Each year on February 18th we celebrate the feast day of Blessed John of Fiesole, better known as Fra Angelico, Dominican Friar and Renaissance artist. This year February 18th was Ash Wednesday. Believing that there are no coincidences with God, I noted this timing and took it to prayer. Through the gift of the Communion of Saints, what might Our Lord be offering us this Lent through the life and holiness of Fra Angelico?
“A Holy Life and Creative Virtue Harmonize with Each Other”
The Office of Readings in the Propers for the Order of Preachers (the Dominicans) has the above quote as a heading for an apostolic letter written by Pope St. John Paul II on the occasion of Blessed John’s beatification in 1982.
Lent can be seen as a time to become who God created us to be. As we turn away from sin and distraction and turn our focus toward the things that are eternal, we cooperate with our true nature and make progress in that work of becoming. The life of Blessed John is a model of how to do this. By following his model, we will give the world what God intended it to have through us. We too can live, “a holy life of creative virtue”.
John and his twin brother, Benedetto, entered religious life together at Florence around 1420. After being ordained to the priesthood John was elected to various offices and fulfilled his obligations with notable faithfulness. He was also an exemplary religious in all his observances, most notably in the application of his God-given talent to create sacred art. Throughout his life he managed to live this holy life of creative virtue in a way that inspired his contemporaries as much as his art continues to inspire us today.
Pope Eugenius IV, who called John to Rome to paint a chapel at St. Peter’s and another at the Vatican palace, noted his ability to draw people to himself, not solely because of his art, but even more so because of his humility, his piety, and his holiness of life. The gifts of art Blessed John left behind after his life of “creative virtue” continue to draw souls by their beauty toward the source of all beauty, God.
In 1955 Pope Pius XII held an exhibition of Blessed John’s paintings at the Vatican and wrote:
Freed from the popular and pious legend which depicted the fervent friar painting his saints while absorbed in unconscious ecstasy, his brush guided by supra-terrestrial beings, his individuality has now been set in its true light. This does not mean, however, that his profound religious sense, his serene and austere asceticism nourished by solid virtue, contemplation and prayer, did not exercise a determining influence on his artistic expression. Rather it provided the power and immediacy with which his art spoke to the minds of others, and, as has frequently been noted, transformed it into prayer. For he was in the habit of repeating, “whoever does the work of Christ should always remain with Christ.”
Blessed John’s work was just that: work. Through a life of saying “yes” to God and “no” to his own will and proclivities, he became who he was created to be. By doing so he gave witness to a faithful life well lived and left a legacy of sacred art to raise our hearts and minds to things that are eternal. Both his life and his art encourage us on our own journey of “yes” to God and “no” to self.
In his faithfulness to a life of prayer and work he became a willing font of what God desired to give the world through him. Had he focused on his own desires and plans the world would have been deprived of both his body of work and his witness to life in Christ.
We Were Born for This Time
We are on the cusp of a new technological revolution, one that even affects the world of art. Artificial Intelligence’s influence in the world increases at an exponential rate, so fast that most of us cannot fathom the extent of what it all means. What better time than Lent of 2026 to have a patron such as Fra Angelico, Brother Angel, to guide us. What we do with our individual spiritual lives and our specific gifts and talents matters. If we choose to use them, God can bring goodness, truth, and beauty into the world. If we choose to go our own distracted way, the world will be deprived of something God decided it needed right now.
Possibly the greatest sin of omission is NOT becoming who we were created to be. The “harmony of our creativity and holiness” expressed through our prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, in union with our specific talents, are what God has ordained for the world right now. As the Communion of Saints, we all have an important, even crucial, part to play. The more of us who choose to observe this Lent fully and nurture our talents seriously, the more of God’s grace will flow into the world.
Struggle Yields Strength
It is a struggle to become who God created us to be. How perfect for Lent! If you need encouragement think of the butterfly in its pupa stage in the chrysalis. It needs to struggle to grow strong enough to survive and fly after it finally breaks through and emerges from that chrysalis. By avoiding the struggle, we will never become, we will never fly. Lent offers the perfect turbo-boost of struggle against ourselves. This struggle will yield closeness to God as well as strength to do the work only we can do.
Perhaps the initial enthusiasm for our Lenten disciplines has waned and the road to Holy Week stretches long before us. Blessed John of Fiesole probably knew this feeling well. The prayer-fed vision of a large mural likely fueled him for days, but then the mundane work of painting, and painting and PAINTING required more than mere enthusiasm. It required discipline.
In a similar way, we are invited to say yes to our Lenten struggle. We are invited to say yes to the harmony of a creative and holy life. Let us struggle through to become who God created us to be: fonts of goodness, truth and beauty ordained for this time and place. If we choose to do so, Easter will find us remaining with Christ like Blessed John, and we will be on the way to leaving our own legacy for generations to come.
Blessed John of Fiesole, pray for us to become, through lives of harmonized holiness and creativity, for the glory of God, the blessing of His world, and for our own eternal good.
