Catholicism is the heart of every great artistic achievement, for the simple reason that truth is the subject matter of great art and Catholicism is truth. Great art is the one earthly immortality, the one way in which the soul may live on earth after death. Long ago Plato told us, "Books are the immortal sons defying their sires." St. Thomas, who built his philosophy of the beautiful on the teachings of Aristotle, tells us that the reason for the continuance of great art is its power to give mental pleasure, no matter how often the mind comes back to it.

Books that live have in them this power to give pleasure to the mind. In every great book, no matter how purely emotional it may seem to be, is that something in which the mind rests. This rest of the mind is not a simple inertia or sleep; it is rather an active feeding of the mind, exemplified in poor fashion by the sleep during which the body rebuilds its energy. Just as great books feed the mind on good food, so do evil books give the mind small doses of poison. Though the human body can get rid of small doses of poison the mind cannot do so, for it has a fatal power of storing everything that enters it in the subconscious.

In an issue of The Bookman I read of an old man who said that he never reads anything except catalogues because he considers reading a waste of time. Life, according to him, is too full to allow time for reading. Though it is true that the development of the mind is aided by the study of other people, though it is true that we become cultured by association with cultured people, it is rather stupid to think such association should be confined to those immediately about us. Culture may be secured by association with the great ones of the past, and the only means to such association is books. In books we find the intimate stories of some of the greatest people who have graced the earth by living on it, for example, the saints of God. Shutting oneself off from the cares and distractions of daily living, in the company of the saints, is without doubt the highest kind of cultural pursuit.

From "The Fine Arts of Reading and Writing" in Certitudes by Sister M. Eileen (New York: D. Appleton & Co, 1927)