’55 and ’69 Liturgical Reforms Uprooting Oral Custom

When the twentieth-century liturgical reformers shuffled, eliminated, and renamed Catholic feast days, they weakened the already increasingly frail connection between faith and culture. The results have reduced the influence of the Church in culture and, as a result, in the population; culture provides, after all, a living connection to the Faith for many. One example of the damage to the faith-culture bond can be seen in the way the revamped calendar after 1969 (and to a lesser extent after 1955) made centuries-old proverbs and maxims associated with feast days suddenly no longer make sense. I call this “feast day disarray.”

In the largely de-Christianized cultures of our era, farmers’ maxims tied to feast days are a holdout, a remaining echo of a bygone era when the Church had helped form and build cultures. These cultures, in turn, had helped sustain the Faith. While I lived in Austria from 2021 to 2023, I kept hearing charming sayings and rhymes in German for one feast day after another. Of particular note was that even non-practicing Catholics in the village where I lived still enjoyed using these traditional sayings, especially the rhymes, and teaching them to me. Because these feast day maxims were part of their culture, so long as the feast days kept recurring, these sayings had roots deep enough to withstand the destructive forces of the zeitgeist. The Immigration Soluti... Malanga, Steven Check Amazon for Pricing.

The locals considered these maxims something special that they were proud to share with me as a foreigner. And learning these maxims was not only a fun and helpful language instruction for me, but it also offered seamless opportunities to bring faith into the conversation; the maxims were natural avenues of re-evangelization.

Most of the traditional maxims I learned in Austria concerned the natural world—plants (especially agriculture), weather, animals, and the like. These are known in German as “farmers’ maxims” (Bauernregeln). With Catholicism being moved ever more to the margins of many societies and the rise of technology in our relation to the natural world, the last remaining tie of these maxims to culture is the yearly recurrence of the related feast days. Yet, jumbling the Catholic calendar severed precisely this rhythm of the year.

Parallel to learning these German farmers’ maxims in Austria, I was also becoming more familiar with the 1962 and pre-1955 Roman calendars. I was learning about the beautiful feast days of our Church’s tradition that, in recent decades, have been eliminated—in technical terms, “suppressed,” moved to other times of the year, or renamed. (See the important research of Matthew Hazell and the article “Sanctoral Killing Fields” by Peter Kwasneiwski.) In the wake of these changes to the liturgical calendar, it occurred to me that many of the associated maxims would no longer make sense.

A saying about sowing on so-and-so’s feast day becomes bad advice if the feast is moved to a time of year in which seeds planted simply die. A saying about snowfall becomes nonsensical when a long-standing winter feast is moved to mid-summer. And few if any people will realize that the name of one plant or another comes from a long-gone Catholic feast day if the feast has been moved or if the feast day or the saint himself has been “canceled.”

I began compiling traditional sayings based on the feast days that the Church moved, eliminated, or renamed in the twentieth century. What I found is that these traditional sayings, when used within the new liturgical calendar, sound like jibberish or they are now being forgotten altogether.

Such liturgically-tied sayings of daily life may be less familiar to English speakers than to German speakers. The reasons these may be unfamiliar include the rupture between the Church and English culture caused by King Henry VIII as well as the secularism that now dominates the main modern influence on the English language, namely, the USA. Nevertheless, I found quite a few such “farmers’ maxims” in English tied to the recently shuffled feast days. I compiled a list in German and English, which I share at the end of this article. (No doubt, there are many such sayings in other languages as well—an area I encourage others to research.)

For readers unfamiliar with farmers’ maxims, to understand what they are, consider Americans saying, “Knee-high by the Fourth of July” to describe how high corn stalks should be by our national holiday. In our era of high-tech farming, some may view such a connection of a culture’s important feast day with the natural world as at best quaint but hardly significant. Yet, this would be a mistake. “Knee-high by the Fourth of July” is both a charming, easy-to-remember rhyme and it connects the dynamism of the agricultural cycle with something at least some in our culture still value, namely our national holiday. A child might enjoy learning this rhyming maxim. If a foreigner came to the USA and heard this saying, he might ask, “What is so special about the Fourth of July?” A conversation about the day might ensue. The Great Deformation:... David Stockman Best Price: $4.26 Buy New $8.99 (as of 05:50 UTC - Details)

In cultures where the Catholic faith has flourished, folk sayings about the natural world were tied to the celebrations the culture valued, namely those of the liturgical year. These served not only as a manifestation of faith in culture but as a bond between faith and culture.

Before the liturgical reforms uprooted this influence of faith in culture, if a non-believing foreigner were to hear the saying that crowfoot (aka buttercup) should bloom around the time of Roodmas,^[1] he might ask, “What is Roodmas? What is so special about this day?” Or a local believer seeing buttercup in bloom and associating it with Roodmas might pause to reflect on the meaning of the Feast of the Finding of the Holy Cross. In this way, such folk traditions in cultures provided a living connection between the people and the faith.

Now, to return to my American example: What if a future regime were to abolish the Fourth of July as Independence Day or move it willy-nilly to January 15? How much sense, then, would it make to say that corn should be “Knee-high by the Fourth of July”? It would no longer make sense. The fourth of July would be a day like any other, not something special warranting such a saying. The new regime might even suppress the saying so that people would forget the association of the Fourth of July with our national holiday.

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