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Episode 108 · June 25, 2026 · 39:10

Catholic Beauty

In this episode of Peaceable and Kind, Derek Vreeland continues the “Holy Convergence” series by exploring the gift the Roman Catholic tradition offers the wider church: beauty.

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Show Notes

In this episode of Peaceable and Kind, Derek Vreeland continues the “Holy Convergence” series by exploring the gift the Roman Catholic tradition offers the wider church: beauty.

Derek begins by reflecting on the meaning of the word catholic, which means ”universal.” He also discusses why Christians should resist the impulse to dismiss entire traditions because of personal wounds or disagreements. He offers a brief historical overview of the Roman Catholic Church, tracing its roots to the apostles Peter and Paul and highlighting the church’s profound influence on theology, education, art, philosophy, architecture, worship, and the preservation of learning throughout Western civilization.

The heart of the episode focuses on beauty as a theological category. Drawing from the ancient Christian understanding of the transcendentals—the true, the good, and the beautiful—Derek explores how beauty reflects the very nature of God. He engages the thought of Thomas Aquinas, who described beauty through integrity, harmony, and radiance, and Hans Urs von Balthasar, who argued that beauty is essential to Christian faith because the glory of God is revealed most fully in Jesus Christ.

The episode also explores contemplation, stillness, and wonder through the writings of Thomas Merton. Derek reflects on how beauty calls us not merely to analyze or apply truth, but to stop, behold, and rest in the presence of God.

Ultimately, this episode argues that the gospel is not only true and good; the gospel is beautiful.

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Transcript

Welcome back. To another episode of Peaceable and Kind, where we are sowing seeds of peace and kindness in a world of conflict and cruelty. I am your host, Derek Vreeland, and before we get started with This episode, let me invite you to leave a rating and a review and subscribe if you haven’t already. You will want to get subscribed because we are in the midst of a mini series here on the podcast. It’s a series I’m calling Holy Convergence where we are exploring various streams of Christian traditions that have come together in my heart, in the life of our church. And this holy convergence is offering us access to a deeper and a richer faith And so I want to invite you to join me in this exploration. We are exploring seven different Christian traditions. That are coming together. And it has utterly changed my life. It has changed the tone and the tenor of our congregation. And I’d love for you to join me in this exploration. On this episode, we are talking about Catholic beauty. Now, whenever I talk about the value of Catholicism, I often get pushback from former Catholics. I had a former Catholic in our church years ago who caught up with me after church And he sort of cornered me, and without any pleasantries, he asked me in a very demanding tone, What do you believe about the Virgin Mary? And I was not really prepared to answer because it was so direct and it was so quick. And so I paused and I I had a inquisitive, curious look on my face, and I said, Uh, she’s blessed And I almost asked it as a as a question because I didn’t know where he was coming from. And well then he goes on to complained that he thought our church was becoming too Catholic, that he was raised Catholic, but he got born again and left the Catholic Church and it’s all dead religion. And I just tried to explain to him, well, you know, our church is not becoming Catholic, but we do recognize that uh Roman Catholic Christians are indeed Christians. There are brothers and sisters in Christ. And of course my explanation uh didn’t do much to change his mind. He ended up leaving our church and And I really wanted him to see that, yeah, we’re not becoming Roman Catholic, even though in our congregation we recite the Apostles’ Creed every Sunday. And in the words of the Apostles’ Creed, we say we believe, or in the Apostles’ Creed, it’s in the first person. I believe in one holy Catholic church. And some people will question that. Wait a minute, wait a minute. Why when we confess our Christian faith? Are we saying that we we believe in the Catholic Church? Does that mean we’re becoming Catholic? And and I often explain, no. In the words of the Apostles’ Creed, the word Catholic is a lowercase C, and Catholic in the Creed Refers to the Catholicity of the Church. The word Catholic means universal. So when we confess our faith using the words of the Apostles’ Creed, We’re saying we believe in a universal church. That is a church that is global all around the world and a church that is in heaven. We believe that all of the baptized who believe the words of the creed, we are in one fellowship, in one church, in one holy and Catholic lowercase C Church. So we’re not saying, in the words of the Apostles’ Creed, that we believe in the Roman Catholic uppercase C Church. Although we do recognize that Catholics are our brothers and sisters in Christ. And so as we explore a holy convergence, I want to talk about what we have received from Roman Catholicism. But let’s back up and look a little bit at the history of the Roman Catholic Church and some of its distinctiveness. The Roman Catholic Church traces its roots back to the earliest Christian community in Rome. led in part by the apostles Peter and Paul. Paul, you will remember, wrote a letter to the church in Rome. It’s the Book of Romans in the New Testament. And these apostles, along with others, led a small but committed community of believers. that were living not only in Rome, but there were churches spread all throughout the Roman Empire Now, both Peter and Paul were eventually executed during the persecution of Christians under the Emperor Nero. But it was their witness that helped to lay the foundation of what would become what we know today as the Roman Catholic Church And despite on and off persecution, Christianity not only survived in the first couple hundred years, but it spread rapidly through the Roman world. Within approximately three hundred years of the existence of the church, Christianity gained legal status after the Roman Emperor Constantine converted to the Christian faith. And from there, Christianity flourished across what we now know as Europe, as well as North Africa and parts of Asia. Before eventually being carried by missionaries to nearly every corner of the globe And the influence of the Catholic Church, and this is the uppercase C Catholic Church, the influence of the Catholic Church on the Western world on on Western civilization cannot be denied. Because we can look back at history and and during seasons of discord and war and disease and cultural uncertainty, the Roman Catholic Church was a stable figure. The Roman Catholic Church preserved education, and protected a number of the treasures of the ancient world. For centuries Catholics contributed to the development of education, law, philosophy, science, architecture, art. and the shaping of local communities, uh, cathedrals and stained glass windows and paintings and music and Liturgy became ways within the Roman Catholic tradition of proclaiming the beauty of the gospel and the glory of God Now, let’s be honest, like every Christian tradition, the Roman Catholic Church has a history of successes and failures Yet, for two thousand years, the Roman Catholic Church has remained one of the central streams of Christian faith Carrying forth the gospel, translating and preserving the scriptures, and affirming the dignity and value of every human life Now, I understand that you may have met a Catholic Christian that didn’t embody this rich and beautiful history. And I would say don’t let your personal experience with a nominal Catholic, someone who’s a Catholic in name only, someone who would say, well, I was baptized Catholic, I go to church on Christmas. maybe Easter and that’s it. So someone who is a Catholic in name only, don’t let them be for you the default picture of what a Roman Catholic Christian looks like. But let’s dig a little deeper and look at some of the distinctives of the Roman Catholic Church. I would say the distinctives begin with worship. Worship in the Catholic Church is centered on the Eucharist, also called the Mass. And the belief that the very real presence of Jesus is present in the bread and the cup when it’s been blessed by a priest. They, like Eastern Orthodox Christians, um have liturgical worship, although I would say For Roman Catholic Christians, their liturgies will look and feel a little bit different than those in Eastern Orthodoxy. But their worship has what I think is a beautiful liturgy that’s shaped by ancient prayers, scripture readings. uh the use of creeds and the seasons of the church and real embodied practices like the celebration of holy communion, the Mass. Another distinctive in Roman Catholicism is the role of the Pope. The Pope for Roman Catholics is the head of the Church. And when they speak of the church, they do mean the Roman Catholic Church. Since Vatican II, they have accepted that uh Eastern Orthodox Christians and Protestant Christians are brothers and sisters, though we are separated brothers and sisters or deficient. because we don’t believe everything in in Catholic dogma and teaching. But in Roman Catholicism, the Pope is the head of the church, and they believe that the Pope is infallible whenever he is speaking ex cathedra, which is a Latin phrase which means from the chair In other words, when the Pope is speaking in an official capacity, he is speaking the truth without any kind of error. Roman Catholics also rely on a mixture of Scripture and Sacred Tradition in forming their doctrine and teaching, much like Orthodox Christians. And then I would think what most people would see as the standout distinctive is the deep reverence for the Blessed Virgin Mary and the Saints in the life of the church. So non-Catholics looking in at Roman Catholic worship would say there is way too much attention on Mary. And this led to a bloody dispute in Western Europe after the Protestant Reformation. But in Roman Catholicism, Mary is the Blessed Virgin. She was chosen by God to bear in her womb. Jesus, the Son of God. In the Orthodox tradition, they call Mary the Theotokus, that is the God-bearer In Orthodoxy, Mary is also revered and honored, but not to the degree that we see in Roman Catholicism. And in their acts of devotion to Mary, Catholics would say that we are venerating Mary. They would say that worship belongs to God alone, so we only worship God, who is Father, Son, Holy Spirit. But we do venerate or honor or respect both the Blessed Virgin Mary and the Saints, So this is a a number of the distinctives that mark out the Roman Catholic Church and the gift Offered to us by the Catholic tradition, at least the gift that has most influenced me and our congregation, is the concept of beauty. Hey friends, I want to pause this episode for just a moment to let you know that Resurrection, 8 Lessons on How God Restores Us, the third and final book in the God in the Neighborhood Bible study. Study series is out now. Go to the show notes for ordering information. So let’s think about beauty not in terms of artistry, but in terms of theology. I want you to think about beauty in the context of what the ancient Greeks called the Transcendentals. So the ancient Greeks and then some of the early church fathers would talk about these transcendentals, the true, the good, and the beautiful Each one of these are more than just qualities, they transcend. And so for Christians, the transcendentals are often understood as reflections of God’s own nature. God is the fullness of truth, the fullness of goodness, the fullness of beauty And creation participates in these realities always imperfectly. But God ultimately is the true, the good, and the beautiful. And truth and goodness get a lot of attention. It’s beauty that we often forget about. So let’s look at Aquinas from the 13th century. St. Thomas Aquinas was called the Doctor of the Church. And for the medieval church there is no Catholic thinker more influential than Aquinas. And Aquinas talked about beauty. He would say that beauty is that which pleases when perceived, which can be applied to a number of different things, but Aquinas, in his massive theological work, the Summa Theologiae talked about beauty in terms of really philosophy and theology, beauty in terms of the inherent nature of things. So in the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas writes, for beauty includes three conditions. integrity or perfection, since those things which are impaired are by the very fact ugly Due proportion or harmony, and lastly, brightness or clarity, when things are called beautiful, which have a bright color Now again, Aquinas is not talking about beauty from the perspective of art. He’s not speaking as an artist. But as a philosopher, he he’s talking about the nature of things. So he would say, for example, a broken thing lacks integrity. So Aquinas is writing in Latin, he uses the Latin word integritas. So if something is broken, it’s not beautiful because it lacks integrity. Then he would say a chaotic thing lacks order, and the Latin word he used there is consonantia. That is order and structure. So if you think of a chaotic scene, I’m imagining a preschool classroom run-amuck. In chaos. That’s not a beautiful thing because it lacks order. And then the third characteristic or condition of beauty for Aquinas uh was clarity or brightness. And a dull or a boring thing lacks brightness. And the Latin word Aquinas used there was claritas. So Aquinas gives us a way of talking about beauty from a theological perspective. Again, I’m not talking about art or artistry. I am not an artist at heart. I don’t necessarily enjoy much art. I mean, I like music, some poetry, literature, but that’s about it. So I’m I’m not I’m not drawn to this at all because I have an orientation towards the arts. So Aquinas uses these three Latin words. The first one, integritas, that is integrity. A thing is whole and unbroken. It has integrity consonantia, that is as order. A thing is beautiful when it’s structured and ordered. It’s not out of control And then the third Latin word is claritas. That is, a thing is radiant. It shines forth with brightness and clarity. So for Aquinas, and I think that this is helpful to understand the gift of Catholic beauty in our holy convergence. Beauty is not just decoration. It’s not just external. Often in our modern world, when we talk about beauty, people think about beautiful appearances. right, a beautiful woman, a beautiful or a handsome man. But Aquinas, I think, helps us see that beauty is a way of talking about God and what God is doing. Because God is whole, God is a being of integrity, God is ordered, God is not chaotic And God is radiant. God shines forth in brightness and clarity. So this is who God is and what God is doing. God is making beautiful things out of our lives. God is making us whole God is removing the chaos from our lives so that both our soul and the way we live is ordered, so that our lives might be bright and shining. So beauty again, we’re not just talking about appearances. Beauty in the Catholic tradition is the splendor of being rightly ordered and fully itself. Well, Aquinas is helpful, but let’s look at some more modern Catholic writers and thinkers. One is Hans Erz von Balthazar. He was a Swiss theologian that lived in the twentieth century, and is regarded as one of the most important Catholic thinkers of the last century. He was deeply influenced by the early church fathers, by literature, by Ignatian spirituality, and the contemplative mystical tradition. Uh Balthazar was a Jesuit and ordained a Catholic priest in 1936. You may not know much about the Jesuits, but they are a religious Catholic order. They’re known for their missionary work. They’re known for Ignatian spirituality. That is a way of experiencing God shaped by the spiritual exercises of Ignatius of Loyola. He was the founder of the Jesuits. Ignatian spirituality emphasizes contemplation and self-examination. and surrendering one’s life to Jesus. The Jesuits also are known for their education and intellectual formation. They are committed to scholarship and theology and philosophy and the sciences and the arts. They’re they’re interested in the life of the mind. And Jesuits also care about the least of these, the poor and marginalized. So they’re known for acts of service and compassion and justice. And they see spiritual formation as that which happens to the whole person. So they want to Nurture intellectual development, moral character development, emotional health, and spiritual maturity all together And Balthazar, who was a Jesuit and a Catholic priest, he argued that beauty is essential to the Christian faith just as important as truth and goodness. And for Balthazar, the glory of God, the beauty of God is most fully revealed in the person of Jesus Christ. Where, Balthazar would say, Truth and goodness and beauty all meet together in the incarnation and are on display through Jesus Christ Highlighted specifically by the co-suffering love on display by Jesus and his death on the cross. So Balthazar called for a recovery of beauty in how we think about God, how we talk about God, how we encounter God. He wanted to reclaim the concept of beauty from a modern world which just reduces beauty to appearance. So he writes in The Glory of the Lord, Volume 1, Seeing the Form, he writes this: Beauty is the word which shall be our first. Beauty is the lasting thing which the thinking intellect dares to approach, since only it dances as an uncontained splendor around the double constellation of the true and the good, and their inseparable relation to one another. This is a very famous line from Baltazar, beauty is the word Beauty is the word which shall be our first. So beauty while it gets pushed back in our conversations of theology and philosophy, Balthazar wants to bring it to the forefront. It’s the the first word. He continues by writing Beauty is the disinherited one, without which the ancient world refused to understand itself, a world which both imperceivably and unmistakenly has bid farewell to our new world, a world of interests, leaving it to its own avarice and sadness Our situation to day shows that beauty demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness, and she will not allow herself to be separated. or banned from her two sisters without taking them along with herself in an act of mysterious vengeance We can be sure that whoever sneers at her name as if she were the ornament of a bourgeois past, whether he admits it or not can no longer pray, and soon will no longer be able to love. So for Balthazar, beauty belongs with truth and goodness, but we cannot conceive of beauty any longer as pure ornament or decoration. So Baldazar takes Aquinas’ three conditions of beauty, integrity, order, and radiance. and and focuses them on Jesus. For Balthazar, beauty is not only a property of things in a general sense Beauty is the self-disclosure of God’s glory. In other words, God is revealing to us the very glory of God through the beauty of Jesus. Beauty, the form of beauty, is revealing something to us. So a beautiful sunset, a beautiful field of wildflowers. The beautiful act of human love and compassion and service, all of these different things are in fact shining God’s glory. And for Balthazar, beauty is revealing the glory of God. And where we see that clearest is in the incarnation, is in the person of Jesus Christ And beauty, whether it is a sunset or wildflowers or acts of compassion and love or the beauty of Jesus Himself, beauty is captivating. It demands our attention if we will slow down enough to notice it. This is the clarity or the radiance that Aquinas talked about And our response to beauty is awe and wonder and imagination. I mean, we don’t we don’t try to dissect beauty and figure out, why is this beautiful? Like we would dissect truth. Uh we don’t try to figure out how to apply beauty to our lives like we do goodness. Our response to beauty is to stop and behold. And let our hearts be captivated. I’ve developed a little habit over the years of capturing beauty whenever I can find it. Growing up, my mom would always take pictures of birds and flowers and butterflies. And as a teenager, I remember asking her, Mom, why are you taking a picture of another monarch butterfly when you have 20,000 pictures of monarch butterflies? But now that I am older, I think I understand that practice. Because now, of course, we have cameras in our pockets. um connected to our phones. And as I am walking or jogging uh through our parkway system in our city, If I see a beautiful sunrise or sunset or a uh blooming tree or bush or or flowers, I stop and and take a picture. I bet I have dozens and dozens of pictures of trees and flowers and sunrises, uh because when I encounter something beautiful in creation I just want to stop and capture it. This has been such a helpful habit for me because it is easy to fall into despair and cynicism. There is a lot that is not well in our world. But beauty, particularly the beauty in creation This saves us from despair. It reminds us that God is good because every sunrise, every new blooming flower, Every butterfly and bird and squirrel, in that beauty, they are revealing the glory of God. In Psalm 19, verse 1, it said, The heavens declare the glory of God. Have you ever been away from city lights, like out in the country or out in the woods? in a state park and looked up on a cloudless night at the stars. Something beautiful about that. It is revealing to us the goodness and the glory of God. So I encourage that practice. But let’s get back to Balthazar. So he did build on what Aquinas taught about the conditions of beauty. But he saw beauty specifically in form. So beauty was the form in which Truth and goodness appear. And the decisive form of beauty is Jesus Christ. This is why I love Baltazar, because like the other Jesuits He remained so focused on Jesus. Jesus is the form That God’s beauty takes in order to reveal truth and goodness. So again, if we think about the transcendentals, the true, the good, and the beautiful, think about it like this. Our response to the truth of Jesus is belief and confession. Our response to the goodness of Jesus is obedience and imitation. But our response to the beauty of Jesus is wonder and fascination. Another way of describing our fascination or wonder in response to the beauty of God revealed in Jesus is contemplation. You may have heard the word contemplation, but the contemplative practices which have grown out of Roman Catholicism, I think, are important practices for all Christians. Now, contemplation is not meditation. Historically, these are two different things. Meditation is an intellectual process. It is a uh ruminating over ideas. It’s thinking or pondering. In the Old Testament, the Hebrew word translated meditate means to chew. So meditation is like a mental chewing of something. And Christian meditation is important to meditate on scripture To meditate on the life of Jesus, very valuable Christian practice. But it’s intellectual It’s more of a response to truth and goodness. Contemplation is one of the ways we respond to beauty. And contemplation is not a process at all. Contemplation is encountering God. Through stillness and silence. It is simply sitting in the presence of Jesus like Mary of Bethany in Luke chapter ten. She Sat at the feet of Jesus. What was she doing? Sitting in the presence of Jesus. This is a picture of contemplation It is not trying to accomplish anything. It is simply being in God’s presence. So in addition to Balthazar, The other Catholic that I want to mention as regarding beauty is Thomas Merton. Thomas Merton was a 20th-century Catholic monk. He was also an author. A social activist, and he described the contemplative life as resting in the beauty of God. I think that’s a great definition of contemplation. What is contemplation? It’s not trying to accomplish anything, it is simply resting in the beauty of God. and in New Seeds of Contemplation, Merton writes, To rest in the beauty of God as pure concept is a pleasure which still belongs to the human order. It is perhaps the highest pleasure to which nature has access And many people do not arrive at it by their natural powers alone. They need grace before they can experience this satisfaction. which is of itself within the reach of nature. So Merton here is calling contemplation the highest form of pleasure. Remember Aquinas spoke of beauty as that which is pleasing. And the highest form of pleasure is not intellectual pleasure or the pleasures of the body. But for Merton, it was the pleasure of the beauty of God. And so I think if you think about contemplation as resting in the beauty of God, perhaps you will begin to see how valuable it is. So the Catholic tradition, through Figures like Thomas Aquinas and more modern people like Balthazar and Merton, they remind us that the gospel The gospel announcement, the story of Jesus, is not only true and good, but it’s beautiful. And this is the gift that we can receive from the Catholic tradition. Reminds me of a couple of verses. Psalm 27, verse 4 comes to mind. where David writes, One thing I asked of the Lord, that will I seek, to live in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to inquire in his temple. Or think about what Paul wrote in Philippians chapter 4, verse 8, where he writes, Finally, beloved, whatever is true. Whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, sometimes translated, whatever is lovely, whatever is beautiful Whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. In the list of things that we are to keep at the forefront of our mind is that which is pleasing, lovely, beautiful. So how does this sit with you? How do you interact with beauty? Maybe this is a new concept for you But where do you encounter beauty in such a way that it draws you to God? For me, it’s often the beauty of creation. And then why do you think so many Christians neglect beauty? They focus on truth and goodness, what we are to believe about God. Goodness speaks of our moral life, how we are to live, but Why do some Christians neglect beauty altogether? What do you think? Do you think it’s a missing component? Do you think it’s important for spiritual formation? I do. So as you meditate and think on these things, let me encourage you to seek out beauty Maybe it is beauty through the arts, but maybe it’s beauty through creation Perhaps you’re able to get outside this week and keep your eyes open for beautiful things. God is making beautiful things all around us. We simply need the intentionality to capture. Well that’s all that I have for you in this episode. Thank you for joining me. Go in peace and be kind.

This transcript was generated with AI and may contain errors.