"Mom, Dad, Where Did all This Ugly Liturgical Art Come From?"

The people were tired of greatness, prestige and words.  They turned to this - the glorification of the ugly.  Some blame Vatican II, but the truth is it began long before that.  

There are many, more poignant examples than these two illustrated above.  

Notice the cretinous faces?

In North America the ugly in liturgical art came from - and continues to come from - St. John's Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota.  Sigh.  

The artist?  His name was Frank Kacmarcik.

He was an avant garde, never married artist from St. Paul, Minnesota.  The Benedictines of St. John's Abbey fell in love with him and later named him an "oblate." 

A strong critic of his oddball art was Vatican II peritus Monsignor R.G. Bandas, who grew up in the shadow of the Abbey in Silver Lake, Minnesota.  He had their number. 

Bandas described the modernistic productions as "pictoral horrors" and "visual blasphemies," pictured as though the saints, Christ and Mary were suffering from abject despair, elephantiasis, leprosy or a deforming arthritis, all contrary to the teachings of the liturgy that Christ "reigned triumphantly" from the cross and that the Blessed Mother is "all beautiful" (tota pulchra).