[Religion and the Visual] In the Presence of Beauty and Mercy

Abstract

It is the intimacy with which he speaks which arrests me. This silver haired Augustinian priest, pried from the parish rectory on a weekday afternoon by my journalistic entreaties, leans over the back of the blond wood pew between us and, in a voice gentled with tenderness, speaks of the polychrome wooden figure set in the marbled side altar before us. Rising above an ornate Eucharistic tabernacle and flanked by sprays of green foliage, Our Mother of Good Counsel leans her cheek against the forehead of the child cradled in her right arm. I have been inquiring about Marian devotion in his Los Angeles parish, the same research query I have been making at dozens of parish churches throughout the metropolitan sprawl of the Catholic archdiocese of this “minority majority” city.