Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - Remembering

More tiresome histrionics from LavaGirl and the money masters today.

When their positions finally implode, perhaps they will make pretty sparks in the night sky for the children. And then they will be gone, their gifts and talents not only wasted, but their names blackened shamefully, and forgotten as if written in ashes.

Silver is carving out a massive triangle pattern on the weekly chart.

Gold is a little more guarded here, but the next week or so should give it a clearer voice.

Below I remember those who are worth remembering, and forget those who have been weighed, and are found wanting.

On 22 February 1943, Scholl, her brother Hans and their friend Christoph Probst were found guilty of treason and condemned to death. They were all beheaded by executioner Johann Reichhart in Munich's Stadelheim Prison only a few hours later, at 17:00 hrs. The execution was supervised by Walter Roemer, the enforcement chief of the Munich district court. Prison officials, in later describing the scene, emphasized the courage with which she walked to her execution. Her last words were:

"How can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone willing to offer themselves up individually for a righteous cause?

Such a fine, sunny day, and I have to go."

The White Rose
Fourth Leaflet
Munich, 1942

We will not be silent.

"...It is the time of the harvest, and the reaper cuts into the ripe grain with wide strokes. Mourning takes up her abode in the country cottages, and there is no one to dry the tears of the mothers. Yet Hitler feeds those people whose most precious belongings he has stolen and whom he has driven to a meaningless death with lies.

Every word that comes from Hitler's mouth is a lie. When he says peace, he means war, and when he blasphemously uses the name of the Almighty, he means the power of evil, the fallen angel, Satan. His mouth is the foul maw of Hell, and his power is at bottom accursed. True, we must conduct a struggle against the Nazi terrorist state with rational means; but whoever today still doubts the reality, the existence of demonic powers, has failed by a wide margin to understand the metaphysical background of this war.

Behind the concrete, the visible events, behind all objective, logical considerations, we find the irrational element: The struggle against the demon, against the servants of the Antichrist.

Everywhere and always demonic powers lurk in the dark, waiting for the moment when man is weak; when of his own volition he leaves his place in Creation, as founded for him by God in freedom; when he yields to the force of evil, he separates himself from the powers of a higher order; and after voluntarily taking the first step, he is driven on to the next and the next at a furiously accelerating rate.

Everywhere, and at times of greatest trials, men have appeared, prophets and saints who cherished their freedom, who preached the One God and who with His help brought the people to a reversal of their downward course. Man is free, to be sure, but without the true God he is defenseless against the principle of evil. He is a like rudderless ship, at the mercy of the storm, an infant without his mother, a cloud dissolving into thin air..."

Please distribute this as widely as possible.

"God has a way of standing before the nations with judgment. And it seems that I can hear God saying to America, 'You're too arrogant! And if you don't change your ways, I will rise up and break the backbone of your power, and I will place it in the hands of a nation that doesn't even know my name. Be still, and know, that I'm God.'"

Martin Luther King, It's A Dark Day In Our Nation, 30 April 1967

But If Not...

November 1967



April 1967




April 3, 1968, the day before he was murdered for speaking truth to power.


A time comes, for every one of us, all children of God, Muslim, Jew, Buddhist, Hindu, and Christian alike, and all who love God and hear these words, when we must choose. We will choose to bear the mark of the dark powers and principalities of this world, or we will refuse, and bind ourselves to the one God in heaven. It may be hard on some, easier on others. But we will all make that decision, and carry the mark of that choice with us forever.

That choice is not made once, but is forged with every action, every day, on our hearts.  So when the final choice is made, we will choose by whom we have served.   And keep in mind that although God is loving, He is also just. And there are sins against the Spirit that even a merciful God will not forgive.

So when you consider your actions, ask yourself, 'Is this God's will? Does it stand in the light of God's witness, His mercy and love? Am I listening to His Messenger, His Word, His Law, and serving the one God, or another, or myself?'

But God reserves justice, and vengeance, and wrath for Himself, and His command for us is simple: 'Thou shalt love the Lord your God, with your whole heart, and your whole mind, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself.'



Someone told me that in Germany these days, no one really knows or cares about Sophie Scholl, and the White Rose Society.

I know. I remember. And I care. And in doing so I save myself, je me souviens.

And if I ever meet her and the others like her, who gave themselves up for what is good, who became beacons of light for us in the long, dark hallways of history, I hope I can say, "I did not forget you."

In Honor of the 70th Anniversary of the Munich Students Movement - Die Weiße Rose - 2nd Leaflet

Someone asked me, why bring this up now?  Why remind ourselves of things better forgotten? Why be gloomy or sad, and burden our beautiful minds?

First, because it is after all, the 70th anniversary of an heroic event, a moment when several people laid down their lives for their fellow men and for the truth. And what we remember makes us who we are, makes us the people we wish to be, whether we intend it or not.   

Secondly, of course, it is because throughout history there are lights, great beacons in the dark seas of time, that stand out for us as examples of what it is to be human. Such examples are frequently not 'successful' in the estimation of the world. Winners.  More often than not they give up their lives, one way or the other, quietly or perhaps with some notice, but almost always for the sake of their conscience.  Sometimes they even die ignobly, flanked on the right and left by common thieves. 

We are so low and perverse in our thinking these days, in our expectations for ourselves, that if Mother Theresa or Dorothy Day had given up their great work for the poor and the dying, and left to become actresses in Hollywood, we would smugly say, 'oh, well that is only human.' Why didn't Sophie Scholl forget her calling and her conscience, and aspire to be the girlfriend of a wealthy banker living extravagantly on the misery of slave labor? As if such a selfish and shallow choice is the epitome and meaning of our lives.

And thirdly, because there is compelling evidence and advice in these pamphlets for our world of today, although we can hope it is quite early and still innocent. If you think these things cannot happen here or ever again, amongst a free and educated people, you are under that most arrogant of delusions, exceptionalism.  Every people, every would be empire, that goes badly first considers themselves to be different, better than the rest, above history and even God, uber mensch.

Then they came with clubs, bullets, and gas.  But sometimes it is with finance,  fraud, and official corruption.  If they come for the weakest,  to rob and even murder them, and the people allow it by saying nothing at all, then the hour will be late, and the die may be cast.

And if you cannot see this, see this tendency to rationalize even the injustice and repression in our own time, torture, confiscation, and murder, then perhaps you are in denial, or willfully asleep.

But who am I? What can I do? The whole of the law is this: to love God and to love your neighbor as yourself, to reject greed and fear and the hatred and envy that they bring, and to keep ourselves well for He who has a triple claim on us, through creation, through redemption, and through His own, to us at least, incomprehensible love. He has allowed us to go out into the world and to be free, and our duty is to bring ourselves home safely again at the last.

“The real damage is done by those millions who want to 'get by.' The ordinary men who just want to be left in peace. Those who don’t want their little lives disturbed by anything bigger than themselves. Those with no sides and no causes. Those who won’t take measure of their own strength, for fear of antagonizing their own weakness. Those who don’t like to make waves—or enemies.

Those for whom freedom, honour, truth, and principles are only literature. Those who live small, love small, die small. It’s the reductionist approach to life: if you keep it small, you’ll keep it under control. If you don’t make any noise, the bogeyman won’t find you.

But it’s all an illusion, because they die too, those people who roll up their spirits into tiny little balls so as to be safe. Safe?! From what? Life is always on the edge of death; narrow streets lead to the same place as wide avenues, and a little candle burns itself out just like a flaming torch does.

I choose my own way to burn.”

Sophie Scholl

The White Rose
Second Leaflet
Munich, 1942

We will not be silent.

It is impossible to engage in intellectual discourse with National Socialist Philosophy, for if there were such an entity, one would have to try by means of analysis and discussion either to prove its validity or to combat it. In actuality, however, we face a totally different situation.

At its very inception this movement depended on the deception and betrayal of one's fellow man; even at that time it was inwardly corrupt and could support itself only by constant lies. After all, Hitler states in an early edition of "his" book (a book written in the worst German I have ever read, in spite of the fact that it has been elevated to the position of the Bible in this nation of poets and thinkers): "It is unbelievable, to what extent one must betray a people in order to rule it."

If at the start this cancerous growth in the nation was not particularly noticeable, it was only because there were still enough forces at work that operated for the good, so that it was kept under control. As it grew larger, however, and finally in an ultimate spurt of growth attained ruling power, the tumor broke open, as it were, and infected the whole body.

The greater part of its former opponents went into hiding. The German intellectuals fled to their cellars, there, like plants struggling in the dark, away from light and sun, gradually to choke to death.

Now the end is at hand. Now it is our task to find one another again, to spread information from person to person, to keep a steady purpose, and to allow ourselves no rest until the last man is persuaded of the urgent need of his struggle against this system. When thus a wave of unrest goes through the land, when "it is in the air," when many join the cause, then in a great final effort this system can be shaken off.

After all, an end in terror is preferable to terror without end.

We are not in a position to draw up a final judgment about the meaning of our history. But if this catastrophe can be used to further the public welfare, it will be only by virtue of the fact that we are cleansed by suffering; that we yearn for the light in the midst of deepest night, summon our strength, and finally help in shaking off the yoke which weighs on our world.

We do not want to discuss here the question of the Jews, nor do we want in this leaflet to compose a defense or apology. No, only by way of example do we want to cite the fact that since the conquest of Poland three hundred thousand Jews have been murdered in this country in the most bestial way.

Here we see the most frightful crime against human dignity, a crime that is unparalleled in the whole of history. For Jews, too, are human beings - no matter what position we take with respect to the Jewish question - and a crime of this dimension has been perpetrated against human beings.

Someone may say that the Jews deserve their fate. This assertion would be a monstrous impertinence; but let us assume that someone said this - what position has he then taken toward the fact that the entire Polish aristocratic youth is being annihilated? (May God grant that this program has not yet fully achieved its aim as yet!)

All male offspring of the houses of the nobility between the ages of fifteen and twenty were transported to concentration camps in Germany and sentenced to forced labor, and all the girls of this age group were sent to Norway, into the bordellos of the SS!

Why tell you these things, since you are fully aware of them - or if not of these, then of other equally grave crimes committed by this frightful sub- humanity? Because here we touch on a problem which involves us deeply and forces us all to take thought.

Why do German people behave so apathetically in the face of all these abominable crimes, crimes so unworthy of the human race? Hardly anyone thinks about that.

It is accepted as fact and put out of mind. The German people slumber on in their dull, stupid sleep and encourage these fascist criminals; they give them the opportunity to carry on their depredations; and of course they do so.

Is this a sign that the Germans are brutalized in their simplest human feelings, that no chord within them cries out at the sight of such deeds, that they have sunk into a fatal consciencelessness from which they will never, never awake?

It seems to be so, and will certainly be so, if the German does not at last start up out of his stupor, if he does not protest wherever and whenever he can against this clique of criminals, if he shows no sympathy for these hundreds of thousands of victims. He must evidence not only sympathy; no, much more: a sense of complicity in guilt.

For through his apathetic behavior he gives these evil men the opportunity to act as they do; he tolerates this "government" which has taken upon itself such an infinitely great burden of guilt; indeed, he himself is to blame for the fact that it came about at all...

Please make as many copies of this leaflet as you can and distribute them.

"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."

Edmund Burke

See also The White Rose, First Leaflet

In Honor of the 70th Anniversary of the Munich Students Movement - 'The White Rose'

"Many people think of our times as being the last before the end of the world. The evidence of horror all around us makes this seem possible.

But isn't that an idea of only minor importance? Doesn't every human being, no matter which era he lives in, always have to reckon with being accountable to God at any moment? Can I know whether I'll be alive tomorrow morning?

A bomb could destroy all of us tonight. And then my guilt would not be one bit less than if I perished together with the earth and the stars.”

Sophie Scholl

The White Rose
First Leaflet
Munich, 1942

We will not be silent.

Nothing is so unworthy of a civilized nation as allowing itself to be governed without opposition by an irresponsible clique that has yielded to base instinct.

It is certain that today every honest German is ashamed of his government. Who among us has any conception of the dimensions of shame that will befall us and our children when one day the veil has fallen from our eyes and the most horrible of crimes - crimes that infinitely outdistance every human measure - reach the light of day?

If the German people are already so corrupted and spiritually crushed that they do not raise a hand, frivolously trusting in a questionable faith in lawful order of history; if they surrender man’s highest principle, that which raises him above all other God’s creatures, his free will; if they abandon the will to take decisive action and turn the wheel of history and thus subject it to their own rational decision; if they are so devoid of all individuality, have already gone so far along the road toward turning into a spiritless and cowardly mass - then, yes, they deserve their downfall.

Goethe speaks of the Germans as a tragic people, like the Jews and the Greeks, but today it would appear rather that they are a spineless, will-less herd of hangers-on, who now - the marrow sucked out of their bones, robbed of their center of stability - are waiting to be hounded to their destruction.

So it seems - but it is not so. Rather, by means of gradual, treacherous, systematic abuse, the system has put every man into a spiritual prison. Only now, finding himself lying in fetters, has he become aware of his fate.

Only a few recognized the threat of ruin, and the reward for their heroic warning was death. We will have more to say about the fate of these persons. If everyone waits until the other man makes a start, the messengers of avenging Nemesis will come steadily closer; then even the last victim will have been cast senselessly into the maw of the insatiable demon.

Therefore every individual, conscious of his responsibility as a member of Christian and Western civilization, must defend himself as best he can at this late hour, he must work against the scourges of mankind, against fascism and any similar system of totalitarianism.

Offer passive resistance - resistance - wherever you may be, forestall the spread of this atheistic war machine before it is too late, before the last cities, like Cologne, have been reduced to rubble, and before the nation’s last young man has given his blood on some battlefield for the hubris of a sub-human. Do not forget that every people deserves the regime it is willing to endure!

Please make as many copies of this leaflet as you can and distribute them.

"I was satisfied that I wasn't personally to blame and that I hadn't known about those things. I wasn't aware of the extent of the crimes. But one day I went past the memorial plaque which had been put up for Sophie Scholl in Franz Josef Strasse, and I saw that she was born the same year as me, and she was executed the same year I started working for Hitler. And at that moment I actually sensed that it was no excuse to be young, and that it would have been possible to find things out."

Traudl Junge, Im toten Winkel - Hitlers Sekretärin

Die Mackie Messers Der Wall Street - The Mack the Knives of Wall Street

Ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerunt?

I was watching old movies and documentaries last night as a follow up to my recent readings. They also have some contemporary and artistic resonance to today.

Here is a clip that I found interesting. You may be familiar with the music if not the lyrics.

Drei Groschen Oper - Die Moritat von Mackie Messer



The above is a scene from the G. W. Pabst movie version of DreiGroschenOper, or Three Penny Opera, with Ernst Busch as the moritat, or street ballad, singer. I have to admit I find his rendition with the jerking enunciation and exaggerated trills a bit distracting. But this original film excerpt gives people who have only been exposed to the jazz versions a better idea of the original meaning and context.

Here is the same tune, with a spoken introduction, performed by Kurt Gerron, who starred in the live premiere of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht's opera at Berlin's Theater am Schiffbauerdamm in August 1928. Gerron played both the street singer and Tiger Brown, the corrupt police chief.



Based on John Gay's satirical Beggar's Opera from 1728, it is set in London just before the coronation of Queen Victoria. The opening night audience, which did not know what to expect, was stunned, demanding encores for almost every song according to eyewitnesses. It was a sensational success that swept Europe, spawning numerous productions, catapulting the authors and actors to fame. Gerron, while remaining a popular character actor, became a successful movie director.

Now it is part of the rustling leaves of history, the voices of ghosts returned, whispers from dead lips.

While watching the 1930 German version of Der Blaue Engel yesterday (with English subtitles as I am not fluent in German) I was reminded that Gerron was third billing as the impresario Kiepert. I had forgotten what a melodramatic piece on morality the movie was, that it launched Dietrich's career, and how riveting a performance is given by Emil Jannings as Herr Dr. Rath. His madness scene is still remarkable, with his high pitched screaming, even in this jaded age of exaggerated emotions and special effects. I find it incredibly prophetic for the German people, and especially the intelligentsia, of that time. They were seduced, and went mad.



One thing always leads to another. If we live here, it does not hurt to get to know the place, before we take our leave.

As you may recall, the 'Weimar Republic' had seventeen governments in fifteen years, and the social and financial disruption had its outlet in the cultural ferment of Berlin.  This phenomenon is brought out fairly well in the CBC documentary, Legendary Sin Cities: Paris, Berlin and Shanghai.

I watched it again this week. If in the 1920's the US was naughty, Paris was voluptuously extravagant, and Berlin was a spasm of idiosyncratic excess.

Actor and director Kurt Gerron had his own very sad end. Although the video clip here merely says he died at Auschwitz in Okt 1944, it does not remind us that just before his death Gerron, himself a Jew, produced a propaganda film documentary, probably under enticement and coercion, for the Nazis about the 'ideal and humane conditions' for the Jewish inmates at Theresienstadt. Such are the ways of the captive mainstream media and the demimonde of the status quo. Mackie, welches war dein Preis?

After it was finished he was shipped to Auschwitz and shot on arrival: advanced profit sharing from the Reich's wages of death. I found a documentary on the internet, Prisoner in Paradise, that speaks to this sad little chapter.

The song of history resonates through time, with like instruments. But what if someone removes all the strings, leaving only empty minds and vacant stares?

I became aware of Brecht as a playwright during a course of study while an undergraduate in university while taking a course in modern drama. I do not remember so much now except that my favorite of Brecht was Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder, or simply, Mother Courage.

The Mackie Messers of Wall Street are nothing new. Each generation has the responsibility to rein in its predators. It is just a question of whether anyone will sing a ballad about them after they are gone.

Let's hope someone sings for our children, so they will not forget, even if they are taken by clumsy hands into insensate barbarity again.

And what if the Café closes, and the lights go out all over Europe again? Our culture is now so artificial, it will not even remain as dust. But the word, and its song and those who hear it, never die, outliving the artifice and most monumental objects of men. And so there is always room for joy and optimism, and even love among the ruins, but not despair.

In Egypt's sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws
The only shadow that the Desert knows:
I am great Ozymandias, saith the stone,
The King of Kings; this mighty City shows
The wonders of my hand. — The City's gone,
Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose
The site of this forgotten Babylon.

We wonder, and some hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when through the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the wolf in chase,
He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race,
Once dwelt in that annihilated place.

Horace Smith, Ozymandias, 1818

Weekend Reading - The Glory of the Human Individual

A relative of my wife's in-laws was called away in her sleep last night, at age 69. She had not been ill. As they say, only God knows the time and the place.

She was still working, to try and make ends meet. She was always cheerful, and always provided the meals for family gatherings. Some of her dishes were legendary.  She was no great person, and the world will not remark her passing. One less old person. And some will say good riddance, just another statistic.

And yet her children and grandchildren are heartbroken and will be missing her greatly. She was a remarkably good wife, a good mother, and a good woman, always.

And her soul will still exist when planets decay and fall from their orbits, and stars burn out, and those who think they are doing God's work will still be regretting their selfish carelessness. And so the individual can be treasured, much more than objects.

Boxed and labeled, and viewed as things, at first a few, and then millions of people, can be efficiently eliminated and burned, and be counted as a mere statistic.

If we have learned nothing in the twentieth century, we should at least remember this, and never forget it. But the darkness, and the madness, will rise again in banal men with hardened hearts and sickened, deformed minds.

"God beholds you individually, whoever you are. He calls you by your name. He sees you and understands you, as He made you. He knows what is in you, all your own peculiar feelings and thoughts, your dispositions and likings, your strength, your weakness.

He views you in your day of rejoicing, and your day of sorrow. He sympathises in your hopes and your temptations. He interests Himself in all your anxieties and remembrances, all the rising and failings of your spirit. He has numbered the very hairs of your head and the height of your stature.

He compasses you round and bears you in His arms; He takes you up and sets you down. He notes your very countenance, whether smiling or in tears, whether healthful or sickly. He looks tenderly upon your hands and your feet; He hears your voice, the beating of your heart, and your very breathing.

You do not love yourself better than He loves you. You cannot shrink from pain more than He dislikes your bearing it; and if He puts it on you, it is as you would put it on yourself, if you would be wise, for a greater good afterwards....

God has created you to do Him some definite service; He has committed some work to you which He has not committed to another. You have your mission -- you may never know it in this life but you shall be told it in the next.

You are a link in a chain, a bond of connection between persons. He has not created you for naught. You shall do good, you shall do His work. You shall be an angel of peace, a preacher of truth in your own place while not intending it if you do but keep His commandments.

Therefore I will trust Him. Whatever I am, I can never be thrown away. If I am in sickness, my sickness may serve Him; in perplexity, my perplexity may serve Him. If I am in sorrow, my sorrow may serve Him. He does nothing in vain. He knows what He is about. He may take away my friends. He may throw me among strangers. He may make me feel desolate, make my spirits sink, hide my future from me -- still He knows what He is about.

May the Lord support us all the day long, till the shades lengthen and the evening comes, and the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over, and our work is done.

Then in His mercy may He give us a safe lodging, and a holy rest, and peace at the last."

John Henry Newman

It is easy to lose sight of the humanity of others. The objectification of the individual, the reduction of the person to a placeholder, is at the heart of all prejudice, most hatred, and much injustice..

Some think that a human being is a wonder of creation, one of the few things in all creation that lasts, and that each person has a potential for value and inherent worth, even if not greatness in this world. They are great, they are essential, they are unique, each significant in their own way. But not everyone turns out well.

Crudely and badly developed people tend to diminish the individual with respect to themselves, even if carelessly, often because of how they themselves have been treated, or how they have learned, and they seek to elevate themselves above the crowd whom they privately despise.

They attempt to climb out of the deep well of emptiness and self-deception that they have become by filling the hole in their being with things and people.  And people of this sort of development and viewpoint are always with us, to some degree in their minority. It is how they influence the majority, society as a whole, that is different from time to time, and place to place.

It is the attitude of society towards the individual, and its obligation to protect the weak, the elderly, and the different from the criminals and the unbalanced predators that sets its character out for all to see.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed..."

The American Constitution, even with its imperfections in realization over time, is laid on this founding principle, as expressed in the Declaration of Independence.

This is why corporatism is the very antithesis of American liberty.

Weekend Reading: Art and Christian Humanism

From an interview with Timothy Verdon, Art Historian and Canon of the Cathedral of Florence.

"God is infinitely beyond human comprehension – God is God, we are creatures. And yet in everything that the Judeo-Christian tradition tells us about God, it is clear that God wants to communicate with his creatures, God wants to be known by his creatures.

The whole point of the law and the prophecy in ancient Israel was that God wanted his creatures to understand him and themselves – a creature is a reflection, to some degree, of the Creator. This will of God to make himself understood – and in that process help us understand ourselves – reaches fulfilment in Christ. Christ is the Word of God where the Scriptures are many words that come from God and are filtered through the inspired authors; Christ is the very Word that all those other words try to give partial expression to.

Christ assumes a form that makes him intelligible to human beings – the Word becomes flesh. And then the Gospel of John immediately adds that he dwelt among us, and we saw his glory. What Christ did while he was on earth was to reveal the identity, the personality of the Father: all of the wonderful things that he did that reveal the father – the words he spoke, the miracles, the acts of mercy – even after Christ’s Resurrection and Ascension, they continue...

What’s the relationship of all of this with art which is my specific field? The relationship is simple. When Christ took a Body – when the Word of God took a body from the humanity of Mary – it was to be seen. Christ is now invisible except in the abstract forms of the sacraments – we see water and we know that we’re being cleansed, we see bread and wine and we know that his Body and Blood are present, but we don’t really see the body and blood. But somehow the extreme simplicity of that communication that God wanted in Christ’s Incarnation is now filtered by a symbolic system of sacraments and signs. So we don’t actually see, but the art of the Church allows us to see. It extends down through the centuries, something like that privileged experience of the people of Jesus’ own time when they saw him and intuited that there was more than just a man here. Art allows us to continue to enjoy that experience...

So the ancient desire of human beings to see God, Moses on the mountain asks God to show him his face…. In Christ people really contemplated the Face of God. Christ tells us that we see him in the poor and the needy, and so on. But the works of visual art that surround these privileged moments in which [people] come into direct contact with Christ, and which usually tell stories from the life of Christ, or of Mary or of the saints, in whom we also contemplate Christ – the works of art are part of this process.

Much of what I’ve done as an art historian is to try to remind other art historians of this whole dimension that I’m describing, which usually has not been discussed. And that’s a grave omission, because the artists and the patrons were more or less conscious of all of this. They lived within this system. So the art historians should be aware of it, because if not they are going to talk about these works in a way which is misleading. Certainly the style, the economical features – all of these things are interesting and real and an important part of the history of art, but the larger framework within which these works were meant to function was something more like what I’ve been describing.

I try to call the attention of colleagues to these things, and even more, perhaps, I try to reawaken Christians to the extraordinary eloquence and beauty of this visual heritage which today ordinary believing Christians have the equipment to understand. They may not be art historians but they have keys to understanding the works of architecture and painting and sculpture that many art historians don’t have. And those keys come from their own faith, from the simple experience of life in church, the life of the sacraments.

One could add that something that Christians tend not to reflect upon and that historians of art and of sacred music and sacred architecture similarly tend not to reflect upon, is that the great work of art that Christianity has produced since its beginning is the Liturgy.

What believing Christians have been harried by the Spirit to do right from the beginning is to seek those poetic forms of expression and those physical actions and those material objects that can be called into play to express their faith. Really Jesus himself taught us to do this. At the Last Supper, he took bread, and then he said words: “This is my Body”. Jesus, who is himself the Word made flesh, in order to communicate, takes physical things that already have their own range of meanings and says words that open that implicit range of meanings to a much more specific and explicit communication.

So Jesus himself is the first teacher of how you combine things and actions and words in order to create a composite work, which is basically a work of art. At the Last Supper, he puts on an apron, he kneels down, he washes their feet. He’s continually doing things that invite reflection and then making sure that we understand what he’s doing.

What I’m saying is that you can’t really just talk about the visual art of the Church, or the music of the Church, or the Liturgy. All of this is part of a single creative impulse that flows from the experience of Christ himself, the Word who becomes flesh. A conceptual expression of God who becomes visible and tangible. The First Letter of St John says that this is what we have seen and touched and contemplated with our own eyes; it’s a total sensory and intellectual experience. The Liturgy is that. So an artist working for the church and for its Liturgy is within this millennial creative action which, in the last analysis, is a continuation in time and space of the Creation described in Genesis."