it. – From Union Square to Rome

Dorothy Day traveled to the local residence of the Sisters of Charity to seek baptism for her child. Sister Aloysia assisted Dorothy with the process and encouraged Dorothy to become Catholic as well. Sister Aloysia brought reading materials and instructed her Catechism lessons. Belief in Catholic Doctrine did not come easy to Dorothy. Even after her daughter was received in the Church she still fought with the decision to become Catholic herself. Even more so, she struggled to reconcile the Church with the class of workers. During this time Dorothy was completely oblivious to the Social Doctrine of the Church annunciated in papal encyclicals. Yet one day she became too troubled in her delay to wait any longer that she sought out a priest and joined the mystical body of Christ. Following her conversion Dorothy had quit her job with the Anti-Imperialist League because of its communist affiliation. Her common law marriage was ended with Foster and she embarked in a life long struggle to serve the poor and speak for the everyday worker. Dorothy was troubled that although the Catholic Church did a fair amount of charity work She did not seem to challenge society to change in the way that would reduce social injustices from happening in the first place.

I wanted to be poor, chaste, and obedient. I wanted to die in order to live, to put off the old man and put on Christ. I loved, in other words, and like all women in love, I wanted to be united in my love. Why should not Foster be jealous? Any man who did not participate in this love would, of course, realize my infidelity, my adultery, and so it is termed over and over again in Scripture.

I loved the Church for Christ made visible. Not for itself, because it was so often a scandal to me. Romano Guardini said that the Church is the cross on which Christ was crucified; one could not separate Christ from His Cross, and one must live in a state of permanent dissatisfaction with the Church…

Not long afterward a priest wanted me to write a story of my conversion, telling how the social teaching of the Church had led me to embrace Catholicism. But I knew nothing of the social teaching of the Church at that time. I have never heard of the encyclicals. I felt that the Church was the Church of the poor, that St. Patrick’s had been built from the pennies of servant girls, that it cared for the emigrant, it established hospitals, orphanages, day nurseries, houses of the Good Shepherd, homes for the ages, but at the same time, I felt that it did not set its face against the social order which made so much charity in the present sense of the word necessary. --The Long Loneliness

Dorothy Day’s life testifies to the grace of God. Soon she became very familiar with the social justice principles of the Church with the help of Peter Maurin and sought to put them into concrete practice in the Catholic Worker movement. Dorothy Day became an active contemplative. Her work for the poor was as constant and rigorous as her religious devotions. She believed in the power of prayer and lived with a simplicity that relied on the providence of God. She taught that to be humble we must be hospitable and open our hearts to the needs of others by being dependent upon God. Her life constitutes a beautiful whole that challenges the social conscience of our time. Reading Dorothy Day will open your eyes to the poor. She invites us to love Christ and perform the Spiritual and Corporeal Works of Mercy. Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day had a sacramental vision that sought to create a “society where it is easier for people to be good.”

It is no use saying that we were born two thousand years too late to give room for Christ. Nor will those who live at the end of the world have been born too late. Christ is always with us, always asking for room in our hearts. –Room for Christ; December 1945

A New Magnificat

Other Parousians have posted on the topic of beauty, analyzing it from a more sophisticated point-of-view and offering profound bits of wisdom and understanding. I am offering something slightly different – a firsthand experience of the transforming effect of suffering on the conventional idea of beauty into a recognition of beauty as determined not by shapeliness and symmetry but by faithfulness and poorness in spirit.

My wife has recently pulled through one of the most trying experiences she will ever face – brain tumors that left her completely debilitated for a period of approximately half a year. For both of us, this experience of suffering worked wonders at adjusting our vision, which could actually be qualified more as blindness rather than vision. Blindness to our own insufficiencies and hypocrisies may have been more debilitating than her physical illness, yet it was the illness that helped to open our eyes, particularly mine.

It was Beth’s intense beauty that first drew me to her, but of course at that time, my understanding of beauty was the result of complete acquiescence to what was socially and culturally defined as beauty. It was a conventional view of beauty, and Beth certainly fit the conventional mold. Watching her waste away in her hospital bed was another level of suffering, but also an invitation to modify and purify my limp standard of beauty. She no longer had the strong and shapely legs she once had. In fact, I remember thinking that they now looked like the legs of a frail, thin, 80 year-old woman. Her eyes were crossing and her hair was falling out in clumps. The smell of tube-feeding seemed to emanate from her body all day every day. With face gaunt, skin unnaturally pale, and nails yellow, it was as though my wife had disappeared. But what struck me throughout all of this was that though I saw this, my love for her never dimmed. It only grew stronger. In fact, the more she lost her conventional beauty, the more I loved her. I still believed she was beautiful, not because of her thin legs or her gaunt face, but because of her. This was my wife, flesh of my flesh and bone of my bones. How could I think anything else of her?

What the loss of her conventional beauty did was open a door that I never thought existed. It was as though her physical beauty stood as a dense fog or a veil before a door that opened to the heart of true beauty, a sanctuary of holiness. Once the fog lifted and the veil was torn in two from head to toe, from top to bottom, I was able to lift my eyes upon a soul strong and alive with holiness. In the midst of all the suffering, Beth remained completely faithful, never crying out of self-pity and always calling upon God for strength. While I should have been the one to comfort her, more often than not it seemed as though she was doing the comforting. She constantly reminded me that I needed to learn to trust God and that our earthly life was not the greatest good. The word that keeps coming to mind is magnificat, for her soul truly did magnify the Lord. If God is Beauty Itself, then to magnify Him is to magnify Beauty. It is only in complete docility to God’s will for us that magnification of Him becomes possible.

This was the beauty I finally began to see – the beauty of holiness through submission. And what a privilege it has been to be called by God to minister to her, attending to her and guarding her.

The Wounding Beauty, An Unexpected Love (Part 3)

Part 1
Part 2

Objections to Beauty, drawn from Ratzinger’s “The Beauty and the Truth of Christ”

Is beauty true or is it just a distracting deception? It seems that good and evil exist along side of each other, as we experience both very deeply. The same can be said of beauty and ugliness. Since both are experienced, this raises the question whether one should be put above the other, whether one is more true, more real. Why associate beauty with reality and not ugliness and evil? Ultimately, this is a question of ontology and priority: which is first in the history of eternity – a positive entity, and which holds greater force? Do we come in contact with true beauty or is it imagined? Is not sin, suffering, and death more real and prevalent than beauty? Where is truth ultimately rooted, in the beautiful or in the ugly? Ratzinger captures these objections succinctly for us:

“Can the beautiful be genuine, or, in the end, is it only an illusion? Isn't reality perhaps basically evil? The fear that in the end it is not the arrow of the beautiful that leads us to the truth, but that falsehood, all that is ugly and vulgar, may constitute the true "reality" has at all times caused people anguish.”

Ratzinger gives the example of Auschwitz, after which many questioned God: does He exist and if so, how could He allow such a horrible thing to happen? No longer able to deny the existence of evil, many denied the existence of a loving God. Did they not realize that they know evil is ugly only because they know that goodness is beautiful? Conversely, do we need to know hate to know love? The experience of evil is always a scandal; otherwise these questions would be irrelevant. Ultimately, we will either find that beauty exists and all evil and ugliness is a negation of it, or evil exists and beauty and goodness is a negation of that. While both are experienced, only beauty – that of love and redeemed suffering lead to truth. Ratzinger’s answer is much simpler: Christ.

“The One who is the Beauty itself let himself be slapped in the face, spat upon, crowned with thorns; the Shroud of Turin can help us imagine this in a realistic way.”

In His Passion, Jesus, the suffering servant was tortured, humiliated, and executed – this is the scandal of the cross, the most beautiful Person, Beauty himself, was defiled – similar to those who suffered and died in Auschwitz. In an even more direct way though, he suffered and died in Auschwitz because “as you did it to the least of these my brethren, you did it to me” (Mt 25:41). So yes, “God is dead;” he died in every suffering victim. Why did he endure it? What is the reality deeper and more powerful than evil? Love. God has transformed even the gates of death. Because of his love, he not only rises from the dead, but he raises us and shares his conquering of death with us.

“However, in his Face that is so disfigured, there appears the genuine, extreme beauty: the beauty of love that goes "to the very end;" for this reason it is revealed as greater than falsehood and violence.”

The deepest and truest reality of love should always inform our idea of beauty; the sacramental vision looks beyond mere appearances. Christ’s sacrifice, his infinite love, is greater than all the evil of this world. Even torture, humiliation, and an imminent death could not stop his love. Without any depth of sight, his beaten face and body is neither heavenly nor majestic. A beautiful face may be aesthetically pleasing, but unless the person is beautiful like Christ, there is no beauty to behold. Then, it isn’t her face which is beautiful, but her being, which is united to Christ who shines forth from within her. We notice and operate from this almost every day. Every time we meet someone, we immediately take in their physical appearance, but only when we get to know them better do they become more beautiful or less, some even repulsive. We are inseparably body and spirit. Our bodies thus mediate spiritual realities, giving them all the more significance.

Briefly, let’s return to the beginning of “The Truth and the Beauty of Christ” where Raztinger draws from Plato and Cabisilas for their description of true Beauty, that is, Christ’s beauty:

“Man, says Plato, has lost the original perfection that was conceived for him. He is now perennially searching for the healing primitive form. Nostalgia and longing impel him to pursue the quest; beauty prevents him from being content with just daily life. It causes him to suffer.”

“”It is he who has sent a ray of his beauty into their eyes. The greatness of the wound already shows the arrow which has struck home, the longing indicates who has inflicted the wound" (cf. The Life in Christ, Nicholas Cabisilas).”

Beauty draws you out of yourself, away from your present state of sin. You forget the self as beauty calls you to fulfill your nature as man, one who is created for the gift of self. Christ is this beauty and this call, this piercing wound, a reminder, a reason, the truth. We were made for his beauty, holiness. However, if it is not ugliness taking the place of beauty, then it is ugliness dressing up like beauty, attempting to appeal to our baser fallen desires. Falsities, like the devil, attempt to clothe themselves in beauty, which is not theirs. This is false beauty,

“a dazzling beauty that does not bring human beings out of themselves to open them to the ecstasy of rising to the heights, but indeed locks them entirely into themselves. Such beauty does not reawaken a longing for the Ineffable, readiness for sacrifice, the abandonment of self, but instead stirs up the desire, the will for power, possession and pleasure.”

This is the perversion of beauty that we cannot allow ourselves be fooled by. To be open to true beauty requires humility. For anyone to be “struck by the arrow of his paradoxical beauty,” he must be capable of receiving beauty as a gift. If he believes he is completely and utterly self-sufficient, his pride will reject any longing for reform; this wound calls for repentance, and a proud man will never repent.

“Is there anyone who does not know Dostoyevsky's often quoted sentence'. "The Beautiful will save us"? However, people usually forget that Dostoyevsky is referring here to the redeeming Beauty of Christ. We must learn to see Him. If we know Him, not only in words, but if we are struck by the arrow of his paradoxical beauty, then we will truly know him, and know him not only because we have heard others speak about him. Then we will have found the beauty of Truth, of the Truth that redeems. Nothing can bring us into close contact with the beauty of Christ himself other than the world of beauty created by faith and light that shines out from the faces of the saints, through whom his own light becomes visible.”

The Wounding Beauty: An Unexpected Love

The transcendental of Truth shouldn’t be our only weapon against the “tyranny of relativism” and modern man’s rejection of God. Rejection of God is more than a rejection of Truth but also of true Goodness and Beauty. For those who shut their ears at the mere mention of truth, perhaps helping them realize the truth and goodness within beauty is a first step.

We all feel the longing for meaning. Even those who are self-proclaimed hedonists living for the pleasures of the moment give partial lip service to their idol. They’re still living for something, even if it is a perversion of a good. Maybe they will best understand true beauty when they experience it – assuming they allow their hearts to be opened when they do.

As Christians we experience the true beauty of Christ, his love and his wounds. This beauty is both true and good in its essence, which are only different aspects of the same reality. In Cardinal Ratzinger’s “The Beauty and the Truth of Christ” he presents us with the paradox of a beauty not overcome by aesthetics or grotesqueness: the beauty of eternal love made manifest in the life, suffering, and death of Jesus, our Christ.

“Implicit here is the more radical question of whether beauty is true or whether it is not ugliness that leads us to the deepest truth of reality. Whoever believes in God, in the God who manifested himself, precisely in the altered appearance of Christ crucified as love "to the end" (Jn 13,1), knows that beauty is truth and truth beauty; but in the suffering Christ he also learns that the beauty of truth also embraces offence, pain, and even the dark mystery of death, and that this can only be found in accepting suffering, not in ignoring it.”

Ratzinger draws upon two sources, Plato and Nicholas Cabasilas.

“Plato contemplates the encounter with beauty as the salutary emotional shock that makes man leave his shell and sparks his "enthusiasm" by attracting him to what is other than himself. Man, says Plato, has lost the original perfection that was conceived for him. He is now perennially searching for the healing primitive form.”

Beauty begins and continually revitalizes man’s search for the “other,” an “other” who possesses perfection. It lifts him out of himself and causes him to suffer the longing for the restoration of that which has been lost in himself. Few could look at Mother Teresa at the bedside of the dying and not be wounded by the scene’s beauty. Here is a suffering so beautiful that it will break your heart.

He then cites Cabasilas:

"When men have a longing so great that it surpasses human nature and eagerly desire and are able to accomplish things beyond human thought, it is the Bridegroom who has smitten them with this longing. It is he who has sent a ray of his beauty into their eyes. The greatness of the wound already shows the arrow which has struck home, the longing indicates who has inflicted the wound" (cf. The Life in Christ, the Second Book).

What greater beauty can be found than in He who is Beauty, God incarnate. When we become like Christ, we reflect His beauty with all the wounds and humility accompanying this beautiful Christian life. We become the saints God predestined us to be, and “nothing but saints can save our world.”