That there has been a tension in the past half century about the place of popular devotions in the Church cannot be denied. One of my common illustrations of that tension has been the demise of the novena. That popular devotion, under various patronages (e.g., the Miraculous Medal, St. Jude, Our Lady of Perpetual Help) was going strong in many parishes in the 1960s. By the 1980s, it had largely disappeared, in no small measure, I would assert, because pastors—with some strange reading of “Vatican II”—decided they did not fit. One might say a similar thing about parish Holy Hours which, happily, have seen a renaissance.

But this essay is not intended to relitigate history. I’ve decided to write about this topic rather because I think there is a larger problem in the background: what I would call the “flattening of time.” Our civil life has grown so isolated, so “autonomous,” so bereft of shared common understandings of our history, and so technical that communal historico-cultural celebrations and contact with nature grows ever rarer. Consider, for example, the nine federal holidays legally observed in the United States. How many still have some element of communal celebration? Fourth of July fireworks? Maybe a Memorial or Veterans’ Day parade? What do we do as a people to celebrate Washington’s Birthday (which is its legal name, even though it’s been rechristened “Presidents’ Day”)? One—the C-word on December 25—doesn’t even speak its name loudly for fear some of the community might be offended.

Likewise, while our society has grown increasingly technical and automated, its contact with the flow of the seasons, i.e., the flow of time, has diminished. Fall, for example, once upon a time also kindled thoughts about the movement of human life inexorably towards an individual’s end: as the poet John Greenleaf Whittier observed, unlike the year, man’s seasons are linear, not cyclical.

The marginalization of Sunday and its substitution by the “weekend” is perhaps the greatest cause in the flattening of time. The distinctive character of Sunday has been largely lost, even in Christian circles, replaced in common culture by a bleached-out version of “down days” (Saturday and Sunday) distinguished not so much for what they are in themselves as in how they differ from “workdays.”

Finally, the hold of even long-held ecclesiastical traditions, e.g., associations of November with the holy souls, May and October with Mary, June with the Sacred Heart, grow more tenuous. How many parishes do much to observe November as a month of prayer for the Holy Souls as opposed, say, to the still commonplace “novena” in its first nine days? How many use the theme of November to address other issues of human mortality, such as making a will, planning one’s funeral, or providing for one’s own post-mortem spiritual welfare by, e.g., reserving the celebration of Gregorian Masses?

Flat-out Bored

I focus on this “flattening” of time because I claim it contributes to the psychological difficulties of our era. Bereft of traditions and with an increasingly attenuated communal engagement in celebration (and penance), moderns suffer from an ennui by which their experience of time is shorn of any meaning other than its passing, passing from one nondescript day to another.

French theologian Helen Bricourt calls on Catholics to celebrate the liturgical year as “another signification of time,” one that “introduces a porosity between the present life and eternal life, and teaches the baptized how to live.”

That’s important, because the contemporary flattened sense of time really does not grapple with the transcendent. Mark Bauerlein would further argue (correctly, I believe) that the screen-centric culture in which we have raised generations since the turn of the century has only reinforced that immersion in the immanent. Our times are not only immanently focused but almost impermeable to anything beyond the immanent. To the extent modern secular American life even acknowledges the transcendent, it relegates it agnostically to the sphere of the private, individual pursuit. It takes a village to inculcate the community’s values, but the lone individual is expected to answer the great existential questions all by his lonesome.

And make no mistake about it: those existential questions perdure because human beings constantly find themselves unsatisfied by the best the immanent has to offer. Recovering a sense of the liturgical year, therefore, is vital, especially since our liturgical year is sacramental and sacramentality engages the whole person, body and soul, in ways our gnostic, anti-corporeal cultural ethos does not.

Complementarity of the Texts

But I started this essay with a discussion of popular devotions, not the liturgical year. I did that deliberately because I also believe recovery of popular devotions is vital to breaking the flattened sense of time through recovery of the notion of celebration.

Yes, the liturgical year is celebratory and, yes, its annual cycle renews human awareness of the great events of salvation history. But the liturgical year is also, in one sense, artificial. It is a calendrical construct intended regularly to survey the flow of salvation history, one whose antiquity has “fixed” certain times of the year, e.g., December and Christmas.

But the liturgical year alone is, in my judgment, insufficient to address modern man’s time needs. That’s not to undervalue the liturgical year but to set it in perspective. Let me draw an analogy. Back in college, we were introduced to the Liturgy of the Hours and communally prayed Morning and Evening Prayer. But one of the wisest counsels I heard back then was from one of our faculty members, Msgr. Zdzisław Peszkowski, who warned us against allowing liturgical prayer to subsume the whole of our prayer lives. If we did not engage in our own prayer, both private (e.g., what was going on in our lives) and traditional (e.g., the Rosary), we ran the danger of a formalized but atrophied spiritual life. Liturgical and private/popular prayer go together and complement each other. So does the liturgical year and popular devotions.

Popular devotions introduce notes into our spirituality that are absent or underrepresented in the liturgical year. Examples:

Marian devotions. The popular devotion of associating May and October with the Blessed Virgin Mary comes from the Church’s Tradition. It serves to reaccentuate the Marian tradition in Catholic spirituality. That tradition is not alien to Scripture or the liturgical year, but neither is it systematically expounded over an extended period of time. A month-long praying of the Rosary at a separate church service or after Mass serves to reinforce that Marian character of our spiritual tradition—a tradition rooted in Christ’s own gift of his mother from the Cross—in ways that the liturgical year just does not do.

To say that the liturgical year alone should be the focus of our ecclesiastical celebrations, therefore, is to lose that focus and, arguably, one of the reasons we lost it in the post-Vatican II era. Let me give an example. Again, back in college, Wednesday nights were reserved for Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament, which began around 6:45 (right after Evening Prayer) and continued until 10:00 (when evening classes ended). Back in October 1980, my class wanted to conclude the evening by praying the Rosary before the Blessed Sacrament starting at 9:30, which would have concluded by that time for Benediction when anybody who had just finished class could then join. But one of our professors reamed us out with the argument, “You’re confusing your Christological and your Mariological mysteries” as well as impermissibly mixing devotions, so he forbade us from continuing. Looking back, I can only say that was an example of the callow post-Vatican II “theology” that seemed incapable of holding two thoughts simultaneously. I mention it not just because of the prejudice it showed towards popular devotions but also because one hears a variant of this mindset today when some liturgists grouse about the resurgence of Eucharistic devotion outside Mass. “Jesus said ‘take and eat,’ not ‘take and look,’” another slogan the theological equivalent of being challenged to walk and chew gum at the same time.

November. A long tradition treats November as the month of the Holy Souls. That theme is not alien to the liturgy of the time: by the time we reach November, the lectionary has typically assumed a decidedly eschatological character. But neither is it specifically focused on the Catholic tradition of prayer for the dead, which has a long history in the Church although one that, in our modern times, seems to have gone into eclipse. Yes, we’re treated to a first reading from Maccabees about prayer for the dead on a November Sunday in one of the three years of the lectionary cycle, but is that enough to sustain consciousness of the Catholic tradition and doctrine of the “communion of the saints”? And does not the very “texture” of November in the natural year (remember, as Catholics we affirm “grace builds on nature”) cause us to reflect on the generally neglected question of our own mortality? Who am I and where am I going? What happens to me when I die? What has happened to all those whom I’ve known who have died? These are the kinds of questions that break the flatness of our immersion in the here and now. They cannot be left to the hope that somebody might infer them from the eschatological bent of some Sunday readings.

Let’s even ask a basic question. Many parishes still announce before or during Mass, “This Mass is offered for the soul of….” Every Mass is an offering for the living and the dead, but our faith also has the doctrinal conviction and tradition of the efficacy of suffrages for the dead. That’s true of Masses even outside November. But apart from the “Holy Souls” focus of November and the popular piety associated with it, how does one reinforce and pass on that awareness that “it is a holy and wholesome thought to pray [and offer Mass for] the dead?” If Pew surprised the bishops about the confusion of Eucharistic belief among Catholics, I challenge the liturgical purist to ask a sampling of average Catholics to explain why we “offer Mass for the soul of….” The answers (if you get them) may surprise you.

Traditions associated with the saints. Popular devotions that also become communal celebrations (and that is not a bad thing—faith should affect a culture) more often emerge from feasts of saints rather than the liturgical year. As a graduate student at Fordham University, New York City, which abutted Little Italy in the Bronx, I witnessed the annual festa of Our Lady of Mount Carmel in July. Sure, it had acquired questionable associations (e.g., gambling connected with the street festival), but its core remained religious, assembling a community and attracting others to it in ways few other activities do in our modern world. The feast was typically counted down to by the long-lost tradition of “novena,” not unlike, say, many parishes’ celebrations of the Feast of St. Anthony. These are good and healthy traditions but not parts of the liturgical year. Should those babies be thrown out with the liturgical bathwater?

On the other hand, reflecting on the nexus to liturgy, perhaps we should ask ourselves whether the various parish festivals or “carnivals” that proliferate particularly in the summertime and independently of patronal feasts need better to be connected to the liturgy. By the very fact it happens on church property, it seems a parish “carnival” should be more than just a fundraising event that happens to be at St. James. It would be good if, in imitation of parish festivals I see at various Orthodox churches, these events at least include a “visit” and “explanation” of the church building for those interested. Even better would be some kind of service—ideally a Mass—held during the festivities. After all, shouldn’t the Eucharist be the heart of celebration?

Tradition and Scripture

I make all these points in conjunction with the 2001 Congregation for Divine Worship and Discipline of the Sacraments’ “Directory on Popular Piety and the Liturgy: Principles and Guidelines.” The document made a welcomed appearance in helping to recover popular devotions after many years of their deliberate neglect, ostensibly in the name of the Second Vatican Council and its principles. It rightly calls for a renewal of those devotions and a cleansing of accretions to them that detract from them.

But I still sense the heavy hand of the “liturgical establishment” in the document, trying to wedge all popular piety into the Procrustean bed of the liturgy and especially the liturgical year. There no doubt needs to be a nexus between them. But I would argue the relationship might better be considered along the lines of how we understand Tradition and Scripture. Yes, there is one source of Revelation, not two: Tradition is not independent of Scripture—nor is Scripture independent of Tradition. Together they present God’s revelation to his people. Indeed, not only did Tradition formulate the authoritative canon of the Scripture but it also provides the working out of the insights of Scripture, even those sometimes only contained in germ in Scripture, through the dynamic living history of the Church led by the Holy Spirit. In that sense, Tradition does not add to Scripture but expostulates it.

One might say the same thing about the relationship of popular piety and the liturgical year. As exposition of the Paschal Mystery, the liturgical year sets the foundation. But, in the living Church guided by the Holy Spirit and his grace, popular piety has expostulated aspects of the Paschal Mystery, seen in the Church’s doctrines, the lives of its saints, and the lived prayer experience of her faithful, over time in ways that should be concordant with the liturgical year.

These are not just word arguments. They recognize the richer texture that the nexus to the liturgical year can provide to popular devotion, one that a too-literal understanding fails to articulate to its fulness, to the loss not just of the Church but of modern man caught in what Jacques Maritain pejoratively called “the Minotaur of Immanence.”