One morning in June 2024, Anne Marie Brillante and teachers and students from the children’s summer catechism class walked into their parish church, St. Joseph’s Apache Mission, and into a void. The stone wall above the altar, where an icon of Jesus Christ as an Apache man had hung for more than 30 years, was bare.
Harry Vasile, an outreach minister at the church, which is located on the Mescalero Apache Reservation in New Mexico, checked the church’s security footage. He saw that on the previous afternoon, a group of men—including some Knights of Columbus and the parish priest—had come into the church, genuflected before the altar, and then removed the icon.
“It’s quite the project to take the icon down,” says Vasile. He estimates it took half a dozen men about two hours to remove the eight-foot-tall painting.
Brillante contacted the diocese about the missing painting, and a representative confirmed the icon had been “removed.” The diocese’s seeming approval appalled Brillante.
“If I came into your church and removed a picture of your blue-eyed, blonde-haired Jesus, I’d be sitting in a cell,” Brillante says.
Brillante, wearing a beaded necklace and a T-shirt emblazoned with “Mescalero Apache Tribe,” says St. Joseph’s trouble began when a new missionary priest was assigned to the parish. This priest had studied in Rome, and although he was from Nigeria, his tastes were distinctly European and continental. He did not know anything about the Apache people or their culture. Nor, says Brillante, did he seem particularly interested in learning.
I’m here to make you better Catholics,” Brillante recalls the priest announcing.
The missionary priest insisted the icon of the Apache Christ was inappropriate for a church and belonged instead in a museum. Sensing a double standard, Brillante protested that many churches in Rome are also functionally museums for paintings by Caravaggio or Michelangelo. “How can a painting of a Native American person not be as good as one of a non-Native?” Brillante says.
The painting of the Apache Christ was a work of art; no one was saying it wasn’t. But apparently, that wasn’t enough for some people. It had to be a certain kind of art, depicting a person with the “correct” appearance.
Beauty plays a profound role in sacred spaces, not just as decoration but as a means of bringing Catholics closer to the divine. Yet, the standards we use to define beauty—and who gets to decide these standards—carry weight. They shape our identity and how others view our faith. And the way we express it speaks volumes, both to those within and outside our faith communities.
What beauty reveals
Beauty—both the recognition of beauty and the making of beauty—reveals something about human identity, says theologian Michael Witczak, a professor of liturgical theology at the Catholic University of America. “It seems to be inherent to humans.” Something in human beings longs for beauty. “Beauty is a way of organizing experience,” Witczak says. “Beauty is a fundamentally optimistic view about being alive, because it’s a way of saying that life makes sense.”
But beauty is not only revelatory of who humans are, what we are, and what we love. “It’s also revealing something about God,” Witczak says.
Beauty gives us a glimpse of the nature of pure being. It is one of the classical philosophical “transcendentals” (which also include goodness and truth). These transcendentals describe what it is that makes being being; in other words, what makes pure being—that is, God.
Anne Carpenter, a professor of theology at Saint Louis University, says it’s dangerous to conflate the church’s metaphysical or theological regard for beauty with the process of making art. Beauty, she says, is about the being of things, not the making of things. “It’s a faith affirmation that everything that exists is beautiful,” says Carpenter. “It is not a claim about which kinds of art are good and which kinds of art are bad or who has to make them and where they have to be from.”
The “Catholic imagination” has become a popular phrase since Andrew Greeley’s 2000 book of the same name, but Carpenter, who teaches several courses on theological aesthetics, says she finds the phrase at once too vague and too limiting. She prefers “sacramental imagination,” which she considers to be both more particular and more universal.
The sacraments prompt Catholics to find grace—and beauty—in ordinary, everyday things like bread and water. They guide us, Carpenter says, to find beauty in all creation, not just in things branded “Catholic.”
Beauty, as one of the transcendentals, is a way to expand our desires beyond ourselves, says Lucas Briola, a professor of theology at St. Vincent’s College in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. “A transcendental is an encounter with something I long for but can only receive with thanksgiving, rather than something I can possess or control,” he says.
Briola goes on to say, “In the Western philosophical tradition, beauty has always held a high role.” But Christian tradition has put its own emphasis on beauty in the person of Jesus Christ, whose life and death put a new spin on what beauty means. In proclaiming the beauty of Jesus
crucified, Christians proclaim the beauty of the vulnerable, including those people whom the world ignores. “It’s a beauty that inverts what we often think beauty entails,” says Briola.
Briola says that having access to beauty in a church setting—in the liturgy, stained-glass windows, music, and art—opens up a “contemplative mode of engaging the world that can counter a more technocratic way of viewing the world.” Citing Laudato Si’ (On Care for Our Common Home), Briola says, “Beauty can address the cultural roots of these social and ecological crises today.”
Beauty, in Briola’s view, offers an alternative to technocratic control, the underlying worldview behind many of today’s social ills. But the technocratic paradigm Pope Francis decries in Laudato Si’ can also corrupt this transcendental experience. “Beauty can be abused or commercialized in order to get us to buy more stuff,” Briola says. In that case, it ceases to be about transcending ourselves for an encounter with the other and becomes instead a way to engorge ourselves or distract ourselves. According to Briola, the commodification of beauty can even happen to the church.
“There’s a danger in which Catholicism itself can be an object for consumption,” Briola says, pointing to Catholic shops and websites that commodify Catholic culture. “Consumeristic Catholicism and corporate marketing culture sell Catholic paraphernalia that’s beautiful but mass-produced.”
Briola also says the “liturgy wars” can objectify beauty and weaponize it to stoke division or shore up certain identity groups. “Like saying, ‘My liturgy is more beautiful than your liturgy,’ ” he says. He also notes that beauty can become an “object to consume rather than iconic,” something that leads us “beyond ourselves in a way that transcends our tribalisms.”
When they gazed at the portrait of the Apache Christ, members of St. Joseph’s Mission had a chance to move past tribalism—but the priest there did not recognize the opportunity.
Myths about beauty
Some Catholics and former Catholics find the church’s messages about beauty and their own bodies objectifying and weaponizing.
“In Catholic culture, the beautiful body is pure, white, penetrable, submissive, and fertile,” says Audrey Farley, author of Girls and Their Monsters (Grand Central Publishing). Farley, who has studied purity culture extensively and was immersed in it as a young Catholic, says the messages she received from faith leaders linked feminine beauty to submission, obedience, and the ability to have children. Her body’s beauty was judged by its appeal to men. “I can see now how pornographic it was,” she says.
Farley says she has found many links between purity culture and eating disorders. “Anorexia is an attempt to desexualize your body, lose your curves, and disappear,” she says. She now interprets her own teenage experience with anorexia as a reaction to her immersion in unhealthy messages about sexuality. “It was a way of dealing with the drama of purity culture,” she says, “the trauma of being surveilled and reduced to my hymen—I couldn’t be a Delilah if I disappeared.”
Farley also says Catholic understandings of beauty tend to privilege whiteness. “Beauty is really linked to whiteness through the visual culture of the church, like saint cards for instance,” she says. “If I drove to my dad’s house and picked some up, they would most likely have white skin and blue eyes.”
At St. Joseph’s Apache Mission, Christ was not depicted as blond and blue-eyed. “When you come into the church, you can tell that it’s an Indigenous design and an Indigenous community,” says Brillante. The stained-glass windows in the church, installed during the mission’s restoration that ran from 2000 to 2014, show the holy family and saints in traditional Apache garments. Harry Vasile’s son was the model for Jesus in the stained-glass window of San Giuseppe (St. Joseph). The Mexican American artist also used an image of his own son as a 10-year-old with long braided hair. One image of Mary shows her holding the child Jesus in an Apache cradleboard.
Just a few days after the Apache Christ icon was stolen, Harry Vasile waited at the church for its promised return, but the diocese took the painting to the Mescalero Apache Tribe offices, just a mile down the road. Despite the delays, Vasile had it rehung in time for Mass that next Sunday.
Brillante says the Apache Christ icon, representing Christ in traditional attire with Apache features, is an important representation of how Jesus would have looked to the Apache nation, especially for the children going through faith formation. Like Our Lady of Guadalupe, the Apache Christ tells Indigenous people that God identifies with them.
Growing up, Brillante says she got used to seeing images of Jesus as a white man, and she is still able to see their beauty. But it was also important for her to see a Jesus who looked Apache, a Mary who looked Indigenous. “These are beautiful to me, too,” she says.
At St. Joseph’s Mission, liturgical life, the art, the vestments, and traditions are all steeped in Apache culture, integrating it into their faith life. But Brillante recalls the priest telling her, “You have to choose—you cannot be both Apache and Catholic.” She was confused and distressed. “That’s not something I ever thought I’d have to choose,” she says.
The objections to the Apache Christ remind Brillante of pictures of Indigenous children at residential schools, including the nearby Carlisle Indian School. These photographs show boys with their hair cut short, clad in button-up shirts and vests. Brillante says that they received the same message over and over again: “You’re not good enough. What represents you is not OK. We’re all God’s children—but God can’t be Apache.” Too often, white Catholics have conveyed this false message to Indigenous people.
Beauty that transforms
Art, as a form of reflecting on beauty, should expand our imaginations. “What art helps us to do is to see the world in a different way; to become aware that God is present in a whole variety of ways,” says Michael Witczak from the Catholic University of America. Ultimately, he says, the Christian idea of beauty—or sacramental imagination—challenges us to see God present in surprising ways. Humanity’s capacity for art is a testament to an optimistic view of life, says Witczak. It’s a testament to the belief that things are beautiful, they connect, they are fitting or appealing to some kind of harmony.
“I see a lot of beauty in the transformative process,” Casey Murano says. Murano is a visual artist and community member at Bethlehem Farm, West Virginia. As a young child, Murano brought a sketchbook to church and took visual notes during Mass. “It helped me see church and faith as something that’s participatory,” she says.
Murano feels that her creative process and her art are a way of living the Eucharist in her own life. The transformative divine creativity of the eucharistic celebration is echoed in her own process of transforming everyday items—even trash—into something beautiful. “Every day is an opportunity to create and transform and see something with new eyes,” she says.
Witczak quotes the Gospel of Matthew: “Lord, when did we see you hungry and thirsty and take care of you? . . . When you did it for the least of my brothers and sisters you did it for me.” Witczak adds, “Jesus invites us to look at the world in a different eyesight; art invites us to do this as well.”
Saints throughout history have challenged the traditional alignment of beauty with wealth or treasure. Like Christ, they found beauty in the poor, in the people society discards. When the Roman governor commanded St. Lawrence, an early martyr, to show him the treasures of the church, St. Lawrence presented the governor with the city’s people who were poor and physically challenged. St. Francis of Assisi, who cast off his rich inheritance and embraced lepers, honored poverty as a beautiful lady.
“Of what use is it to weigh down Christ’s table with golden cups, when he himself is dying of hunger?” asked John Chrysostom, Archbishop of Constantinople, in a homily on the Gospel of
Matthew. “Do not, therefore, adorn the church and ignore your afflicted brother, for he is the most precious temple of all.”
“Give us bread, but give us roses,” was a protest slogan that came to be associated with the textile strikes of early 20th-century New England. The slogan, which became a poem and was later put into song, insists that the poor are entitled not only to food and life’s minimum necessities but also to the beauty of the Earth.
Jim Forest, a Catholic Worker and long-time peace activist, loved to tell a story about the day a donor gave Dorothy Day a lovely diamond ring. She put the ring in her pocket—and then, later, she gave it to a homeless woman, a regular visitor at the Catholic Worker.
As it happened, this woman was not a very gracious guest. In a 1997 talk at Marquette University, Forest said he could not remember hearing this woman ever say thank you for anything. “Wouldn’t it have been better if we took the ring to the diamond exchange, sold it, and paid that woman’s rent for a year?” someone protested. Day responded that it was a sign of respect for the woman’s dignity to allow her to do what she liked with the ring: sell it—or keep and enjoy it. “Do you suppose,” Dorothy asked, “that God created diamonds only for the rich?”
Pope Francis, in Evangelii Gaudium (On the Proclamation of the Gospel in Today’s World), the opening exhortation of his papacy, called for the church to embrace the “way of beauty” (via pulchritudinous). “Every expression of true beauty can thus be acknowledged as a path leading to an encounter with the Lord Jesus,” the pope writes. He calls for evangelizers to be “bold enough to discover new signs and new symbols,” and “different forms of beauty which are valued in different cultural settings,” including forms that may seem unconventional or foreign.
Beauty that shows us Jesus
In her kitchen, with autumn afternoon light behind her, Anne Marie Brillante wipes away tears. Although the icon was restored, the wound from its removal has not yet healed.
At this point, her website chronicling the story of the Apache Christ and its theft has been live for months. The Diocese of Las Cruces has been pressuring her to take it down, saying she is stoking division, but Brillante says, “I don’t think that brushing it under the rug and hiding it and pretending it didn’t happen is right.” If the diocese wants to add anything, she says, she will record that, too. “If you apologize, and let us know that what happened wasn’t right, we’d put that up there, too.”
In September, three months after the theft, the Diocese of Las Cruces still had not apologized to the parishioners of St. Joseph Apache Mission. A representative of the bishop declined to comment. And, at press time, the chancellor had not responded to multiple requests for comment.
Bishop Peter Baldacchino did meet with the parish council shortly after the painting was stolen, and the four-hour meeting ended with a promise to continue the conversation after a new pastor had been appointed. When Bishop Baldacchino next came to the church, however, he said a Mass but did not offer to speak with anyone or hold a meeting afterward.
The entire ordeal hurt Brillante deeply, breaking her trust in the institutional church. “I will never in good faith be able to trust another priest,” she says, crying. “The trust I once had is gone.”
St. Joseph parishioners were told that if they did not “settle down,” they would remove their current priest. (In an email exchange, the pastor said he could not recall those words.) “We would be without the sacraments,” Brillante says. “They would take the Eucharist away from us.”
Brillante believes the diocese forgot a fundamental tenet of the Christian faith: We are all made in the image and likeness of God. “God loves all of us . . . made us all,” she says. But, she says, the message her community received is, “Everyone else is able to see Christ as themselves, but you cannot.”
This article also appears in the January 2025 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 90, No. 1, pages 30-35). Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
Image: AP Photo/Andres Leighton
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