The Catholics Reviving Renaissance-Style Arts Patronage

A cohort of American Catholic patrons of the arts sense the time is ripe for another Renaissance. “We need to create a culture of patronage,” Frank Hanna, the Atlanta venture capitalist and philanthropist, told me. “People commissioned great works of art for the Church. But they also gave this same beauty as gifts to those they loved, and to the communities in which they lived.”

Frank and his wife Sally are the patrons of Frank La Rocca’s Mass of the Americas, conceived by Archbishop Cordileone as a tribute to Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception and Our Lady of Guadalupe. The Mass of the Americas was performed in a number of great cathedrals and major churches before ending up No. 1 on the Billboard traditional classical music chart. On October 7, Archbishop Cordileone (as part of his project to prepare for the 500th anniversary of Our Lady of Guadalupe’s appearance) will celebrate the Mass of the Americas with a festival choir at the shrine where she appeared in 1531 outside of Mexico City.

“When I turned fifty I thought: ‘You need to have more time in your life for beauty,’” Frank told me. A lot was condensed for Frank in that word “beauty”: Reverence; co-creation with God; things that are good in themselves, not merely useful. He recalled the child in the womb he and his wife lost years ago. “In sarcasm I used to say, ‘the graveyards are full of indispensable people,’ implying that none of us really are. And then this baby we were going to have died and changed my soul. That baby was not dispensable. That baby changed my life. And I thought: If that little baby who died in his mother’s womb is not dispensable, no one is dispensable: The graveyards are indeed full of indispensable people, and they were all indispensable in their moment.”

“I feel called to support the liturgy,” Frank said. “The Mass is different from every other art form because it’s the work of God and man together that goes back two thousand years. So, this patronage of new sacred music for the Mass is attaching ourselves to something that in and of itself is timeless. On that altar is the God of the universe with angels surrounding him. We can’t see the angels but they’re surrounding him. It’s nice to have a good soundtrack to it.”

How does Frank calculate the return on his investment in the arts? Frank, who provided early financing for the company that produced the Flannery O’Connor biopic Wildcat, said, “When I saw Wildcat, I thought, ‘This is good, but it has a limited audience.’ But then so did Flannery O’Connor’s short stories. Was her work in vain because only 100,000 people read her stories in a country of 350 million people? It’s mind-boggling how many people have been influenced by Flannery O’Connor. I can name you bishops, cardinals, movie and music stars, and other artists.”

What makes a work of art significant is not that it sells many units but that it is fertile: It inspires other works of art and other great endeavors. The easily neglected first step toward a new Catholic renaissance is, therefore, not maximizing units of sales, but inspiring artists to create more and better.

“Culture and art do not work by the rules of the market, because of the incalculability of the factor of time,” Frank explained. “Really fine art doesn’t pay for itself because the significant audience for it may be spread very thinly over many years. Michelangelo couldn’t collect the fee the Vatican Museum takes from seeing the Sistine Chapel. Michelangelo needed a patron.”

He makes an analogy to another creative endeavor: “Mere money cannot compensate a mother for staying home to raise her kids. I’m a free-market guy, but there are certain things that the market doesn’t address. Either beauty has this mysterious effect on the world, or it doesn’t. If you think it does, then you say: ‘I need some of this for my soul, and it will help the souls of others.’ God has put me in a spot where I can be a patron of this beauty.” 

Colin Moran, founder of Abdiel Capital, is another data-driven investor who sees liturgy as key. “Sacred music isn’t an external decoration. Song is meant to make prayer be more than a movement of the rational will; to make prayer pleasing to us. But there is a gap between this thick nourishing stew that worship objectively is meant to be and the bloodless way Catholics today subjectively experience the Mass. A lot of that gap has to do with the fading of the Church’s musical patrimony from the liturgy,” he explained. “When you look at cathedrals in Europe, clearly what they had in mind by worship was something outside of normal experience. They had incredible expectations that have now fallen out of people’s expectations of liturgy: that it is extraordinary through the senses rather than just through abstract intellectual understanding.”

Colin founded the School of Sacred Music in New York City, assembling a first-rate choir for biweekly Vespers. “Just sitting in Vespers for half an hour on Tuesdays and Thursdays has changed my idea of how pleasing liturgy can be. Non-Catholics walk away filled with a sense of enthusiasm. It’s very different from a concert,” Colin mused. “If I hear this same music in a concert, I’m completely indifferent to it, I’m not sure why.”

Maybe it’s because a soundtrack needs a movie?

“In Manchester by the Sea, the movie’s depiction of the main character’s grief for his brother opened up Handel’s Messiah to me,” said Colin. “There is something similar going on with sacred music in the liturgy. Hearing the music as part of this story has resonances and meaning that just the sound by itself doesn’t convey.”

Pierre Ferragu, who heads up New Street Research’s global technology research team, is another Wall Street mogul who understands the combined power of music and story. His newfound role as a patron of the arts is as U.S. executive producer for the French musical Bernadette of Lourdes, a role for which he had zero experience. “I tried to resign at least a half a dozen times and every time the Holy Spirit took me by the collar back into it,” Pierre told me. “I talked to a priest friend in despair. He said, ‘I don’t know how to help you, but if you want, we can call the actor Kelsey Grammer.’” The Frasier star became U.S. co-producer. 

Pierre aims at nothing less than breaking Broadway’s stranglehold on playwriting. In 2026, Pierre plans to open with a tour through twenty-five major cities, each with a two-week run in large, two-thousand-seat theaters, creating a new national ecosystem for grace-filled theater. “One successful musical can finance a pipeline of seven musicals down the road,” he told me. “When young Catholic artists reach out to me about needing funding for theater projects, I tell them, ‘Bear with me. We’re building the infrastructure to do that.’”

For Jim Perry, co-founder of Madison Dearborn Partners, patronage of the arts means carrying on the Great Tradition, which “also encompasses the great artistic tradition of the Church,” he said. “I’ve become a big believer in Fr. Gerard Manley Hopkins’s idea that the world is charged with the grandeur of God. We’re trying to understand God, and beauty is a pathway to doing that.”

His latest patronage project is Chicago’s Athenaeum Center for Thought and Culture, which occupies part of a full city block complex built by German Catholic immigrants at the turn of the last century. Jim envisions a fully restored building housing a Catholic cultural center focused on beauty and the arts. “Are you out of your mind?” Jim’s friends ask him. But to Jim, it’s worth it: “I’ve invested a lot in the infrastructure, and in return I’ve got a community devoted to the arts and to the Catholic tradition. It’s just a contribution to the tradition.”

The poet Dana Gioia often reminds his fellow Catholic artists not to wait for the Church to lead or the culture to applaud: Make art. It’s a powerful message, but I do not think the artists can do it alone. Frank Hanna is right: We need to revive a culture of patronage of living Catholic artists.

Last July, Frank gave the Mass of the Americas to his parish in Atlanta as a forty-first anniversary gift to his wife: “We want to give gifts to those we love,” he explained. “This Mass of the Americas is beautiful. My wife is beautiful like this music. Now a diamond necklace is also beautiful. But this is different because this is also holy. And it can be shared with everyone. It’s a witness that what the Renaissance patrons of the arts did can still be done.”