Vatican City, Nov 29, 2018 / 05:27 am
Pope Francis wrote in his 2015 encyclical, Laudato si, that, "by learning to see and appreciate beauty, we learn to reject self-interested pragmatism."
The Holy Father quoted this line again in a Nov. 29 message to a Vatican conference centered on answering the question of how to preserve the beauty and the sacredness of now-empty and unused Catholic churches.
"The common sense of the faithful perceives of the environments and objects destined for worship the permanence of a kind of imprint that does not end even after they have lost that destination," the pope said.
Catholic churches which are no longer being used for worship, he said, can still be preserved in such a way that they can be "witnesses to the faith of the community that produced them in the past and for this reason they are in their own way instruments of evangelization."