Arts & Beauty

The Pontifical Council for Culture chose to collaborate with an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York because of the Met’s significance to culture and potential global outreach, but officials were unaware of the widely criticized gala that took place on Monday... Read more

[caption id="attachment_98456" align="aligncenter" width="682"] The Last Chapter[/caption] Picture the scene. An expectant audience, which includes the great Catholic writer, J. R. R. Tolkien, awaits the arrival of another great Catholic writer, Hilaire Belloc, the latter of whom has been invited... Read more

DETROIT — When the Sistine Chapel Choir’s angelic voices graced Detroit in September 2017, their performance was billed as a “once-in-a-lifetime” opportunity for the Motor City. Not so fast. The Cappella Musicale Pontificia Sistina, as Pope Francis’ personal chorus is... Read more

In Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time there’s a discussion about space-time that uses a four-dimensional geometrical shape called a tesseract (the square of a cube, as a cube itself is the square of a square) to approach the idea of a dimension outside space-time: a fifth... Read more

Like many peripheral things which stick in the mind I can still remember the lines of French poetry which the BBC broadcast to the French Resistance as the code to signal the advent of D-Day. To those who waited, these sonorous words conveyed the unleashing of an awesome power, they announced... Read more

The finding of the Child Jesus in the Temple is something of an odd subject for an artist, but I was struck by Bernardino Luini’s treatment of the subject which is to be found in Room 66 of the National Gallery. Luini is not a particularly well-known artist, though his name has had a lot... Read more

In this season of the Church calendar the Rosary should loom large for every Catholic. Nativity imagery will abound at all churches depicting the birth of Christ in the manger. But the importance of Mary within the story of the incarnation of Christ is something that is deeply important which... Read more

Back in March, protests erupted over a painting displayed at the New York City Whitney Museum’s biennial. Some activists stood in front of the picture, trying to block others from viewing it. Others called for it to be taken down, and some even called for the work to be destroyed. But it... Read more

I’m in the dance band on the Titanic Sing “Nearer, my God, to Thee” The iceberg’s on the starboard bow Won’t you dance with me.                   ∼ Harry Chapin, 1977 Back in the late 1970s, when I was an impressionable young lad, I was introduced to the songwriting of... Read more

Today is a good day to join more than 1,000 priests and an even greater number of the faithful in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass in remembrance of Venerable Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen and with the intention of moving forward his beatification cause. May 8 marks the archbishop’s 122nd... Read more