For many Catholics, the experience is familiar and disquieting: newly built churches that feel more like conference centres than places of worship, stripped of ornament, symbolism and the Holy. The question of ugliness in modern church architecture is often dismissed as a matter of taste or nostalgia. Yet for David Clayton, artist, educator and one of the most articulate contemporary defenders of traditional Catholic aesthetics, the issue runs far deeper. At stake is not merely style, but theology: how the Church understands worship, the human person and the relationship between beauty and truth.