Fundamentalist college has major Catholic art collection

November 22, 2011

Religion News Service has drawn attention to the major sacred art collection at Bob Jones University, the fundamentalist college in South Carolina that lifted its ban on interracial dating only in 2000.

“It’s one of the best collections in the Southeast generally, and certainly in terms of Italian painting from the Renaissance through the Baroque, it is one of premier collections of Italian paintings in America, without contradiction,” said Edgar Peters Bowron of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston.

The collection was amassed by Bob Jones, Jr., who served as the university’s president from 1947 to 1971 and who, according to The New York Times, described the Catholic Church as “not another Christian denomination.” Jones added:

It is a satanic counterfeit, an ecclesiastic tyranny over the souls of men, not to bring them to salvation but to hold them bound in sin and to hurl them into eternal damnation. It is the old harlot of the Book of the Revelation--the Mother of Harlots …

She is drunk with the blood of the saints of God whom she has harassed and persecuted, imprisoned, massacred and destroyed. The monstrous abomination which is Rome has, like a vampire, fattened upon the lifeblood of men and nations. . . . Constantly changing her masks but never her nature, she has infiltrated where she could not command and adapted when she could not enforce.

 

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Further information:

• Want Catholic art? Fundamentalist Bob Jones University has it (RNS)
• The Way We Live Now: 3-12-00: Counter Culture; The New Double Standard (The New York Times)
• Bob Jones University Museum and Gallery