Blessing of Throats on the feast of St. Blaise; Stations of the Cross; Advent wreaths; Seven Churches Visitation on Holy Thursday; St. Andrew Novena; Saffron buns for the feast of St. Lucy…
These traditions and many more—ranging from widely practiced to downright obscure—all make up the beauty of liturgical living within the Catholic Church.
Kendra Tierney, blogger at CatholicAllYear.com and author of The Catholic All Year Compendium, joined Trending with Timmerie to discuss why traditions and feast days are such an important part of practicing our Catholic Faith.
When Kendra and her husband started having kids, they knew that they wanted the Catholic Faith to be a part of their family culture. “We started looking into, you know, how do we manage the hard stuff? How do we get our kids through Mass, how do we sit down and say a family Rosary, how do we observe abstinence and fasting days? … As I was looking more deeply into it … I started discovering these beautiful old traditions of the ways that feast days were celebrated,” explained Kendra.
“I realized that that’s really the fullness of our deposit of faith—learning to do the hard stuff but also learning about the joy and the way that these traditions that come back around every year really get us invested in our faith and help give us that Catholic identity.”
These old traditions of our faith—May Crowning, the Easter Vigil, Corpus Christi processions, special feast days—bring us out of the daily “norm”. They offer a unique way to practice our faith and help us enter into the beautiful liturgical seasons. And as Kendra reminds us, they’re a way to bring our faith into our everyday life and instill a deeper faith in our kids.
“Those traditions are so important. Those Corpus Christi processions, I think especially—what a beautiful way to literally bring what we believe out into the streets, out into the neighborhood around every Catholic parish! I say my goal with my blog is to make Catholicism weird again—because that’s what makes it special! That’s what makes it different and not just one choice among many. … These traditions, and especially when they’re in the home and ideally when they’re part of your larger community as well, I think that makes our faith harder to walk away from.”
For more ideas for liturgical living, listen to Timmerie’s interview with Kendra:
Tune in to Trending with Timmerie weekdays at 6-7pm CT only on Relevant Radio®.
