By Mary Baudouin
Tucked away in a corner of the lush green of the Saint Louis University campus is a tiny museum that houses a treasure dedicated to exploring the spiritual and religious dimensions of contemporary art. The Museum of Contemporary Religious Art (MOCRA) has had the mission of enhancing an ongoing dialogue between contemporary artists and the world’s faith traditions and exploring the ways that visual art can encourage and facilitate interfaith understanding.
Founded by Fr. Terrence Dempsey, SJ, then an assistant professor of art history at the university, MOCRA opened on Valentine’s Day 1993 in the magnificent former chapel of what had been the house of studies for Jesuit scholastics. In addition to its permanent collection, MOCRA has hosted a wide array of exhibitions over the past 33 years, encompassing a variety of mediums including painting, photography, print, sculpture, video, digital art and more.
Its latest exhibit – and sadly one of its last [i] – has deep roots in Catholic social teaching. To See This Place: Awakening to Our Common Home seeks to bring alive Pope Francis’ Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home through the work of three artists: Mary Mattingly, Athena LaTocha and Tyler Rai.
MOCRA Director David Brinker worked with co-curator Al Milner to create To See This Place. He believes the exhibition “delights and inspires even as it troubles and challenges.”
Brinker described his inspiration for the exhibit: “In recent years, I have pondered how themes traditionally associated with the Sacred Garden and Noah’s Ark, prime subjects of MOCRA’s interfaith outlook – creation, fertility, love, desire, fall and redemption – might find expression amid the looming climate crisis. Then I read Pope Francis’ 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’. His skillful interweaving of biblical imagery, scientific data and political, social and technological forces suggested bountiful entry points for an exhibition reflecting our environmental realities.”
In Laudato Si’, Pope Francis wrote that a scientific approach is not the only means of addressing the climate ills plaguing our planet:
Given the complexity of the ecological crisis and its multiple causes, we need to realize that solutions will not emerge from just one way of interpreting and transforming reality. Respect must also be shown for the various cultural riches of different peoples, their art and poetry, their interior life and spirituality.[ii]
The three artists featured in the MOCRA exhibit display their own personal relationships with creation, landscape and culture through moving and vastly different art.
Mary Mattingly’s works in the exhibition focus on access to clean water. Recalling experiences of drinking water contaminated with agricultural runoff, Mattingly wrote, “Having an ecological focus that responded to a place and encompassed home wasn’t a choice, but probably more of a fundamental part of how I perceive living in the world.”
The centrality of water in the world’s ecosystems is also stressed in Laudato Si’, as is the fundamental human right to clean water.[iii]
Among Tyler Rai’s contributions to the exhibition is a display of hand-dipped beeswax candles mounted on driftwood, reminiscent of “soul candles,” lit for the living or in remembrance of the dead on the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur. The threads of the candles are symbolically “imbued with prayer.” She also presents a video filmed on an ecologically fragile segment of the Chesapeake Bay as a gesture of mourning, reverence and resistance in the face of climate change. “We need the earth in order to remember our rituals – and the time to remember is now,” Rai said.
Athena LaTocha’s massive murals are influenced by her upbringing in Alaska. “[My] understanding of the land was influenced by the rugged monumentality of the terrain and the impact of the oil and gas industry upon the land,” she said.
LaTocha hopes that her art will evoke “a sense of awe, fear and the insignificance of humanity in the vastness of the universe.”
In Laudato Si’, Pope Francis also acknowledged this relationship between humans and the earth. “The earth was here before us, and it has been given to us … This implies a relationship of mutual responsibility between human beings and nature.”[iv]
Brinkley closed the exhibition notes with: “The work of Athena LaTocha, Tyler Rai and Mary Mattingly calls us to a ‘loving awareness’ of our common home. By awakening us to the particularities and interconnectedness of the spaces we inhabit, these artists help transform it into climate hope.”
For an in-depth look at the MOCRA exhibition, including photos and artist comments, visit the MOCRA website.
Mary Baudouin is the provincial assistant for justice and ecology for the Jesuits USA Central and Southern Province.
[i] As part of ongoing efforts to align resources with strategic priorities and ensure Saint Louis University’s long-term financial sustainability, the Museum of Contemporary Religious Art (MOCRA) will close in May 2026. The university will take steps to further MOCRA’s mission, including carefully preserving its permanent collection and incorporating selected works into exhibitions at the Saint Louis University Museum of Art (SLUMA).
[ii] Laudato Si’, 19
[iii] Laudato Si’, 27-31
[iv] Laudato Si’, 67
Featured photo: Installation view, To See This Place: Awakening to Our Common Home at MOCRA, 2025. Photo: Kevin Lowder.
