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We must contend against the strongest imaginable combination of prejudices and superstitions. These are of two sorts. There is first, the heritage of ignorance and fear from the dark ages of the sixteenth century. I am speaking of non-Catholic Christianity. Ignorance of authentic history, instigated by protagonists of propaganda; fear of beauty, because all that we now have in Christian art was engendered and formulated by and through Catholicism; fear that the acceptance of beauty means that awful thing — 'surrender to superstition.' It is fear that lies at the root of the matter, as it does in so many other fields of mental activity." So speaks Ralph Adams Cram, who, as I have said, is not a Catholic, but who thus pleads with his fellow Protestants to return to the Catholic wisdom their forefathers so mistakenly abandoned.

This is SO good that I snipped out a small section in case some folks shy away from wading through it all.

I had to struggle with this exact question in my journey.