Two weeks after everybody else, I have begun thinking about what the new year holds. After a decade of convent life, my sense of time, space, and self has been so effectively remolded on the spinning pottery wheel of the liturgical year that seeing the first of January as the beginning of anything—rather than the solemnity marking the end of the Christmas Octave and the transition to the latter half of Christmastide—is something I find increasingly difficult. It’s only once I see The end of Christmastide. printed starkly at the end of the second Vespers of the Baptism of the Lord (bright red, with a full stop to boot) that I can begin to come to terms with the reality of the new chronological year.

Christmastide, and in particular the Christmas Octave, tends to be a time of relaxed discipline and increased festivity in the convent. We pray Lauds later in the morning, to give more time for personal prayer and silence, or simply for sleep; we dispense with table reading in order to enjoy each other’s conversation at meals; a sister, on leaving her cell, might find the prioress has opened a box of sweets and left on a table in a communal room. In the evenings, for those who want, there is the option of watching a film or a television show during recreation.

This Christmastide we went for something highbrow and improving (acutely necessary, one might argue, after eight solid days of letting me talk at meals) and watched episodes of the documentary series Civilisation, presented by the art historian Kenneth Clark on the B.B.C. in 1969. It’s a yearly challenge to find something that eleven women of diverse ages and cultural backgrounds will all enjoy watching together. But we were on to a winner with Civilisation, thankfully. And it turned out to be more significant in shaping my thoughts about 2026 than I might have predicted.

Kenneth Clark’s commentary on the Western world’s greatest artistic and cultural achievements included everything we wanted: analysis, appreciation, historical context, characteristically English potshots at French culture. But the episode which most struck me was the fifth, where Clark, at that time not yet a Catholic, visits the Sistine Chapel. There he expounds on Michelangelo’s scriptural frescoes, in particular those of the creation of man and the Last Judgement, as a visual commentary on the dignity of the human person. And while Clarke’s commentary is certainly very inspiring, what was most striking for me was the contrast between the Sistine Chapel which Civilisation filmed in the late sixties and the Sistine Chapel as we see it today—for Kenneth Clark is hymning the praise of frescoes which are, to the modern eye, dark and almost offensively grubby.

In 1980, just over a decade after Civilisation was filmed, the Sistine Chapel and its frescoes underwent an intensive process of conservation and restoration which took nearly fifteen years to complete. Cracks, flaking, water damage, candle-soot—all were remedied or removed, so that the intricate detail and full, vibrant color of the frescoes could be seen and appreciated. Everything Clarke says about the pre-restored frescoes in Civilisation is true, of course; that beauty was perceptible even beneath dirt and damage. But anyone who has seen Michelangelo’s Last Judgement in the years since 1994, when the chapel was re-opened to the public and the newly restored frescoes were unveiled, has seen something which Kenneth Clark could only imagine. I wondered what more he would have been able to perceive in those frescoes had he seen their dazzling human figures restored and renewed.

The unveiling of the Sistine Chapel frescoes in 1994 was marked by a Mass celebrated by Saint John Paul II. He began his homily by welcoming those who had come to “admire the marvelously restored frescoes,” and went on to describe the Sistine Chapel as “precisely—if one may say so—the sanctuary of the theology of the human body.” By “witnessing to the beauty of man created by God as male and female,” he said, the Sistine Chapel “also expresses in a certain way the hope of a world transfigured, the world inaugurated by the Risen Christ.”

This phrase “theology of the human body” is not unknown to us, of course: the Theology of the Body is the name by which we know the Pope’s extensive cycle of Wednesday audience catecheses on the nature of human love and its role in the salvific economy. That high, biblical anthropology which he presented in those catecheses is found also throughout his magisterial corpus, from his encyclical letter Redemptor hominis on the redemption of humankind, to the apostolic exhortation Familiaris consortio on the Christian family, to the apostolic letter Mulieris dignitatem on the dignity of woman.

It seems to me that the restoration of the Sistine Chapel serves as a kind of visual metaphor for that work of theological restoration which took place simultaneously in the Pope’s magisterial preaching: a restoration of our sense of the dignity of the human person, illuminating that beauty of man created male and female, brightening our hope in a world transfigured by grace. But this is also a description of the papal teaching office in its entirety. The exercise of that office restores, illuminates, and brightens a reality which we have not made ourselves, but which we have received in faith—a reality which we are then free to contemplate in the full depth of its beauty.

I can’t help but see some significance in the fact that January 2026, the beginning of the first full chronological year of Pope Leo XIV’s pontificate, also marks the beginning of a new round of restoration and preservation works in the Sistine Chapel. These new works are expected to last three months, concluding in time for Easter. As this new year of Pope Leo’s pontificate unfolds, we will benefit from the visual metaphor offered by the renovations. They remind us of the fundamental purpose of his magisterial pronouncements: These are given to us to brighten and restore our vision of ourselves as individuals made in God’s image and likeness, as the mystical Body of Christ, and as the privileged recipients of supernatural hope in a world transfigured.