Posted on 07/10/2003 5:17:05 AM PDT by Desdemona
by Joanna Bogle
Are Young Catholics Cultural Orphans?
7/10/03
Recently a Catholic group concerned with promoting relationships with other faiths sent me a collection of brochures describing family life and traditions in Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Sikh, and Japanese Shinto cultures. Catholics were urged to establish contact and learn about the different festivals.
Losing "Folk Catholicism"
But there was nothing for them to take with them about their own culture. Despite the widespread ignorance among young Catholics about the Church's feast-days, fast-days, calendar and traditions, they were expected to go empty-handed with no materials speaking of our beliefs, prayers, or way of life.
A friend described to me enthusiastically a visit made with her Catholic women's group to a magnificent Hindu temple — the decorations, the grandeur, the formalities to be observed. They had been careful to dress appropriately and to observe any rituals required of them. They were intrigued by the meanings of the various things they saw.
These incidents came to mind as I spoke to a group of Catholic writers about Catholic customs — the origins of things like pancakes on Shrove Tuesday and Hot Cross Buns on Good Friday, the scattering of flowers before the Blessed Sacrament in procession, May crowning of a statue of Mary, the blessing of throats for Saint Blaise in February.
In discussion afterwards, it became clear that there was widespread concern at the loss of our sense of Catholic culture — of belonging to a community rich in a heritage of faith stretching back 2,000 years. Many Catholic boys and girls today are more familiar with football rituals than with some of the basic signs and symbols of our Faith. Few would be able to explain confidently, for example, why we genuflect before the Tabernacle or why the priest wears vestments of different colors at various times of the year.
What are we doing? Many young Catholics don't even know we are meant to fast on Ash Wednesday, or attend Mass on various Holy Days. They don't have a liturgical "map" in their heads with landmarks such as Advent, Lent, or Pentecost. Their ideas about Christmas and Easter are formed not by Christians traditions but by commercial ones, and increasingly a paganized Halloween is replacing even the vaguest notions of All Saints Day and All Souls Day and praying for the dead in November.
We are creating generations of cultural and spiritual orphans — expecting them to remain Catholics without any links with the past, and without the sense of belonging to a community that has a glorious heritage of which they are a part and to which they can make their own contribution.
The willful destruction of many statues and shrines in churches in the 1970s (under the guise of "implementing Vatican II") is now generally acknowledged to have been a disaster, along with the deliberate and unnecessary abandonment of virtually all Latin in some parishes, so that words and phrases such as "Gloria in excelsis", "Pater noster" and "Sanctus" now mean little or nothing to many people.
But perhaps the greatest loss was the sense of "folk Catholicism", a confidence in our own value as a faith community, a people on pilgrimage together with ideas, songs, traditions and customs that bind us with one another and with those who have gone before.
Revival of the "Domestic Church"
It's not too late — it is never too late — to make things right. We can and must revive our Catholic memories and traditions. Modern life makes many things easier: we can travel to shrines and places of pilgrimage at home or abroad, we can enjoy great paintings and music via art galleries, CDs, and the Internet, and even family celebrations are easier thanks to supermarkets, freezers and modern kitchens, which take much of the grim labor out of preparing and serving meals.
Pope John Paul II has spoken often of the "domestic Church", the little human community that is the family. A Catholic family home should be a place of welcome and hospitality, where visitors can "catch" something of the flavor of the Catholic faith and absorb its message.
Grace at meals — perhaps varying according to the season, or to reflect specific events or needs. A special meal on the feast-day of the patron saint of each member of the family as it comes round. Traditional dishes for great Church feasts, perhaps discovered on trips abroad or in one's own country. Candles on an Advent wreath. Simple meals in Lent with funds saved going to Catholic projects. Commemorative candles from Baptism or First Communion carefully saved and re-lit for special occasions.
All of these things require planning — and encouragement, via the Sunday pulpit, from the clergy, who do need to remind us from time to time that our homes should not be shrines to television or merely places where we sleep, launder clothes, and grab snacks from the fridge.
We need reminders, too, about the importance of having a crucifix hanging in our home, together with perhaps a statue or picture of Our Lady and/or of the Sacred Heart — and that every Catholic should possess a Rosary, and know how to use it.
Re-Catholicizing Schools
Catholic culture should obviously be widely reflected in our schools. It is a delight, on entering a Catholic school, to find a statue of Our Lady that is obviously well cherished and has a votive light or a fresh posy of flowers in front of it. It is sad when our schools seem keener on emphasizing their secular credentials than on celebrating the real values on which they were founded. I once passed a Catholic girls' school boasting the slogan "Educating girls for success", which struck me as being a quite horribly inaccurate vision of what such an establishment should be doing!
We need to think about Sunday as a special day. How often you hear people speak with respect of the ways Jewish families honor their Sabbath rituals, and yet we seem to think we can ignore Sunday Mass if it is a bit inconvenient, or treat Communion lightly, with snacks and sweets munched without thought to the need for an hour's fast.
In today's society, each of us needs to be evangelistic. People are hungry for real spiritual truths. Aromatherapy, counseling, and various diets may have their uses, but cannot answer our deepest needs. We are made for God, and there is an ache in our hearts until we find Him. Using our Catholic traditions and customs, we can restore our confidence in our own faith and learn to share it with others.
The next time some one asks you about Catholic customs and traditions, don't just mumble that we don't seem to have any — make it your business to rediscover them and pass them on.
Copyright © 2002 Women for Faith & Family
Joanna Bogle is a British Catholic journalist who frequently appears on radio and television. Excerpts from her A Book of Feasts and Seasons appear on several pages of the Prayers and Devotions section on the WFF web site. She is the author of a book for girls aged nine and up, We Didn't Mean to Start a School ($10 - write Mrs. Bogle at 34 Barnard Gardens, New Malden, Surrey, KT3 6QG, England.)
This article previously appeared in Voices, the journal of Women for Faith & Family, and is adapted by permission.
For example, take an urban block that is, for the sake of argument, 90% Roman Catholic. In the east, there would be a heavy ethnic predominance toward one type, in the midwest, somewhat mixed. Nonetheless, as the calendar ticked round, nearly everybody on the block was observing particular cultural traditions on the same day. The adults and kids talked about it, prepared for it, and would even mix households and celebrate some things together.
Move 40% of that block out to the new suburbs surrounding Lake McMansion. All of a sudden, you don't have that common purpose and common event out at the lake - some years, they even start to forego it for other activities. And in the old neighborhood, that old ethnic and religious cohesiveness is irreparably broken, even for those who are left.
The various forms of liberalism, socialism, neo-modernism, liturgical minimalism, modernistic wreckovation architecture, and related left-wing "isms" which had afflicted liberal Catholic circles are part of the wider gnosticism in secular modern culture and really have nothing to do with Catholicism. "Third Force" pychology, Enneagrams, and Marxist Liberation Theology which were in vogue in seminary and clerical circles are classic examples. Modern ideological culture has a gnostic/totalitarian component with all the trappings of fuzzy emotionalist mystification. Hillary Clinton screaming nonsense is a good illustration of the phenomenon - angry, emotional, irrational, an incontinent fuzzy mind wandering all over the ideological landscape with an unknown destination of all kids spending the first five years of their lives under the total control of government social engineering in statist "day care" laboratories. Socialism + scientism gone amok.
Unfortunately, the people who make decisions about what kind of church building to construct, the building committees and clergy involved, frequently do not have any formal training in Catholic sacred architecture in any sound sense. The construction firms that often are contracted to do the job do not have such training either. When you build enough ugly churches, it becomes a trend. They just keep repeating the same, tired, trite, minimalist formulae. Why any bishop allows that, along with the odious wreckovation, is a strange mystery. They could stop it today, now, if they wanted to. The ridiculously absurd part is that someone thinks modernism is "progressive" or whatever. It's a joke. A well-known joke, lampooned in books and articles by architects and art historians.
Actually, your arguments are well taken, and they are virtually identical to what E. Michael Jones has been saying in several articles and books. He believes that in many cases the highway projects were deliberately steered to break up ethnic voting blocs in major cities -- usually Catholic voting blocs, but sometimes other groups as well.
Also, "inclusive language" Scriptures for the catechetical material (not approved), the use of "BC" and "BCE" instead of "AD" (now exactly what happened 2,000 years ago to form the origin and starting point of our calender?), and get this, "First Testament" and "Second Testament" as opposed to "Old" and "New" to apparently not offend Jewish people? The list can go on and on...
I am not trying to start something, really, Why post an article if you don't want debate? I do not thing his post was hateful, it was just another point of view. Becky
I've heard that it is properly called "Rose" ;-)
Isn't this one of two days in the Latin Rite calender where Priests are allowed to wear rose colored vestments instead of purple? Just wondering. You know, to "lighten" things up.
Is this a reference to the Eastern Orthodox?
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