3 minute read
Evangelisation through Beauty
Michael Carroll on the Great Commission for Traditional Catholics
It is ten years since Summorum Pontificum and it is now time for those within the Traditional Latin Mass community to collectively use the great virtue of prudence to transmit the message of the Gospel into the culture and society. It is time to evangelise the culture.
The great virtue of prudence gives us foresight and the mental and spiritual means of achieving even the most great and overarching goals. After we sanctify ourselves and our families through the Latin Mass, devotions, mortification, and dying to self byway of The Imitation, we have one Great Commission left, which is to evangelise. Our traditional message can no longer be kept under a bushel. Christ's light must once again enlighten a society which is groaning under the weight of sin and a dystopian nightmare.
It is now the responsibility of traditionalists to evangelise the culture, because since Vatican II we have not collectively as a Church become the Lumen Gentium as was predicted by the council. The great hope was that the faithful would also become The Light of the Nations and that the faith would be transmitted into society from the bottom up, but this never happened.
Firstly, there is our personal duty. It has been noted elsewhere that true evangelisation is a consequence not a program. The renewal of the Church, the culture, and our broken society will not come about by plans and structures, but by holiness of life. What is required is the sort of mortification taught us by St Thomas A Kempis, St Francis de Sales, St Thérèse of Lisieux and Christ Himself, when He said, "Go and sin no more". In order to transmit the Gospel to the men and women of today we must first become a holy people.
Secondly, there are those of an artistic, cultural, and literary mind who, with transcendent skills and a girding of grace from God, can transmit great works of literary, cultural, and artistic merit from the top down. The airwaves, the broadcasting media, our libraries and galleries can be transformed into conduits of God's grace through high artistic endeavours.
As Archbishop Gomez eloquently put it: “Catholicism creates a culture. Catholicism is a way of living born from the encounter with a divine person, Jesus of Nazareth, who is the Word of God and the Son of God humbling himself to come among us in human form. With the incarnation, the world becomes charged with the grandeur of God.”
Since the fruits of Vatican II have so far not provided the solutions to transmit the Faith into the culture, the responsibility now falls on tradition to enlighten the world and bring Christ to the world once again. This message must be transmitted into the culture from the top down, starting with highculture.
Archbishop Gomez goes on to say: "For nearly 20 centuries, the world’s greatest artists were inspired by religious themes. By the search for God in a fallen world and by the great questions of human existence — who are we, where do we come from, why do we suffer and what is it that truly matters? The people of our times are not satisfied by the temporary consolations and diversions of our consumer, secular society. Their hearts are troubled. They are restless to know that their life has value and meaning. They want to know love and wholeness and community. They want to know that there is something that lies beyond here, something more than this life. So let us pray for artists and writers, students, teachers, critics and readers."
This revolution will only come from individuals and brave souls who are willing to step up to the plate in mortification and from the fullness of grace that flows from tradition and the Latin Mass. It will take the courage of individuals, but it is clear that there should now be a clarion call to transmit the goodness, beauty, and truths of Our Lord Jesus Christ into the culture and wider society.
