SIR, -If you will excuse a quibble, the fact that we

can talk of "sacred" and "secular" art at the present time shows up the weakness of the Church's position in this matter and the inadequacy of our ideas in putting it right.
Whereas, perhaps before 1800, this distinction, if allowed, would have been one of application or use of existing art forms, themselves unquestioned, in the present it is one of "form" itself. The idea of a sacred form in art is absolutely novel and has never occurred before; it is the root of the present trouble and seems to stem from precisely that looking back to its great agcs that the Church indulged in during the 19th century.
Up to the end of the 18th century, pursuit of beauty and the emergence of testhetic form stemmed from the cultural pattern of the times and not directly from Religious Faith. The art forms were the logical (and sometimes unselfconscious) expression of the cultural pattern which in its turn was founded on Christianity. The
consequent harmony between art
forms and religious use was so inevitable as almost to be taken for granted.
If the 19th century demonstrated anything it showed religious and esthetic values were not necessarily connected and it was possible for them to live apart. (N.B.-In themselves they may flourish exceedingly in this state; though it is difficult to say which is the more notorious as a result of the separation-the curious religions of artists or the curious tastes of churchmen.) Perhaps, in the 20th century we have learnt that the role of the Church in art patronage in a period of healthy culture is far less romantic and more matter of fact than was imagined by Pugin, the Gothic Revivalist and their present-day followers. Quite simply, the Church is occupied with iconographic accuracy and the prevention of immoderate distortion. Questions of esthetics are beyond churchmen as such, and it is neither a necessity nor their function for churchmen to have good taste, they have enough to do in their proper sphere.
The history of the Church's taste in the centuries of Christian culture is quite simple. It never existed. The artist had taste, and as a rule there were not bad artists. The Church took what was there. This seems only too easy to see at a time when reintegration of Christian culture is an impossibility.
The difficulty of the application of art to Church needs today is a direct result. first, of the breakdown of Christian culture; a breakdown which, from an asthetie point of view, was not perceived for a century after it happened; and second, the consequent emergence of value put on explicit asthetic formal values for their own sake alone, which is the dominant note of contemporary art: at once an idolatry of form and a form of idolatry. The first has destroyed the Church's confidence in the artist: the second has for many reasons given the artists and the artifact far more independence and numinousness than they ever had before.
Up to the present the Church can only use the work of art whose form is implicit. The contemporary work of art of explicit form will war against the ideals of the Church, because it draws to itself too much attention. The Church has the almost impossible task, never asked of her before, of bridging the gap between art and religion without the essential medium of a living cultural pattern: a situation which is resolved by the emphasis on the necessity of a "sacred" form of art and not of the hitherto normal procedure of secular forms to sacred uses. Owing to there being no general tradition of art that she can trust, she has found it necessary to overstep her boundaries and dabble in wsthetics.
The Church will not get a consistent and universal form of art at its disposal before it finds the energy to create a new culture. Until that comes about, the process of putting art to sacred use will always be a hand-to-mouth business.
Mary Court, Patrick Reyntiens. Odiham.