“For centuries,” wrote Benjamin Sutton at the art market website Artsy, “the Catholic Church was one of the world’s most important collectors and patrons of art.” But during the Renaissance secular powers grew apart from the Church, which lost its rights of taxation.
The Counter-Reformation saw a resurgence of Catholic art, especially Baroque – but that was the last era in which the Church “was able to throw significant weight (and money) around in the art world”, Sutton wrote. For, as Eleanor Oliphant of New York University remarks, “The rise of capitalism further removed capital from the hands of the Church, as more and more of it circulated through the market rather than being held within institutions.” But in recent years a small return to artistic patronage has begun in some places.
As for the future, the academic Dugan McGinley says: “The most populous Catholic countries are now in the global south, so any future influence in or from the artistic realm will likely reflect new cultures that we have not traditionally associated with Catholic art.”
The darkness of proselytism
At Mutual Enrichment, Fr John Hunwicke asked what “proselytism” means. Pope Francis has attacked proselytism “without defining the term”, which can create problems. Fr Hunwicke offered an example: he described a “decayed, overgrown” Calvinist chapel in a wooded region of County Kerry. The chapel “dates from the time of the Famine. The squire provided ample food to those of the peasantry, and to their children” – if they took part in Calvinist worship. But if Irish Catholics declined to do so, their “children would starve”.
Fr Hunwicke wrote: “That dreadful building still had, when I discovered it 20 years ago, hanging around it the stink of Evil.”
How to make a college more Catholic
At Crisis, Anthony Esolen offered some advice for the next president of Providence College, his former employer. The president’s task, when he is appointed in 2020, will be “re-establishing the Catholic faith as the school’s foundation, aim, and reason for existence” – which will not be popular outside the theology department. So how should his hiring policy work?
Based on experience, Esolen wrote, the job advertisement should stress the college’s Catholicity. And it helps if the applicants have to write a response to the college’s mission statement.
Such filters are needed because “Catholics, serious Christians, and devotees of the Western heritage” need to “fight every inch of the way through graduate school”, often keeping their heads down. This means that there are truly brave people out there who do not float down the stream of mass phenomena. These people above all ought to be sought out.”
If the next president takes such an approach, he will need “the courage to be opposed, slandered, and hated. The alternative, however, is to be barely liked, slandered, and despised. It is better to be hated for being faithful than to be despised for being weak.”
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