A “Comment” on 2018 Met Gala Dating Back Sixty Five Years

Crucifixion with the Virgin, Saint John, and the Magdalene

‘”Cardinal Timothy Dolan has defended the controversial 2018 Met Gala (“Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination”) as “a celebration of what we call the evangelization of culture.”

“I did not find the spirit of the evening to be offensive or blasphemous at all,” said the cardinal.

‘“Flesh-flashing” outfits adorned with Christian symbols’ — evangelization of culture?

“To take those symbols, hard won by the generations of artists and thinkers who built up Christendom on the foundations of the pagan world and reduce them to accesories to surgically-augmented body parts” — that’s not blasphemous? Not offensive?

The very word “imagination” in today’s predominantly secular world suggests a creation of the mind, an idealized poetic creation that has nothing to do with faith.

The Catholic imagination only really exists where it expresses, affirms, conforms to sacramental reality and dogmatic truth.

Maybe someday the celebrities that disgraced themselves at the Gala will come to understand the difference between Catholic imagination and its counterfeit.

What’s far more important is that people who should know the difference — permit, and promote the secularization of the Church.

Those who should be in the forefront of fighting for the Church and her values — choose instead to appease Hollywood elite.

‘They err who say “the world is turning pagan again.” Would that it were! The truth is that we are falling into a much worse state.’

C.S. Lewis wrote this in March, 1953. And in September of the same year elaborated:

‘For no one returns from Christianity but into a worse state: the difference between a pagan and apostate is the difference between and unmarried woman and an adulteress. For faith perfects nature but faith lost corrupts nature. Therefore many men of our time have lost not only the supernatural light but also the natural light which pagans possessed.’ (from The Latin Letters of C.S. Lewis: C.S. Lewis and Don Giovanni Calabria)

Sixty five years later we are still in dire need of light.

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Image: Gerard David. Crucifixion with the Virgin, Saint John, and the Magdalene, c. 1485. Oil on panel, Overall: 25 7/8 x 16 5/8 in. (65.7 x 42.2 cm). BF123. Public Domain.