A Question of Conviction
The Catholic Church was once the great patroness of the arts. She commissioned artists who produced what have come to be regarded as some of the history’s greatest works of art. The great artists created works of timeless value for the human family and the glory of God.
Now, it seems, to be an artist one must be a rebel after a fashion. Art must be “challenging” to have “social value.” The sacred must be profaned — the crucifix dumped in a bottle of urine and the Virgin Mary covered in dung, for example. Controversy and irreverence rule in the milieu of modern art.
But when profane art appears on a Catholic campus, what is one to do?
When a black-and-white woodcut relief depicting the Virgin of Guadalupe as a stripper was included in an art display at the University of Dallas (UD), a Catholic institution, university president Francis Lazarus did nothing.
You May Also Enjoy
Interpretation of the three ‘secrets’ entrusted to the children at Fatima has been subjected to the vagaries of private interpretation by otherwise faithful Catholics.
To turn us away from sin and toward Christ: This is essentially our Lady's mission in this world.
Even such founders of Protestantism as Martin Luther practiced veneration of our Lady and called her Immaculate Conception a "sweet and pious belief."