Frank Kacmarcik

Who was Frank Kacmarcik?

Frank Kacmarcik was an American designer, in later life a Benedictine Oblate, and a leader in the Liturgical Movement.

In France after the Second World War, he studied painting, religious art, and church decoration. He graduated in 1947 from the Minneapolis School of Art with a degree in painting. In 1950, he became as assistant professor of art at St. John's University in Collegeville, Minnesota, and helped establish art as a major there. Beginning in the 1950s, he often designed covers for Worship magazine, a scholarly journal of liturgical theology.

"He worked as a full-time consultant in church design, printing, and the graphic arts. In addition to becoming one of the most influential voices in church design following the Second Vatican Council, he also designed for Benziger Brothers' publishing house many of the first generation of Catholic liturgical books in English in implementation of the council's call for a vernacular liturgy. In these books, he introduced a reform toward a simpler, more legible style."

From From Seeing and Believing by Paul Philibert, O.P.,.