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Is glory "beauty"? Beauty has so many definitions, I think this is a silly point to argue.

Do you think a sunset is beautful? A snow-capped mountain range? Do you thank God for creating such natural beauty? Is that paganistic? Is gold beautiful? Silver? Gems? All natural and all created by God. Are paintings beautiful? Some are. Some aren't. Paintings created to glorify God are beautiful. So too, statues created to glorify God are beautiful.

Is the stick figure drawing a child creates for you beautiful? Absolutely. It's not great art in the popular sense. It's nothing you'll see in the Louvre. But it's beautiful because a child has chosen to glorify you with his/her limited abilities. Mankind can't BEGIN to reach the kind of beauty God has awaiting us (Lord willing) in Heaven. The paintings on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel may be nothing more than stick figures to God, but they are also beautiful in His eyes because they were created to give him glory, not unlike the child and his crude drawing tacked to your refrigerator at home.

Begrudging the 'opulence' of the Sistine Chapel is akin to telling your nephew his refrigerator artwork sucks and a waste of time when he could have been doing his homework instead.

"Do you think a sunset is beautful?"

Yes, but AMAZINGLY we are warned of the very thing!

"And beware lest you raise your eyes to heaven, and when you see the sun and the moon and the stars, all the host of heaven, you be drawn away and bow down to them and serve them, things that the LORD your God has allotted to all the peoples under the whole heaven." Deut 4

"Is that paganistic?"

It can be - easily. We are idolatrous by nature. And if you don't recognize that about yourself then you don't know yourself.

"Is gold beautiful? Silver? Gems?"

Peter tells us we have things much more valuable than all that...

"knowing that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers, not with perishable things such as silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot."

"Begrudging the 'opulence' of the Sistine Chapel is akin to telling your nephew "

I am really not arguing against art. I am taking issue with the statement, "The Catholic Church, instead, offers a celebration of beauty" - with which I could agree had the author said "... Church, instead, offers a celebration of the beauty of Christ"