It’s a common sight: A young person shifts from the Communion line leading to the eucharistic minister to the one leading to the priest. He then drops to his knees and sticks out his tongue for the priest to place the host on it. I roll my eyes as he walks reverently back to his pew, thinking Geez, he must think he’s so much holier than the rest of us!
I know that I can never really know what’s in someone else’s heart. But as much as I try to stave off my judgment of young traditional Catholics who very outwardly engage in acts of intense devotion, I can’t help but find myself aggravated. Part of my quickness to assume that their intentions are less than pure is because I used to be just like them—that is, until a friend fraternally corrected my performative acts of piety.
When I entered into full communion with the Catholic Church during my junior year at Fordham University, I was on fire with faith. I wanted to do all that I could to live my newfound beliefs intensely, to get to know God more and more. I thought that meant doing all the things Catholics are supposed to do, but in more extreme ways. On top of refusing to receive Communion from lay people or in my hand while standing, I made it a point to bow lower than everyone else during the mention of the Incarnation in the creed and to pound my chest loudly during the Confiteor. When people reached out their hand to hold mine during the Our Father, I shook my head—telling them afterward that it constituted liturgical abuse because it is not in the rubrics for Mass.
I would even recite some of the Mass responses in Latin. This was because I had developed a devotion to the Tridentine Latin Mass, and was determined to include as much from it as I could whenever I was “forced” to attend a Novus Ordo Mass, which wasn’t reverent enough for my liking.
Beyond the Mass itself, I would cross myself ostentatiously whenever I passed by a church—especially when I was walking with non-Catholic friends. And I never left home without wearing a large cross and several saint medals, if not also a Catholic-themed graphic T-shirt. I would also go out of my way to “defend the faith” as much as possible. This usually took the form of starting arguments with people who did or said things that challenged the church’s moral or theological teachings. I frequently told my family members that they were in error for being “cafeteria Catholics” and sincerely hoped my corrections would bring them back to the right path.
But it wasn’t until a friend corrected me that I started to realize the errors in my own mentality—and in my heart. After making a stink about how, technically, eucharist ministers should only be used when there are so many people receiving communion that it would take an “inordinate” amount of time for the priest to be the sole person distributing the host, Suzanne told me, gently but firmly: “The liturgy is not about you.”
She went on to explain that she believed that the best policy was “when in Rome, do as the Romans do.” Unless what the priest and parish community is doing objectively constitutes liturgical abuse or heresy, it’s best to go along with the others rather than to distinguish yourself from them—no matter how noble or sincere your intentions are. “The liturgy is about communion with Christ through your being part of the body of believers. It’s not about your ‘self-expression’ or personal piety,” she said. Suzanne clarified that while one’s personal connection with God indeed plays a role in the liturgy, it should not take precedence over your being one with the people among whom God has placed you at Mass.
Suzanne helped open my eyes to how much my supposed piety was a mask for my selfish need to prove I was holier than those who I perceived to be lukewarm cradle Catholics. I slowly started to understand how much sanctity is less the result of my personal effort to do pious acts and more the result of being attentive to and responding to the ways Christ was making himself known—taking on flesh—in the people and circumstances in front of me.
As the Italian theologian Father Luigi Giussani put it, Christian morality comes down to “adhering to the Presence of Christ” in our daily life. The more I contemplated this, and followed other Catholics who were more focused on seeking Christ in the day-to-day than in performing externally pious actions, I began to recognize how Christ was truly present in reality, and not just in my head or heart.
In his book In Search of the Human Face, Father Giussani emphasizes that the central claim of Christianity is the “event” of God becoming a human being who lived, ate, drank, worked, suffered and cried alongside other human beings. God’s “companionship with man” eventually gave birth to a community uniting those who encountered him in their lives. This companionship—the church—makes it possible to encounter Christ today. And it is precisely this presence of Christ’s body through the communion of believers—belonging to it, adhering to it, following it—that is our point of reference when discerning how to live our faith in our day-to-day lives.
Surely, personal acts of piety can play an important role, but they should always be in service of, never a replacement for, our attempts to enter into deeper communion with him through his presence in reality and the people in our lives. At the end of the day, unity with Christ and his body comes first. True righteousness is more about charity and mutual obedience than it is about my need to do my own thing, no matter how noble my intentions might be.
Father Giussani warns that too many Christians reduce their faith to a set of ideas, rituals or rules, which risks placing too much emphasis on the individual’s initiative rather than the initiative of God coming to reach us. This problem was also named by Pope Francis whenever he reminded the church that Christ “ci primerea”: He always precedes us—he reaches out to us even before we attempt to reach out to him. Father Giussani believed that this “self-referential” way of living the faith became widespread especially after the dawn of Enlightenment philosophy. He cites the influence of the ethical theories of Immanuel Kant, who insisted that truly moral actions must derive from the purity of the individual’s efforts, and not by “extrinsic” motivations—like the desire for unity with God, the pursuit of meaning or the reward of eternal happiness.
Entering into an intentional community quickly showed me how much my extreme devotions were not a substitute for adherence to Christ in my neighbor. Indeed, when not channeled toward that ideal, they become a major obstacle to it. There was something deeply humbling about realizing that praying vespers “my way” threw the others off track—and got on their nerves. Furthermore, having to follow our community’s prayer schedule, on top of our cleaning and cooking schedule, took time away from my preferred personal devotions and made it near impossible for me to have time to get to the nearest parish that had a Latin Mass. I was pleasantly surprised to find that, rather than making me feel distanced from Christ, giving up “my way” of doing things actually made me feel closer to him than I had ever before.
Above all, being surrounded by people who warmly embraced me as I was, including my most annoying and selfish shortcomings, helped me to recognize Christ’s radiant presence in even the smallest, most mundane things in my day. This awareness of his presence inspired me to do my work with new gusto. I paid careful attention to the importance of all the little details, and treated people with a new tenderness I didn’t know I was capable of.
At a certain point, I no longer felt the need to wear all my medals and Catholic graphic T-shirts, to cross myself ostentatiously or start arguments with people about church doctrine. I found that banking on my desire to find Christ in the real by itself was enough—and that there was something more organic about witnessing to the faith in this way than my forced, blatant demonstrations of devotion. I began to see that it’s the subtle way of witnessing through the way we live and love one another that makes people pick up on the fact that there is something different about us Christians, and which incites people’s curiosity to know more about our faith. As much as I had written it off as cringe, I eventually realized that the saying is true: Christians ought to “preach the Gospel, using words when necessary.”
Of course, not all people who drop to their knees to receive Communion during a Novus Ordo Mass or who value apologetics are trying to be holier than thou, or to set themselves apart. I know plenty of people who do these things with the most sincere, earnest intentions. I also think it’s absolutely correct to be scandalized by objective liturgical abuse or heresy, and that there’s a time and a place to offer fraternal correction for these errors.
But I also think that all of us, especially young converts like myself, ought to probe our consciences and ask how much our impulse to do things differently from the others is driven by something self-seeking that can quickly morph into an escape from adhering to Christ in the real.
While I still value my personal devotions, I’ll always be grateful to Suzanne for reminding me that Christ is present not only in my head or in my external acts of piety, but above all in the flesh of the faces and circumstances in front of me.
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