Encounter the Catholic Imaginative Vision as it is incarnated in works of art, architecture, and literature, as well as in the artists and intellectuals who have given it further expression. With one post per week, explore the expression of the Church across times and cultures.
The Irish island of Skellig Michael provided a remote and penitential setting for an ancient monastic community that sought a life of solitude, prayer, and self-sacrifice.
Overlooking a crater lake hidden within the hills southeast of Rome, the papal palace (and gardens and observatory) at Castel Gandolfo has provided popes a respite from Rome's summer heat.
It has been said that God writes straight with crooked lines. The origins of the Basilica of Our Lady of Seven Sorrows might provide an example of that kind of oblique writing.
Encounter St. Peter (and his bones) in the excavations of the Vatican Necropolis (or "Scavi") beneath St. Peter's Basilica in Vatican City.
The Basilica of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, standing in the location of the house of the beloved third-century virgin martyr, shows forth the vast centuries of Church history.
The precious stone of royalty and emperors in St. Peter's Basilica is found in two unexpected places: in the floor over which countless pilgrims walk and the base of the baptismal font.
In the ninth chapter of "Letters to a Young Catholic," Weigel explores restoration and liturgical renewal by focusing on St. Mary's Catholic Church in Greenville, South Carolina.
In "The Return of the Prodigal Son," Rembrandt shows the desolation that comes from a life of sin, a brother on the cusp of a decision, and the embrace of mercy.
Old St. Mary's, the oldest standing church in the Phoenix area, has served the spiritual and pastoral needs of Catholics in Arizona for generations and is now home to Mary College at ASU.
Devotion to Mary, Untier of Knots, was born from a painting of the same name and highlights Mary's loving interventions into our lives.
Immaculate Conception Cathedral stands over the site of both centuries of persecutory practices and the previous cathedral, which was destroyed by the 1945 atomic bombing of Nagasaki.