Published December 17, 2024
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 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.
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.
Why Foes of Faith Try to Destroy the Bond of Faith with Language and Culture
One thing that is, well, perplexing about the liturgical reformers’ recklessness in severing faith from culture by shuffling the liturgical calendar is that the powerful relationship between faith and culture, such as proverbs connected to feast days and the celebration of special feast days on weekdays, was not some sort of secret they could not have known. The importance of this relationship has long been evident—at least to those outside of academia—such as political leaders.
Historically, leaders hostile to the Church understood that breaking the bond between faith and culture was an essential step toward eliminating faith in the population. In particular, they knew that the long-standing traditions found in language and special celebrations were key reinforcements of the faith-culture bond. Two examples of leaders who sought to break this bond are King Henry VIII and Adolf Hitler.
King Henry VIII issued an edict to ban the use of agricultural and meteorological sayings connected to saints’ feast days. In a book about weather lore, one author explains, “Forthright Henry VIII was so impatient with his subjects who paid too much attention to the saints and astrologers that he tried to do something about it. His advice is reflected in this verse…:
Better it is to rise betimes
And make hay while the sun shines,
Than to believe in tales and lies
Which idle people do devise.[2]
While King Henry VIII’s excuse for banning maxims associated with saints’ feast days may have been his accusation that they were “tales and lies,” the effect of removing saint-related sayings from the language was likely not lost on him. And he would not have been the first leader to attempt to cover up an effort to remove faith from a culture with an ostensibly pragmatic justification.
More recently, the Nazi regime in Germany made a point of trying to use and shape folklore sayings to foster their ideology because they recognized the influence of folklore in the culture.[3] Moreover, under their anti-Catholic measures, “the state abolished some religious feast days and moved others from weekdays to Sundays,” as historian Richard J. Evans recounts.[4] The government was particularly concerned about refusals to comply with such measures.
Evans notes that “On 31 May 1941, for instance, it was reported” by government officials “in the rural district of Ebermannstadt, in Bavaria, that people were simply ignoring the injunction to work on religious feast days.”[5] According to this report: “All attempts to shatter this loyalty have met with ice-cold rejection, and in part arouse discontent and hatred. The (legally abolished) feast day of the Ascension was just one solid demonstration against the state ban…”[6]
The Nazi government often gave pragmatic—that is, fig leaf—excuses for its anti-Catholic measures; the excuse given for abolishing some feast days and moving others to Sundays, explains Evans, was “the need for an intensified war effort.”[7] (Yet, as the report of May 31, 1941, makes clear, the actual concern of the government was the population’s “loyalty.”)
People saw through such paper-thin justifications. The report from 1941 continues:
The abolition of Ascension Day as well as the ban on the holding of processions, pilgrimages etc. on workdays is regarded as a mere excuse for the gradual and ongoing general removal of Church festivals altogether, as part of the total extermination of the Christian religious communities.[8]
The people were not wrong about the actual objectives of the Nazi party. For example, Martin Bormann, personal secretary to Adolf Hitler, sent a notice to “the Party Regional Leaders in June 1941 reminding them that National Socialism was incompatible with Christianity and urging them to do all they could to reduce the influence of the Churches.”[9]
As for the Catholic Church since the middle of the twentieth century, while the intentions of the liturgical reformers and bishops who have been moving feast days to Sundays and shuffling the calendar overall may be clouded in some uncertainty, one result is clear: the weakening of the bond between faith and culture.
Deracination = De-evangelization
Today, with satellites and mobile phone apps informing us about when to sow and the weather, it is unlikely new maxims will emerge for the altered dates of these feasts. On top of this, as little in the Church seems to be stable anymore, by the time a new saying might emerge, some academic liturgical studies “experts” (whose world scarcely extends beyond an indoor office and digital screens), may have already moved the feast days yet again.
Given that many of the traditional maxims are agricultural, hardly a more appropriate word is to be found to describe this impact on culture than “deracination”: separating culture from its Catholic roots and separating daily life from the soil. Thus, we should not be surprised then when the seeds of renewed evangelization fail to sprout, for they are falling onto soil that the modern Church herself has helped make arid.
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Jennifer Bryson, Ph.D., is a Fellow in EPPC’s Catholic Women’s Forum. Currently, she is translating the works of Ida Friederike Görres (1901–1971) from German to English. She lives in Lincoln, Nebraska.
