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While it is generally assumed that the Second Vatican Council did not leave much room for public devotion outside the reformed and newly endorsed patterns of the Catholic liturgy, laid out in the Constitution on the sacred liturgy (Sacrosanctum Concilium), the present essay shows a remarkable case of the survival and transformation of a preconciliar devotional practice. The 3,000 crosses that still decorate the landscape in the Canadian province of Quebec are being maintained and taken care of by Catholic laypeople. In a complex process of selective (re)interpretation and (re)negotiation of what they see as key concepts of the Council–such as lay participation, openness to the world, and a positive attitude toward non-Catholics and non-Christians–these Quebeckers succeed in making the crosses into a new, revitalized expression of their postconciliar religiosity and their own distinct Catholic identity, with little interference from the Church authorities.

This introductory chapter explains the coverage of this book, which is about the influence of Catholic nostalgia on the works of Irish author James Joyce. This book identifies the specific Catholic rituals and devotions that caused a nostalgic reaction in Joyce and suggests that his depiction of Catholic issues in his work has inspired in his readers an enduring admiration for institutional Catholicism. It also explores the influence of Joyce on subsequent writers, including Flannery O'Connor and Thomas Merton.

Because of the Reformation during the sixteenth century, parishes of England experienced how symbols of Catholic devotion were torn down and burned. The Catholic mass — including the priests' decorated vestments and the altars — was under attack, as was the importance and focus given to the notion of consecrated bread and wine that supposedly represents the body and blood of Christ. Along with idolatry, sacrifice — which could be in the form of thanksgiving, benevolence and liberality to the poor, and the mortifying of one's own body — was also a major target. After Edward VI's reign, the English version of the bible and the pulpit became the new icons during that period. This era also offered the basis for the Elizabethan settlement in the 1560s.

The life and works of Irish immigrant to the United States John England illustrate how the doctrine of purgatory was severed from its location at Lough Derg. England was influenced by the philosophical values of the French Enlightenment. He started an American press and published one of the longest-running Catholic periodicals in the United States, The Catholic Miscellany. In The Catholic Miscellany, purgatory is represented as a condition of the soul, and its spatial features are eradicated entirely. This version of purgatory gained popularity and was often posited as a counter to elaborate descriptions of souls on fire. John England’s work regarding purgatory is representative of the development that represents purgatory as a condition or state of soul, and not as a visceral place of punishment.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book addresses the following question: How does one account for the rosary's ubiquity, durability, and resilience? The book does not reconsider the medieval origins of the rosary, but begins in earnest with the enhanced status and popularity of the rosary among Roman Catholics, particularly after the Christian military victory over Ottoman forces at Lepanto, off western Greece, in 1571. It argues that the rosary survived and flourished because it was able to absorb the reframings of reform, representation, ritual, religious identity, and devotion that came to characterize early modern Catholicism and that have continued to shape Catholic piety and practice to the present day.

Here the issue of cultural Catholicism is examined for late medieval Ireland c. 1200-c1550, by way of devotional cults and practices. Such evidence as survives allows us to draw some conclusions about the distinctive religious practices among the two major groups living in Ireland at that time: the Gaelic Irish and the Anglo-Norman Irish. Despite different devotional tendencies in each community it is clear that facile distinctions based on ethic group must be avoided in order to judge Irish Catholicism within the broader context of European Catholicism as a whole. The essay also examines the issue of how different the idea of identity was for the average of the Anglo-Irish inhabitant of the Pale, from that of English visitors, or indeed of the ‘mere’ Irish within the Pale and those who lived beyond it.