Urgent: Support the Foundation for Sacred Arts!

My good friend Erik Bootsma, graduate of the Notre Dame School of Architecture (and the artist behind the design for American Papist Apparel), sent me this impassioned plea for financial assistance.

I know many members of this organization and would love to see AmP readers get behind their important mission and work. Please read, contribute, and spread the word:

"The Foundation for Sacred Arts is dedicated to a new renaissance in Catholic arts: Painting, Sculpture, Music, Architecture, etc.

The Foundation sponsors speakers, academic forums, arts competitions and exhibitions of contemporary artists who best exemplify artistic excellence with an emphasis on the continuity of artistic tradition. We already have a number of speakers and programs coming up next year and beyond.

The Foundation is, however, desperately in need of financial support to keep its office open and to continue its work of building a solid groundwork for new programs needed to help foster a truly Catholic and beautiful culture of art in the Church today.

Right now the Foundation is actively searching for seed money to jump-start this new programming, while also requiring financial support to maintain current operations.

Every penny is precious right now so small donations are just as welcome as large ones. We hope to eventually raise $100,000 through a combination of individual donations and larger grants."

I think the main challenge facing the Foundation at this point is that they are unknown. Living as Catholics in 21st century America, I think we are all keenly aware of the urgent need to support young Catholic artists who are inspired to create beautiful art in the Catholic tradition.

Beautiful works of art, after all, inspire us to see the beauty of God's creation and the dignity of his creation Man. Good art is fitting praise for the all-good God. And we shouldn't have to look for good Catholic art only in museums and art history books.

Erik recently wrote an excellent article for the Catholic News Agency entitled "Novelty vs. Beauty":

When I tell Catholics I meet that I’m an architect, invariably they ask me, “Why doesn’t the church I attend look like a church? Why don’t they build nice churches like the old ones we love?” Sometimes I come up with a complicated answer or theory, but most of the time I answer, “architects.”

In the United States, we have a fairly good tradition of building beautiful churches in which one can feel a true sense of reverence. One would be hard pressed to find a church built before World War II that wasn’t beautiful and beloved by its parishioners. It would be an even more difficult task to find such a church built after the World War that comes close to the beauty found in an average 1920s church and a Herculean task to find one built since the 1960s.

How is it that even within the Catholic Church, where we affirm and believe in the importance of tradition, that a deep and profound architectural heritage came to be abandoned? Again the answer is that architects, like so many other artists, have become obsessed with the idea of novelty. Most artists have been trained to believe by their mentors in 20th century art culture that only novel or “revolutionary” creations are worthy of being called art.

[Read the full article here.]

Another important factor in the sad situation that Erik describes is, well, money. Catholics must actively help good artists do their work. We've probably all complained at some point about bad Catholic art. Well, I've moved past grumbling and now I want to fix it. And the Foundation for Sacred Arts is well-equipped to do just that, with your assistance and mine.

If you cannot contribute to the Foundation directly, please help spread the word by emailing your friends, blogging about this, and telling your friends about them on Facebook and Twitter. All donations are tax-deductible, so that's an incentive, too.

If you want to contact Erik directly for interviews or publicity, you can do so at "erikbootsma [at] gmail.com."

So the next time you walk into a beautiful or ugly Catholic church, think for a moment about who was responsible for building it. Then, if you want to see more beautiful Churches, or less ugly ones, drop a few dollars in the Foundation's basket. I will.

Augustine wrote that he who sings, prays twice. Well, he who helps those who helps others pray ... well, it works out pretty good for them, too! I know I can count on you papists.