Well, it’s been a while, hasn’t it?
No excuses, but here are some anyway:
Me needing and wanting to lend a hand to offspring at various stages of life.
Summer?
Synod? Maybe?
Various other writing projects, most of them drifting at this point.
So…here I am.
I was also moved to return here because for some reason, I’ve had a little surge in subscriptions lately. I figures it must be a sign of some sort.
Get back to work!
I’m thinking it might be related to the new podcast in which I’m participating in with Chris Barnett, who also has a Substack - you can check out the post on our first episode here. New episode coming in the next day or so.
So with All Saints’ Day coming up, I thought that would be a great subject for a post.
(Me on the regular blog on why The Kids Need Saints.)
Remember the purpose of this Substack - it’s not to analyze or critique so much (from my perspective) but to provide a space to share stories. Here’s the statement of purpose, in case you’ve forgotten.
So, saints.
To revisit my background: born in 1960, an only child, cradle Catholic daughter of a cradle Catholic French-Canadian mother and a non-practicing Methodist Texan father. Religious practice was consistent and very non-ethnic, whitebread suburban American in style. Public schools through 8th grade, with my only religious education during that time being First Communion prep, CCD in maybe 5th and 6th grade, then some very minimal Confirmation prep in 8th. Catholic school in high school, explored here. All of this happening in the Midwest and South: Illinois, Kansas and Tennessee, mostly.
Saints?
Hardly any. My mother, as I said, was very observant, but also, I suppose, reticent about devotion and devotionals - which strikes me as perhaps a French-Canadian thing. (I may be wrong about that). I had a cross and a rosary, and was taught to say the rosary, but there were no other saints’ images in our home, and no one ever said anything about patron saints for any of us, for any purpose - for anything. I wasn’t named after a saint (Amelie - a dead aunt, I think) - and had to work hard, when I started getting interested in such things, to find a saint associated with my name - I eventually found the early Christian martyr Victoria.
It goes without saying that my minimal, current-events oriented CCD experience never mentioned saint, and even the one guy who pulled out the Baltimore Catechism didn’t emphasize them - I suppose he was too busy teaching us things like “God exists, guys.”
My main memory of saints during that period (1974-78) was not any devotion to any long-canonized saints, but rather the excitement over the canonization of the first American saints: Elizabeth Ann Seton and John Neumann.
But that’s it. No devotions, no praying to saints, no attention to patron saints. Once I got to college and was very involved in campus ministry - no different. The spiritual emphasis was all on participating in the Mass, Scripture (a good thing!), mental prayer - guided meditations and such - and if you were going to go deeper, the charismatic movement.
I do think a lot of that is related, not only to the immediate post-Vatican II de-emphasis on devotions, period, but also to the fact that neither my upbringing or the places where my young life was lived had any ethnically Catholic component at all.
As I keep saying over and over - it was a different world, and I’m telling you, no one in 1976 could have imagined the pendulum swinging in the way it has, with devotion to saints being, well…cool, I guess?
I have some of my mother and grandmother’s religious items, including a stash of holy cards, all of which were of French-Canadian origin, from the early 1900’s through, probably the 1940’s. I was looking through them this morning for images for this post and was surprised by the small number of saints’ holy cards. Most of them were Jesus and Mary and the Holy Family in various arrangements and designated for various intentions. The most popular saint in this collection was - not surprisingly, really - St. Thérèse of Lisieux.
I invite you to share your stories of devotions to saints (or any popular devotions) both before the Council and in the fifteen years or so after….
At my Catholic elementary school (early 80's in Ontario) I don't remember anything about saints either, except one statue and plaque in the entryway about the school's titular saint. Nobody suggested choosing a Confirmation saint when we were confirmed, though I and one other kid did, since his and my families were traditional enough to know about the practice. Our priest allowed it but treated it as rather weird.
We didn't learn to say the Rosary or ever do so at that school; in fact, insofar as it was mentioned, it was treated as a backward and outdated thing some old ladies still insisted on doing. BUT for some reason, the school fairly regularly gave us these ugly molded plastic and string, glow-in-the-dark rosaries - presumably somebody once bought or donated a boatload of them and they had to do something with them, even though they didn't really believe in the rosary any more? There are still a dozen or more of them kicking around my parents' house, probably.
Pre Vatican II and probably as long as they were published my family subscribed to the Treasure Box magazines. I remember the earliest ones contained the story of St. Therese of Liseux a few pages and lots of pictures per issue. Around the time of the opening of the Council we got Vision books about saints and another series more of adventures in a Catholic historical fiction style.
Since I attended a 2-room school in grades 1-6 I had a religion class on Church history in the 1964-5 year at the latest, and it mentioned St. Roche at least in connection with the plague. I don't remember most of the rest of it.
Confirmation was in 4th grade and I would have done much better to postpone it because I really didn't want to receive it and couldn't get out of it. I took St. Frances not connected to any saint because we were all required to take another saint's name of the same sex as ourselves. Luckily, a sacrament received under physical duress, which is what it took to get me there, isn't received, so I was able to actually receive it as an adult. Rather like when the Spanish mob told the Jews to be baptized or die and many agreed to be baptized. The Pope said the baptisms were invalid and many Jews who could afford to moved to the Papal States. The Spanish monarchs refused to accept the Pope's decision, eventually leading to the Spanish Inquisition. Please forgive the digression.