Respecting the Peoples’ Devotions

When I was a young child in the 1940s attending Catholic school in Plaquemine, every Sunday there was a 7:30 a.m. “Children’s Mass” at St. John the Evangelist Church.  All of us would arrive half an hour early and report to the school assembly room next door to the church.  There the nuns would line us up and always ask if we had brought an English Sunday Missal to follow the Mass as the priest celebrated it in Latin.  Many of us had not brought one and were told to pray the rosary during the Mass on our beads or our fingers, if we had forgotten to bring rosaries too.  All this was normal, and we could look across the aisle and see many parents also fingering their beads.
This way to attend Mass continued until the 1960s when the first document that the Second Vatican Council had promulgated, the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy (Dec. 4, 1963),  was implemented with published altar missals in English and other modern languages.  It took a few years for full implementation.  As Father Clement J. McNaspy SJ observed in Abbot’s “The Documents of Vatican II,”  “some opposition was only to be expected; but the overwhelming majority of the faithful found the ‘new liturgy’ intelligible and authentic.”  After all the documents were promulgated, I wrote some adult education classes on them for our diocesan Office of Religious Education.  Those who attended the classes seemed overjoyed with praying the Mass in their own language.  It was an exciting time in our new diocese which had begun in 1961.
  However, it seems common to our human nature to often go too far when very positive or very negative things happen.  We were able to put away our rosaries during Mass and just listen to the Scriptures and eucharistic prayer while responding enthusiastically to the congregation’s parts like the opening prayers, Gloria, Credo, Our Father and closing prayers.  But some put away their rosaries for good, saying they were a thing of the past.  Well, fortunately, rosaries did not stay forgotten long.  

If we are to pass on our faith to our young people, we must provide them with living practices of prayer and religious experiences
of joy.

Anyone who has made a pilgrimage to Lourdes or Fatima would remember the great devotion with which huge gatherings of people still pray the rosary together and aloud.  I was also surprised and edified when, as a college chaplain at LSU, students would often ask me to lead them in a rosary before the Blessed Sacrament or accompany them in a drive across town to Our Lady of Mercy’s adoration chapel for an hour of private prayer.  They always went prepared with rosaries and prayer books.  
Perhaps I should not have been surprised.  We are talking about heaven’s most powerful lady, the woman with the moon beneath her feet and the stars above her head in the Book of Revelation; the woman whose revelation to a Mexican peasant in Guadalupe, Mexico brought about the conversion of the native people of that country; the mother of our savior to whom pagan kings brought gifts and angels sang when she gave birth to God’s son.  For good reason all generations have called her blessed.
A simple prayer in her honor that all can pray like the rosary will be used forever.
Pope Francis in his daily Mass homilies often talks about respecting devotional prayers of the people.  Some got upset two years ago when he invited native people from the Amazon jungle to the Vatican for a synod on the family.  They brought with them carvings of pregnant women and burnt some kind of incense as he prayed with them.  But Jesus always used the purest, most simple things to express God’s presence in our life – bread, wine, meals, fig trees, mud, lilies of the field, sparrows, weddings and children.  
In Latino cultures of Central and South America the sacramental nature of Catholicism is very much alive.  I remember being on a mission trip to a town in Mexico on the feast of Corpus Christi.  The entire town came to the central square with the church on one side and government offices opposite across the square.  After Mass in the church we followed the priest carrying the Eucharist in a large monstrance into the square where small altars with pictures of favorite saints and other religious symbols had been erected on each corner.  The procession stopped at each altar; the monstrance was placed on it, and with much incense and accompanied by a mariachi band we sang hymns to a beautiful Latin beat as all knelt on the paving stones of the square.  When we finally completed the fourth altar and the priest reentered the church and placed the Eucharist back in the tabernacle, a high school band with dancing cheerleaders marched around the streets bordering the square while tamales, tacos, beer and wine were brought in for a great feast.  I thought of the Gospel line where Jesus says, “And the son of man came eating and drinking.”  And added to that, a line from a great spiritual writer of the last century, Romano Guardini, “We bend our hearts with our knees.”
If we are to pass on our faith to our young people, we must provide them with living practices of prayer and religious experiences of joy.  That is difficult when Catholic school education costs so much.  Our parishes will have to provide what so many of us got from Catholic schooling.        

Father Carville  is a retired priest in the Diocese of Baton Rouge and writes on current topics for The Catholic Commentator. He can be reached at [email protected].