The Faithful’s Rightful Aspiration To “Devotion” In The Sacred Liturgy

By JAMES MONTI

The word “devotion” is one that comes up frequently enough in Catholic conversation. It is a term with a very rich and beautiful meaning, yet strangely enough, for decades now, it has been cast as virtually a pejorative expression, as something somehow at odds with our most important action as Catholics, the sacred liturgy.
The word “devotion” is derived from the verb “devote,” which means “to give up oneself or one’s time, energies, etc., to some purpose, activity, or person,” i.e., to dedicate oneself or one’s possessions to a special purpose or a particular person. It is especially when this devotion involves the giving of oneself to the service of another person that we recognize it as a most eloquent expression of unselfish love.
But what particular meaning does the word “devotion” have in our lives as Catholics? St. Thomas Aquinas offers us a very simple and succinct answer — that devotion is “the will to give oneself readily to things concerning the service of God” (Summa Theologica: First Complete American Edition in Three Volumes, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, New York, Benziger Brothers, 1948, II-II, q. 82, a. 1, co., volume 2, p. 1535).
Just how important is devotion? St. Thomas calls it “the principal act of religion” (ibid., II-II, q. 104, a. 3, ad. 1, volume 2, p. 1643). The heart is moved to devotion by contemplating who God is in all His goodness and who we are as sinful creatures totally dependent upon Him and in need of His mercy. It is devotion that inspires us to give the most generous response to God that we will ever make in our lives, whatever our vocation may be — the total surrender of oneself to God.
If therefore as St. Thomas Aquinas says devotion is “the principal act of religion,” it must have an integral role to play in our fruitful participation in the sacred liturgy. In a highly insightful 2009 presentation on the role of solemnity in the sacred liturgy as seen by St. Thomas Aquinas, Sr. Thomas Augustine Becker, OP, closely examines the Angelic Doctor’s thought on devotion in relation to our participation in the liturgical rites. As she explains, St. Thomas considers the interior disposition of the person receiving a sacrament as crucial to just how efficacious the person’s reception of the sacrament will be (“The Role of Solemnitas in the Liturgy According to Saint Thomas Aquinas,” in Matthew Levering and Michael Dauphinais, editors, Rediscovering Aquinas and the Sacraments: Studies in Sacramental Theology, Chicago, Hillenbrand Books, 2009, pp. 118-120).
A person who is well disposed will be open to receive far more deeply God’s grace than one who is not. What could be a better disposition than true devotion as defined by St. Thomas, the “will to give oneself readily to things concerning the service of God”?
Our Lord’s parable of the seeds that fell on different sorts of ground (Luke 8:4-15) could well be said to be a parable about the importance of devotion. Clearly the message is that the interior disposition and receptivity of the hearer to the word of God makes all the difference as to what will become of his faith.
So a mentality that says we shouldn’t come to the sacred liturgy with a “devotional attitude” is really erroneous. We do need to come to the liturgy with devotion. We do need to raise our hearts generously to God. The liturgy is not meant to be some cold intellectual abstraction in which the heart is left outside the door.
This takes us to the question of whether the manner of celebrating the sacred liturgy and the physical setting within which it is celebrated should be conducive to devotion. In light of the above, of course it should. Most of the liturgical ceremonies are celebrations of one or more of the sacraments, and all the sacraments are sensible signs that efficaciously impart invisible realities. So our senses should be deeply engaged in these rites.
Sr. Thomas Augustine explains that St. Thomas Aquinas identifies what he calls a “certain solemnity” in the particular manner of celebrating the sacred liturgy as ordered to the fostering of devotion as well as the inherent dignity of the sacrament being conferred or confected. For this solemnity to kindle in the human heart a devotion befitting the object of our devotion — Almighty God Himself — it “must evoke a certain gravitas, a dignity that aspires to reflect and respond to the magnitude of the divine act occurring in our midst” (Sr. Thomas Augustine, “The Role of Solemnitas,” p. 130). In light of this, it follows that man should employ the most precious metals, jewels, and fabrics and his loftiest artistic talents and sensibilities for the liturgical action.
Actions that trivialize the sacred liturgy and manners of celebrating it that denude it of beauty and reverence, as well as liturgical art and architecture that are manifestly ugly, stifle and suffocate the senses, and in doing so, snuff out devotion. There are all too many modern churches in which barren, almost windowless walls plus a dearth of religious imagery, or imagery that totally distorts the human form, overwhelm the worshipper with this suffocating atmosphere.
Much of this re-engineering of “the liturgical setting” has been purposefully designed to smother any traditional disposition of devotion so as to make the liturgy about something else altogether, about “fighting for social justice” and other earthly concerns. It turns St. Paul’s admonition to “seek the things that are above” (Col. 3:1) upside down into a secular mantra to “seek the things that are below.”
There is a multivolume corpus of liturgical legislation, over three centuries in the making, that relatively few are even aware of nowadays, the Decreta Authentica Congregationis Sacrorum Rituum (Authentic Decrees of the Congregation of Sacred Rites). The copy I have was published as a five-volume set by the Vatican from 1898 to 1901. As the title indicates, this is a collection of over four thousand decisions regarding the sacred liturgy handed down by what was then called the Sacred Congregation of Rites, or alternately, the Congregation of Sacred Rites (the predecessor of the Congregation for Divine Worship), with the decisions numbered consecutively from when the congregation was first instituted by Pope Sixtus V in January of 1588.
These decrees were issued to answer a wide variety of questions that arose on how to adhere properly to, carry out, and apply the rubrics of the liturgical books that were universally promulgated following the Council of Trent, beginning with the Breviarium Romanum of 1568 and the Missale Romanum of 1570. Each question typically came from one particular diocese, but the response of the congregation was held to be authoritative for the universal Church, albeit in some cases the decision only pertained to a local situation in one diocese or one country. Even in the present-day Ordinary Form of the Roman Rite, at least some of these decrees are still held to be in force.
What is of particular interest in these Decreta Authentica with regard to our consideration of the role of devotion in the sacred liturgy is that often enough the Sacred Congregation of Rites qualified or moderated its decision for the expressly stated reason that the devotion of the faithful ought not to be disturbed. In other words, when it was asked about the permissibility of continuing a longstanding local liturgical practice in a particular place that technically seemed to be at variance with or at least outside of what the post-Trent books prescribed or permitted, the congregation would sometimes reply by stipulating that the practice should not be suppressed if doing so would disturb the devotion of the people.
The Church so highly valued the importance of devotion in the hearts of the faithful that she did not want to quench any “dimly burning wick” (Isaiah 42:3) out of an excessively harsh insistence upon absolute liturgical uniformity.
It is because of this maternal solicitude of the Church for sincere manifestations and expressions of popular devotion that she has permitted and continues to permit in local places such practices as the Spanish custom of using Passion-related statues in the adornment of the Holy Thursday Repository and the tradition in Bavaria, Austria, and Poland of exposing the Blessed Sacrament in a veiled monstrance for adoration at a representation of the Lord’s Tomb on Good Friday and Holy Saturday.
As we all know, the word “devotion” in a Catholic context is also used to identify forms of Catholic worship that are not liturgical but rather more personal expressions of piety, yet also often practiced communally, such as the rosary, the Stations of the Cross, personal prayer before relics or images of the saints, and the like.

The Love Of God

The rightful assertion of the preeminence of the sacred liturgy as the supreme form of Catholic worship has unfortunately been expressed all too often in a manner that comes across as denigrating popular devotions. There is no good reason to do it this way. In our Catholic faith there are many distinctions regarding what is more important or more perfect that are not meant to insinuate that other things we do or believe as Catholics are “inferior” or unimportant.
For example, we routinely speak of the Holy Eucharist as the greatest of all the sacraments, for it is the sacrament in which Christ gives us His very self, yet it would be absurd to say that the Church considers the other sacraments, such as matrimony and extreme unction, to be unimportant. The truth of the matter is that to develop a healthy spiritual life we need both the sacred liturgy and popular devotions.
One further aspect of devotion as the most fitting disposition of the soul for the sacred liturgy deserves our attention — that devotion is high contagious. Who among us has not been deeply moved by the sight of a devout person in church silently pouring out his or her heart before God as seen in their exceptional acts of reverence and other actions of heightened piety?
Such a sight inflames with devotion the hearts of those who witness it, because what we are witnessing is the beauty of love. As we said at the beginning, devotion is by definition a matter of love. What better gift can we bring to the sacred liturgy than the love of God?