Two weeks ago, celebrities arrived at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as they do each year, adorned in meticulously-designed and often curious artistic pieces to fit the theme of the Met Gala, an annual fashion event which benefits the Met’s Costume Institute. This year’s theme? “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination.”

This week, some Catholics continue to condemn the Vatican-approved event as offensive, mocking, and even “blasphemous.” Uneasy with such outfits as Rihanna’s papal miter and short dress, they did what has become a classic gut reaction: they took to the Internet.

By now, the Twitter storm has slowed down and, one would hope, people have taken the time to more carefully contemplate the meaning of a reunion of Catholic Church history and contemporary high fashion. But some religious news sources continue to criticize the event. So what’s the real answer here?

Actually, linking fashion and Catholicism makes a lot of sense. The Catholic Church has never had a problem with the use of image. Look at any old church, basilica, or cathedral. Look at the statues and art adorning Catholic sites. Look at the countless paintings done in the name of the Catholic church or the faith it preaches.

In essence, Catholicism has traditionally been artistic. As the Cardinal Archbishop of New York himself proclaimed, the Catholic imagination comes down to truth, goodness, and beauty. Fashion, as an art form, plays with notions of truth and goodness through its exploration of the beautiful. It allows us to explore not only natural beauty which the Catholic church would place in God’s hands, but also the beauty which human beings have the ability to envision and create.

Yes, create. If, as the Church suggests, people are made in God’s image and likeness, perhaps it follows that we should be given the agency to create beauty ourselves. If anything, it does God more justice to recognize how beautiful it is that he gave us the ability to create more beauty. This idea that God could have empowered us rather than only imposing one idea of beauty is one which matches the idea of our free will. In this way, art- including fashion- could be seen as a way of acting out our identity as beings created in God’s likeness. To place this art on our bodies takes this concept even further by tangibly linking our own creation of beauty with God’s creation of us.

Taking this one step further, the fact that these celebrities may have accentuated the shape of their own bodies right next to their creative accentuation of Catholic images actually demonstrates a new kind of respect for both God’s creation and human creation at once. This juxtaposition is powerful and multiplies the beauty.

The Church’s collaboration with contemporary fashion icons and ideas shows a move toward the acceptance of ever-expanding theological ideas as well as the acceptance of people with new kinds of interests and ways of life. Truly, broadening acceptance is something the Church always needs to work on (in more ways than one).

Beauty is not pre-determined. Beauty is dynamic and we create it. If the Church is ever to move forward, it must allow human beings more space to create, change, and transcend current ideas.

Fashion is the first step toward a Church that is more inclusive, dynamic, and empowering of human individuals.