Sacred Art: Creation and Symbolism (continued)

I have this kind of faith in harmony for the success of a stained glass window. These creeds are the founding rock of my work. They personally commit me. I am convinced that my ideas in this matter are the most elevated for I drink at the wells of the Faith which founded cathedrals and monasteries.

I will wind up by saying that a stained glass window is not religious by its topic nor its technique, but by its spirit. Hence the Great Work, through the years, must steer itself away from time to go towards eternity, and, instead of addressing a few men, make itself clear to all humanity. These convictions, I possess as well as they possess mefor I've been schooled at the biggest and most beautiful cathedrals of the world, the cathedrals of France. My masters, those who have showed me the genius of my predecessors, have all worked or meditated at Amiens, Senlis, Bourges, Paris, Reims, and Chartres.

Declaration of Pope John XXIII on Sacred Art (October 1961)

Sacred Art serves the purpose of building Man, of improving him, of making him worthy of the Christian vocation capable of praying, of contemplating, and of freeing himself from the dregs of sin and of the tendency towards losing time idly and the other gifts of the spirit, for the purpose of making his inner dimensions develop, in his union with God and in the exercise of the supernatural charity. Art possesses a character which we can qualify as sacramental, definitely not as the word really means, but as a vehicle and as an instrument God uses to prepare the souls to the prodigy of a blessing. Through art, the spiritual values become visible, more within the reach of the human mind who wants to see and touch. The harmony of structures, plastic shapes, the magic of colors are all means seeking to make the invisible closer to the visible, and the sensitive closer to the supernatural.

Church does not seek but to achieve its mission of elevation and of sanctification of Man. And, as well as the angels are the messengers of God and present our prayers to Him, Christian art lifts us beyond sensory perception to unite us with God, to make us follow His Holy inspirations, to facilitate and channel our contacts with Him.

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Guidelines of the Episcopal Commission for Pastoral, Liturgy " sacred Art Acknowledged by the Assembly of Cardinals and Archbishops of France

Like for any other art and perhaps more than any other, the Commission acknowledges that Sacred Art is "alive" and must fall in with the spirit of its era, as well as in its techniques and its materials.

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Excerpt from the Allocution of Pius VII to the Artists (19th of May 1948)

Art is the son of nature. It leans over it, contemplates it, listens to its silence, not in order to uproot its secret, but to hear its confidences just like we listen to those of a mother. It does not make it its prey to show to the indiscreet eyes the unparalleled beauty of its external dress. It does not turn it into its slave, torturing it to curb it, to disfigure it, according to the capriciousness of its abstruse thinking. As distant to an exaggerated realism, all material and of bad choice, as it is to a false idealism which sacrifices it to an egoistic and proud whim: with the respectful love of a son, it guesses the transparency of its veil, it hears the echo of its inner song, and in this transparency, in this echo, it ecstatically discovers what it harbors even in the most material beings of spirit and of spiritual reflections.

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