A Catholic church should look Catholic. Its form, sacred signs, and symbols should attract us,

draws to its interior, the statues, stained glass, a beautiful altar. There should be no confusion.

Even for non-Catholics who enter, this is the house of God. But instead, we have this. We go to mass in iconoclastic modernist

boxes, devoid of transcendence, catechized by what Joseph Ratzinger called the cult of the ugly. We call it

Recovation, the brutal period of iconoclasm that engulfed the global church from the 1960s through the 1990s,

whitewashing sacred art, gutting sanctuaries, and ripping out the altar rails.

We built new worship spaces shaped like flying saucers, prison blocks, and factories.

What could possibly have driven Catholics to

abandoned centuries of Christian art? Did they really think that this was better than this?

It's easy to blame Vatican, too. But we have to go back further to fully understand how we got here.

The war on beauty occurred across many religious traditions and began long before the fathers convened for the Second Vatican Council.

The Catholic Church's late and almost total capitulation to modernist architectural trends was particularly devastating on a cultural and spiritual

plain, overturning, as it were, the last refuge of sacred art.

But the story of recovation isn't just about art.

The fact that Catholics offered wholesale submission to the stripping of the altars

betrays a foundational loss of faith and identity.

But when it comes to salvation history, destruction never has the last word.

Today, hundreds of parishes and dioceses are recovering that sense of identity and faith,

and I can't wait to show you some of my

favorite renovation stories. But before that, we have to ask, how did we get here in the first

place? It's easy to blame Vatican II for anything we don't like about the Catholic Church today.

Architect and historian Duncan Stroke says it goes back much farther.

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