I recently read a profile of Duncan Stroik, professor of architecture at the University of Notre Dame. What caught my eye was the description the professor gave of one of two key moments in his path to becoming an architect who would design sacred architecture. When he was in graduate school at Yale, an architect responded to one of his projects with the words, “I can tell that you’re interested in beauty, and I think you should get closer to beauty.” [For more, see the National Catholic Register article “The Architect Who Fought Modernism-and Inspired a Sacred Architecture Revival” (May 27) by Jonathan Liedl.]

I suggest we should all get closer to beauty. One man who could help us is the late Father Thomas Dubay, S.M. (1921-2010) in his 1999 book The Evidential Power of Beauty: Science and Theology Meet. Among other things, Dubay reminds us that we see beauty when we recognize holiness. (In this regard, kindly check out my blog series on recognizing lay holiness, starting here.)

I envision a series of podcasts, lectures, pamphlets, undergraduate courses, whatever, that would describe the beauty seen in various fields of endeavor, various fields of study. They would include music, art, archaeology, theology, philosophy (in which beauty, as aesthetics, is a subject in its own right), physics, biology (including embryonic development and the workings of the human heart), astronomy, mathematics (so much of which is identified as “elegant”), literature, rhetoric, history, biography, athletics, film. In all this, we would not repeat the error of St. Augustine (354-430 A.D.) who, in the 32 years before his conversion, mistook the grandeur of the created world for that of the Creator. Instead, the beauty of the created world should lead us to the Creator. In his Confessions he addressed the Creator: “O Beauty, ever ancient, ever new” (Book X, ch. XXVII, para. 38).

Bishop Barron has several podcasts which address beauty. In “Reflections on Beauty” (May 25, 2022) he recites that, as a freshman during his one year at the University of Notre Dame, he took a very popular art history course from the late Professor Robert Leader (1924-2006) whom we should note intimately knew ugliness as a wounded combat veteran of Iwo Jima. (See Robert A. Leader, “The Killing Fields of Sulfur Island,” Notre Dame Magazine, Winter 2002-2003.) When young Robert Barron saw the professor’s slides of medieval gothic churches, he wept in appreciation of their beauty. Indeed, an obituary of the professor states the same thing: “A memorable indication of his skills as a lecturer was the sustained standing ovation he once received from his students at the end of a crowded Washington Hall lecture on the unpromising subject of Gothic cathedral architecture.”

This account by Bishop Barron resonates with me because I graduated from Notre Dame, my father was a combat veteran of Iwo Jima, and I have published nine essays, and have given talks for 30 years, about the great Gothic Revivalist, Augustus Welby Pugin (1812-1852) who was my grandfather’s grandfather. Just recently, a grade school classmate of mine who has lived in the UK for 30 years sent me this 10-minute video on St. Giles, a church that Pugin designed inside and out. I had seen pictures of St. Giles but I found this video stunningly beautiful, especially the images of Our Lord and His saints.

In addition to my talks and writings on Pugin, I have sought to bring people closer to beauty by starting two reading clubs discussing St. Augustine’s writings since 2013 and, during the COVID shutdowns, talking to middle schoolers via Zoom about 50 great speeches of the Western world such as those by Reagan, Churchill, Bishop Sheen, St. Paul, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. John Henry Newman. And I’d like to share with you one of my beautiful experiences: The Manual of Prayers published by the Midwest Theological Forum contains all of the 50-plus Prefaces recited by the celebrant at Mass. I find great beauty in their wording and their structure.

Readers may like to share their thoughts on how we might bring people closer to beauty and to the Beauty.