The liturgical vandalism that followed
Vatican II, unjustifiably
perpetrated in its name, will not be easy to repair.

Popular devotions: A call for renewal

By John M. Grondelski 

Among the totally unnecessary casualties of the post-Vatican II “liturgical reforms” in the United States was the wholesale decimation of popular devotions.1 Alleged to be out of harmony with the “spirit” of the Council, long-standing popular devotions like Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament, Marian devotions, and novenas were suppressed, often to the discontent of parishioners. Their elimination from parish life was usually justified by repetition of the hackneyed phrase, “the spirit of the Council,” with no further elucidation of how these devotions violated that “spirit.” Occasionally, some pastors rationalized their ukases by arguing that popular devotional practices did not embody the Christological and Eucharistic foci central to Conciliar liturgical renewal.2 (That adoration of the Blessed Sacrament did not meet those criteria suggests, to this author, just how theologically superficial much of that thinking really was).

In wake of last year’s welcome decision by the U.S. Bishops to restore the tabernacle to the central location in the church building, the time may be opportune to revisit the need to restore and enrich popular devotions at the parochial level. These two issues do, after all, have several points in common. The sidelining of tabernacles, like the suppression of popular devotions, took place supposedly to accentuate the centrality of the Eucharist (understood as celebration of the Mass). The decision to remove tabernacles from the main altar, like the decision to eliminate various popular devotions, was often imposed as a Conciliar “mandate” despite the absence of any explicit warrant for such moves in the Council texts themselves. Finally, tabernacle relocation, like elimination of popular devotions, was usually the fiat of the local pastor and was usually resisted by the lay faithful, who were often instinctively aware that these “symbolic” actions implied an agenda that just somehow seemed misdirected. (This phenomenon is a telling commentary of sensus fidelium about which those, who might otherwise be expected to invoke it as a locus theologicus, are strangely silent. Unfortunately, whether from the “right” or “left,” parish priests still often nurse a clericalism that leads them to treat parishes as their own personal fiefdoms.3) 

In light of the foregoing, current efforts at “reforming the reform”4 of the liturgy, which have succeeded in restoring tabernacles to their natural place of central prominence in churches, might also turn their attention to the reenrichment of parish liturgical life by recovering the wealth of popular devotions lost in the post-Conciliar period.

The losses
In the late 1960s, as a fourth and fifth grader, I remember going with my mother Monday nights at 7:00 p.m. to a local parish for “novena.” It wasn’t just a novena. Mass was celebrated, which included a sermon followed by Novenas of the Miraculous Medal and St. Jude Thaddeus. Confessions were heard through the Offertory. People frequently availed themselves of the opportunity to receive the sacrament and go to Communion. One could be invested in the brown scapular after Mass.

The picture just painted would send shivers up the spine of a certain type of liturgical purist. Granted, the setup of the novena was not ideal; it should and would be different today. One could argue that the Novena prayers are better put at the end of Mass. Perhaps the interval between the homily and the offertory should be reserved to official sacramental celebrations: Baptism, Confirmation, Marriage, Ordination, Anointing. 

On the other hand, those attending that Mass also did so to participate in popular devotions of the Miraculous Medal and to St. Jude. These were and are approved forms of devotion. Whether they belong at the end of Mass or could remain after the homily is really a secondary issue. The real question that needs to be asked is why should the picture just sketched disturb a liturgist? For all the rhetoric about appreciating local culture, certain liturgical purists fail to appreciate that the celebration just described did accommodate the culture prevailing in many American parishes at the time.5 Devotion to the Mother of God and to the saints was something commonplace in the parish life of the times. Why does it not, then, have a claim to cultural protection?

The novena, as just described, did embody many of the values of the Council’s liturgical reforms. It took place in conjunction with Mass. The availability of Confession fostered sacramental participation. People did not just “make” the novena; they came to Mass. While the Church encourages daily Mass, the reality of many working peoples’ lives makes that practically impossible. Whatever can be done, then, to facilitate voluntary weekday participation in Mass deserves promotion. The novena just described resulted in real, average parishioners attending Mass at least one additional time during the week. Indeed, attendance was high, usually about 50 people. From a pastoral parochial perspective, that novena was a “success.”

So what happened to it? Granted, generations changed and that reduced attendance.6 At the same time, the novena fell victim to the discouragement of Marian devotions which were not encouraged in the post-Vatican II era in America. Still, as long as the parish’s founding pastor was there, the devotions continued and people continued attending them.

The arrival of a new pastor, however, signaled the beginning of the end. Encountering resistance to the outright abolition of the devotion, he permitted the novena to continue, but not in conjunction with Mass. Eliminating Mass further reduced attendance, giving the pastor a further excuse to limit the frequency of the novena. Eventually, the novena came to be celebrated monthly. Now a distinguishing characteristic of novenas is their repetition over a set, and relatively limited, time frame. When nine weeks turns into nine months, another nail was driven into the coffin of the devotion. Because this devotion did not harmonize with this particular pastor’s “spirituality,” he tried for a while just leaving the Church open and letting those who gathered say the novena themselves. Needless to say, a church service without priestly leadership generally does not last.

Eventually, after such a series of blows, attendance shrank so far that the pastor who killed off the devotion could now argue that the novena died a natural death and could be dropped from the Church’s schedule. In the end, a valuable spiritual opportunity, which had graced that parish for decades, was lost and nothing put in its place. To argue that such an outcome was conciliarly “inspired” is, to put it charitably, strange.

The story rehearsed here, however, was repeated in numerous variations throughout the United States. Nor were novenas alone the victims. Seasonal devotions like Marian devotions in May and October also disappeared. In some places, “Stations of the Cross” declined.

Disappearing Eucharistic devotions
One of the most bizarre losses attributable to the “Conciliarly-inspired” anti-devotional mania of 1960s and 1970s America was the decline in Eucharistic devotions.7 Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament is one victim. Indeed, I have known seminarians who, scheduled to assist at Exposition, found it necessary to ask colleagues what the devotion was about. It’s not their fault; they were deprived of a valuable part of their Christian heritage.

Another casualty of the decline in Eucharistic devotions is the disappearance of Nocturnal Adoration.8 For those of another generation unfamiliar with the practice, Nocturnal Adoration typically took place in one central parish in a town or other fixed area, usually starting around 8 p.m. on the First Friday of the month and ending with the first Mass on Saturday morning. Nocturnal adoration societies from various parishes, at one time men but later increasingly with women in attendance, took turns on a rotating schedule adoring before the exposed Blessed Sacrament. The practice was a conscious attempt to respond to Jesus’ invitation in the Garden of Gethsemane, “Could you not watch one hour with me?” (Matt. 26:40) in reparation for insults to the Blessed Sacrament. 

Disappearance of Exposition and Nocturnal Adoration is attributable to a variety of causes, some pragmatic, some ideological. On the pragmatic side, city pastors concerned about theft were increasingly leery about leaving Churches open all night. On the ideological side, theologians whose Eucharistic spirituality confined itself exclusively to the Mass looked with jaundiced eye on Eucharistic devotions outside Mass. One sometimes hears the simplistic slogan, “Eucharist is a verb, not a noun.” Now, the Eucharistic Action of the Mass is the most important moment in the Church’s life. That said, the perdurance of the Real Presence in the Eucharistic Species is also a clear tenet of Catholic belief, one that fundamentally distinguished Catholic Eucharistic theology from its Lutheran, Anglican and Calvinist counterparts. The Church has long fostered Eucharistic Adoration; the fact that much Eucharistic devotion evolved during the Middle Ages does not (except for some liturgists) render it suspect.

One could argue that, at one time, Catholic devotion to adoring the Eucharist seemed stronger than Catholic devotion to receiving the Eucharist. It was not unusual, prior to the Council, to see Catholics participate in Exposition or Adoration while abstaining from receiving the Eucharist. Whatever the Jansenistic tendencies responsible for this state of affairs forty years ago, however, they clearly do not exist today. In today’s era of frequent Communion and infrequent Confession,9 indeed, the exact opposite is needed: reviving devotion to the Eucharist outside of Mass would contribute to an increase in reverence for the Eucharist badly needed today, especially when some surveys suggest that young Catholics cannot even explain what the Real Presence means. And any revival of devotion to the Blessed Sacrament is bound to reinforce the Conciliar teaching that the Eucharist is the center and source of the Christian life.10

Happily, there are some signs of a renaissance in Eucharistic devotion outside of Mass. A growing number of parishes has either inaugurated or renewed the practice of Corpus Christi processions. Sometimes neighboring parishes team up so that individual churches become stations and a real, public procession takes place. Given the fact that Corpus Christi is observed in the United States on a Sunday, the possibilities for a real celebration do exist.

Other parishes have rediscovered Forty Hours devotions. A few use Forty Hours as a kind of retreat, an opportunity for spiritual renewal in the parish. The period just before Lent or the long Ordinary Time seem especially appropriate moments when parish attention can be focused on a need for recollection and renewal. Likewise, in some places parish missions have resumed with salutary results.

Nocturnal adoration and All-Night Vigils have also reappeared in some places. Texts for Nocturnal Adoration have been revised to provide good Scriptural Eucharistic catechesis. Where pastors are reticent, for pragmatic reasons, to leave their churches open all night, arrangements can be made to accommodate Adoration in most places at least through midnight.

Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament need not be a parish rarity. The author recalls his experiences recently in Poland, where many parishes usually provide for a half-hour or hour of Exposition before the main Sunday evening Mass. Other parishes, in the United States and Europe, provide an afternoon of Eucharistic Adoration at least once per week, sometimes culminating in a Mass around supper time which allows locals to attend Mass on a weekday at a more convenient time. 

Efforts to recover Eucharistic devotion extra Missam can provide an opportunity to recover reverence for the Eucharist, something which has gone into desuetude in recent years. It can also be an effective means to cultivate Eucharistic spirituality while also inculcating some Eucharistic catechesis. Obviously, there should be no doubt of the conformity of such efforts with the Council.

A side note: the recovery of Eucharistic devotion should go hand-in-hand with a reaccentuation of the Sacrament of Penance. While an earlier exaggerated mentality led people to avoid Communion unless they first went to Confession, the pendulum today has swung the other way: there is a clear imperative to reestablish the linkage between Penance and the Eucharist. Providing occasions to go to Confession, during Sunday evening Exposition, at Nocturnal Adoration or Forty Hours, and certainly in conjunction with major Eucharistic feasts like Corpus Christi would send the message that Communion is always linked with on-going and ever-deepening metanoia.

A future for Mary and the saints?
Recovery of other popular devotions may prove harder. The decline in Marian devotion in mainstream American Catholic culture will take time to repair. Perhaps one way to revitalize it is to capitalize on the practices of certain ethnic groups where Marian devotion still exists: Hispanic devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe in December (and to Our Lady as under particular patronal titles of specific Latin American countries), Polish devotion to Mary, Queen of Poland in May, Italian devotion to Our Lady of Mount Carmel in July and Portuguese devotion to Our Lady of Fatima may all provide occasions during the course of the year where novenas or at least tridua can be celebrated. One simple practice found in England is to include the Ave Maria in the Prayer of the Faithful at Mass. After articulating the individual petitions making up this week’s Prayer of the Faithful, the celebrant usually summarizes them all by adding: “Putting our trust in Mary, the Mother of God whose assistance we seek, we pray together, Hail Mary. . . ” after which the celebrant concludes with the usual entrusting of our prayers to God. A simple practice, but one which restores an element of Marian devotion and a petition for Mary’s intercession into the weekly cycle of Mass.

Other devotions may not lend themselves so readily to resurrection. Once upon a time, for example, mothers cultivated a devotion to St. Gerard Majella. Novenas to the saints were commonplace: in addition to the “usual staples” of the Miraculous Medal and St. Jude Thaddeus, there were often seasonal novenas — to St. Anne in mid-summer or St. Joseph in March. With the decline in devotion to the saints, some of these devotions may in fact be lost, though pastors are well counseled not to assume there are no embers worth fanning. But the Church is also no museum: each generation also finds its own spiritual expression in its own devotions. Devotion to the Divine Mercy, based on Our Lord’s Revelations to Sr. Faustina Kowalska, has rapidly spread in America (and the Marian Fathers of Stockbridge, Massachusetts have done yeoman work in encouraging it). Although Kowalska’s revelations are 70 years old, Devotion to the Divine Mercy is very much in keeping with Vatican II. It is Christocentric, it focuses on the sacraments (particularly Penance and Eucharist), it reinforces both the call to conversion and the need for trust in God, and spurs the devotee to practical action to express mercy towards one’s neighbor. The Novena to Divine Mercy, which begins on Good Friday and ends on the Second Sunday of Easter — the Feast of Divine Mercy — would be an appropriate parish devotion (which also revives the practice of novena) that could be easily implemented in parishes during the high point of the Church’s year. 

The work of recovering popular devotions will not be easy. It is an unfortunate truth that it is easier to destroy than to build, and the vandalism that followed Vatican II, unjustifiably perpetrated in its name, will not be easy to repair. In the legitimate quest for restoring a Christocentric focus to Catholic spirituality, unjustified denigration of the cult of Mary and the saints took place. In the desire to accentuate the centrality of the Eucharist, the Eucharist itself sometimes became the casualty. Restoring Eucharistic devotion already appears to be at least in some measure underway. Bringing back Marian and sanctoral devotion will be a harder struggle, because a whole generation has grown up not understanding why a balanced Marian spirituality is important and often giving but lip service to the doctrine of the communio sanctorum. While, paradoxically, the Church’s celebration of her saints has been enriched by the revision of the Roman Calendar, and while Pope John Paul II has been prolific in beatifying and canonizing many candidates for the altar, devotion to the saints needs once again to “seep down.” It is not enough that we honor the saints through obligatory feasts at Mass. We need to bring back the saints as role models, spiritual guides (both through example and prayer) and as intercessors. And that requires a restoration of broader devotion to the saints.

With the decision to restore the Tabernacle to its central place in churches, the American Bishops hopefully have brought to a close a vexatious controversy (which never should have been) about what Vatican II “required.” At the same time, it also hopefully marks the beginning of an era in matters liturgical where the Council’s prescriptions are implemented in lieu of some unwritten “meta-Council.” Vatican II did not call for “business as usual.” Sacrosanctum Concilium, the Sacred Constitution on the Liturgy, was among the most important documents to come out of the Council. That document did call for reform. It did not call for throwing the baby out with the bath water. It called for a healthy renewal of the Church’s traditions, not their wholesale amputation. It called for faithful servants who knew how to combine the old and the new.11 

Note:

1 Sacrosanctum Concilium’s (the Sacred Constitution on the Liturgy’s) primary teaching on popular devotions can be found in its article 13. The Constitution says that such devotions “are to be highly recommended” on the stipulation that “they conform to the laws and norms of the Church.” (That stipulation appeared to provide a legal fig leaf behind which some “liturgical reformers” hid their opposition to such devotions). The Council did teach that popular devotions should “accord with the sacred liturgy, [be] . . . in some way derived from it, and lead the people to it, since . . . the liturgy by its very nature is far superior to any of them . . . .” Affirming the rightful primacy of the liturgy (as in Sacrosanctum Concilium, # 10), however, was hardly a warrant to eliminate popular devotions rather than to undertake the more onerous but challenging task of adapting them. There is a fundamental difference between reform by revision versus reform by repression. Vatican II provided sensible criteria for the organic renewal of the liturgy (see Sacrosanctum Concilium, # 23). Alas, similar criteria were not employed by those who had to deal with popular devotions. All citations of the Second Vatican Council in this article are from Austin Flannery, gen. ed., Vatican Council II: The Conciliar and Post Conciliar Documents (Northport, NY: Costello, 1975).

2 See Second Vatican Council, Sacrosanctum Concilium (hereinafter, SC), ## 7, 8, 33, 61, in Flannery, pp. 4-5, 11-12, 20 (on Christological dimensions); SC, ## 2, 47-49, in Flannery, pp. 1, 16-17 (on the Eucharistic dimensions). On the latter, see also Second Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution on the Church Lumen Gentium, # 11, in Flannery, p. 362.

3 See Rev. Serge Keleher, “Whatever Happened to the Liturgical Movement? A View from the East” in Beyond the Prosaic: Renewing the Liturgical Movement, ed. Stratford Caldecott (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1998), p. 74: Authoritarian clericalism is “the notion that everything must be done purely out of obedience ‘because I say so, that’s why!’ The obedience thus demanded is pure servility; it has nothing to do with interior religious assent, and still less does it have to do with genuine understanding. Thus the parish priest who in 1961 employed abusive language to dismiss those who suggested a greater use of the vernacular in the Mass could and did employ similarly abusive language in 1968 to dismiss anyone who suggested that it would be well to maintain some liturgical Latin and Gregorian chant.”

4 In general, see the insightful essay by M. Francis Mannion, “The Catholicity of the Liturgy: Shaping a New Agenda,” in Caldecott, pp. 11-48.

5 On the importance of culture in liturgy, see SC, ## 38-40, in Flannery, p. 14. Remember also that Gaudium et spes devotes a whole chapter to culture (including culture and faith): ## 53-62 (Flannery, pp. 958-68). It is a paradox that while some Catholic theologians have kept an embarrassed silence about popular devotions as an aspect of Catholic life and culture secularized academics at Yale were giving accolades to non-theological works like Robert A. Orsi’s The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880-1950 (New Haven: Yale UP, 1985) and Thank You, Saint Jude: Women’s Devotion to the Patron Saint of Hopeless Cases (New Haven: Yale UP, 1996). A good example of Catholic social science work in this area is Joseph Varacalli’s The Saints in the Lives of Italian-Americans: An Interdisciplinary Investigation (Stony Brook, NY: Forum Italicum, 1999).

6 Generational change is, of course, but one reason for the “decline” of popular devotions. An interesting collection of essays on popular devotions (itself a rare phenomenon) can be found in the June 2000 (vol. 14, no. 6) issue of Priests and People. 

7 A far-too-neglected post-Conciliar document is the Sacred Congregation for Divine Worship’s Eucharistiae Sacramentum, “On Holy Communion and the Worship of the Eucharistic Mystery Outside of Mass,” issued 21 June 1973. Text in Flannery, pp. 242-53.

8 One source of information on Nocturnal Adoration is the Nocturnal Adoration Society, c/o the Rev. Mario Marzocchi, S.S.S., at St. Jean Baptiste Parish, 184 East 76 Street, New York, NY 10021. 

9 Although now more than two decades old, it is worth recalling Edwin Gordon’s “Frequent Communion and Infrequent Confession,” Homiletic and Pastoral Review, 81 (November 1980)/2: 55-59.

10 Second Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution Lumen Gentium, # 11, in Flannery, p. 362.

11 See Mt. 13:52

John M. Grondelski is associate professor of Christian Ethics, School of Theology, Seton Hall University, South Orange, NJ. He holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in moral theology from Fordham University, New York. Married and the father of two, he has published in journals such as Antonianum, Angelicum, Irish Theological Quarterly, and Josephinum Journal of Theology and, after a seven-year hiatus, returns to HPR.