DEATH MASKS


Ludwig Van Beethoven


John C. Calhoun


Antonio Canova


Samuel Taylor Coleridge


Heinrich Heine


Isaac Newton


Pope Pius IX


Torquato Tasso

REQUIESCAT IN PACE

QUEEN of HEAVEN MAUSOLEUM ~ HILLSIDE IL







A few weeks ago, having a few spare hours on a Sunday afternoon, my girlfriend and I visited Queen of Heaven Cemetery in Hillside. Part of a complex of three contiguous Catholic cemeteries covering an area as large as a small suburb, it includes the largest Catholic mausoleum in the world - a towering structure with two long wings, each three stories tall, its walls and alcoves filled with tombs. Completed in the late 1950s, it was one of the last beautiful ecclesiastical structures built in Chicagoland, with a hauntingly dark chapel and a stately Gothic tower at its center.

Its wings, unfortunately, are filled with a great number of modern stained glass windows and ugly statues, but the quantity of artwork nearly compensates for the lack of quality. Almost every saint, sacred place, biblical story, doctrine, apparition and devotion imaginable has some space dedicated to it; portions of Holy Scripture and the wisdom of the Church Fathers are written in calligraphy on the walls; countless relics are displayed in cases embedded in the masonry. I know of no other place in the area in which a curious neophyte might receive a comprehensive Catholic education, simply by walking around it.

Visitors are advised to bring earplugs; a painfully high-pitched squeal is audible in many parts of the mausoleum; presumably this is some sort of animal repellant.

DIES IRAE ~ W.A. MOZART

NOVEMBER

WITHOUT a SIGNATURE



Orson Welles in F for Fake:

Now this has been standing here for centuries. The premier work of man perhaps in the whole western world and it's without a signature. Chartres. A celebration to God’s glory and to the dignity of man. All that’s left, most artists seem to feel these days, is man. Naked, poor, forked radish. There aren’t any celebrations. Ours, the scientists keep telling us, is a universe which is disposable. You know it might be just this one anonymous glory of all things, this rich stone forest, this epic chant, this gaiety, this grand choiring shout of affirmation, which we choose when all our cities are dust; to stand intact, to mark where we have been, to testify to what we had it in us to accomplish. Our works in stone, in paint, in print are spared, some of them for a few decades, or a millennium or two, but everything must fall in war or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash: the triumphs and the frauds, the treasures and the fakes. A fact of life... we're going to die. Be of good heart, cry the dead artists out of the living past. Our songs will all be silenced - but what of it? Go on singing. Maybe a man's name doesn't matter all that much.

RELIQUARY OF CARDINAL BESSARION

PATRONISING NONSENSE

C.S. Lewis:

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic - on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg - or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

I read Mere Christianity about years ago, and this most famous paragraph in the book has since remained in my memory. But hearing a friend mention it recently, I remembered something that had occurred to me some time ago. It is a point so obvious that I am amazed that a man of Lewis's intelligence never noticed it:

Take the above paragraph, substitute the words Catholic Church for Jesus and change a few of the nouns accordingly - and the argument still holds. That is to say, the truth claims of Catholic ecclesiology are just as scandalous as those of Christology. To say I'm ready to accept the Catholic Church as a great source of moral and theological wisdom, beauty and holiness, but I don't accept her claim to be the one Holy and Apostolic Church, alone possessing the fullness of truth and the means of salvation is to speak patronising nonsense.

For if the Catholic Church is merely a great source of moral and theological wisdom, beauty and holiness - one of many, of course - then She would not make such a claim and anathemize those who reject it. The Catholic Church, like Christ her head, can be considered to be true, crazy or evil. There is no other option. And Lewis, who of all people should have known better, chose to hold a nonsensical and patronizing great moral teacher view of the Catholic Church throughout his life.

Reflecting on this, I find myself increasingly less offended by anti-Catholicism. Because faced with the truth claims of the Catholic Church, there are only two completely sane responses: conversion and anti-Catholicism. The latter is obviously the wrong response, but it reveals a healthier philosophy than the qualified admiration of certain of our "separated brethren".

The LIFE of JOB

MASTER of the HILDEGARD CODEX









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