Introduction to the series
It was 7 May 1964, and Saint Paul VI was celebrating Holy Mass in the Sistine Chapel before an unusual congregation: musicians, poets, filmmakers, sculptors, painters, writers… That moment of prayer was, in a certain sense, the inauguration of a new era in the relationship between the Church and artists, whether believers or unbelievers. “As you know," the Pope said in his homily, “our ministry is to preach the world of the spirit, of the invisible, of the ineffable, of God, and to render it accessible, comprehensible, and, indeed, moving. You are the masters of this work of transferring the invisible world into accessible, intelligible forms. This is your task, your mission; your art consists in gathering treasures from the heavens of the spirit and clothing them in words, colours, and shapes.”1
Since then, every pope has continued and deepened this dialogue, each in his own way. Saint John Paul II, himself an artist, enthusiastically championed the via pulchritudinis, the path of beauty. Benedict XVI, with his refined appreciation of music, took up that invitation, convinced that beauty is a privileged place for encountering God in a secularised world. Francis, for his part, had a special affinity with literature, and he wrote a letter on its importance in Christian formation in 2024. That letter was the catalyst for the reflections presented in the following articles. And since the beginning of his pontificate, Leo XIV has devoted particular attention to the world of cinema as “a workshop of hope, a place where people can once again find themselves and their purpose,”2 even calling for efforts to bring people back to theatres.
The call to passionately love the world and find holiness in everyday life cannot leave the world of the arts to one side. Saint Josemaría’s writings make constant reference to literature. We also know that he prayed with some popular songs of his time, that he liked watching films, and that he occasionally mentioned the visual arts in his preaching — not to mention the way he encouraged his sons and daughters who were artists.
In the light of the teachings of recent Pontiffs and of the spirit of Opus Dei, we approach these different artistic fields — visual arts, music, literature, and cinema — as places of personal flourishing, discovery of the world, and, above all, encounter with God. The arts are arranged in the series according to their historical emergence: while we have traces of pictorial representations and work with sound dating back some forty thousand years before Christ, many tens of thousands of years went by before the stable writing system needed for literary work emerged. And cinema emerged between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, after theatre and photography.
“Their eyes were opened”: these words, which Scripture repeats at two pivotal moments in the history of salvation, are the backdrop for the reflections that follow. They describe two experiences of profound interior transformation. At the very beginning, the eyes of Adam and Eve are opened when they eat the forbidden fruit (cf. Gen 3:7); they are opened, and with them comes the wound: man and woman perceive the abyss of evil in their hearts and their radical fragility. Yet, at the other end of the story, the eyes of the disciples on the road to Emmaus will one day be opened at the breaking of bread (cf. Lk 24:31); and when their eyes are opened, the wound will begin to heal: the mysterious companion who made their hearts burn within them is the God whom they had believed lost to them forever. “Their eyes were opened”: fallen creation and new creation, wounded history and history finally reconciled, are interwoven in these words, as they are in all genuine artistic creation. If art, in its thousand manifestations, leads us along the arduous path from the fallen Eden to the garden of the Resurrection, it will have borne its true fruit.
Their eyes were opened (I): In the most material things of the earth
“In order to communicate the message entrusted to her by Christ, the Church has need of art.”3 These words are drawn from Saint John Paul II. At first, we might think they refer only to sacred art, to the need for artistic means (painting, architecture, sculpture, poetry, music, and so on) by which to communicate the content of the faith. Yet the Polish Pope, who was perfectly comfortable in the wings of a theatre, glimpsed a broader horizon: the Church needs art because evangelisation means not only the proclamation of the creed, but also a profound search for truth, both divine and human.
The treasure of the Christian message is not confined to dogmatic questions, nor even to the biblical texts; it has the power to reveal to us the divine radiance in every dimension of human existence: in life, in love, in suffering, in the search for meaning… From this flows what Benedict XVI affirmed: that when art “confronts the great questions of existence, the fundamental themes from which the meaning of life is derived, it can assume a religious value and be transformed into a path of profound interior reflection and spirituality.”4
A doorway to mystery
Arriving at this understanding of the potential of art, especially of certain disciplines within the visual arts, has been neither easy nor swift. It suffices to recall that clear prohibition in Leviticus: “Do not make idols or set up an image or a sacred stone for yourselves, and do not place a carved stone in your land to bow down before it. I am the Lord your God” (Lev 26:1). In reality, that commandment contains a profound truth which continues to resonate today: there is a danger in believing that nothing exists beyond what we see, understand, and control; a risk that the material ceases to be a symbol and becomes an idol: a mirror in which we see only ourselves.
From the very beginning, human beings have made use of material elements to express and gain access to the realm of the mysterious, of that which transcends them, of the sacred. It is important, therefore, to understand the symbolic character of art. From the Greek symbolon, to symbolise means “to unite” or “to join”: art does not merely represent, then, but refers back to the reality it evokes, unites itself with it and enables us likewise to unite ourselves with it, to gain access to it. Through the symbol, art becomes a doorway that opens the world to the transcendent, a bridge uniting the tangible with the sacred.
Early Christianity, the direct heir of Judaism, did not find it easy to discover how to represent a God who had become incarnate. To avoid reducing Christ to the representational models of the age, various paths were explored, which ultimately led to the development of iconographic language. Nevertheless, the reservations and opposition that surrounded icons too were gradually overcome, thanks to deeper reflection on the Person of Christ. At the Second Council of Nicaea, held in 787, the Church recognised the invaluable role of images in the Christian tradition, affirming their legitimate place in worship and catechesis.5 Saint John Damascene expressed this forcefully: “In former times, God, who has no body or form, could not be depicted in any image. But now that He has made himself visible in the flesh and has lived among men, I can make an image of what I have seen of God.”6
Although the dispute over the use of images has resurfaced from time to time, it became clear then that the Incarnation of Christ had inaugurated a positive evaluation of the material, and that this new perspective could no longer yield to the ancient reservations. When “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (Jn 1:14), the material world acquired a unique dignity, one previously unimaginable. The humanity of Christ, in its very materiality, expresses at the same time his divinity: in it, we mysteriously glimpse his infinite and unfathomable love. For this reason, the Incarnation transforms our entire understanding of the material, of what it means to be human. This has a bearing on images and on art as well.
The revolution of a God who takes on matter
In Christ, God incarnate, we understand that matter is not an obstacle but, on the contrary, a place for the manifestation of the divine. Images, and the visual arts in general, are not something superfluous and decorative, but one of the most powerful expressions of the fact that Christianity is a faith in a person of flesh and blood, not an abstract theory. Christ embraces the bodily and material condition: He is conceived in a woman's womb, is born and grows as every human being grows, knows hunger and thirst, needs sleep, feels pain… This reality, which might have been left behind with the Resurrection, is instead reaffirmed — indeed, glorified — on Easter morning: when Jesus appears risen, He shows his wounds so that his disciples may touch them; and in his Ascension He takes with Him his glorified body, the same body that is given to us in the Eucharist.
The Incarnation of the Word sets our own bodiliness before our eyes. We are not angels, but embodied spirits or spiritualised bodies; in us, flesh is as important as spirit: “In man, spirit and matter are not two united natures, but rather their union forms a single nature.”7 Yet in the West especially, culture and thought have frequently been marked by dualistic philosophical tendencies, which tend to separate the material from the spiritual. From these fragmentary anthropological visions, the physical dimension of our existence has come to be viewed with contempt or suspicion, as though evil had its origin in matter or the body. One may then not only feel ill at ease with the fragility and vulnerability of one's material reality, but also lose sight of the spirituality of the body, “a temple of the Holy Spirit” (1 Cor 6:19). In a world that apparently glorifies the material, even if only superficially, we may find ourselves cut off from ourselves, fragmented, whilst remaining unaware of the authentic value of bodiliness: to be the place of “divine iconic representation in the human creature.”8
In his catecheses on the theology of the body, Saint John Paul II explains that human bodiliness is not only not an obstacle, but is actually the privileged means for communion with God and with others; the materiality of the body is a living symbol, a visible expression of the invisible that enables us to be united with the transcendent. Just as the material character of the sacraments is indispensable for them to transmit divine life to us,9 our own materiality is a place of communion with others and with God, and will be so for all eternity in heaven.
The value of the Incarnation in the world of art
Works of art reflect this same dynamic of the Incarnation. They are not abstract ideas confined to the realm of the conceptual: the artistic idea is realised by becoming incarnate, by taking form in matter. The artist does not merely reflect on what he wishes to communicate, but explores the material means with which he will transform those ideas into a sensory experience. A painting, a sculpture, a musical composition or a film do not exist until they come to life through pigments, sounds, or images. It is this process that allows art to express itself and to unveil something of the mystery of reality, as contemporary American artist Bruce Nauman declared in the title of one of his neon works: “The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths.”10
For this reason, the materiality of art is not a secondary matter. A canvas is not simply a physical support for what one truly wishes to communicate, but is itself, in its very materiality, what one wishes to communicate. Every work of art reproduces, analogously but really, the same dynamic of the Incarnation: it makes visible, in time and space, what was previously invisible. Art is not, therefore, simply a ladder that we can discard once we have reached the roof, once we have gained access to “content” that might exist independently of its material support: the work of art, in its presence before my gaze, is a concrete place of the manifestation of truth; and that manifestation is inseparable from the work itself.
This incarnational character of art resonates with the heart of Saint Josemaría's message: it is not merely that we can find God without leaving the world, but precisely in the world and in the things of the world. Indeed, if we do not find God “in the midst of the most material things of the earth” (in the materiality of our work, in the warmth of those we love, in the forms of our works of art) we will never find him at all. “There is something holy, divine, hidden in the most ordinary situations, and it is up to each one of you to discover it.”11 And this is precisely what art in general, and the visual arts in particular, help us to exercise: the capacity to recognise the invisible in the visible.
A true aesthetic education, therefore, does not consist only in being able to take delight in works of art, but above all in growing ever more capable of appreciating the immense richness and beauty of what life presents to us each day. In turn, the sensory character of art enables us to understand and express matters very difficult to approach by other means:12 it allows us to exercise intuition, imagination, sensitivity, and affectivity. For there are realities of life that conceptual reflection cannot fully exhaust, and which art manages to illuminate in an intuitive and powerful way: love, freedom, suffering, anguish, glory, and so on.
Art moves us to walk together
The visual arts can sometimes be difficult to understand, perhaps owing to the immense variety of styles in which they find expression. Forms have changed so greatly and multiplied so enormously that we sometimes do not know how to judge their quality or appreciate their beauty. It is for this reason that one of the most common errors in this field is that of identifying the beautiful exclusively with certain forms of representation belonging to a particular era, culture, or tradition. Such a reduction, however, can impoverish our understanding of art. Saint Paul VI alluded to it when he asked the artists’ forgiveness for the constraints that the Church had sometimes placed upon them:
“We have disturbed you by imposing imitation as the main canon upon you who are creators, ever alive and fertile with a thousand ideas and innovations. ‘We,’ you were told, ‘have this style: you must adapt to it;’ ‘we have this tradition and you must be faithful to it;’ ‘we have these masters and you must follow them;’ ‘we have these canons and there is no other way.’ Perhaps we have placed, one might say, a leaden weight upon your shoulders. Forgive us.”13 Christian art must certainly face the challenge of balancing tradition and innovation, identity and transformation, without restricting artistic beauty to particular styles or forms, as if the immense wealth of languages and modes of expression that human beings can imagine were to be excluded.14
This demand can be expressed in even more radical terms: Christ has introduced into human history “a new dimension of beauty”15 that cannot be confined within any fixed set of criteria. This too is part of the mystery of God having willed to assume the human condition to its uttermost consequences. Joseph Ratzinger highlighted the paradox of calling “the most beautiful of men” a crucified and maltreated man, his face disfigured by suffering: “Saint Augustine, who in his youth had written a book on the beautiful (…), perceived this paradox with great force and realised that in this passage the great Greek philosophy of beauty was not only being refounded but was being put dramatically into question: what beauty is and what its significance might be would have to be thought through and experienced anew.”16
Beauty in the Christian sense, therefore, does not reside simply in the execution of a perfect form or a pleasing formal symmetry. Christian beauty is something broader, which affects not only the object but also the one who perceives it: it is that quality which renders any reality worthy of being loved. Beauty in this sense has to do with the capacity to understand that all reality is loveable; all reality contains something of the mystery of God, whether it strikes us as beautiful or appears disfigured to our eyes. Our approach to the work of art must therefore be like a personal dialogue that respects the work's way of addressing us, without allowing our prejudices to hold us back, close us off from it, or lead us to impose our own meaning upon it. It is a dialogue that demands that we go out of ourselves and draw near to another's point of view, however distant, incomprehensible, or painful it may seem.
The thinker Simone Weil, along the same lines as Joseph Ratzinger, identified this paradox in Christianity: “It is in affliction that the splendour of God's mercy shines, in the depth of it, in the centre of its inconsolable bitterness. If (…) one remains at that point without ceasing to love, one ends by touching something which is no longer affliction, which is no longer joy, but which is the central, pure, intrinsic essence, common to joy and affliction, which is the very love of God.”17 This helps us understand how beauty can take on painful forms, forms that also open us to reality and allow us to love it. Embracing this vision is not easy, but art is one of our greatest allies in learning to do so. The disquiet we discover in so many works reminds us that we all face, with wonder and awe, the great questions and mysteries of life. Art enables us to discover in every person, in every small aspect of life, an invitation to discover “the Love that moves the sun and all the other stars.”18
1 Saint Paul VI, Homily, 7 May 1964.
2 Leo XIV, Meeting with representatives of the world of cinema, 15 November 2025.
3 Saint John Paul II, Letter to Artists, 4 April 1999.
4 Benedict XVI, Meeting with artists, 21 November 2009.
5 Cf. Second Council of Nicaea in the year 787, Conciliorum Oecumenicorum Decreta, no. 111; qtd. in Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 1160.
6 Saint John Damascene, On Holy Images, 1, 16; qtd. in Catechism, no. 1159.
7 Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 365.
8 Gianfranco Ravasi, "And God Saw that It Was Beautiful. Faith, Beauty, Art," opening address, Theology Days of the Centre for Theological Studies, Seville, 3 March 2016; available at cultura.va.
9 Cf. Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 1084.
10 B. Nauman, "The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths (Window or Wall Sign)," neon scultpure, 1967.
11 Saint Josemaría, "Passionately Loving the World," in Conversations, no. 114.
12 Cf. Francis, Letter on the Role of Literature in Formation, 4 August 2024, no. 17.
13 Saint Paul VI, Homily at Mass with Artists, 7 May 1964.
14 A fuller treatment of the role of art in the liturgy (in particular music and architecture) lies beyond the scope of this text. The reader may consult, for example, the Constitution Sacrosanctum Concilium (1963) and the Instruction Musicam sacram (1967).
15 Saint John Paul II, Letter to Artists, 4 April 1999.
16 J. Ratzinger, "The Contemplation of Beauty," message to the Rimini Meeting, August 2002, Humanitas 29 (2003), pp. 9–14; available at humanitas.cl.
17 S. Weil, Waiting on God, Trotta, Madrid, 2024, pg. 55–56.
18 Dante, Divine Comedy, Paradiso, Canto XXXIII.