Where Is The Good Catholic Art?
Image Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures/Double Skinny Macchiato
By Dean Robbins
This is an independently submitted op-ed and does not reflect the views of The Tower.
YouTube movie reviewer The Critical Drinker has just over 2.2 million subscribers and nearly 800 million views. He has been interviewed by Ben Shapiro and has appeared on Fox News. Since the start of 2025, he has released 37 videos on current films and television. Four of these videos positively cover a film or show. Five criticize Disney’s 2025 remake of Snow White. There are many other channels like his. They all represent a troubling trend in conservative attitudes toward art: all destruction and no creation.
Social media has shown that negativity gets clicks and there is no denying that a well-done takedown of a piece of media can be very entertaining. I have written a few myself. But, if conservatives, especially those who are Catholic, want to meaningfully change American culture for the better, they need to make and disseminate good art.
What then is good Catholic art? First, I will start by saying what it is not. Good Catholic art is neither an imitation of past styles nor the contrived chasing of contemporary trends. Many works of art, not just Christian ones, fall into either one of these. In the Christian world, they usually appear in the form of “why can’t we make art like we did in the Middle Ages and Renaissance” or the forced “how do you do, fellow kids” attitude that created things like the Street Bible (the one where “God says the word and WHAP! Stuff everywhere!”).
The former misses that the majestic art of the Renaissance was the authentic and original product of a particular culture. There was a time when Bernini’s “Abduction of Proserpina” was modern and shocking. These works still have power and should be learned, but refusing to be open to new forms of expression leads to a dead, calcified faith and a limiting of God’s providential power. The latter misses tact and subtlety in favor of a blunt-force impact that pushes away more than it attracts (think God’s Not Dead). It is, put simply, cringe.
Good Catholic art is rather the authentic mediation of the true, the good, and the beautiful through the wholly unique lens of an artist living in a certain time and place. Art is good because it is not only the unique product of an individual’s way of seeing but reveals something in the world through that way of seeing. It is true diversity, which art ought to be a reflection of.
For unbelievers, good art is often more effective than a rational argument. We all put up mental guards to support our own beliefs but the beautiful can get past those guards more easily. Even if you aren’t Catholic, you can appreciate St. Peter’s Basilica, while a Catholic can appreciate The Iliad or Senso-ji Temple in Tokyo.
Dr. D.C. Schindler, CUA alum and professor at the JPII Institute for Studies on Marriage & Family, wrote that “there is no more decisive expression of the dominion of the world entrusted to man than the task of saying things in an adequate way that does justice to their essence and gratuitously, mercifully, elevating them to a mode of existence not given in their essence alone.”
It is core to our very identity that we say things adequately through mediums like art. There is good Catholic art being made, but it remains niche and lacks the institutional systems progressive art has (museums, most of Hollywood, etc.). Recent examples, to name a few, include the films of Terrence Malick (A Hidden Life and To The Wonder pictured above) and Alejandro Monteverde (Cabrini), the fiction of CUA professor Tara Isabella Burton and Jordan Castro, the music of the Hillbilly Thomists and the Innocence Mission, and the poetry of James Matthew Wilson and former CUA professor Ryan Wilson. All of these artists’ work contains authentic, faithful Catholic identity while having a broad appeal.
Great Catholic art cannot be contrived and only comes as a gift of the Holy Spirit. However, we can learn to recognize, choose to celebrate, and work to support it as a community when it does arrive as opposed to being reactionary and destructive.
