I am going to spend a few days casually blogging on this book. Habits of Devotion is a collection of four essays on the transformation of American  Catholic life during the course of the 20th century  in four areas: Prayer, Confession, Marian Devotion and the Eucharist.

The book is part of a series, the ‘Cushwa Center Studies of Catholicism in Twentieth-Century America’ , which is, oddly (since the Cushwa Center is part of Notre Dame,)  published by Cornell University Press not by the University of Notre Dame Press.

I’m going to start with the first essay, "The Catholic Community at prayer, 1926-1976" by Joseph Chinnici, O.F.M., not just because it’s the first in the volume, but also because I think it’s the strongest essay in the book, and really sets the stage for what follows and addresses many issues which come up in this blog and in Catholic conversations generally, nowadays. So first, on those issues and conversations.

For all of us, whether we want to or not, the Second Vatican Council looms large in the Catholic consciousness. I say, "whether we want to or not" because most of the Catholics I know who are active in catechesis and other apostolates are not really interested in rehashing the same conversations about V2, endlessly, and are tired of every subject, every initiative, every blasted suggestion being filtered through that prism: "Oh, is it in the Spirit of Vatican II?" "But – won’t that just take us back to the days before Vatican II?"

Because, you know, considering "before Vatican II" = about 1930 years of Christian history…well, maybe. And maybe "it" should, because if "it" doesn’t  – where does that leave us, exactly? In 2007 in my little corner of the world, informed by only my experience and the present zeigeist?

That’s depressing.

So "before" and "after" loom large, for better or worse, and in different senses, in the consciousness of many. The opinions and evaluations of "before" and "after" range widely all over the map, and exploring that map and making those evaluations is not what these blog posts – or this book – is about.

What I’m quite interested in is change. Whatever way you slice it or evaluate it, the "changes" of the post-Vatican II era happened quite rapidly. To get a sense of it, just imagine that in about 2013, the 1962 Missal will be back in force, everywhere, no questions asked or answered. That would be an astonishing, revolutionary, and probably puzzling change. Well, that’s what happened from 1964-1970, with much of the change occuring within an even narrower span (even before the official new Missal was issued in 69/70.)

I have long been obsessed with the question of how this happened, having no memory of any transistions myself – given that I wasn’t taken to Mass regularly until I was five or six, and that was a university town and parish where things tended to move more quickly (I swear I remember a clown at Mass at one point, but that could just be my imaginiation, I freely admit) – that would have been 65-66, I just have no concept of what happened or how it happened so quickly.  It fascinates me.

The story is long and complicated and much of yet has not yet been told or analyzed properly – the further away we get, the more objective, I think, that effort will be. There are political and personality issues, there are long-held agendas that finally have the chance to see the light, and there is the huge, unavoidable issue of general social and cultural upheaval that involves much more than just the bugaboo called "the 60’s" and goes back through suburbanization, de-urbanization, wars, economic depression, immigration and beyond.

What the essays in this book do, though, is to focus on life on the ground, for the most part. How did the spiritual experience of lay Catholics change during this period? Why?

The essays for the most part admirably avoid any valuation of that change in any direction, seeking to simply (even though it’s not simply) examine the evidence and shape it into something that makes sense.

So, with prayer.

Chinnici begins by describing the changes in the spiritual lives of American Catholics during the period, doing a bit of historiography in the process, a historiographical reflection that covers how "revolutionary" these changes have been typically described to be.

But were they so "revolutionary?" Chinnici doesn’t deny the differences, and the dramatic difference between 1926 and 1976, but he knows that these things don’t just come out of nowhere, nor can they simply be imposed by the unwilling from elitists with an agenda above (the paradigm that some hold to). I’m going to skip one section (which I’ll come back to) and focus today on what Chinnici says about Scripture.

(What are his sources? Many. Records of the USCCB and diocesan archives, articles in scholarly and popular publications, and proceedings and records of various religious communities and lay movements, like the Christian Family Movement.)

What Chinnici writes of in this section is the rather extraordinary movement, beginning in the late 20’s, but reaching a high point in the 40’s and 50’s, to deepen Catholics’ acquaintance with and understanding of Scripture. He dates this to the publication of Fr. Paul Bussard’s Leaflet Missal, begun in 1929. (Burssard also invented a shortened form of the breviary to be used in Catholic schools.). The Leaflet Missal (a missalette, basically) was very popular and was fed off and fed into the growing popularity of missals, period.

This seems like a no-brainer to us, and missals were certainly not invented in the 20th century, (*see clarification in post. Vernacular translations of the missal were on the Index until 1897, but many personal devotional books contained big chunks of the Mass, in the vernacular as well as the Latin, embedded within meditative prayers and readings.) but in the context of the 20th century, the growth in popularity of these books was seen as a victory for deeper participation in the Mass and in the Word because if people were using these, that meant they weren’t using other non-Mass prayer books or doing other devotions during Mass. A study guide published in 1937 with the New Roman Missal explained the superiority of the (dual-language) missal by pointing out "The Missal associates one more intimately with the celebrant and therefore more closely with Christ; for the priest represents Our Lord;" "The Missal contains many apt and beautiful citations fromt he Psalms of David. Now these prayers of David are indeed the prayers of Chrsit, for David is a type of Christ:" and "Books of Piety are often very good and useful; at the best, however, they are never so good as the prayers of Holy Scripture, or those of the Fathers of the Church." (33)

A new Confraternity version (therefore, official) of the New Testament was published in 1941, and Chinnici points out, in that year, the bishops proclaimed Pentecost to be "Biblical Sunday" which it was celebrated as every year on Septuagesima Sunday until 1952, when the celebration was extended to a "Bible Week."  Within 4 months of that first celebration, half a million copies of the New Testament had been sold, and in 1943, 1.5 million Scripture reading lists for Lent were distributed through parishes and other Catholic institutions. Bishops frequently appealed to their people to familiarize themselves with and pray with Scripture.

1952 was the 500th anniversary of the publication of the Gutenburg Bible, and Christians throughout the world celebrated, including Catholics. The Confraternity of Christian Doctrine sent out 35,000 information packets on celebrating the occasion to Catholic institutions, and 7 bishops issued pastoral letters on the occasion.

(of course, in the middle of this was the issuance of Pius XII’s Divino Afflante Spiritu in 1943, which focused attention on Scripture, as well)

Chinnici writes:

In 1952, a member of the Lay Committee of the National Center of the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine captured the heart of the change that was taking place ever so slowly in the practice and understanding of the Catholic community at prayer. ‘The reading of the Bible,’ he advertised to the thousands of Catholics who received the mailings, ‘should be the regular accompaniment to the receiving of the Sacraments in the building of the Christian life. The Sacraments make one a sharer of Christ’s life in the Mystical Body. The seroius and reverent reading of the Bible makes on a sharer in Christ’s mind. It makes one think with Him, love what He loves, hate what He hates. Without the Sacraments, we may know the mind of Christ but we are not able to conform ourselves to It. Without the Bible we may have the will and strength to conform ourselves to it, but we do not know how. Therefore, if we are to become more Christ-like, we must make use of both the Sacraments and the bible. To use either to the exclusion of the other is to leave on part of Christian living undeveloped. T ouse neither is of course impossible for a Christian." (38)

So, what’s clear is that in the United States, a concerted effort was being made to help Catholics read and understand the Bible more and to use it in their spiritual lives. "Vatican II" didn’t change anything here – there was already a movement afoot, with the clearly stated purpose of helping Catholics be more informed, more faithful disciples of Jesus. Those "dark days" before Vatican II were not, it seems, about keeping the faithful stupid and uninformed. But it also shows a recognition of a need  – that the spiritual lives of Catholics would benefit from a closer acquaintance with and use of Scripture, that perhaps was absent.

(And who knows how much this was also influenced by the encounter with the American Protestant, Bible-focused context? A lot, I would suspect.)

But even now, you might see a difference, in reading what the layman says above, with comparing how many of us received our Scripture formation in those post-Vatican II years. For many of us, Scripture was not taught as a means to know the Mind of Christ. It was a document to examine as we would examine any historical text, but a text that happens to be important because it happens to informs our heritage, because we’re just lucky that way. The worthy and essential business of re-introducing Catholics to the Scriptures directly was pervaded by the skepticism of the Academy, as even high school textbooks and priest’s homilies became more interested in helping us learn about JPED and Q and what the gospel writers "were trying to say here" rather than the Mind of Christ.

And, at the end of the chapter, when we’re finished with the structure of 1 Corinthians, we’re simply asked "Share what this means to you." Not  – what does this teach you? How can your life and faith as a disciple be formed, challenged and changed by this?

Next up: "The Pedagogy of Participation". That should interest a few of you…

(And we have discussed the relationship of BIblical scholarship to the role of the Bible in spirituality here before…just a few months ago. Yes, Scripture study does mean an acquaintance with the various aspects of scholarship and background. But when is the line crossed so that the Scriptures become just another text to unpack and be vaguely inspired by and lose their spiritual power in our lives? I’d rather not rehash that discussion, exactly. When I can find a link that particular post, I’ll toss it up here)

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