Signs and Wonders: Those Funny Catholic Practices May Have a Point After All

Catholic practices can provide invaluable assistance to contemporary society in recovering a sense of the sacred. I am keenly aware of how effective they can be even though I was not raised a Catholic and was never taught Catholic practices. If anything, there was a certain aversion to Catholic practices in our Protestant household. My father would mildly complain of Catholic “ritualism” even though he did not seem the least bit uncomfortable with the arcane intricacies of Masonic ceremonies. And there would be the predictable charges that Catholics prayed more to Mary than to God when one inadvertently picked up the recitation of the rosary on the radio.

Yet Catholic practices still had a way of impinging on our Protestant lives. For some strange reason, my Scottish Presbyterian mother was always very strict about not having meat on Good Friday, although I have never heard of that being characteristic of her own religious tradition. It must have derived from Catholic sources.

Although I often viewed them as superstitious as a youth, I could not help but be struck, even impressed, by many of the Catholic practices which I witnessed. There was the kid on the basketball court who made the sign of the cross before attempting the foul shot. There were the men on the streetcar in Pittsburgh who would tip their hats or cross themselves as we rode by a Catholic church. There were the Catholic secretaries and lunch room employees who would show up for work at our public school once a year with smudges of black ash on their foreheads. A most strange custom, we non-Catholics thought, but certainly an unforgettable one.

As a youth on my way to a camp in New Mexico, our entire busload of Boy Scouts had the opportunity to visit with the Archbishop of Santa Fe. His excellency received us cordially in the garden of his residence in cassock, purple sash, and gold cross. He talked with us in a most congenial, pleasant way, almost as one of the guys, when the tone of the meeting suddenly changed. The Scoutmaster barked out, “Okay, everybody on their knees—Protestant boys, too! The archbishop’s going to give us his blessing.” I remember how unspeakably odd it seemed that we would kneel down outside—right there on the grass and the dirt and the gravel. But it was a moment I’ve never forgotten as the archbishop held his left hand on his chest and traced the sign of the cross in the air with his right.

Later, as a Boy Scout counselor, I remember our camp being visited by a group of women religious. The camp director, himself a non-Catholic, called us together to give us the ground rules. Shirts were to be worn all day. The women were to be addressed, “Yes, Sister,” and “No, Sister,” and under no circumstances were we to turn our backs on them. We were all aware that there was going to be in our midst people who were out of the ordinary, yet in such a way that not only did they not engender ridicule, they engendered reverence and respect.

In our neighborhood there was a man who had been a farmer and later became the foreman of a gas company road crew. On one occasion he invited me to a function at his church. I don’t remember what it was, but the rosary was a part of it. The rosary was, frankly, incomprehensible to me, but I do remember the interminable recitation of Hail Mary’s. “Just as my parents said,” I thought, “they pray more to Mary than to God.” Yet the incident left a very strong impression. Mill workers, ditch diggers, pipe fitters, some with work clothes on, others with ill-fitted suits, on their knees in the hot church with perspiration rolling down their faces and spreading across the backs of their shirts. I remember to this day how strange and how incredibly small the rosary looked hanging down from those massive, dirt-cracked hands.

Upon reflection it is remarkable the extent to which I as a Protestant growing up in Protestant America was exposed to Catholic practices. When I began traveling to Catholic cultures, the impact was all the greater. Statues of the Virgin over the doors of houses, adorning the outside walls of shops, tucked in niches on random street corners. Wooden and wrought-iron crucifixes on country lanes, and tiny chapels in farmers’ fields.

Innocent Abroad

When I was living in Fribourg, Switzerland, I was startled from sleep one morning with cannons exploding from the hills surrounding the old city. I discovered that it was the Feast of Corpus Christi, and the entire town was being roused for the festivities. Along the route to be taken by the Blessed Sacrament, residents of homes and proprietors of businesses had lashed green sapling trees to the fronts of the buildings. Colorful tapestries were hung from windows and flowers were heaped around outdoor altars along the route from which the Eucharistic blessings would be given.

Mass was celebrated by the bishops in one of the principal squares in town in front of the large Dominican residence. At Mass, as the consecrated Host was elevated, soldiers on the top of a neighboring building with binoculars and field radios notified the artillery on a nearby hill who fired the cannons in salute. When the chalice containing the Precious Blood was raised, the cannons acknowledged Our Lord again. When the Blessed Sacrament, in its glistening monstrance and under its huge canopy, was carried by in the bishops’ hands, Swiss guards would snap to attention with their halberds, and modern infantrymen would do the same with their assault rifles.

The mayor and other town dignitaries marched in procession with their gold chains of office hung proudly over shoulder and on chest. Men and women in religious habit marched with members of their order. All the children who had received their First Communion in the preceding year marched in procession. All children confirmed in the preceding year marched in procession. All adults received into the Church in the preceding year marched in procession. Marching bands playing solemn, sober music swayed slowly back and forth as they proceeded with great dignity along the route. Young girls in white dresses spread flower petals in the path of the approaching Sacrament while two altar boys carrying thuribles alternated walking backwards as they incensed the Sacred Host without interruption. This was no expression of private belief. This was the profession of faith of a people, of a culture.

My first visit to Mexico fell between December 8 and 12; in other words, between the great Marian feasts of the Immaculate Conception and Guadalupe. As I was being driven to the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, I was amazed to see literally thousands of people streaming along the tree-lined boulevard between the streets leading up to and away from the church grounds. People were carrying colorful banners and huge floral depictions of the Virgin. Others had arms full of flowers. Many of them sang hymns as they went.

As I witnessed this I remembered the terrible persecution of the Church in Mexico 60 years earlier and the anti-Catholic laws still on the books which stripped priests and religious of their civil rights and which forbade the Church from owning property. Aware of the incongruity of the scene before my eyes with the political reality of Mexico, I said to the driver, “I thought there was a law in Mexico against public manifestations of religion.”

“Oh, si, senor. There is still a law against it.”

“Well, then,” I asked, “how is it that these processions are permitted?” He seemed incredulous at my question. “But, senor, this is all for Our Lady of Guadalupe!”—as though, because of her great importance, she and the present activities fell entirely outside the parameters of the law.

Even after a dozen years of being a Catholic I encounter practices that are totally new to me. After moving recently to Philadelphia, two ladies in our office were telling me of their trip to the New Jersey shore the preceding day, August 15. They were laughing about their stroll along the beach and of their struggles to remove shoes and stockings to wade in the ocean up to their ankles. Once they had made it into the water, one expressed her dismay that, after all their efforts, the water may not have been blessed yet. Not to worry, responded the other. Surely by then some priest along the shore had blessed the water. When I enquired what in the world they were referring to, they were dumfounded that I did not know about the blessing of the ocean every year on “the Holy Day.” Never having heard of the practice, I asked a local priest about it who assured me that it was a custom of long standing. He had an elderly aunt who spent every summer at the shore, but who never went in the water except on August 15. “There is,” he said, “a cure in the waters on that day.” I have no idea of the origin of the custom. It may be linked to Mary’s title of “Stella Maris.” But Catholic practices have a way of becoming incorporated into virtually every aspect of public and private life, touching light and even silly moments as well as profound and agonizing ones.

In his autobiography, Josef Pieper tells of the dismay of his family when his schoolteacher father was called for military service during the First World War. It was a time of considerable apprehension for the family, and the moment was solemnized with Catholic practice. As Pieper recounts it:

After supper, we children were summoned to the parents’ bedroom. Ordinarily we never went there, but on this day the house was full of strangers. The only thing I remember of what took place then, is this: father blessed each of us in turn, with a great sign of the cross from forehead to breast and from shoulder to shoulder. He had never done that before. Mother leaned against his shoulder and said, in tears, “and what if you don’t come back?!”

The family of Josef Pieper was thus helped through one of the most difficult and emotion-charged moments of his childhood by adverting to a simple, ancient Catholic practice.

A number of years ago I worked for a large Mexican bank and was privileged to be immersed in a thoroughgoing Catholic culture. One of the bank executives with whom I worked was intrigued with the emerging mini-technologies. He would wear a couple of digital watches showing the time in different parts of the world. He always carried a tiny clock which could be set up on desk or table and had a built-in alarm. Another similar one was simply a pocket watch. One day we were racing along the freeway in San Diego, California, late for an eleven o’clock appointment. All of a sudden, at eleven, this banker went off with five different timepieces beeping, ringing and buzzing. Strapped in with his seat belt and speeding along the highway, he could do nothing to turn himself off, and we had to endure the racket until he was able to pull over. Obviously he felt an explanation was in order and with some embarrassment pointed out that it was time for the Angelus in Mexico City, and he had set the timepieces to remind himself to say it!

On another occasion I had eaten at the Bankers’ Club in Mexico City with this same gentleman. On the way back to the office we were discussing Mexico’s external debt. Virtually in the middle of a sentence he slipped through a door on the narrow street into a darkened sixteenth-century church, where he went down on both his knees for several minutes before the Blessed Sacrament in exposition on the altar. He then rose, walked out the door, and once on the street, picked up the discussion about Latin American debt as though nothing whatsoever had interrupted our conversation.

Catholic practices all. And other Catholics could surely add innumerable other ones. Some silly, some profound, some a source of comfort, others the source of light-hearted humor. Catholic practices make up the daily life of a Catholic individual and a Catholic society. The Morning Offering; the invocation of Mary, Jesus and Joseph; the sprinkling of holy water on children at bedtime; the incantation to St. Anthony—”Tony, Tony, come around; something’s lost and can’t be found”—the pleas to St. Jude to prevent a bankruptcy; the novenas for a sick spouse. All of these many practices fill the lives of the faithful, enrich, comfort, and orient them. Often it is difficult to trace their origin. Often the ones which seem most intimate and natural to a people were never even introduced by ecclesiastical authority. They emerged as natural, faith-filled expressions of love or joy or thanksgiving or grief or desperation.

Above the Mundane

The one characteristic these Catholic practices all seem to share is their ability to turn people away from the mundane, the worldly, the everyday, and direct them toward the sacred, the transcendent, the eternal. One could be traveling on the streetcar in Pittsburgh thinking about how to make new sales contacts or how to position oneself to meet the new girl in the office when suddenly, on the part of a half-dozen people, there was an adverting to another reality, another dimension, not separate from this realm, but permeating it, leavening it, making sense of it. Perhaps the adverting to Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament by those on the streetcar was only fleeting, with virtually no break in the train of thought regarding increasing sales or meeting the new girl. But the adverting took place, Our Lord was acknowledged, and, implicitly at least, the statement was made that increased sales is no end in itself and any future wife would, one would hope, be married in the Lord.

The sign of the cross made before the attempted foul shot was an expression of the intensity of desire to succeed, an acknowledgment that, no matter how great a basketball player he was, he still needed help, he was not self-sufficient. Of course, the gesture should not be presented as more than it was either, sometimes touched with a healthy amount of superstition. But it was the sign of the cross, the instrument of our salvation, our only hope for immortality. Though on the basketball court, it was the sign of the same cross raised high on cathedrals and kissed before a martyr’s death.

Granted, these outward Catholic practices are not enough. As the sixteenth-century Theatine Lorenzo Scupoli writes in his classic The Spiritual Combat, “Since exterior works are nothing more than dispositions for achieving true piety, or the effects of real piety, it cannot be said that Christian perfection and true piety consists in them.” Indeed, the practices can sometimes be little more than superstition or thoughtless habit. We know that even the magnificence and beauty of a Corpus Christi procession can be repugnant to the Lord if it is not an expression of holy, righteous lives. “I hate, I despise your feasts, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies… but let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” (Amos 5:21, 24). Of course the Lord wants justice and righteousness and abhors empty, hypocritical practices, but feasts and solemn assemblies are in no way evil of themselves, as the Puritan supposes. Our Blessed Lord Himself went in procession up to the Temple, chanted the Psalms of David, observed the ritual laws, fasted and feasted. He denounced only the insincere religiously-observant of His day, not the ritual observances themselves.

The host of Catholic practices that have developed over the centuries and in such a variety of cultures have arisen from a living out of the faith. They arose from the admonitions of men like St. Benedict, who told his monks to treat the tools in the workshop with the same reverence they would the sacred vessels of the altar with the result that all of creation came to be viewed with a certain reverence and awe.

In many respects we might say that it is virtually impossible to have the faith without having Catholic practices. Catholicism is a sacramental religion and naturally finds expression in fingering wooden beads, wading in water along the ocean shore, tracing the sign of the cross over the bodies of one’s children. Catholic practices are as natural as the mother stroking her child’s cheek or the father throwing his arm around the returning soldier-son or the patriot raising his hand to his heart at the national anthem or the lover slipping a ring onto the beloved’s finger. In fact, were external practices missing in Catholicism, one would have to question whether one were dealing with a true religion.

A Calvinist woman in Switzerland one time recounted to me her visit to a Catholic church as a child. She had been awed by the dark, soaring arches, by the shadowy figures of saints high in niches, by the eerie, living flames of flickering votive candles. She could not forget the sight. It haunted and enticed her for years. The woman had been confronted by the “mysterium tremendum et fascinans!” The words of Genesis (28:17) came to mind, “How dreadful is this place! This is none other than the house of Elohim.”

The Lutheran theologian and phenomenologist of religion Rudolf Otto, who thought Catholicism in error on a number of theological points, nonetheless felt compelled to write rather admiringly of our faith:

In Catholicism the feeling of the numinous [the sacred] is to be found as a living factor of singular power. It is seen in Catholic forms of worship and sacramental symbolism, in the less authentic forms assumed by legend and miracle, in the paradoxes and mysteries of Catholic dogma, in the Platonic and neo-Platonic strands woven into the fabric of its religious conceptions, in the solemnity of churches and ceremonies, and especially in the intimate rapport of Catholic piety with mysticism.

Regressive Reforms

It must be said that the attempt to eliminate many devotional Catholic practices by certain theologians and liturgists today diminishes the character of Catholicism as a religion and lessens its effectiveness in pointing to the transcendent in our midst. There are schools of thought influenced by secularism or feminism or Marxism which want to accomplish that very thing. But we see it in other, less likely, places as well. The radical Calvinism of a Karl Barth, with its characteristic Puritan repugnance for what is naturally human and sensuous, wanted to deny that Christianity was even a religion, for religions express the human attempt to reach out to God and save oneself, something repugnant to the “neo-orthodox” like Barth.

The followers of Barth at the University of Marburg used to ridicule Rudolf Otto because of his studies of the phenomenon of world religion. All that mattered to them was the relationship of faith between God and the individual. What they called for was a “religionless Christianity,” since religion was a human product of sinful persons, according to their interpretation of the classical Protestant doctrine of the total depravity of man.

What they received some 30 or 40 years later, however, was a religionless Christianity with a vengeance. We had the secular city of Harvey Cox and the secular gospel of Paul van Buren and the situation ethics of Joseph Fletcher and the whole “death of God” movement in the major Protestant denominations. The result of the rejection of the place of religious practices was first an unnatural Christianity and finally the replacement of Christianity altogether with secularism. We now live in a world which, publicly at least, is devoid of the transcendent, the sacred, the holy.

We now have the world which Immanuel Kant called for in his Religion Within the Bounds of Reason Alone. This is the same Kant who said a man should be ashamed to be caught on his knees alone in prayer. And it is a brutish and brutal world that we have inherited in which even human life has lost its sacred quality and, therefore, its claim to inviolability, a world in which the attempted slaughter of entire peoples has been adopted as government policy, a world in which nations have disappeared from the face of the earth, in which centuries-old Catholic dynasties have been snuffed out, a world in which more children have perished at the hands of men than were ever offered through the fire to the bloodthirsty god Moloch. Once human life lost its sacred character, once it was no longer the “imago Dei,” it became merely more “stuff,” more material, to be used in the building of the secular city.

Catholic practices that permeate the lives of individuals and nations, even in their degeneracy, acknowledge the transcendent source of our being and of our ultimate destiny. Catholic practices point to the Source of our inestimable worth. They even allow the worldly to be properly worldly by constantly adverting to the sacred and not allowing the world to be confused with it. They enable the natural to be truly natural for, as we know, without the supernatural the natural degenerates into the unnatural. Catholic practices remind the world in ways large and small, silly and profound, that it is under judgment, that it has an unavoidable and prearranged destiny.

Emile Durkheim, the Frenchman of the last century whom some call the father of sociology, was no Catholic. Yet he maintained that the greatest distinction of which the mind was capable was that between the sacred and the profane. Indeed, such a distinction was necessary for the integration and ordering of society.

Mircea Eliade, another non-Catholic and a phenomenologist of religion, made a similar point. It was sacred practices that put society in touch with the “really real,” with the unchanging in a world of flux, with the divine axis around which reality and society could be ordered. In other words, Catholic religious practices have a very important sociological function to perform, and at a time of social disintegration should be emphasized more, rather than de-emphasized. But these practices cannot be forced. Even to serve their social function they must be authentic. They must arise naturally from the piety of a people.

There were various attempts in the recent past in this country to inject salutary Catholic practices from elsewhere. For example, some tried to promote the observance of the saints days of family members rather than birthdays. Or the attempt was made to develop a devotion to St. Nicholas rather than Santa Claus, to be observed on December 6 rather than December 25. But many of these attempts were rather forced within the American context and were frequently the expressions of another culture as much as an expression of the one faith. Devotional Catholic practices indigenous to the United States will arise, however, and with their full flowering, there will be distinctively American public manifestations of the faith as grand as a Corpus Christi procession in Germany or a Holy Week procession in Mexico or Guatemala. This will only occur, however, when the piety and devotion of the Catholic faithful are deepened through a living relationship with God in Jesus Christ.

Authentic Practice

There are many practices which have long been proven effective in fostering piety and deepening faith, and they should be taught and encouraged at every turn. They are fundamentally private, but in time—and time may be generations or centuries—they will blossom culturally as the most characteristic expression of a people. Some of the more basic are: the rosary, the Morning Offering, the recitation of the Angelus, spiritual reading, weekday Mass attendance, daily meditation and examination of conscience. There is nothing extraordinary about any of these practices. And that, I believe, is one reason for their efficacy and for the social hope they can provide for the future. They are ordinary, they require no heroic effort, they should be as much a part of our daily routine as our practices of physical hygiene or expressions of spousal or parental love.

Individual Catholics should deepen their spiritual lives by drawing on those well-established practices which sacralize their days and sanctify their work. They should try the ancient and new practices for themselves and their families and make them a regular part of their lives. The institutional Church can adopt certain policies to foster Catholic practices so that the faithful can work as leaven within the social body, helping to remind it that its Author and Judge is the Lord God and that all its acts must be measured against the standard of His justice.

We live in a world cut off from its spiritual roots, and as a consequence cultural life is disintegrating before our very eyes. Inconceivably, mothers by the million cooperate in having their children cut and scraped and suctioned from their wombs. Divorces equal marriage in some areas of the country. Innocent non-combatants are gassed to death in regional conflicts or blown from the sky by terrorists. Drug abuse shreds the fabric of nations and undermines hope for international peace.

Christopher Dawson saw the malady clearly. “We have a secularized scientific world culture which is a body without a soul; while on the other hand religion maintains its separate existence as a spirit without a body. This situation was tolerable as long as secular culture was dominated by the old liberal humanist ideology which had an intelligible relation with the Western Christian tradition, but it becomes unendurable as soon as this connection is lost and the destructive implications of a completely secularized order have been made plain.”

We have lost our bearings. We don’t know “where we are.” Sigmund Freud spoke of the cosmic insult to man’s pride when Copernicus showed that we lived on a mere speck in a vast universe rather than at the center of the cosmos. Darwin delivered another insult when he showed us, not as the crown of creation, but as a chance product of biological process, a cousin of the ape. Freud called this the biological insult. Marx claimed to show that all our greatest cultural and artistic and political achievements are really nothing but the product of economic factors. This might be called the cultural insult. And Freud himself delivered a devastating blow to the pride man has always had in the vaunted faculty of reason. In the words of the psychoanalyst Karl Stern, “Human Reason, royal and autonomous, became a mere surface ripple over an ocean of dark mysterious currents which seem to be guided by blind, irrational forces. This was the psychological insult.”

But that kid on the basketball floor tracing the sign of the cross before the foul shot tells a different story. He declares that we are indeed the center of the universe, that even in our natural state, we are “higher than the animals and a little lower than the angels,” and that in our supernatural state we are higher even than the angels. That gesture made in a moment’s time with little or no thought over a sweaty body in the heat and excitement of athletic competition before shouting fans declares what has been proclaimed in untold ways throughout the whole of the Christian dispensation—that each one of us is so precious in God’s sight that the Father sent His only Son to shed the last drop of His life’s blood so that we might reign with Him forever in glory.

Author

  • John M. Haas

    John M. Haas is the President of The National Catholic Bioethics Center. Dr. Haas received his Ph.D. in Moral Theology from The Catholic University of America and his S.T.L. in Moral Theology from the University of Fribourg, Switzerland.

tagged as:

Join the Conversation

in our Telegram Chat

Or find us on
Item added to cart.
0 items - $0.00

Orthodox. Faithful. Free.

Signup to receive new Crisis articles daily

Email subscribe stack
Share to...