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Ave Explores Series | Art and Architecture | Week 2
St. Peter's Bones and the Beauty of the Catholic Faith
by Deacon Andy DeRouen
After two years of architecture school, countless turns of the pencil sharpener and bottles of clear tacky glue emptied between the joints of chipboard models, I was knee-deep in a career crisis. Sure, I’d be able to design a hospital or an airport one day and perhaps it would be the most efficient design the world had ever seen, but what would it mean? Could I ever design something that meant more than just an arbitrary dance of light upon the walls or an expansion of space here and there to change the way people move inside? What makes a building meaningful at all?
I lost sleep over this dilemma, but as an architecture student, that’s not saying much, until one day I mustered the gumption to storm into a professor’s office with the outburst, “Tell me about beauty!” Much to my surprise, this secularly-minded professor at this secular institution handed me a book on the aesthetic theory of St. Thomas Aquinas. I didn’t know what to say. As a twenty-year-old college student, I was only distantly familiar with the guy. He was smart and he wrote some things, but what could he possibly teach me about architecture? Did the Church of my upbringing really have the answer to my problem?
In the months that followed, I discovered this hidden treasury of church architecture, a form that had unfolded for centuries with the development of Catholic theology, liturgy, culture, technology and art. Walls were not just walls, but a reflection of the firmament of heaven (Revelation 21). Light was the medium of catechesis: the light of reason became something literal and tangible through the stained glass windows of Gothic churches. The edifice of a church, unlike anything else, represented something timeless not according to mere style but rather by the eternity to which it pointed. Needless to say, I was enthralled. But if I was going to build real Catholic churches, I’d have to know theology first. And this was how God enticed me to become a priest.
Beauty is particularly effective for the mind searching for truth and the heart searching for goodness. After four years of living and studying in Rome, where beauty abounds in the architecture, the landscape and the language, I have much to miss. Most especially, I will miss my time working and praying at St. Peter’s Basilica, where Christian architecture demands the attention and reverence of the world. As a guide to the excavated Necropolis, or Scavi, I had the opportunity to lead pilgrims not only through 1500 years of constructed history but also directly to the Apostolic foundation of our faith: the bones of St. Peter. Beautiful? Yes. But how when there seems to be so much less splendor in a collection of bones than in something man can build with grandeur?
The Scavi taught me that beauty is so much deeper than what appears pleasant on the outside. Peter’s bones, fragmented and decayed as they are, are beautiful because they are true and good. The truth that they belong to Peter, that they’re old enough to be his, and that they were found beneath the basilica strengthen my faith more than if the bones were pretty. The chance to reverence his bones in such a tangible and personal way is one of the greatest goods the Church has given to her pilgrim children. It fosters in us the gifts of awe, piety, fortitude, and understanding more concretely than a picture does. When we hunger for beauty, nothing short of truth and goodness will satisfy.
Look at what we value as beautiful in design today: It’s no longer the drama of a colonnade or the audacity of a flying buttress. Instead, modern architects fawn over the cleanliness of lines, the unobstructed framing of a view, or the ability to disappear in a landscape. Our understanding of beauty has been sanitized. If architecture is a response of every age to the beauty of creation, the reality of God and the value of man’s thoughts, then modern architecture is a grave departure from history, whereby the natural world is the only thing worth capturing because God doesn’t exist and man has nothing valuable to say at all. Beautiful design has become almost exclusively synonymous with efficiency, flawlessness, and automation. But our Catholic faith is strongly and paradoxically against this. Faith accounts for man’s flaws and turns them into something redeemable. There’s nothing efficient about a collection of bones and yet faith interprets it as a sign of hope in the Resurrection. Faith looks up at Jesus dying on the Cross and calls it beautiful precisely because man lacks the autonomy to save himself.
I’ll never forget when one professor said to me, “Architecture is the built form of philosophy.” It changed my life. What he said was true, and for Catholics whose faith enriches natural reason, this is also good. If we believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, that he walked the earth, endured his Passion, died for the sins of all humanity, and rose victorious on Easter Sunday, then don’t we have something beautiful to proclaim to the world? Shouldn’t the churches we build reflect the faith we embrace? Shouldn’t our very lives radiate that same beauty?
Download this article as a PDF here.
Deacon Andy DeRouen will be ordained a priest of the Diocese of Lake Charles on June 27, 2020. Prior to entering the seminary, he studied architecture at Louisiana State University, eventually moving to Rome to study theology at both the Pontifical Gregorian University and the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas.
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