What Traditional Catholic Churches Taught Me About Beauty

In older Catholic churches, the columns can look like giants bending and bowing in reverence toward the center. Everything draws your attention to the altar. To me, that’s a beautiful example of design giving a building’s purpose a visible form.

I think these churches are gorgeous. They were designed as a home for the Catholic families who gather there and a home for God himself. That purpose gives meaning to the ornament, the layout and the proportions. The beauty belongs to what the building is for.

The massing, the size and shape of the larger forms, feels appropriate. The proportions are beautiful. But what holds my attention is how those decisions work together. A column has its own shape and detail, while its place in the whole composition helps direct the eye toward the altar.

That’s what I find so compelling about these spaces: the deliberate choices. Those artistic decisions work together to lift the mind toward a heavenly reality, a divine reality.