Beautiful Churches ...

The point of the exercise is not to compile a travel guide. It is to remind us of the importance of beauty, of a Christian aesthetic, in Catholic theology. Here we part company from some of our Protestant brothers and sisters whose forebears engaged in the worst iconoclasm and emphasized a radical simplicity in ecclesiastical architecture that was not without its own beauty (see Old Ship Church in Hingham and many other very beautiful, very simple congregational churches in New England) but that was hardly exhaustive of aesthetic possibilities for Christian worship.