The catechsim of ugly

All humans desire beauty. While there are certain elements within beauty that can be deemed so called subjective, there are many more objective elements.

In the culture there is a bombardment of ugly things which are all meant to detract from mystery and to strip the human mind of it's curiousity to things that are beyond itself.

The following are some pictures of various things, which of these are beautiful, which of these are not?

 

 

I'm going to come out with a not so surprising statement: The catechism of ugly has been a partiicpant in the Passion of the Church.

The banal, the ordinary, the typical, have driven people away (actively and not so actively) away from beauty and the Truth of Christ.

While certainly beauty in of itself isn't enough, I think that without the visual, it becomes difficult to try and transcend reality. Simply put, ignoring one of the 5 senses that we have will lead to a disfunction in the rest.

Many that are on the outside looking in at us Catholics for sure wonder why all the visual "trappings" why not use an unadorned hall with simple things? The answer is rather simple, we as humans need these things to remind us that there's soemthing beyond ourselves. Plain and boring just doesn't do that...

Sorry that I had to show our previous Holy Father with the hideous vestments, and our present one with the atrocious crosier, but they're necessary for this discussion. The one thing that I'm always reminded when I see the picture of Benedict XVI in Austria, is he had to endure a lot the first 2 years of his pontificate...and sometimes that meant hideous vestments.

As you can see I borrowed from our lovely Russian Orthodox friends to teach us a little about how to do beauty right. (And some samples of beautiful Roman Vestments too)...not that I'm hinting at a halloween costume or anything....

I don't wish to go to church and be bombarded by more ugly...Mass/Divine Liturgy should be transcendent from the world, and transcendent from what we see on the ordinary basis....Mass should not be this...(I hate to torchure you readers...but I need to make my point, have mercy on me, please :)..the bottom 2 videos should serve as reward)

But rather these: