Parish Life
Popular devotions have enjoyed a renaissance. Public prayers to Mary, pilgrimages to apparition sites, the use of sacred objects, prayer before religious images, perpetual exposition of the Blessed Sacrament, the rosary, and a host of other customs have found their way back into mainstream Catholic life.
Soon after the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), the customs that are generally called “popular devotions” lost their grip on Catholic piety. The accessibility of a liturgy translated into the vernacular and trimmed of its arcane details as well as the breakdown of the ethnic groups that sustained many of these customs gradually pushed devotions out of the center of Catholic parish life.
Now they seem to have moved back. No statistical studies bear this out, but observation and anecdotal evidence certainly suggest that a grass-roots movement -- a movement of those largely born after the council -- is breathing new life into these old forms.
This trend raises questions not only about the future of public prayer but also about the future of the church. What does it mean that so many Catholics seek sustenance in customs that only recently were seen as old-fashioned and essentially dead?
From the beginning, Christianity has wrestled with what to do in the face of popular religious customs that are not part of the official liturgy. In most cases, the church has made the best of the situation. It has, for example, embraced a remarkable number of pre-Christian feasts and seasons, customs and structures, with only minimal alteration. It has also regularly embraced movements that have spontaneously arisen among believers, like the charismatic renewal. Still, the embrace has often been hesitant and half-hearted, and in the background tension has smoldered and often flared.
The popular devotions that re-emerge today are kindling just such tension. They fly in the face of a conventional wisdom that deems devotional rites inferior to the liturgy if not dangerous for the church.
In the middle of the last century, for example, a group of scholars and pastors, first in Europe and then in the United States, launched a campaign against non-liturgical popular devotions. This campaign was but one facet of an extensive and ambitious process that came to be called the Liturgical Movement. Despite its name, this movement was not essentially concerned with the liturgy. Its ultimate focus was social reform.
The members of the Liturgical Movement held that in the Catholic liturgy properly celebrated, the church acts as one unified body, and by so acting it can learn to be a body. If the church learns to be a body, it will have undone the lessons it learned from the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution -- forces that they thought dehumanized society -- and will have become a force for genuine social change. As a significant social force, the liturgy would lead the world back from the brink of social chaos and move it once again toward human dignity. The reformers believed the liturgy could change the world, and that devotions had precisely the opposite effect, since they were not acts of the body of Christ as a whole.
This thinking slowly gained ground in the church and prevailed at the Second Vatican Council.
In 1975, well after popular devotions had slipped into the shadows of church life, liturgist Carl Dehne examined why they had once appealed to so many Catholics. He concluded that their appeal came from the interweaving of a number of characteristics. The devotional rites were expressive, rather than educational. They were relationship-centered, rather than theme- or idea-centered. They were Christ-centered, not human-centered. They were ceremonial rather than heady, and relatively unvarying from season to season.
These qualities gave the rites and customs their tremendous appeal. The stations of the cross provide a good example. The stations gave believers an opportunity to express their feelings related to the passion and to forge a relationship with Christ, upon whom the entire rite focused. The rite was a repeating circle of commemoration, adoration, meditation and petition. The series of prayer circles accompanied a ceremonial movement of the entire assembly or at least of the ministers. The 14 markers, the prayers, the music and the gestures were unvarying, no matter the day or season.
Today, as these sorts of devotions move again, if only tentatively, onto center stage, pastors and liturgists often critique the trend and its champions quite negatively. They see an unhealthy sentimentality at work; a naive nostalgia; a self-centered piety; and even a neurosis that desperately grasps at certainty in a world so transitory and unsure.
Church professionals are wise to monitor these developments, especially if they threaten to disrupt the parish. Still, a negative judgment, both of the devotions and the devotees, is not necessarily warranted. This apparent movement backward may actually be a sign of good religious instincts and a thirst for spiritual nourishment that is otherwise not available.
Within the last decade a number of critics have asked whether the Vatican II-inspired liturgy is actually a “renewed” liturgy. Even the most skeptical agree that great strides have been made. But they agree, too, that all is not well in the liturgy today. A sampling of commentators across the church’s spectrum, from Pope Benedict XVI to Matthew Fox, reveals a remarkable agreement about the shortcomings of contemporary liturgical prayer:
- It focuses far too much on human beings and far too little on God in whom human life unfolds.
- It does not effectively invite people into relationship with God, others and creation.
- It is heady rather than emotional, sedentary rather than embodied.
- It ignores the negative aspects of life and denies people a context in which to express how it feels to be human.
Note that what these various commentators point out as shortcomings of modern liturgy are counterbalanced by the strengths Dehne saw in the devotions.
Pastors must, of course, cast a discerning eye on devotional customs, whether old or new, that arise or re-emerge in the church. But they must also submit to the scrutiny of these very customs. Just as the Liturgical Movement sought to redirect popular customs and rites that had gone off course, popular movements sometimes steer official programs and policies aright.
When Juan Diego, a poor Mexican, claimed to have been visited by the Mother of God, the official church stood in harsh judgment. Now, devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe judges us, calling us to care for the disenfranchised and the foreigner. As we stand in judgment of the devotions that claim the loyalty of believers now, what is the judgment they pass on us and on the choices we make in the ongoing renewal of the church’s prayer?
Patrick Malloy teaches at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. This essay has been edited and is reprinted from Celebration, NCR’s sister publication.
