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ANALYSIS: Catholic aesthetics have captivated both believers and nonbelievers worldwide, sparking a renewed admiration for the good, the true, and the beautiful.

Solène Tadié Vatican May 14, 2025

There are images that do not fade. The chant of the traditional antiphon In Paradisum floated above St. Peter’s Square, as the Church entrusted the soul of Pope Francis to the heavenly Jerusalem, on April 26.

The long cortege of crimson-clad cardinals followed in silence, the weight of centuries upon their shoulders; the solemn procession of the 133 cardinal-electors, filing slowly from the Pauline Chapel to the Sistine Chapel, accompanied by the ancient hymn Veni Creator Spiritus calling down the Holy Spirit as the conclave was about to start, May 7.

Then, following the Latin command “Extra omnes” (everyone out), the large bronze doors of the iconic Sistine Chapel closed with gravity, shutting out the world. All these moments have captivated both believers and nonbelievers worldwide, sparking a renewed admiration for the beauty inherent in Catholicism.

Antidote to Human Finitude

Posts and comments proliferated on X and Instagram, paying tribute to the spectacle generated by the Catholic Church’s ages-old traditions. A growing number of voices were making a bolder claim.

No other religion is superior in aesthetics https://t.co/KaXsfAdKaB

— Don Orca (@CatholicOrca) May 7, 2025

“Catholic aesthetics are beautiful because the religion is true,” an X account claimed — a phrase that resonated beyond the usual Catholic circles. In an online ecosystem saturated with immediate gratifications and passing fashions, the idea that beauty could signify immutable truth feels not only refreshing, but quietly revolutionary.

At the heart of this renewed fascination is the instinct that Catholic beauty is not merely incidental or decorative but objectively revelatory. This recent online movement is not driven by ecclesiastical authorities but by grassroots figures such as Julia James Davis, creator of “War on Beauty,” whose presence on YouTube, X and Instagram has become a rallying point for this sensibility.

Davis contends that modern culture’s abandonment of beauty — in architecture, art, dress and even manners — reflects a deeper rejection of truth itself. In contrast, Catholicism safeguards a form of beauty still ordered, transcendent and unapologetically aimed at the soul.

Davis’ critique resonates with younger generations navigating a cultural landscape of sterile minimalism and aggressive utilitarianism. For them, the sight of candlelit altars, Gregorian chant and sophisticated iconography are synonymous with transcendence and offer a privileged pathway to God.

Other recent trends have confirmed this societal phenomenon, starting with the extraordinary success of the traditional pilgrimage from Paris to Chartres, which has to turn down thousands of registrations every year.

In France, more than 10,000 adults — a record-breaking figure — were baptized at Easter 2025, a 45% increase from the previous year. In the U.K. and Belgium, similar upswings are being reported. And in all three countries, as in the U.S., the most common new converts are not middle-aged or elderly, but young adults in their 20s. In their testimonies, again and again, beauty is mentioned: the beauty of the liturgy, of sacred music, of the old rites.

Catholic Genius

This intuition — that beauty speaks of truth — is not new.

In the aftermath of the French Revolution, two centuries ago, French writer François-René de Chateaubriand, in his masterpiece The Genius of Christianity, formulated what many online are now rediscovering instinctively. At a time when the Enlightenment had reduced religion to ethical principles, Chateaubriand saw beauty as the most accomplished form of apologetics for reaffirming the reality of the Incarnation. The veracity of a religion, he argues, is judged by the beauty it disseminates and the sophistication of its dogmas, areas in which Christianity has excelled like no other over the centuries. One should look, he insisted, not only to the saints and theologians, but also to the material heritage the faith has produced.

“Attached to the footsteps of the Christian religion,” he wrote about the arts, “they recognized her as their mother as soon as she appeared in the world. ... Music noted her chants, painting represented her sorrows, sculpture dreamed with her beside the tombs, and architecture built for her temples as sublime and mysterious as her thought.”

For Chateaubriand, beauty was not optional but essential. Music, for example, was not merely to give pleasure, but to purify the soul and elevate it toward virtue.

“The most beautiful music,” he observed, “is that which most perfectly imitates the beautiful.” When religion takes hold of music, he argued, it combines two conditions indispensable to harmony: beauty and mystery.

But nowhere is this more striking than in architecture. For Chateaubriand, the Christian temple — especially in its Gothic form — was an embodiment of divine presence.

“This is why there is nothing more religious than the vaults of our ancient Gothic churches,” he wrote. “One could not enter such a church without feeling a shiver of devotion and a vague sense of the divine.”

It is hard to imagine a more perfect parallel to the Sistine Chapel, where the recent conclave unfolded, leading to the election of Pope Leo XIV. When the cardinals filed under Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, they were not standing in a neutral meeting hall, but in a space alive with theological claims. Its frescoed walls and celestial ceiling are, indeed, mere proclamations of faith.

What Chateaubriand named with the lyricism of Romantic literature, a new generation is rediscovering through algorithms, reels and screenshots. The platforms have changed, but the message remains unchanged: The beauty of Catholicism is the outer form of a living reality; it is the visible echo of a truth too large to grasp all at once.

Cultural Hunger

Yet many thinkers of our time believe that the postmodern world, the one that emerged from the Second World War, is facing an unprecedented “beauty crisis” and that this does not spare the Catholic Church.

“Catholic artists and writers feel isolated and alienated from both their society and the Church. The Catholic Church had lost its traditional connection with beauty,” poet Dana Gioia claimed in 2019. Post-conciliar apologetics, which focused on reason, ethics and social justice, tended, according to observers, to marginalize beauty as, at best, a peripheral tool in the Church’s evangelizing mission and, at worst, a vehicle for pride and greed.

Hans Urs von Balthasar, one of the greatest Catholic theologians of the 20th century, warned in his 1982 book The Glory of the Lord: Seeing the Form, that abandoning beauty meant falsifying the faith itself.

“We no longer dare to believe in beauty,” he wrote, considering that “beauty demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness, and she will not allow herself to be separated and banned from her two sisters without taking them along with herself in an act of mysterious vengeance.”

For von Balthasar, beauty was not a luxury but a necessity, the radiance of truth made visible.

Philosopher Simone Weil, drawn to the mystery of the Catholic Church without ever formally entering it, came to a similar conclusion: “The beautiful is the experimental proof that the Incarnation is possible,” she wrote. Beauty, for her, was not sentiment but metaphysics. It was the moment when the soul is pierced by something that goes beyond it and recognizes a presence.

The spontaneous revival of Catholic aesthetics online — at a time when new conversions are unexpectedly abounding — is therefore particularly significant, especially since it does not emerge from ecclesial strategy, but from popular cultural hunger. These passionate young people, in search of meaning, are finding, as Chateaubriand did in his time, that Catholicism does not merely possess beauty. It reveals it — because it is true.