The Beauty of Holiness: Liturgy, Music, and the Arts | Fr. Innocent Smith, O.P.

The Thomistic Institute

Christianity, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 19 August 2024

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Father Innocent Smith explores the theological understanding of beauty as a reflection of God's nature, emphasizing its importance in Christian liturgy and worship. He examines how beauty is expressed through various forms of liturgical art, including architecture, visual arts, and music, highlighting the diversity of aesthetic expressions within the Church. The lecture concludes by discussing how liturgical beauty helps cultivate virtue and deepen faith, even in challenging circumstances.

This lecture was given on February 9th, 2024, at Mississippi State University.

For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstitute.org/upcoming-events

About the Speaker:

Fr. Innocent Smith, O.P. entered the Order of Preachers in 2008 and was ordained to the priesthood in 2015. From 2015 to 2018, Fr. Innocent served as parochial vicar at the Parish of St. Vincent Ferrer and St. Catherine of Siena in New York City. From 2018 to 2021, he lived in Munich while completing a doctorate in liturgical studies at the University of Regensburg. From 2021 to 2023, Fr. Innocent served as Assistant Professor of Homiletics at St. Mary’s Seminary & University in Baltimore. In 2023, he joined the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception.

Fr. Innocent’s teaching and research interests include liturgy, homiletics, sacramental theology, ecclesiology, and sacred music. His S.T.L. thesis, “In Collecta Dicitur: The Oration as a Theological Authority for Thomas Aquinas,” explored the importance of the liturgy as a source for scholastic theology. His monograph Bible Missals and the Medieval Dominican Liturgy focuses on medieval manuscripts of the Bible that also contain liturgical texts for the celebration of Mass.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Welcome to the Tomistic Institute podcast.
0:06.8	Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square.
0:13.1	The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Temistic Institute chapters around the world.
0:19.1	To learn more and to attend these events, visit us at to mystic institute.org.
0:25.2	My talk today is titled The Beauty of Holiness, Liturgy, Music, and the Arts.
0:31.8	I wanted to start with a phrase from one of the Psalms.
0:36.1	Give unto the Lord the glory due unto his name,
0:40.2	bring an offering and come into his courts.
0:44.2	O worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness,
0:48.6	Fear before him all the earth.
0:52.4	This phrase from the ancient scriptures of Israel has helped form Christian
0:57.4	understandings of what it means to worship, what it means to give glory to God's beauty, and to
1:04.0	allow God's glory and God's grace to form our own hearts, to make us capable of being like God.
1:12.7	One particular expression of this is in the hymn,
1:15.8	O worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness.
1:19.2	Bow down before him, his glory proclaim.
1:22.8	With gold of obedience and incense of lowliness, kneel and adore him. The Lord is his name. This hymn
1:32.1	captures some central themes of Christian liturgy. We have to use our bodies in worship. We bow down
1:41.9	before God. We use our voices in worship. We proclaim his glory. But all of these
1:49.4	external efforts are really about orienting our internal life to be one with God, to have the
1:59.1	gold of obedience, the incense of lowliness or humility, acknowledging
2:05.4	that God is truly Lord, and that his beauty is worth praising. One beautiful line from the
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Thomistic Institute, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of The Thomistic Institute and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.