The beauty of church, from inside out

At Mass last Sunday, the sun of an autumn morning was pouring through the stained-glass windows. Its rays bathed the altar in glorious light as the Eucharistic prayer began. The altarpiece was adorned with pink roses that beautifully contrasted the white marble and its statue of St. Cecilia. My wife leaned over and whispered in my ear, “It’s the prettiest church in the world.” 

I found myself later reflecting on her love expressed in that moment. It is a love that I share. Not simply for the Church as the people of God, or love for the parish of St. Cecilia – but the literal church building. I think that love of the sacred is not just a love of people, or community, or time, but also the love of space. Our church is a sacred space – the prettiest in the world.

It is the prettiest church in the world because of the time and love that we have devoted to it in our faith journey. Beauty is not mere decoration. It may not be the most aesthetically beautiful church in the world, or even in the diocese, but our unique relationship with it makes it so. Thinking about this reminded me of the Little Prince and his love for his rose. In Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s classic story, the Little Prince comes across a garden filled with 5,000 ordinary roses just like his. This makes him deeply sad, as his rose had claimed she was the only one of her kind. A later encounter with the wise fox opens his eyes. The fox tells him, “It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.”

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It is the time we have ‘wasted’ there that makes St. Cecilia the prettiest. Think of your own church and all the hours you have spent there. What aspects of the building come to mind that are special to you? Maybe it is the particular feel of the wooden pews and how they are arranged. Perhaps it is a particular statue or image in the sanctuary. Maybe it is the warm feeling you get when you walk down the familiar steps to the church basement for Coffee Sunday. There a million little things that go into the creation of a church building and our experience of it. What do you see when you close your own eyes? 

One thing I can promise you – so long as your church continues to nurture your spiritual life, it will get prettier and prettier with time. St. Cecilia has been our parish for 16 years. It doesn’t mean things have to stay the same. If we love our church buildings, we will also want to care for them. We will want to renew them as they age and inevitably breakdown. In this sense, the church building is a physical image of the living community that it contains. We recently renovated our church basement, and it definitely looks and smells better now (especially today since it was a Pizza Sunday when the parish enjoys Maria’s amazing pizza for lunch after Mass).

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This all brings about an interesting proposal: every church in the world is the prettiest church – as long as there is even one person who loves it. Through my now almost 20 years working for Development & Peace – Caritas Canada, I have been in A LOT of Churches – mostly here in Canada but also all over the world. It gives me a great amount of pleasure to think that they are, each and everyone of them, the prettiest church in the world. What a gift it would be to see all these sacred spaces through the eyes of those who love and care for them so dearly. 

Perhaps the only who can truly grasp this gift is our Lord himself. It is in the prettiest Church in the world - thousands upon thousands of them in every time zone all around the globe - that Jesus offers himself to us again and again and again. In The Spirit of the Liturgy, Pope Benedict XVI (then Cardinal Ratzinger) wrote, “The church building is intended to be a place of prayer and of the presence of God, and thus a place where Heaven is opened up to us.” It certainly felt like heaven opened up to us this morning. I hope all of you who read this feel the same about your churches too.

(Stocking is Deputy Director of Public Awareness & Engagement, Ontario and Atlantic Regions, for Development and Peace.)

A version of this article appeared in the October 25, 2026 issue of The Catholic Register with the headline "The beauty of church, from inside out".