3 - Religious practice

Summary

Pilgrimage was just one of the many Catholic practices where popular and official Catholicism overlapped and reinforced each other. The Church and the population also agreed on the importance of most other rituals of Catholic practice: the sacraments, weekly services, regular Mass, and prayer, especially the Rosary, and the festivals of the liturgical year. The basic harmony achieved between the Church and the faithful was the result of a number of structural and institutional factors within German Catholicism, including the temporizing nature of the disciplinary aspects of Tridentine reform in Germany. Decisive, however, was the willingness of the Church to tolerate and even support popular religious practices, and the simultaneous popular appropriation of many clerical initiatives. If shrines and pilgrimage illustrate the ways in which the Catholic Church accepted popular devotions, the rapid growth of the cult of the Rosary, complete with confraternities, prayer meetings, and processions, exemplifies popular enthusiasm for clerical initiatives.

THE LITURGICAL YEAR AND EVERYDAY RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

Early modern Catholicism was and remained a religion of ritual. Indeed, German Catholics seemed to turn with enthusiasm to rituals, as a counterpoint to the Lutheran critique of the “empty rituals” of late medieval Christianity.