The lesson that people hold radically differing views about church art is the harder to learn when one comes to it from the iconodul-istic side. Looking back on my own Roman Catholic schooling, and the place of statues and holy pictures in the religious devotions of that milieu, I realize that once sacramental awareness develops, it is not always easily confined to the matter of the theological sacraments themselves. The beheading of the statues in the Lady Chapel at Ely, which I visited at the age of eleven, seemed a shocking circumstance whose motivation was totally incomprehensible, even allowing for the fact that it was the work of Protestants, and the Old Testament, which might have brought the dawn of understanding, was, of course, no part of an ordinary Catholic education at that time. In short, the author of Charlemagne’s Libri Carolini would have found much upon which to make adverse comment in me, my fellows, and the monks who taught us. With the first artistic love of my student days, which was Romanesque sculpture, came an awareness of the voices and practice of those great medieval Protestants, the Cistercians. But only in the later encounter with Charlemagne was I forced to listen seriously to the moral and theological arguments against the unbridled use of figurai art in the service of the Church.
Correction to: Curriculum, culture, and Catholic education: a Queensland perspective
