At Christmas, The Vatican’s Beauty Captures An Unbeliever’s Heart … And Soul

Norm Pattis is a criminal defense and civil-rights lawyer, and a blogger, headquartered in New Haven, Connecticut. He’s not religious — he describes himself as “tone-deaf to the sound of the divine” — but on a Christmastime trip to Rome, something happened.

It caught him by surprise, brought him up short, filled him with a longing for something he didn’t know he wanted.

Here’s an excerpt from his Dec. 23 column in The New Haven Register, called “God, it seems, is everywhere”:

It is easy to scoff at the Church until you stand inside one. There’s a silence in the air, the intimation of something holy. All truly is calm. This story of a virgin and her child is so wildly improbable, yet it speaks a truth I can almost hear: Almost, as if a lover’s glance fell just askew and did not meet my eye.

There is a safety in the confines of the Church I found stunning. Amid the world’s chaos, something stands, and has withstood, the test of time. I imagine finding a place there, if such a thing were possible.

I am suddenly the father of a child in need of healing: “I believe, help thou my unbelief,” the words of Mark in his gospel, come to mind.

So it is the eve of Christmas. I am far from home and familiar rhythms, but close to the ones I love. I am a stranger in a strange land filled with religious symbols reason has taught me to scorn.

Many Catholics today run from beauty, creating vestments and vessels and churches that are stripped down, devoid of rich imagery. They worship in spaces that are more auditoriums than sanctuaries (in truth, running away from the Sistine Chapel straight toward a Quaker meeting hall).

God, of course, is everywhere, and Christ can be found in the darkest and barest of corners. He’s just as present in the Eucharist among soldiers on a windswept hill in Afghanistan as he is in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City … and sometimes, perhaps even more so.

But as a revert for whom walking back into a Catholic church was not a matter of habit but an act of the will, I can also testify to the unexpected sensation that they are never truly empty, and that I’ve never felt lonely in one. After all, the Master of the House is always home.

(And that’s why Catholics cross themselves when passing a Catholic or Orthodox church, recognizing that Christ in physical form is present in the Tabernacle within. Otherwise, it’s just a building.)

But when I have walked into a truly beautiful Catholic church, large or small, ornate or simple — but not modernistic or minimalist, more of a homely but lovely Franciscan sort of simplicity — I know exactly what Pattis is talking about.

Images flood my eyes, my soul opens, my heart sings. I look up and around and, for a moment, I get the barest glimpse of Heaven on Earth. Even in the purely secular world, the Christmas season of color and sound and twinkling lights, as if all the stars in the sky came down to pay homage, the power of Christ expressed in human creations of beauty is inescapable.

And, by the way, I didn’t feel this many years ago, when I visited the Episcopalian National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. It’s lavishly decorated but felt more Disneyland, museum or movie set than sacred to me — and I wasn’t even back in the Church at the time. But D.C.’s Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, the national Catholic church … ah, now that was dazzling, and the Franciscan Monastery of the Holy Land in America across the street is, as the Website says, “an oasis of peace.”

To run from beauty is so foolish, whether out of a misguided aesthetic or a fear of spending money on furnishings, art or vestments (let’s face it people, the Sistine Chapel was not cheap, but the return on investment is incalculable).

Wherever the Church and her lay faithful create beauty, whether it’s a building, a piece of music, a video, a movie or a TV show, she draws people to herself and thereby to Christ.

When you walk into a church and see the loving handiwork of generations of dedicated artists and artisans (not just bland, angular statuary bought from a religious-supply house), smell the flowers and the incense, hear glorious music — especially Gregorian chant and polyphony, which are prayer rendered in song — you are embraced in the Church Universal.

Said Pattis:

It’s Christmas, and, I say it once again, I am far from home, a stranger in a strange land, surrounded by symbols of a faith I do not share.

Yet I am so filled with longing just now. I’m wishing, once again, for the things I longed for as a child — just one glimpse of the divine, just one whisper from a voice without a body. Jacob’s hip was broken when he wrestled with an angel. Lucky Jacob.

The Church universal, a word made flesh.

Come home, Norm Pattis. We’ve left the Light on for you.

For those who’ve never been to the Basilica, here’s a peek: