Reconciling the World to Himself

Reconciling the World to Himself – Popular Piety Around the World

In December 2001, the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments issued a Directory on Popular Piety and the Liturgy (DPL) outlining a set of principles and guidelines regarding the relationship between the two.

The document opens with the reason for the directory, namely, “to draw attention to the need to ensure that other forms of piety among the Christian people are not overlooked, nor their useful contribution to living in unity with Christ, in the Church, be forgotten.” (DPL 1)

The Place of Popular Piety in Our Life of Faith

It proceeds to explicate this point: since the renewal of the liturgy after Vatican II, “contradictory attitudes” toward popular piety have been noted. In some areas of the world, forms of popular piety that were “estranged from genuine Biblical revelation and compete with the economy of the sacraments” were rightfully abandoned.

However, many other inherited forms were also hastily and unfairly discarded, “resulting in a void that is not easily filled.” In other areas of the world, popular piety continued to thrive, even when perceived with air of suspicion by Church authorities aware of the constant need to “purify popular piety of equivocation and the dangers deriving from syncretism.” (DPL 1).

As Peter C. Phan observes, after the Second Vatican Council, “‘Popular’ was often derided as unsophisticated, superstitious, emotional, individualistic, reactionary, and even anti-liturgical” in contrast to the Roman liturgy’s superior characteristics of sobriety, brevity, and simplicity (Phan, v).

A recent conversation I had with a millennial Catholic who teaches at a Catholic middle school in the Midwest speaks to Phan’s observations. The school chaplain had recently introduced the Chaplet of the Divine Mercy to the students. Once a week, they would sing the Chaplet to a catchy contemporary tune composed by Trish Short and popularized through EWTN. Apart from the earworm caused by the repetitive nature of the Chaplet, this young teacher was bothered by the text of the Chaplet which he found “sappy.” As we continued our conversation, I realized that he did not know much about the devotion, the image of Jesus, the Divine Mercy, or Saint Faustina Kowalska apart from the fact that she received a revelation. For him, everything apart from the tune of the Chaplet felt foreign.

What is Popular Devotion?

At the risk of overgeneralization, it seems safe to say that apart from the Rosary, few American Catholics, especially younger ones, have much familiarity with some kind of popular devotion in the United States. Without exposure to popular piety, many lack an understanding of the ways of popular devotions. For youth and young adults going on short-term mission trips, this could result in a tendency to prematurely make negative judgments upon various practices they encounter and cause them to overlook deeper cultural and theological experiences present to them.

Divine Mercy in Rwanda

It was three in the afternoon on a sunny Saturday at the Divine Mercy Shrine in the district of Kabuga, just outside of Kigali, Rwanda. The bells of the chapel rang announcing the hour of the Divine Mercy throughout the small town. I took my seat on a bench at the back of the “chapel of the tomb” and hurriedly looked up the Chaplet in English on my phone. There were about twenty of us in the space – men, women and children. An older woman knelt at the front of the chapel, before a statue of Jesus lying on his side – buried – with weapons of the 1994 Rwandan genocide at his feet. Clutching a rosary in her right hand and with arms outstretched in the orans position, she led the recitation of the Chaplet in the local language.

“For the sake of his sorrowful Passion…” she intoned; “have mercy on us and on the whole world” followed the people. These words, spoken in a foreign language, resounded like a mystical chant, inviting me to ponder the grace of Divine Mercy for the people of Rwanda.

When the Chaplet concluded, some stayed awhile to pray silently. A boy about ten years old walked up the statue of Jesus and knelt before him. He put his hand on Jesus’ chest for a minute then gently stroked Jesus’ cheek. A middle-aged woman knelt beside the boy with her face cupped in her hands and elbows resting by Jesus’ side. She was wearing a dress printed with the image of Jesus the Divine Mercy in a repeated pattern –here in Rwanda, many literally wear their piety on their sleeves.

I did not know the prayers of the woman or the young boy, but their gestures alone spoke a universal language. I recognized touching, stroking, and being close to another as gestures of love, tenderness, and mercy. At this shrine, people come to lay down their trials and suffering at the feet of Jesus, symbolized by the weapons of the genocide. Buried with Jesus, The Divine Mercy, pain, violence, and evil come here to die with Christ and rise into agents of mercy in their new life.

Popular Devotions in the Early Church

Approaching popular devotions with misgivings has not always been the norm, nor has popular piety been always set apart from the liturgy. History bears witness to the symbiotic relationship between the liturgy and popular piety that emerges from local cultures, particularly in the Eucharist as the central celebration of the paschal mystery.

In the apostolic and post-apostolic periods, Christians often incorporated rites inspired by individual, domestic, and community piety into public worship (DPL 23). In the fourth and fifth centuries, as the liturgy became increasingly organized into discernable “liturgical families” reflecting local traditions, languages, and spiritualities, popular elements continued to be incorporated into worship (DPL 26).

The pontificate of Saint Gregory the Great (590-604) saw a time of liturgical flourishing accompanied by popular religious expressions and is held up as an exemplar of an era when popular piety and the liturgy mutually enriched each other (DPL 27).

Liturgy versus Popular Piety in the Middle Ages

It was during the Middle Ages that a “decisive differentiation between liturgy and popular piety” began developing, leading eventually to a “dualism of celebration” (DPL 29). This rupture began for several reasons, three of which I consider the most important:

1. Incomprehensibility of the Latin Liturgy – as Christianity began spreading to lands where the Latin Language was not the vernacular of the majority of believers, new forms of prayer in the local tongue, speaking in ways that commoners could understand, emerged to fill the gaps left by an increasingly alien liturgy;
2. Increasing clericalism and individualism – in a Christian society with marked distinctions of roles, the liturgy came to be understood as a domain exclusive to priests with laity present only as spectators (DPL 30). Participating in Mass did not constitute a communal action. Instead, it was a “pious exercise done by an individual to obtain grace.” (Francis, 26);
3. Allegorization of the liturgy and diffusion of miracle stories – these genres engaged the imagination and emotions of the people, prompting the faithful to participate in rituals associated with them more fully (DPL 30).

The Rise in Eucharistic Adoration

It is during this period that many devotional forms, some of which persist today, appeared as a parallel or even an alternative to liturgy. For instance, Eucharistic adoration compensated for the infrequent reception of Holy Communion, the Rosary became a substitute for the psalter, and new rites of blessings reflecting popular pre-Christian beliefs and practices developed (DPL 32). While these new forms of popular piety could be distinguished more clearly from the liturgy as compared to the days of Christian antiquity, they nevertheless continued to inform liturgical practice and especially its theology (Francis, 33).

The Council of Trent and Piety

The gap between popular piety and the liturgy continued to widen after the Council of Trent when the liturgy “entered a period of static period of substantial uniformity” as popular piety continued to flourish (DPL 40). However, liturgy and popular piety were not necessarily practiced apart from each other.

During this period, pious exercises were seen as an important means for defending the Catholic faith against Protestants, at least in the West. Some of these exercises encouraged the participation in the Sacraments as a means of conversion and others took places within the liturgical actions (DPL 41). In new mission territories, liturgical practices and popular piety of the medieval Iberian Peninsula brought to the “New World” by Spanish and Portuguese missionaries continued to thrive (Francis, 35).

Subsequently, this form of pre-Tridentine Catholicism adapted to local religious sensibilities as missionaries dialogued with locals and adopted traditional expressions to explicate the faith. For instance, to re-contextualize the worship of the sun within the worship of the Eucharist, missionaries conflated the image of the sun with Christ, adorning the reserved host in a monstrance with a sunburst [and St. Patrick using the three-leafed shamrock to speak about the Trinity] (Francis, 37). These customs may not have changed the liturgy itself, but they added a context through which new liturgical theology emerged.

The Enlightenment – the Learned Versus the Simple People

The rupture was accentuated in the West during the Enlightenment when rationalism created a gulf between the “learned” and the “simple people.” The “learned” promoted religious practice based on knowledge and harbored disdain for popular religious expressions, which they regarded as “superstitious and fanatical.” (DPL 42).

That this sentiment of distrust towards the emotionalism in popular piety remains with us today was evident in my conversation with the middle school teacher. Coupled with the fact that all forms of popular piety are properly optional (though sometimes encouraged), in contrast to the sacraments, which are necessary for a Christian life, a person may see no reason to participate in any kind of pious activity outside of the liturgy. But such over cautiousness may inadvertently close one off to an encounter of grace through popular practices, particularly in foreign lands.

Popular Devotion Today – A Means of Reconciliation

The Directory recognizes the “expression of the profound and mature religious feeling of the people at a given moment in space and time” as one of the “riches of popular piety.” (DL 1) Indeed, popular devotions are unavoidably bound up with grace-filled stories of the people who pray the prayers, visit the shrines, and participate in the processions, often more so than in liturgical celebrations, even though both are never mutually exclusive.

Here at the University of Notre Dame, students visit the Grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes to pray for more than healing from illnesses. The Grotto is where candles are lit in desperation after Mass during exam week, where marriage proposals happen under the gaze of our Lady, and where alumni take their children and retell events from their days as a student at Notre Dame.

These stories revolve around the grotto, but transcend the grotto itself. The stories tell of particular expressions of the faith rendered visible in ritual expressions as part of the ongoing mystery of salvation history in the past and today. By participating in popular religious practices, we enter into the Christian story of others and more deeply into the universal Church through the particularities of salvation history. That is, popular piety is a means by which God is “reconciling the world to himself” through Christ (2 Cor 5:19).

Divine Mercy in Rwanda

This was my experience at the Divine Mercy shrine in Rwanda and what I tried to communicate to the young teacher as we continued our chat. I recalled the history, symbolism, and theology of the devotion and shared the sights and sounds I witnessed at the Divine Mercy Shrine in Kabguga. I spoke of the impact the devotion has for the Rwandese people whose lives had been ravaged by unspeakable violence.

I recounted learning about the dynamic life of the shrine and how the devotion synchronizes with the liturgical year, mapping the theology of mercy onto the central mysteries of the faith. I related how I came to the realization that in Rwanda, Jesus as the Divine Mercy helps those who have lost all hope discover new life for themselves and even the possibility of becoming blessings for others.

Experiencing God in Popular Devotions

At the end of our conversation, he indicated that he now saw the Divine Mercy devotion in new light. It was no longer something a class of middle school children awkwardly sang every Monday morning, but part of a larger movement of the Spirit animating the lives of fellow Christians who desperately need to experience God’s mercy. It was as if the historical, social, and theological context I provided along with the testimony of my time at the shrine incorporated his experience into a larger fold and made him reevaluate his own assumptions. A new awareness of the devotees’ cultural context allowed him to empathize and be in solidarity with the Rwandan people and even with others who practice the devotion.

In an age of increasing nationalism and isolationist tendencies, empathy for the other is more necessary than ever. Participating in the popular piety of another, even if it seems foreign at first, is certainly one way to experience deep cross-cultural exchange and the grace of empathy that enables human and Christian solidarity.
Help people approach and understand popular devotional practices in 3 steps.

Provide a historical context of the practice that answers the following questions:

1. Where and when did the devotion originate?
2. Who were the first devotees?
3. What are the stories associated with the devotion?

Invite personal participant observations of the rituals. Some questions that might guide the observations include the following:

• Who participates in the practice today?
• Where do the devotees they come from?
• What are the people wearing?
• What gestures do they use?
• What are the sights, sounds, smells, and textures of the place where the devotion occurs?

If opportunity presents itself, speak to some devotees and learn the place of the devotion in their lives.

Make time for thanksgiving, reflection and conversation after the experience. The reflection may be guided by questions such as:

• How did the experience make you feel?
• What did you observe that felt familiar or foreign?
• How does the practice relate to the Paschal Mystery of Christ?
• What did you learn about the people and their culture through this experience?

References:

• “Directory On Popular Piety And The Liturgy. Principles And Guidelines”. Vatican.va. N.p., 2017. Web. 1 June 2017.
• Francis, Mark. Directory On Popular Piety And The Liturgy: Principles And Guidelines. A Commentary. Peter Phan. 1st ed. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2005. 19-43. Print.
• Phan, Peter. “Preface”. Directory On Popular Piety And The Liturgy: Principles And Guidelines. A Commentary. 1st ed. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2005. V. Print.

Further reading:

• Bamat, Tomás. Popular Catholicism In A World Church. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1999. Print.
• Espín, Orlando O. The Faith Of The People. 1st ed. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1997. Print.
• Francis, Mark R. Local Worship, Global Church. 1st ed. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2014. Print.
• Martin, James. Awake My Soul. 1st ed. Chicago: Loyola Press, 2004. Print.
• Pecklers, Keith F. Liturgy In A Post-Modern World. London: Continuum, 2006. Print.