ABSTRACT
In this essay, I examine the idea of the Roman Catholic churches as coordinated monuments memorializing the histories and doctrines of the church. In this way, they function to remind worshippers of the past and the values of their religion so that it has, as Anthony Appiah calls it, normative significance. In the first section, I provide a number of examples of the various devices Catholic churches employ in order to illustrate history and doctrine, and attempt to account for the way in which this contributes to discharging an essential social function, the reproduction of Catholic society. Finally, I discuss the importance of these phenomena for the philosophy of art.
