RonRolheiser,OMI

The World Will be Saved by Beauty

October 6, 2025

A A A

In the movie The English Patient there’s a very heartwarming scene.

A number of people from various countries are thrown together by circumstance in an abandoned villa in post-war Italy. Among them are a young nurse, attending to an English pilot who’s been badly burned in an air crash, and a young Asian man whose job is to find and defuse landmines. The young man and the nurse become friends and, one day, he announces he has a special surprise for her.

He takes her to an abandoned church in which he has set up a series of ropes and pulleys that will lift her to the ceiling where, hidden in darkness, are beautiful mosaics and wonderful works of art that cannot be seen from the floor. He gives her a torch as a light and pulls her up through a series of ropes so that she swings like an angel with wings, high above the floor and is able with the help of her torch to see beautiful masterpieces hidden in the dark.

For her, the experience is one of exhilaration; she has the sensation of flying and of seeing wonderful beauty all at the same time. When she’s finally lowered back to the floor she’s flushed with excitement and gratitude and covers the young man’s face with kisses, saying over and over again: “Thank you, thank you, thank you for showing this to me!”

And from her expression, you see too that she is expressing a double thanks: “Thank you for showing me something that I could never have come to on my own and thank you for trusting me enough to think that I would understand this, for trusting that I would get it!”

There’s a lesson here?

The Church needs to do for the world exactly what this young man did for his nurse friend; it needs to show the world where to look for a beauty it would not find on its own, a beauty that is hidden in darkness. And it needs to trust that people will “get it,” will appreciate the richness of what they are being shown.

Where might the Church find such hidden beauty? In the deep rich wells of its own history, and in nature, in art, in science, in children, in the energy of the young, and in the wisdom of the old. There are treasures of beauty hidden everywhere. The Church’s task is to point these out to the world. Why?

Because beauty has the power to touch and transform the soul, to instill wonder and gratitude in a way that few things have. Confucius understood this. That’s why he suggested that beauty is the greatest of all teachers and why he based his philosophy of education on beauty. People can doubt almost anything, except beauty.

Why can’t beauty be doubted? Because beauty is an attribute of God. Classical Christian philosophy and theology tell us that God has four transcendental properties, namely, God is “One, True, Good, and Beautiful.” If this is true, then to be touched by beauty is to be touched by God; to admire beauty is to admire God; to be shown beauty in hidden places is to be shown God in hidden places; to be in awe of beauty is to be in awe of God; and to feel that awe is to feel a homesickness for heaven.

 The renowned theologian Hans Urs Von Baltasar highlighted how beauty is a key component in how God speaks to us and how that should color how we speak about God to the world.

However, we shouldn’t be naïve in our understanding of this. Beauty isn’t always pretty in the way that popular culture perceives it. Granted, beauty can be seen in the spectacular colors of a sunset, or in the smile and innocence of a child, or in the perfection of a Michelangelo sculpture, but it can also be seen in the wrinkles of an old woman and in the toothless smile of an old man.

God speaks through beauty and so must we. Moreover, we must believe enough in people’s sensitivity and intelligence to trust that they, like the nurse in The English Patient, will appreciate what they are being shown.

In a famous line (often quoted by Dorothy Day) Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky writes: The world will be saved by beauty. What’s the logic here? How might beauty cure the many ills which beset us?

Here’s Dostoevsky’s algebra: In the face of brutality, what’s needed is tenderness; in the face of hype and ideology, what’s needed is truth; in the face of bitterness and curses, what’s needed are graciousness and blessing; in the face of hatred and murder, what’s needed are love and forgiveness; in the face of the kind of familiarity that breeds contempt, what’s needed are awe and wonder; and in the face the ugliness and vulgarity that pervades our world and our evening news, what’s needed is beauty.

A Tradition of the Heart – Roman Catholic Devotions

September 29, 2025

A A A

Growing up in a Roman Catholic home, devotions were always a vital part of our religious diet. While our family saw the Eucharist as more important than devotions, we nourished our spiritual lives a lot on devotions, as did many Roman Catholics back then.

Among other things, we prayed the rosary every day, prayed the Angelus daily, prayed special litanies (St. Joseph in March, Mary in May and October, and the Sacred Heart of Jesus in June), prayed the Stations of the Cross each Friday in Lent, were anxious to attend Eucharist on First Fridays and First Saturdays to obtain special promises from God, and said special prayers to obtain indulgences.

As well, there were pilgrimages to Marian shrines for those who could afford them and most everyone wore medals from Lourdes or Fatima and had a special devotion to those shrines (with a special devotion in my own family and parish to Our Lady of the Cape, at Cap De Madeleine, Quebec). Devotions were a big part of our spiritual lives.

What’s to be said about devotions from a theological view and from the view of a culture that mostly distrusts them?

We might begin with the reaction of Martin Luther and the great Protestant reformers. They were fearful of two things in devotions. First, at that time, some devotions were too unbridled and were simply bad theology (famously, selling indulgences). Second, they saw devotions, not as necessarily bad in themselves, but as often displacing Jesus and God’s Word as our center and main focus. And so, they distanced themselves from basically all Roman Catholic devotions, the unbridled as well as the healthy.

For the most part that Protestant and Evangelical distrust of Roman Catholic devotions has come down right to our own day. While that distrust is breaking down today in some non-Roman churches today, it is still the prevalent attitude inside most Protestant and Evangelical circles. In brief, they distrust most devotions because they are seen not just as deflecting our focus from the centrality of Jesus and the Word, but also as potentially unhealthy contaminates, as junk food in our spiritual diet.

What’s to be said about that?

It’s a fair and needed warning to Roman Catholics (and others) who nourish their spiritual lives with devotions. Bottom line, devotions can easily ground themselves on shaky theology and can be a junk food contaminating our spiritual diet: where devotions replace scripture, Mary replaces Jesus as center, and certain ritual practices make God seem like a puppet on a string.

However, that being admitted, as Goethe once said, the dangers of life are many and safety is one of those dangers. Yes, devotions can be a danger, but they can also be a rich healthy supplement in our essential diet of Word and Eucharist.

Here’s how Eric Mascall (the renowned Anglican theologian at Oxford with C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Dorothy Sayers, and Austin Ferrar) spells out both the danger of devotions and the danger of not having devotions as part of your spiritual life: The protestant reformers (Luther, Calvin, Zwingli) were so afraid of contamination by Roman Catholic devotions, that they put us on a diet of antiseptics. When you’re on a diet of antiseptics, you won’t suffer from food poisoning, but you can suffer from malnutrition.

That’s an equal challenge to both those who practice devotions and those who fear them. The theology undergirding certain devotions admittedly can be sloppy (for example, Mary is not a co-redeemer with Jesus). However, inside many devotions (to Mary, to the saints, to Eucharist adoration, to the Sacred Heart) there can be a rich nutrition which helps nourish the center, namely, God’s Word and the Eucharist.

The late Wendy Wright in her book Sacred Heart: Gateway to God makes a wonderful apologia for Catholic devotional practices, particularly devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. For her, Catholic devotional practices are a tradition of the heart. While Jesus remains central and his resurrection remains the real anchor for our faith, devotions can give us something beyond just this raw essential.

Using devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus as an example, she writes: “In this devotion, we, and Jesus and the saints, exist in some essential way outside the chronology of historical time. The tradition of the heart makes this vividly, even grotesquely, clear. The divine–human correspondence is intimate. It is discovered in the flesh. Our fleshy hearts are fitted for all that is beyond flesh by conforming to the heart of Jesus. That divine–human heart is the passageway between earth and heaven. That heart is the tactile tracings of divine love on the created order. That heart is the widest, wildest longing of humankind’s own love.”The dangers of life are many and safety is one of those dangers. Devotions can deflect us from what’s more central and can take their root in some questionable theology, but they can also, in Wendy Wright’s words, be a blessed passageway for the heart between heaven and earth.

Everything is Wrong About Them, Except Themselves

September 22, 2025

A A A

Gilbert K. Chesterton, the renowned Catholic apologist, was great friends with George Bernard Shaw, the famous playwright, even though Shaw, an agnostic, had major issues with Chesterton’s belief in God and especially with him becoming a Roman Catholic. Indeed, when he heard that Chesterton had become a Roman Catholic, he wrote him a letter expressing his disappointment.

Ever the colorful writer, Shaw ended that letter describing to Chesterton a vision he had of him going to confession: “You will have to go to confession next Easter, and I find the spectacle – the box, your portly kneeling figure – all incredible, monstrous, comic. …. Now however I’m becoming personal (how else can I be sincere?).”

But these differences didn’t deter them from being great friends. They had a deep respect for each other and valued each other. Indeed, at one stage, Chesterton felt a need to defend Shaw from well-intentioned Christians who were vilifying him because of his agnosticism. Speaking in Shaw’s defense, he wrote: “There is one fundamental truth in which I have never for a moment disagreed with him. Whatever else he is, he has never been a pessimist or in spiritual matters a defeatist. He is at least on the side of Life. Everything is wrong about him except himself.”

Most of us, I suspect, have friends like that, people who no longer walk the path of explicit faith with us. From a certain Christian point of view, most everything is wrong with them, except themselves. They aren’t professed agnostics or atheists, but they don’t fit the description of a practicing Christian either. They rarely go to church, mostly disregard the church’s teaching on sex, pray only when in crisis, consider us church-goers naïve, and are too immersed in life here-and-now to think much about God, church, and eternity.

Yet they radiate life, often in ways that challenge us. There’s something about them that’s very right, inspiring even, and life giving. They may be practical agnostics and ecclesial atheists, but their presence often brings positive energy, goodness, love, intelligence, sunshine, and humor into a room.

Don’t read this wrong: This does not imply (as does an over- simplistic, rationalizing notion that’s popular today) that those who do go to church and try to follow the church’s rules are the naive and immature, while those who don’t go to church and make their own rules are the enlightened and the mature. No. There’s nothing enlightened about people drifting away from the church, thinking they are beyond church, living outside its rules, or believing that a passionate focus on this life justifies a neglect of the other world. That’s a fault in religiosity, and often a fault too in wisdom and maturity.

Simply put, the wonderful energy we see in the many good people we know who no longer go to church is precisely just that, wonderful energy, though not something to be confused with depth.

For example, I look at many of our talented pop musicians and see how they can make people dance, no small thing, a godly thing even. We dance too little and our spirits are often too heavy. But that doesn’t give us license to confuse playful energy (“Ob-la-dee, Ob-la-da, life goes on!”) with wisdom or depth. It’s a wonderful thing to make people dance, to bring sunshine into a room, to lift human hearts so they can drink in life a bit more, but that’s not the full menu, nor indeed the deeper part of the menu. It is what it is, a good thing in itself, but only that.

But it’s on the right side of things. It’s on the side of life. It helps bring divine energy into a room, and that needs to be blessed. That’s why, as Christians, we need to bless our good ecclesial agnostic friends and let ourselves be blessed by them.

That’s also why we should be more discriminating in our use of phrases like “a culture of life” and “a culture of death.” God is the ultimate author of all that is good, whether that goodness, sunlight, energy, color, and warmth is seen inside a church building or outside of it. And wherever that energy is good, there’s “a culture of life,” even if it might also be carrying some elements of “a culture of death.”  

Richard Rohr says not everything can be fixed or cured, but it should be named properly. What’s wrong is wrong, and should be named as wrong, but what’s good is good, and should be named as good. I look at some of my “pagan” friends, at their energy, their warmth, what they bring into a room, and it helps lift my heart. Everything is wrong about them, except themselves. God also made their sunshine and their warmth. They don’t go to church, and that isn’t good; but they are often on the side of life and their implicit faith helps me to remain on the right side of things. And that is good.

Back to Top

Searching for Something?

Recent Columns

View more >