The casual reader of Flannery O’Connor might describe her short stories as violent, gloomy, and full of grotesque characters. O’Connor herself would have added another word: Catholic. This might come as a surprise. After all, there are scarcely any Catholic characters or mentions of Catholicism in her stories. Furthermore, O’Connor’s blunt treatment of death and suffering seems out of place in a world where Christian stories all appear forcefully optimistic. And yet O’Connor herself wrote, “I write the way I do because (not though) I am a Catholic.” She’s not the only one. J.R.R. Tolkien insisted that his Lord of the Rings trilogy was also deeply Catholic, despite the fact that his books are devoid of any mention of organized religion. Yet Tolkien, who was raised by a Catholic priest, considered his Catholicism a driving force behind his fiction.
Both Tolkien and O’Connor—as well as countless musicians, painters, filmmakers, and poets—create art that’s Catholic, not because it’s full of overt Catholicism, but because it’s rooted in a deeply Catholic way of seeing the world. For these creators, Catholicism—with its nuanced understanding of good and evil, its awareness of the fallenness of humanity, and its intense physicality—provides a framework for engaging with—and portraying—reality. By looking at the world from a distinctly Catholic point of view, countless artists have created work that is both deeply and discretely Catholic. George Weigel, in his book Letters to a Young Catholic, refers to this Catholic worldview as “the sacramental imagination.”
In order to understand the sacramental imagination, we have to first make sense of sacramentality. Sacraments, simply put, are physical signs of God’s grace. In the sacraments, God uses elements like water, oil, and wine to enact the drama of salvation history. Catholicism is deeply sacramental, because it posits that God works through creation—rather than against it. Which is why Catholic churches are often full of stained glass, incense, and statues. These physical objects serve to help people place themselves in God’s presence. But sacramentality, properly understood, isn’t confined to the walls of a church. True sacramentality involves recognizing the ways in which God’s grace is present in the created world, even in the grittiest of places.
In case this all sounds rather abstract, let’s take a brief look at a concrete example of sacramentality in action: the conversion of Avery Cardinal Dulles. Dulles, who’d been raised Presbyterian, became a committed atheist by the time he was a teenager. One day, while he was a student at Harvard, he went for a walk and spotted a flowering tree on the banks of the Charles River. Suddenly, he was filled with the sense that there was a God who had personally created the world. Dulles later converted to Catholicism, entered the Jesuits, and became a Cardinal. In that moment on the banks of the Charles, the created world revealed something to him about the transcendent.
Sacramentality changes the way we interact with the world. The realization that God works through physical creation “allows us to experience the world not as one damn thing after another, but as the dramatic arena of creation, sin, redemption, and sanctification” (Weigel, 11-12). Essentially, Catholicism enables a deeply poetic worldview. The meaningless is imbued with meaning. Trees now have the capacity to trigger mystical experiences. God is not a distant concept, but an immanent experience.
In a sense, this was what St. Ignatius was getting at when he insisted that we try to find God in all things. God isn’t just found in church or on Christian radio stations. He’s in back alleys with addicts, He’s present in broken homes and bad neighborhoods, and He’s alive and at work in the muck of our humanity.
At the beginning of this article, I mentioned J.R.R. Tolkien and Flannery O’Connor. Why? Because their work is driven by the sacramental imagination. But it isn’t just them, it’s all Catholic culture, and that’s what I want to talk about now—Catholic culture. But before we really get into why Catholic culture is awesome, it’s important to understand how it’s tied to the sacramental imagination.
For starters, the sacramental imagination shows that something can be Catholic even if it isn’t overtly religious. Why? Because the entire point of sacramentality is that grace is often disguised. Just as someone might look at a host and miss the fact that it’s Jesus’s body, people might miss Tolkien’s heavy reliance on Augustine’s notion of evil. But just because people don’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not there. Sacramentality allows Catholics to create culture with a subtle Catholicism. In this way, Catholic culture is awesome, because it isn’t a distinct subculture. It’s not detached from mainstream, American culture. It’s American culture with an intentional Catholic flavor, and it says something about God. Look, for example, at G.K. Chesterton’s fiction. Some of it stars religious characters, but his novel The Man Who Was Thursday expresses profound Catholic ideas without directly engaging religion.
Because of the often “hidden” nature of Catholicism in Catholic culture, Catholic culture is remarkably distinct from America’s protestant subculture. While America’ protestant subculture is full of Christian rock music, low budget movies, and self-help books, Catholic culture is a direct engagement of questions about humanity, the purpose of our lives, and the nature of God, often in a veiled and incredibly creative way.
The sacramental imagination also demands that Catholic artists reflect something of the human experience as it actually is. Remember: a key feature of sacramentality is that God can work through all aspects of our lives, not just the neat “churchy” parts. It would be problematic, then, for Catholic artists to feel the need to pretend like humanity is less broken than it actually is. Weigel explains why in Letters to a Young Catholic. He points out that when God redeemed the world, He redeemed this world, with all its muck and brokenness. Yet for whatever reason, when many Christians create art, they seem to portray a painfully sanitized version of reality, a world that looks nothing like the world we actually live in.
But Catholics, writes Weigel, can’t do that. We have a responsibility to find God here. We have to engage “this world, not some other world or some other humanity of our imagining—because God took the world as it is. God didn’t create a different world to redeem” (Weigel, 14-15). A prime example of this is the film series 8beats, a collective of short Catholic films based off the Beatitudes. The film about the beatitude “Blessed are the pure of heart” is about an erotic dancer. Talk about engaging an un-sanitized reality.
The result is a culture that is at once relevant, transcendent, gritty, and real. Catholic culture doesn’t shy away from the hard topics, nor does it see itself as a refuge from the secularization of society. Instead, Catholic culture is a vehicle of change. It challenges nihilistic worldviews by suggesting that the world is imbued with transcendent meaning, and it uses beauty to communicate objective truths about the human experience. It has a lesson to teach all of us about sacramentality, and it stands as a challenge to artists who want to make art purely for political activism, and not for the sake of beauty. More than anything, Catholic culture engenders a commitment to seeing the world in a deeply Catholic way. That means acknowledging the fact that God works through the material, the mundane, and the messiness of our lives. It also means creating art that engages the world as it is, instead of pretending that we live in a utopia—or that a utopia is even possible. Catholic culture is about saying yes to grace, which often hides in the most unexpected places.
So if you have a moment, go and appreciate some Catholic culture. You got plenty of stuff to work with: The Lord of the Rings, The Old Man and the Sea, Sagrada Familia, the Dies Irae, the stories of Flannery O’Conner, the poetry of Hopkins, the novels of Waugh, Tolkien, and Greene, the music of Mozart, Rossini, and Haydn (but not Haugen), the art of Michelangelo—
Well, you get the idea.