Art & Creativity Quote by Richard Morris

Strip away the incense and Richard Morris is making a hard-nosed claim about infrastructure, not just inspiration. His line doesn’t merely praise Catholicism for “supporting the arts”; it argues that the Catholic faith functioned as the operating system for Western music - the patronage network, the training pipeline, the performance venues, the calendar, the audience, the reasons to compose, the reasons to rehearse. “No great Western music” is maximalist on purpose, but the more surgical jab is “certainly no decent choral repertoire.” Morris is defending a particular kind of music-making that depends on institutions willing to sustain large ensembles over centuries, not just fund a hit.

The subtext is anxiety about modernity: in the late 19th century, sacred authority is thinning under pressure from industrial life, urban entertainment, and Protestant/Anglican habits that can prize congregational simplicity over elaborate choirs. By yoking “decency” to Catholic roots, Morris implies that aesthetic seriousness requires doctrinal seriousness - that without a theology of ritual, sacrifice, and transcendence, choral music collapses into pleasant pastime.

There’s also a quiet polemical edge. A clergyman in Victorian Britain knows he’s speaking into sectarian competition; the phrase “the truth is” performs moral certainty while pre-empting counterarguments about secular composers or non-Catholic patrons. What makes the sentence work is its audacity: it forces readers to confront how much “Western culture” was built not by lone geniuses but by liturgy, bureaucracy, and belief, even if later ages preferred to credit the concert hall over the church.