Truth is Beauty

"As soon as we begin to explicate the poem, analyze the picture, classify the architecture or dissect the music we lose what we were enchanted by, and it is this enchantment through beauty which matters....Why should we take time and spend money to make our churches beautiful, our liturgy beautiful, our music beautiful, our art beautiful? Because it is through this beauty that we are taken into the heart of the divine order of all things. This is so difficult to communicate in a world of useful things. We have come to regard beautiful things as only so much luxurious ornamentation. We regard expenditure on beauty as wasteful--boors that we are--but this is not only boorish, it is spiritually bereft."

Fr. Longenecker on why churches should be beautiful.