'An Ordinary Mystic'

T he relationship between the art world and the Catholic Church in recent years has been, to say the least, strained. To pick two prominent examples, Andres Serrano’s photograph “Piss Christ” was condemned by Catholic leaders when it was first shown in 1989, as was Chris Ofili’s elephant-dung-covered Madonna, “The Holy Virgin Mary,” when it was unveiled at the Brooklyn Museum 10 years later. While these works have their Catholic defenders, the controversies that erupted around them are a sign of a wide gap that has opened up between art—specifically the visual arts—and religion. Once the foremost patron of the arts, the church is now more circumspect about contemporary painting. The art world, meanwhile, seems glad to be rid of the church’s influence, exercising its own kind of censorship on material it deems tainted by sentimental piety.

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