Catholic Culture Studies

All art that is not yoked to religion, like a big strong to to a plough, is useless. Any artist who is not religious is worse than useless: he is playing barehanded with fire, and will suffer for it.

But what religion? In the west, nearly inevitably, Catholicism. Protestantism has never understood the uses of art. For Catholicism, it is a native language. Judaism, of course, generates more than its fair share, but Judaism is a small faith.

I continue to be astonished to learn of artists who are devout whom I never suspected. Did you know Andy Warhol, that icon of the gays, was an almost daily churchgoer? Did you know Salvador Dali was very publicly Catholic? That Aubrey Beardsley converted? That Cezanne was very devout? That Anton Gaudi is a candidate for beautification?

Cinema: Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, Robert Altman, Frank Capra, Mack Sennett—where would English-language film, be without the Catholics? Never mind French or Italian cinema.

And it isn't just the visual arts. English-speaking culture is especially strong in the language arts, traditionally—but don't the mostly-Catholic Irish tend to stand out within the English world in that regard? Even many of the big names of the literature of England tend to be Catholic, despite the rarity of the breed in that country, and the oppressions it faced: William Shakespeare, Alexander Pope, John Dryden, Geoffrey Chaucer, Oscar Wilde, TS Eliot, John Gray; in the USA Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jack Kerouac.

Music? JS Bach was a Catholic convert. So was Gustav Mahler. Franz Liszt was a Franciscan. Vivaldi was a priest. Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Verdi, all identified themselves sufficiently with the Catholic church to compose Catholic sacred music.

Credit Protestantism with being more successful at commerce and good government; but it is Catholicism that gives Western civilization all of its preeminence in the arts.

With all those heavy guns, it seems to me odd that we do not see faculties of “Catholic Cultural Studies” in the universities, the way we see faculties of cultural studies of every other imaginable group. I think it would reveal a consistent cultural message. In fact, it is surpassingly odd that the main thrust of our literary and artistic criticism is Marxist or Freudian or existentialist or Jungian or structuralist or postmodern or “queer,” and not theological and parabolic.

It is also ironic that most folks today who have artistic pretensions are violently anti-Catholic. That is probably the primary reason that the arts are now so bankrupt. The Pharisees have taken over the temple.