Sacred artist shares how Aquinas inspired her stunning work
Mexican visual artist Edith Pons, winner of the 2026 Bernini Award in Fine Art, has brought her artistic vocation together with her Catholic faith. After studying at Mexico’s La Esmeralda and later returning to faith, Pons came to see art as a way to serve God rather than a vocation she needed to abandon. Guided by classical tradition and St. Thomas Aquinas, she aims to create art that offers hope and helps people turn toward Christ. Her 2025 painting of St. Michael placed third in the Catholic Art Institute’s Sacred Art Prize, and a second painting received an honorable mention.
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Mexican artist Edith Pons says the teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas helped her bring her Catholic faith and artistic vocation together. The 2026 Bernini Award winner in Fine Art describes sacred art as a way to serve God, support worship and draw people toward beauty and faith. 1
Pons studied at Mexico’s National School of Painting, Sculpture, and Printmaking, known as La Esmeralda, and initially focused on contemporary art. After a period of distancing herself from both faith and art, she says a difficult moment in her life led her back to the Church; she later came to see her artistic vocation as another way to serve God. 1
She began exploring religious subjects around 2009, after a priest suggested she paint a religious work. For years she made copies and commissioned pieces, then began applying Aquinas’ criteria to original work in 2025, starting with St. Michael, in sepia. That painting took third place in the Catholic Art Institute’s 2025 Sacred Art Prize, while The Triumph of St. Michael received an honorable mention. 1
Pons says sacred art is made for God and intended to serve worship, helping people approach the mystery represented. She distinguishes it from religious art, which may address God or spiritual life but can be more personal or interpretive and may not be suited to liturgical use. 1
In her view, sacred art is not simply a vehicle for an artist’s personal expression; it carries a responsibility to be rooted in tradition and doctrine. Religious art, meanwhile, can still accompany people in daily life and remind them of their faith. 1
Pons argues that beauty can draw people toward spiritual questions even before they understand Church teaching intellectually. She says art can help make grace and holiness desirable and, recalling St. Hildegard of Bingen, can awaken a sense of what people were created for. 1
She describes painting her second image of the Divine Face of Christ as a formative spiritual experience. Pons now sees her art as an apostolate that extends her mission beyond Mass; she says that when her work does not have a religious subject, its purpose should be beauty. 1*
Sacred art mediates beauty as a path toward God
Sacred art can mediate beauty by drawing us beyond the visible work toward the mystery it expresses. A painting, icon, church, poem, or piece of music is not God, nor is its beauty a substitute for faith; rather, it can awaken wonder, quiet attention, and a desire for the source of beauty. The Church calls this the via pulchritudinis—the “way of beauty”—a path that can lead toward God and help deepen prayer.
Pope Benedict XVI describes the movement well:
Art is able to manifest and make visible the human need to surpass the visible, it expresses the thirst and the quest for the infinite. Indeed it resembles a door open on to the infinite, on to a beauty and a truth that go beyond the daily routine.
The image of a door matters: sacred art invites us through, but is not the destination. Christian art points beyond itself because its symbols refer to the story of God’s saving work, fulfilled in Christ. The Pontifical Council for Culture explains that Christian art draws its inspiration from the Incarnation and Redemption and can direct the beholder toward the meaning and end of human life in Jesus.
Beauty can move a person before that person can fully explain what is moving them. A soaring church may lift the gaze; sacred music may open a space for prayer; an image of Christ may hold the attention on his suffering love. Such experiences are not proofs of God in the mathematical sense. They can, however, stir the human longing for what is true, good, and more than merely useful. Benedict XVI recounts how sacred music and visual art can lead people to remember God, pray, or even turn their hearts toward him.
This is why sacred art is more than decoration. When its Christian meaning is understood, it can communicate the faith through image, colour, form, and sound, and serve as a means of evangelisation and catechesis. The Church’s cultural council calls faith-inspired images a form of Gospel proclamation and notes that Christian art can help people contemplate the mysteries of salvation.
The path is an invitation, not a guarantee. A beautiful object might attract attention without leading someone to God; beauty can also be admired solely for its technique or treated as an end in itself. The Church’s reflection on the via pulchritudinis warns that beauty can become an “idol” when the means is mistaken for the end. Christian art therefore benefits from being encountered in the light of Scripture, Tradition, and the faith that gave it meaning.
That context helps us see what an artwork is asking us to contemplate. A depiction of the Crucifixion, for example, is not merely an arrangement of forms or an evocation of sadness: it refers to Christ’s self-giving love and the hope of redemption. Sacred art can thus lead from sensory experience toward prayerful attention to the mystery it signifies. For icons, the Church’s cultural council uses sacramental language by analogy, saying that an icon can make present the mystery of the Incarnation in one of its aspects; this is an analogy, not a claim that an icon is a sacrament in the strict sense.
To say that sacred art mediates beauty, then, is to say that it can help the heart and mind pass from what is seen to the God who is not seen. Its deepest purpose is not simply to please the eye, but to serve contemplation: to make room for wonder, disclose something of the faith, and direct attention toward Christ, who is the way to God.