Why artists choose Catholicism

To encounter a priest at an artist's garden party in Brooklyn seemed like a very strange thing in the spring of 2022. The artist — the painter and writer Veronika Sheer, widow of the abstract expressionist painter Ron Gorchov — was a Jewish convert to Catholicism, drawn in years before by a sudden insight while contemplating a Giotto fresco. But her typical guest, balancing their wine and cheese on tippy little tables among the willow fronds and tulips, was young, eccentric, and non-religious: painters wildly pattern-matching their vintage clothes, genderqueer women in Carhartt work gear, or men with painted nails. The priest, Father Paul Anel, turned out to have a special mission to artists, which made it only slightly less strange. "Artists are seekers," he told me, "and often they are troubled, and have experienced a lot of suffering; the Church should reach out to them."