Trondheim – St Olav’s Cathedral was open: orderly, restrained, silent. And above all, it was empty. No movement, no groups, none of those continuous trajectories of bodies and glances that, in Italy, almost invariably end up turning every “important” church into a place of transit, of lingering, of aesthetic consumption. Not here. Here, what remained was the essential. At the heart of the building, without staging and without the need for explanation, there was what, for the Catholic faith, is a real centre, not a metaphor: Jesus in the Tabernacle. No direction, no “cultural framework” to prop up its weight. Only a Presence that does not seek an audience and is not measured by participation. A single red light to declare it, and everything else restored to its true order: adoration and encounter. “Let’s keep the Lord company for a while,” I said to myself.
A short distance away, in the great Nidaros Cathedral, the scene was the opposite: visitors, tourists, the curious. One enters, looks up, takes photographs, is struck by the beauty. Many, however, do not even know that the cathedral is not Catholic. As we were leaving, a group of Italian tourists stopped us. They saw some priests from our group in cassocks and asked, quite naturally: “Who is this church dedicated to? When is Mass?” We explained the history of the place and specified that it is not a Catholic church. The reply came immediately: “Ah, they look the same.” It is a small detail, but it says a great deal. We are used to treating this heritage as if it were, almost by definition, an extension of the Catholic faith and, ultimately, of the Italian/European tradition. Not so much because we truly believe—and therefore distinguish what is essential from what is merely form—but because we have learned it as the “Catholics’” cultural heritage: an aesthetic and historical identity that often precedes, and at times replaces, an awareness of faith.
Nidarosdomen is a magnificent space: architecture, light, layers of history. A building that can speak even to those who do not share the faith for which it was born, because beauty, when it is genuine, possesses an attractive force that transcends belonging. The contrast, however, is not sociological and does not arise from a polemical reflex. It is a theological knot, and it concerns us closely as well. What may appear to be an exception is, in reality, an enlarged photograph of what happens every day in our art cities. Catholic churches - especially in the Eternal City - are often crowded, yet not always inhabited in the fullest sense. One enters for Caravaggio, for Bernini, for a mosaic, for “culture”. It is legitimate, sometimes even valuable: beauty can be a threshold. The problem arises when the threshold becomes the destination, when everything stops at the frame, when beauty ceases to point back to its source. At that moment the work is no longer a sign, but an end in itself: it holds the gaze, without opening it any further.
Christian art was never born as neutral ornament. It flourished within a lived faith: through people and communities capable of diverting resources even from their own families in order to build something beautiful in honour of God. It was born of men and women marked by an encounter with Christ and, at the same time, of artists of extraordinary talent who knew how to evangelise through beauty, making art a form of proclamation even before it became something to be admired. When today we accept that such art can “function” independently of all this, we reduce it to inert heritage: we preserve it, but we do not read it; we defend it, but we do not accompany it. And thus the highest stake is lost. Because if art and culture are presented as a self-sufficient circuit, a language to be deciphered, a heritage to be consumed, a “beauty” to be visited, they end up closing in on themselves. They become aesthetic experience, intellectual exercise, collective identity. All legitimate, even useful. But not enough.
The decisive point lies elsewhere: that art was not created merely to “say” something beautiful; it was created to lead to Someone. “Ἐγώ εἰμι ὁ ποιμὴν ὁ καλός - I am the good shepherd,” says Jesus, the beautiful one. That art was conceived as a threshold, as an invitation, as a space capable of orienting both gaze and life towards an encounter with Christ. When this orientation is lost, beauty ceases to be a sign and becomes an end; it no longer leads beyond itself, it holds back. And thus what should open onto the Presence is reduced to a frame: a Christianity translated into culture, stripped of the risk and freedom of personal response. In this sense, the silence of the Catholic cathedral of the Trondheim prelature says more than many pastoral analyses. It reminds us that faith is not measured by flows, but by fidelity; that it can pass through history even without social recognition; that it remains true even when it does not attract, when it produces no numbers, when it generates no “movement”. And that, precisely then, it reveals its most authentic nature: not a consensus to be won, but a Presence to be safeguarded.
This logic also runs through literature and much contemporary reflection. In Norway, faced with this panorama, one inevitably thinks of Jon Fosse: capable of brushing against God not through an accumulation of words, but through subtraction, through listening, through silence. In his horizon, silence does not coincide with sterile emptiness; it is a space in which it once again becomes possible to hear what we usually cover with noise. For this reason, a seemingly deserted church can be full of meaning, if it safeguards what truly matters. A crowd is not required for a presence to exist; it is enough that that presence be recognised as the heart of the place, and not as a marginal detail of the sacred furnishings. The Catholic tradition has never separated beauty and truth; at the same time, it has never overlapped them, as if the former alone were sufficient to guarantee the latter. Cristina Campo grasped this when she wrote that authentic beauty is not embellishment, but a discipline of the gaze, an interior education that demands respect, attention, measure. The liturgy, and everything that flows from it, trains us to recognise that not everything is available, that not everything is for consumption, that there is an order that precedes our desire and does not bend to our habits. When this awareness is lost, art remains. But it ceases to speak: it becomes mute, because it has been severed from the source that gave it voice. The same holds true for the theological understanding of the image. Pavel Florenskij insisted on a decisive point: the sacred image is not born to hold the gaze, but to send it beyond. It does not ask to be consumed as an aesthetic object; it asks to be crossed, because it is the sign of an Other. When the gaze stops at the surface, the image loses its function. And this category helps us to read many of our churches that have become places of passage: splendid, visited, photographed, yet often unable to lead beyond aesthetic emotion to what that art was meant to indicate.
The English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins spoke of a world “charged with the grandeur of God”. But this density does not impose itself on its own: it calls for a trained gaze, capable of contemplation. When such a disposition is lacking, even the sublime is flattened: the form remains, depth is lost, and what should open up becomes mere surface. The problem, then, is not beauty; it is the gaze that rests upon it, the habit with which we pass through it. Bernanos truly showed that grace does not coincide with a well-executed religious atmosphere. It can make its way through poverty, solitude, stripping away, where there are no emotional supports and no reassuring frames. For this reason, an empty church, if it safeguards the Eucharist, can be closer to the Gospel than a full church reduced to a backdrop: a place that hosts presences, but not necessarily an encounter; that produces crowds, but not always adoration.
When lived experience fades, management takes over. Péguy grasped this gap: every spiritual reality, if separated from its source, ends up being increasingly administered, organised, normalised. And so even faith risks being reduced to an inheritance to be preserved through procedures, rather than a life to be transmitted through witness. That is why here, even without the architectural majesty of Nidaros Cathedral, we can contemplate what is most beautiful of all: Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament. And perhaps here we can breathe something that still frightens us, but which Joseph Ratzinger understood perfectly: “The future of the Church may reside - and will reside - in those whose roots are deep and who live from the pure fullness of their faith. To put it more positively: the future of the Church, once again as always, will be reshaped by the saints, that is, by men whose minds are deeper than the slogans of the day, who see more than others see, because their lives embrace a wider reality. Let us take another step. From the present crisis there will emerge a Church that has lost much. It will become small and will have to start afresh more or less from the beginning. It will no longer be able to inhabit many of the buildings it constructed in times of prosperity. As the number of its faithful diminishes, it will also lose much of its social privilege. In contrast to an earlier period, it will be seen far more as a voluntary society, which one enters only by free decision. As a small society, it will make far greater demands on the initiative of its individual members.”
M.P. and fr.M.S.
Silere non possum