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Fyodor Dostoevsky never said or wrote the words attributed to him that “Beauty will save the world” but the thought contains such hope that it seems suited to a writer of his genius.
A major element of that hope is the stark counterpoint it presents to the grim daily reality of horrible ugliness that threatens the world.
Shadowing the beauty of the release of the Israeli hostages on Thanksgiving were the demonic acts of slaughter perpetrated by Hamas almost two years to the day before, and the squalor that awaits Palestinians as they make their way to ruined homes to mourn their own dead loved ones.
Amid the beautiful heroism of the Ukrainian people holding on in courage against the vicious, megalomaniacal Vladimir Putin are the spectres of slain children, mothers, fathers, people who went out to buy milk or go to work and never came back.
The seemingly infinite struggle between the glorious and the damnable is hardly confined to those two conflicts. Indeed, a list of the names of the countries and regions where it goes on would surely exhaust most, if not all, the letters of the alphabet.
Paradoxically compounding the burden of living in a world fraught with such struggle is the often-staggering difficulty of heeding our own Christian faith’s call and obligation to resist giving into the despair that forges a path to the nightmare of nihilism.
Yet as guest columnist Leonard DeLorenzo writes on our pages this week, what the Faith asks of us, it also gives back to us as gift. He cites the case of a writer named Sarah Clarkson who went through mental health afflictions that personified the madness of our mad, mad world and overpowered them by shifting her gaze from worldly infinite struggle to God’s eternal beauty.
“(Clarkson) began practicing trusting the story of beauty,” DeLorenzo writes.
He quotes her words: "My deep belief is that beauty has a story to tell, one that was meant by God to speak to us of His character and reality, meant to grip our failing hands with hope. We know God when we behold His beauty, when His goodness invades the secret rooms of our hearts. To believe the truth that beauty tells: this is our great struggle from the depths of our grief.”
There is resonance of Clarkson’s discovery in the message Pope Leo recently delivered in Rome to members of Aid to the Church in Need where he lauded the international organization’s ceaseless struggle for religious freedom across the globe. In essence, the Holy Father said, Aid to the Church in Need is a model of the Church we need to aid in making religious freedom a watchword for the beauty of peaceful co-existence.
“Your assistance helps Christians, even small and vulnerable minorities, to be “peacemakers” in their homelands,” the Pontiff told delegates. “In the Central Africa Republic, Burkina Faso and Mozambique, the local Church – often sustained by your help – becomes a living sign of social harmony and fraternity, showing their neighbours that a different world is possible.”
Leo’s truth spoken about the power of free faith to promote peace, and Clarkson’s insight into the salvific gift of trusting Beauty, are no verbal pacifiers to turn our frowns upside down and let us shrug off ugliness with a dismissive “oh, it’s not so bad after all.” It is so bad. It is so ugly. The reality of our world shows it so.
Gaza, Ukraine, the alphabet of earth’s suffering peoples, provide the daily proof. So, and we must not shy away from this, does the Church’s own tormented struggles with the priestly sexual abuse scandals of recent decades. Let us not forget, either, our Catholic reckoning with complicity in sins against Indigenous people here in Canada.
But, as St. Paul might say, by no means does that negate the Beauty that goes always before us. What could be more beautiful, after all, than He who came to take away the sins of the world? What could lift our eyes and hearts more gloriously than a Son sent by a Father who so loved the world? Yet, unbelievable as it sometimes seems, there actually is more.
There is the Beauty of the Mass through which we are invited to participate body, mind and spirit in His death and Resurrection. There, the secret, shadowed, ugly rooms of our human hearts can be opened to the truth whose Beauty has already saved the world.
A version of this story appeared in the October 19, 2025, issue of The Catholic Registerwith the headline "Believe, trust in beauty".
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Like many Canadians, Mark Joseph has felt an increasing unease about the number of churches, synagogues and other places of worship being vandalized and torched over the past five years.
