From Charles Coulombe at The European Conservative:
September and October in Europe are filled with innumerable harvest festivals and blessings of the fields; Michaelmas is a great holiday in many places—and even in England greeted with daisies and roast goose. If Halloween is an American import outside of the British Isles’ Celtic Fringe (wherein you’ll still find some very interesting observances), throughout Catholic and even much of Lutheran Europe the cemeteries are the places to be on All Saints Night and All Souls Day, with their innumerable beautiful candles. Catholic or Protestant, hounds shall be blessed and horns sound in churches across the Continent in honour of St. Hubert’s Day. November 11, with its sombre memories of the Great War, is festooned with red poppies, blue cornflowers, and forget-me-nots in Britain, France, and Germany. But it is also Martinmas, welcomed with goose and red wine—and in Central Europe, singing children illumine the night with paper lanterns and songs in honour of St. Martin. Every Scot keeps St. Andrew’s Day, while St. Nicholas in turn is welcomed on his feast day with his creepy companion (be he called Knecht Ruprecht, Zwart Piet, or Krampus) for the children’s rewards or punishments. The buildup to Christmas unleashes a cavalcade of local customs, but the candle-crowned girls on St. Lucy’s Day in Sweden with their morning coffee and cakes are among the most charming. The observances of Christmas Eve and Day vary not only from country to country but province to province and even town to town, with the gifts brought by figures ranging from Father Christmas to the Christ Child Himself. But the next too is kept well, whether one hunt the wren in Ireland or bless the horses in Hungary. New Year’s Eve and Day are also great times for celebration, with everything from telling fortunes with molten lead to giving more gifts to first-footing. But the Epiphany is a much bigger feast in Europe than America, with children again going singing from door to door in German-speaking lands, and the Three Kings and Befana bringing gifts in Spain and Italy. So it goes on, until the revelry of Candlemas and Carnevale.
Even so, it is not just Autumn and Winter that are heavy with such feasts; every season has them, from Ireland and Portugal to the Ural Mountains—indeed, they are celebrated with redoubled vigour in Central and Eastern Europe since the fall of Communism. Most, of course, are based like the ones we have looked at on the liturgical year, be it Latin or Byzantine, Gregorian or Julian. Nor is it only on the calendar that Christianity has left its mark in Europe. Every palace and castle has its chapel; every city and town has its cathedral or civic church. The abbeys—ruined or occupied—still mark the landscape, as do innumerable wayside shrines and holy wells. So too has the Faith marked the arts and literature of Europe, no matter how much artists and writers attempt to escape it. In a word, the identity of Europe is complete, utterly, and inescapably bound up with Christianity.
But herein lies a problem. It is certainly true that – as with American Christmas, Easter, and Halloween—it is possible to celebrate the many feasts of the European year without any faith, even as it is possible for American Supreme Court Justices to attend the annual Red Mass of the Holy Ghost in Washington, D.C., or innumerable British municipal bodies to have civic services or kirkins of the council offered on their behalf. It can all be, as American jurists have it—“civic Deism”—pretty rituals emptied of all religious or other meaning through endless repetition. Christmas can indeed be just about gifts, Easter about bunnies, and Martinmas about geese. Even in this meaningless practise, there is the feel-good rush of nostalgia, of revived feelings of good-will. Surely that is enough? (Read more.)
In all of my travels, it struck me that just as—in a real sense—the descendants of the Recusants and the members of the Ordinariate in Britain are truly the most English of the English, the most Welsh of the Welsh, and the most Scot of the Scots because they are the direct inheritors of what founded their countries and made them great, my new friends are truly the most Danish of the Danes. Despite the national superstitions that conflate national identities with their Protestant State Churches, the same is true of all Northern Europe. Despite the centuries of apostasy, the old churches and castles and manor house, the woods and fields—all of the landscape—cry out that these were Catholic countries. It is wonderful to see, in Denmark at least, that more and more are heeding the call.
It is not merely a question of safeguarding a glorious past, however, anymore than it is among the surviving devout in post-Catholic countries, from Ireland to Italy to Austria. It is about building a truly Catholic and so humane future. My young friends plan to make this event a recurring one—and to invite similar groups from around Scandinavia: Swedes, Norwegians, perhaps even Finns and Icelanders. All of us Catholics around the world must support these developments, with our prayers if nothing else.
Indeed, it is interesting to note that this movement is organic; it is not an initiative of the hierarchy, but rather a spontaneous outburst, a natural result of goodwill seeking Infallible Truth—and finding it in Catholic Tradition. Just as the initiative for the Ordinariates came from the Anglican side, so too here. But this renewed search for reality is not confined to the lands of the Reformation: my last two (adult) godsons have been respectively a Brahmin Hindu from Calcutta and a Jew from Israel—both of whom found the Faith on their own. In the latter’s convert class here in Austria, over half of the thirty or so others were Iranians or Afghans.
Eras which see mass fallings away from the Faith often see compensations elsewhere. The loss of the Near East to Islam preceded wholesale national conversions in Northern and Eastern Europe; even as millions followed Luther, Calvin, and Henry VIII out of the Church, millions more followed Our Lady of Guadalupe and St. Francis Xavier in. It may well be that a period which has witnessed majorities fall away from the practice of the Faith in what were the Catholic heartlands in Ireland, Southwestern Europe, and Latin America may precede one that shall see them made up or excelled in lands traditionally hostile toward the Church. Nothing could be more fitting than a return to Catholicity of those Scandinavian lands who first brought the Faith to North America. But regardless of the macrocosm, every soul is infinitely precious to God—sufficiently so for Him to die for each of them. Any individual on his way to the Truth should be nurtured every way we know how—for our own soul’s sake as well as his. (Read more.)
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