By Marie T. Sullivan

Sunday September 13^th, 2026

In my youth, after years of post-college wandering, I resumed going to church.

A kind friend, learning that I was a lover of the fine arts, steered me to a traditionalist Catholic parish in Chicago. I was struck by the sheer beauty of the place: the art and architecture, the choirs, the incense and snow-white altar linens, the dignity of the movements on the altar.

What kept me there, after the initial lure of the beauty, was the faith itself. But that’s another story.

For many, the fine arts furnish a pathway to religious faith. They can lower the gates of resistance for the most hardened atheist, if no foxhole is at hand. They speak of God without words.

I have seen beautiful churches of various denominations, but write here about the beauty of Catholicism, with which I am familiar. All matters of doctrine aside, in its more traditional forms it offers a feast of the fine arts. It has been called the most sensual of religions, serving the eye, the ear, the sense of smell:  all that lovely incense and candle wax. The late Dennis Martin, a distinguished professor of history and theology at Chicago’s Loyola University, once pointed out that Catholicism’s sensuality is one reason it is viewed with suspicion by Protestants.

Of all the beauties music is the most powerful, according to Peter Kreeft, the celebrated professor of philosophy at Boston College. It reaches into the human heart the most deeply, he said. Asked why in a live lecture, he replied: Historical evidence. “One of your obscure modern scholars has shown that social and political revolutions have usually been preceded by music revolutions,” he wrote. “Another sage said ‘Let me write the songs of a nation and I care not who writes its laws.’”

For better or worse, Dolly Parton’s “Nine to Five” fueled a movement.

“Music is more powerful than reason in the soul,” Professor Kreeft adds. “That is also why Plato made music the very first step in his long educational curriculum:  good music was to create the harmony of soul that would be a ripe field for the higher harmony of reason to take root in later.”

The treasures of sacred music are rich, voluminous and written by the finest composers in human history. Tomas Luis de Victoria, a sixteenth-century priest-composer, is one shining example. Years back the English vocal ensemble The Sixteen created a film about Victoria called “God’s Composer.” Its renowned director, Harry Christophers, points out how the soaring musical lines of Victoria’s music mirror the architecture of the churches in which his music was sung, with its vaulted arches, to evoke the transcendent and give the closest thing on earth to a tiny glimpse of Paradise.

The website Aleteia once ran an article titled “Why the Devil Hates Sacred Music.” Answer: Because it’s the music of Heaven.

I recall hearing of a survey of fallen-away Catholics, asking why they had left. Surprisingly, the top reason was not any particular issue. It was that they simply drifted away. One suspects they were driven away by the music they heard in many Catholic churches in the United States, which compared to the music of Victoria is as a Hallmark card to the Mona Lisa. Bad church music is equivalent to a Hostess Twinkie; it fails to nourish. Its only value is that hearing it is penitential, and suffering through it may help you atone for your sins. It also gives you a good look at Purgatory so you won’t want to go there.

This viewpoint is not elitist. We want good music in church for the same reason that chalices are made of gold.

We need more choirs in churches, singing quality repertoire. They need not be composed of professionals. Capable volunteers can make a beautiful sound, and there are libraries of fine choral literature waiting to be sung. For those of simpler taste there are simple works, like good hymns. Children’s choirs too can sing so beautifully as to make grown men weep. Sacred choral works abound that are high in quality but easy to sing. As a bonus, the texts of great sacred works inhabit you when you sing them repeatedly, and remain within you. Kids in particular are unlikely otherwise to be exposed to such enriching textual fare. Singing in the choir feeds their little brains.

A far-fetched analogy. Remember the ‘Fifties, when most coffee served in America was bland? With the democratization of air travel in succeeding decades, more and more Americans flew abroad, went to cafes in Paris and Rome and experienced a first-class cup of coffee. Wow. “Why can’t we have this at home?” they asked, and went home and learned how to fix a great cup of coffee. The Gospel of Good Coffee spread throughout the land. Now there is a Starbucks on every corner.

Surely we can do the same with church music in the United States. Embrace quality and democratize it, so that one needn’t travel great distances to hear it. Let it be done not as a performance, but done well nonetheless, and in the service of the service.

Doing so can help fill pews.

“How will we understand each other in Heaven?” asks Peter Kreeft. “Will we all speak English, or Dutch, or Latin? No, we’ll all speak music.”

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An Ohio native, Marie T. (Terry) Sullivan has lived in Chicagoland for all of her adult life. Her background is in music. For two years she served as culture editor for the now defunct Chicago Daily Observer.