Reclaiming Catholic Culture: Popular Piety in the Modern World

prayers, home chapel

“How can we reclaim our Catholic culture?” a friend asked recently. Like so many millennial Catholics, he wanted to offer his kids more than the stagnant, awkward Church life that drove so many of his generation away from the faith. The Church of the 1990s – to those of us raised in suburban parishes – offered little more than Knights of Columbus pancake breakfasts and embarrassing guided meditations. Looking back, the millennial Catholics whose faith survived are determined to offer something more substantial to their own children. Unfortunately, we don’t really know how to go about it.

“How can we reclaim our Catholic culture? I mean, I love the Medievals – they had so many amazing, Catholic customs. But I don’t want to build a culture that looks like cosplay.” He’s right of course, no living culture can be built in imitation of something else. Right now, we have neither the imagination nor the connection to nature that would allow us to create a culture half as rich as our medieval predecessors. A Catholic popular piety has to be accessible to the populace. But it can lift up that populace – it shouldn’t exist in the muck at the bottom of a culture.

Popular Piety

Too often, modern Catholicism exists in a limited sphere – we go to Mass, hopefully make a monthly Confession, and say “Jesus is the Reason for the Season” at Christmas. Occasionally, our faith slips into daily life through devotionals or one of the various Catholic media outlets. But popular piety is so much more: “The religious sense of the Christian people has always found expression in various forms of piety surrounding the Church’s sacramental life, such as the veneration of relics, visits to sanctuaries, pilgrimages, processions, … the rosary, medals, etc.” (CCC 1674).

These expressions of piety should “harmonize with the liturgical seasons” (CCC 1675). The popular piety of old used to weave together the traditional culture of the people with the mystery of the Christ. The problem is, the modern world doesn’t have much use for mystery. But Catholics do have a use for mystery – in fact we have a need for it. That’s one of the reasons the banal Catholic culture of the 1980s and ‘90s was so devastating to the faith of everyone involved.

Popular piety is all about mystery. In its heyday, the overabundance of mystery in popular devotions even occasionally distracted from the piety itself. That’s why the Catechism insists that “pastoral discernment is needed to sustain … and, if necessary, to purify and correct the religious sense which underlies these devotions” (CCC 1676). Today’s popular piety too often suffers from an overabundance of emotionalism and sentimentality instead, but the need to be purified and corrected remains.

Truthfully, with fallen nature being what it is, popular piety – like every aspect of life – is always going to suffer from an over or under-abundance of something.

Reclaiming Catholic Culture

Despite its inevitable shortcomings, building up a popular piety that uplifts and engages is essential to reclaiming a Catholic culture for ourselves and our children. That culture can’t be so divorced from the modern mind that it feels like playing make-believe; but it can’t be built in imitation of secular culture either.

Instead, “the piety of the people” should be “a storehouse of values … capable of fashioning a vital synthesis” between the divine and the human (CCC 1676). In other words, Catholic culture should be a place where all the beauty and mystery of God’s love meets the wildness and enthusiasm of the natural world.

When we look for inspiration at popular pieties of the past, we see a lot of playfulness, intimacy with the saints, affectionate adoration of God, and deep joy in the midst of this suffering world. So how do we go about reclaiming that joy?

Body and Spirit

One of the best ways to reclaim popular piety is by finding ways to dismantle all the walls we’ve built around the religious sense within us. The modern world likes to talk of faith as something personal and private, but when we’re extending “the liturgical life of the Church” through our living expressions of piety faith is anything but private. Our faith, like our other relationships, isn’t meant to be hidden away from the world.

Let’s stop pretending that our faith doesn’t affect our jobs, friendships, or entertainment. Building a Catholic culture within our own domestic churches means that everything is influenced by our faith. One of my favorite ways to do this is with food. Fasting and feasting have been essential parts of the Christian life since Christ Himself spent 40 days fasting in the wilderness. Intentionally reclaiming bits and pieces of our traditions around food is a great way to start rediscovering the piety of the people.

Feasting and Fasting

Fasts and feasts go together in the Catholic life. We fast on Fridays and feast on Sundays, fast at Lent and feast at Easter. Traditionally, each major feast was preceded by a vigil fast. An easy way to ease into the Church’s rhythm of fasting and feasting is to revive the practice of Friday abstinence. If you’re not already abstaining from meat on Fridays, reclaim this tradition! Pair it with a Sunday indulgence to keep the traditional balance in your life.

Then, after embracing a smaller fast and feast, you can move on to others: Advent & Christmas, Lent & Easter, St. Michael’s Lent & Michaelmas, and a dozen smaller vigils and feast days scattered throughout the year. It’s fun, and fasting before a feast ensures that you’ll be eager to celebrate on the holyday.

Prayer

Along with the rhythm of fasting and feasting, prayer is an essential part of popular piety. In the Middle Ages, new devotions – both orthodox and theologically suspect – were passed from neighbor to neighbor. It can be challenging to feel that excited about prayer when too often the prayers themselves are sentimentalized. It can also be challenging to distance ourselves enough from all the little escapes modern life offers to really engage in prayer.

I like to really listen to my friends when they’re talking about a new devotional or prayer. Ask questions and be prepared to be impressed by the devotionals your friends recommend.

Community

Popular piety should belong to communities. Occasionally those communities are small – a family or a small group of friends with a shared vision for living. Often though, these communities encompass a few families within a parish. They share similar devotions, celebrate feasts together, pray for each other, and in their shared “storehouse of values … radically [affirm] the dignity of every person as a child of God” (CCC 1676).

A New Culture

A few small steps and a change of perspective can take us from wondering how we can reclaim a Catholic culture to living in that reclaimed culture. It’ll be small and localized, of course. But all tiny changes change the wider world as well. It’s enough to build up a subculture in our own communities – eventually that subculture will spread to the wider Church.

Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Pinterest

1 thought on “Reclaiming Catholic Culture: Popular Piety in the Modern World”

  1. Loved loved loved this. Thank you for some wonderful thoughts on where we are today with our Catholic faith.
    I’m a convert with none of the pre-1960 hangups. I love my faith, my church. And yet I had quite a shock this past weekend when I visited a former church I’d attended and saw what an enterprising priest had done with it.
    Ah, progress.

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.