“The face of my Son must shine in the Church” (Inner Word).
“He who has seen me has seen the Father” (Jn 14:9) – Jesus tells Philip when he asks Him: “Show us the Father” (v. 8).
Today too, our Father wants to be known through His Son. In a special way, the face of Jesus must shine in the Church, that is, in us who have been baptized into Christ and who earnestly seek to follow His ways. For this to happen, the Church must recover all the beauty that our Father has given her. But it is precisely this beauty that is in danger of being lost to the extent that the Church becomes worldly and is infected by the spirit of the world.
Just as God made Himself like us and took on our human condition, so He wants us to share in His divine nature and restore that image in which the Father created us.
People in the world must be attracted by the spiritual beauty of the Church: by the unchanging beauty of the truth she proclaims, by the beauty of the virtues that must become visible in our lives, and by the fruits of the Spirit that must mature in us.
But when the proclamation begins to revolve more around the things of this world than around the things of heaven, when the liturgy of the Church is no longer a reflection of the heavenly Church, when the sacred music that should resound in her is replaced by banal songs, when new temples are built according to the criterion of the practical rather than the beautiful and fall into the distortions of modern art, then it is high time for a true renewal of our Holy Church, so that our Heavenly Father and also mankind may see the divine face of Jesus reflected in her.