Beauty as Empty Aesthetic: The Spiritual Vacuum of EWTN’s Latest Production
Catholic News Agency reports (December 5, 2025) on EWTN Studios’ collaboration with actor David Henrie to produce “Seeking Beauty,” a documentary series allegedly exploring Italian culture and art as pathways to the divine. The marketing materials promise an examination of “physical beauty” and “spiritual richness” through visits to Roman landmarks and art restoration workshops. Henrie claims the series reveals how “beauty is ultimately the language of the divine and a reflection of God.” EWTN Studios president Peter Gagnon boasts this production continues their “legacy of innovative Catholic media” that supposedly inspires transformation.
The Deception of Beauty Divorced from Dogma
This venture exemplifies the neo-modernist reductio of Catholic tradition to aesthetic experience. Pius XI’s encyclical Quas Primas establishes that true beauty flows from Christ’s social kingship: “When once men recognize, both in private and in public life, that Christ is King, society will at last receive the great blessings of real liberty, well-ordered discipline, peace and harmony” (Quas Primas, §19). The series’ promotional materials conspicuously omit any reference to the unbloody renewal of Calvary’s Sacrifice occurring daily in traditional Masses across Italy or the Church’s doctrinal condemnation of religious indifferentism.
Henrie’s breathless account of Caravaggio’s “human” errors reveals the project’s theological bankruptcy. The Council of Trent decreed: “If anyone says that in… sacred images… the mysteries of our redemption should not be taught and confirmed, let him be anathema” (Session 25). Yet here, sacred art becomes mere psychological artifact rather than sacramentals elevating souls to supernatural realities. This naturalistic approach echoes Modernist propositions condemned in Lamentabili Sane: “The dogmas which the Church proposes as revealed are not truths fallen from heaven, but a kind of interpretation of religious facts which the human mind has laboriously found” (Proposition 22).
EWTN’s Complicity in the Neo-Church’s Apostasy
The press release’s claim that EWTN maintains a “legacy of innovative Catholic media” constitutes historical revisionism. Founded during the conciliar revolution, this network consistently legitimizes the Vatican II sect’s destruction of Catholic worship. While occasionally permitting traditional voices airtime, EWTN fundamentally operates as propaganda arm for the counterfeit church in Rome – a fact proven by their platforming of “papal” events and Novus Ordo liturgies.
Henrie’s production company Novo Inspire Studios exemplifies the ecclesial imposture infesting media ventures. Their stated goal of creating “content that the whole family can enjoy” reduces Catholicism to bourgeois entertainment, ignoring Pius XI’s warning: “The Church… demands full freedom and independence from secular authority… She cannot depend on anyone’s will” (Quas Primas, §32). True Catholic art must confront the world with the scandal of the Cross, not offer palatable “faith-inspired content” indistinguishable from secular programming.
The Masonic Roots of Aesthetic Modernism
The series’ thematic focus on Italy’s “spiritual richness” while ignoring the Roman Church’s current occupation by antipopes exposes its fundamentally anti-Catholic agenda. Henrie’s pilgrimage sites – St. Peter’s Basilica, Caravaggio exhibits – function as empty signifiers in a post-conciliar Disneyland, where beauty becomes aesthetic commodity rather than sacramental reality. This aligns perfectly with Masonic strategy outlined in the False Fatima Apparitions file: “Stage 3 (1958-2000): Takeover of the narrative by modernists, concealment of the Third Secret, ecumenical reinterpretation”.
When Henrie marvels that Renaissance artists “were struggling with the same things that I struggle with,” he inadvertently reveals the series’ anthropocentric heresy. True Catholic art directs viewers ad Deum, not ad hominem. The Syllabus of Errors condemns precisely this inversion: “Philosophy is to be treated without taking any account of supernatural revelation” (Proposition 14). By reducing divine transcendence to humanistic self-reflection, the production commits the modernist error condemned by St. Pius X: “Revelation was merely man’s self-awareness of his relationship to God” (Lamentabili Sane, Proposition 20).
Silence on the Roman Church’s True Glory
Most damning is the documentary’s utter neglect of pre-1958 Catholic Italy – the land that produced saints like Philip Neri, Catherine of Siena, and Pius V who defended Christendom at Lepanto. Instead, viewers receive a religiously neutered “culture” divorced from the Roman Catechism, Eucharistic processions, and Forty Hours devotions. The series’ Spain-focused second season proves its alignment with the Bergoglian agenda of Hispanicizing the Church to erase Roman tradition.
True beauty resides not in frescoes or architecture but in the unchanging Mass of Ages. As Pius XII taught: “The worship rendered by the Church to God must be in its entirety interior and exterior” (Mediator Dei, §24). EWTN’s aesthetic tourism substitutes sentimentalism for sacraments, making viewers consumers rather than adorers. Until productions feature exclusively validly ordained priests offering the Tridentine Mass – rather than conciliar “clergy” desecrating sanctuaries – no media venture can claim to seek Catholic beauty.
Source:
David Henrie and EWTN Studios to release ‘Seeking Beauty’ docuseries in the new year (catholicnewsagency.com)
Date: 05.12.2025