Excerpts from Integrated Art: Expressions of a Deified Reality, New Oxford Review
By Thomas J. Kronholz | New Oxford Review | November 2025.
Thomas J. Kronholz is a systematic theologian, author, and classical pianist. He holds advanced degrees in systematic theology from Notre Dame Graduate School at Christendom College and piano performance from the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University. His latest book, Make Our Hearts Like Yours: Daily Meditations on the Sacred Heart of Jesus, is available from Our Sunday Visitor.
… When [Maurice Gustave] Duruflé and his wife attended a postconciliar Mass set to jazz music, they were reportedly visibly scandalized and made loud protests afterward, earning them verbal ridicule. Whatever the motivations for incorporating pop music into liturgy — you cannot point to historic success in attendance numbers — the tragic result is that real formative damage is done to those immersed in its excesses. If integrated art restores man’s vision of things as they truly are, unintegrated art produces something exaggerated, less real.
Here, the properties of beauty set down by St. Thomas Aquinas — integrity, proportion, and clarity — are in serious doubt. Losing sight of the objective and the transcendent, the congregation is drawn into the subjective realm of their own emotions, becoming prey to self-reference. This Cartesian turn risks trapping man within himself, ultimately hindering his ability to ascend to the Divine Other.
Modern Catholic sensibilities, we must admit, often share much with the secular culture, which has yet to recant its longstanding rejection of tradition, order, and the sacred. For this reason, the people of God are immersed in self-referential music, non-representational art, ideological graphic design, sardonic poetry, and skeptical theology. While there are surely elements of renewal within the Church, these are often the result of the “grass roots,” not the wider landscape of historic institutions.
The rise of thoughtful literary magazines, beautiful church renovations, and sacred music must be celebrated as signs of life and literacy; nevertheless, the arts largely remain viewed as luxuries that are neither necessary nor useful. Aligned with the pragmatism of the age, Christian organizations typically see the arts as a financial extravagance that can and must be eliminated. But nothing could be more misguided, as the arts tangibly express the invisible contents of the faith. What could be of more practical use? More effective for evangelization? Increased investment in authentic expressions of beauty, poetic collections of prayers, sacred music, and architecture are necessities, as they are signs of human love and sources of its inspiration…
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Amid the devastation of the Second World War, Duruflé composed the greater part of his magnum opus, Requiem, Op. 9, which blends ancient plainchant with modern harmonies and textures, forming a vast impressionistic landscape. He captures the expansive atmosphere of Gregorian chant by accommodating his score with a mercurial use of meter, even as he fits traditional chants with advanced harmonies and coloristic textures, forming a structural narrative. The resulting effect is a balanced aesthetic that marries the objective to the subjective. Inasmuch as his personal style embodies his life’s contact with the liturgy and academic studies, faith and reason here meet.
Works like Duruflé’s Requiem don’t simply represent supreme balance, indicating the artist’s affective maturity or the culture’s spiritual health; their performance produces just such an effect on its hearers — that is, to the extent that art influences men. Just as music that lacks integration and aesthetic balance stirs human passions in proportion to its own excess, works of deep integration form men in that divinized reality, which is more profound and exalted than we realize…
As we slowly approach the great Jubilee of Christ’s Redemption in 2033, we would do well to prepare personally and corporately, re-examining our relationship with our own humanity and with Christ’s divinity. Those setting out on the path of the spiritual life easily fall into the trap of dualism and stoicism, forgetting the meaning of their humanity. Conversely, those immersed in the secular world risk losing all sight of the transcendent reality about them, wholly investing themselves in the pragmatic concerns of the day…
Catholic Critique 