Graphic design is a silent but powerful language. Instantaneously recognized, a single graphic is easily digestible. It serves as a branding device for more than your afternoon cuppa at Starbucks or a Ralph Lauren sport shirt. Applied to an ideology and a movement, it simplifies everything it stands for. It leapfrogs over complexities, contradictions, and muffles the noise of rational argument. Most significantly, it conveys an identity and, with that, a corresponding ethos. Under Constantine, the Chi-Ro—standardized and emblazoned on the official banner of the Roman Empire—was disseminated throughout the known world as understood by Greeks and Romans at the time. Continue Reading

Treason of the Clerisy

Maureen Mullarkey

July 27, 2015

I foresee churches with their Jesuit bureaucrats open daily from 9-5, closed on weekends. Georges Bernanos

Jesuits are blameless here but the point stands. The debacle at Our Saviour is a symptom of bureaucratic conditions more critical than any clash of taste in church décor. Umbrage over “the integrity of the art” is a red herring. If that were the essential factor, this would be a minor local foofaraw. But it is not minor; and the breach of trust on display extends beyond locale to the temper of our clerical bureaucracy itself. Continue Reading

Vandalism With Intent

Maureen Mullarkey

July 23, 2015

Something unedifying is under way at the Church of Our Saviour, on lower Park Avenue in Manhattan. This alert from a knowledgeable source came Tuesday morning and has been circulating:

I am informed that having [been] officially appointed Pastor of COS, Father Robbins is in the process of removing the other icons and also wants to remove the large Pantocrator. The demolition is in process, and the intention is to finish it before anyone can protest. So immediate action is needed.

Sacred Art vs. Sacred Subject

Maureen Mullarkey

June 30, 2015

Fanaticism in matters of sacred art is an attitude that can lead to a decadence more sterile than the one we are now endeavoring to overcome. Maurice Lavanoux, “The Authentic Tradition and Art,,” Liturgical Arts (1954)

This past Saturday I caught a late afternoon train into the city for the last night of One Faith, East and West, a collection of contemporary sacred art at NYU’s Catholic Center. This was the final stop after exhibition in Beijing and Moscow. The show closed with a talk by painter Clement Fuchs, “Hermeneutics of Continuity in Sacred Art.” Continue Reading

Dodging the Sacred

Maureen Mullarkey

November 14, 2010

MODERNITY OFFERS SECULARISTS TWO SEDUCTIVE HEDGES: aestheticism and Buddhism. New York’s Rubin Museum yokes them together in a pictorial fantasia on the New Age-y theme of universal spirituality. No divisive truth claims mar the view from the $100 million monument to Multi-Plan founder Donald Rubin’s own purchasing power and those acquisitive cravings that Buddhist doctrine decries. All contradictions and irreconcilable differences disperse in the solvent of art appreciation, that distinctly Western ideology at the heart of museum culture. Embodying the Holy: Icons in Eastern Orthodox Christianity and Tibetan Buddhism is a visually splendid, conceptually shallow, exhibition. Continue Reading

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The Rainbow, LBGTQ Catechesis, & Queering the City

Treason of the Clerisy

Vandalism With Intent

Sacred Art vs. Sacred Subject

Dodging the Sacred

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