Festive Faith: Catholic Celebrations Through the Year and Around the World

Review

SECTION ONE Some books argue that holiness looks like relentless solemnity. Festive Faith, published by Ave Maria Press, argues the opposite: that the Catholic calendar's pattern of feasts, fasts, and ordinary time is itself a school of the soul, training the person in wonder, gratitude, and the kind of embodied joy that ancient Christians wore as a mark of identity. The book is addressed to Catholic families and individuals who sense that the Church's liturgical year holds more formative power than their daily lives have yet drawn from it — people who observe Christmas and Easter but who have not yet let Candlemas, Corpus Christi, or the feasts of lesser-known saints reshape the tempo of their weeks. Readers looking to recover a sense that faith is alive in the body, at the table, and in ordinary household time will find this a useful guide. SECTION TWO - **Created**: The book affirms that the body participates in worship. Feasting is not a concession to appetite but a recognition that the person is a unified whole — that bread, wine, and shared table time are genuine mediators of gratitude and communal identity. This is the imago Dei expressed in creaturely delight, not despite it. - **Fallen**: Joylessness is treated as a symptom of something disordered in the person, not simply a temperamental fact. The liturgical year's rhythm of fast and feast is implicitly a remedy for the flattening of desire that comes when concupiscence — disordered appetite that either over-grasps pleasure or numbs it into acedia — goes unaddressed. The calendar provides external structure that re-orders interior experience. - **Redeemed**: The book's central claim is that festivity is a practice of redemption — that by entering the Church's feasts with intention, the person is being re-shaped toward the Paschal pattern: death and resurrection played out in the small scale of seasonal celebration. Grace works through particular, embodied occasions, not in the abstract. - **Justice (worship)**: Festive Faith trains the virtue of religion precisely by insisting that feasts are owed, not optional. Giving God specific times of celebration is an act of justice — giving the Creator what is due — rather than a mood-dependent expression of feeling. - **Prudence (memory)**: The liturgical calendar is a technology of corporate memory. By returning year after year to the same feasts, the person rehearses the story of salvation and builds the habitual orientation that Aquinas identifies as the integral part of prudence that draws on past experience to inform present judgment. SECTION THREE Festive Faith sits in natural conversation with Pope Francis's[^1] argument in Evangelii Gaudium that Christians whose lives resemble 'Lent without Easter' have misread the Gospel — the book's insistence on embodied celebration is a practical answer to that diagnosis. Pope Benedict XVI's[^2] Wednesday Audiences supply the theological grammar beneath the book's practice: his reading of Psalm 104's 'wine to gladden the heart of man' as a sign that gifts beyond bare necessity reveal the 'free giving and abundance of love' is precisely the anthropological ground on which festive observance rests. The sharpest counterpoint comes from Bonhoeffer's[^3] The Cost of Discipleship, where the disciples 'stand aside' while 'the world keeps holiday' — a reminder that Christian festivity is not simply cultural celebration baptized, but must be grounded in the cross if it is to resist becoming mere sentiment. ## References 1. Pope Francis (2013). *Evangelii Gaudium*. — "There are Christians whose lives seem like Lent without Easter." 2. Pope Benedict XVI (n.d.). *Wednesday Audiences*. — "Food, oil and wine are gifts that bring life and give joy, because they go beyond what is strictly necessary." 3. Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1937). *The Cost of Discipleship*. — "While the world keeps holiday they stand aside... the disciples meditate on the end, the last judgement."

✓ Strengths

• ✓Affirms the body-soul unity of the person by treating feasting, fasting, and seasonal celebration as genuinely formative acts rather than mere cultural observances.
• ✓Locates joy within the liturgical calendar, treating festivity as a theological category that participates in the Paschal Mystery rather than a sentiment layered on top of faith.
• ✓Addresses the Fallen condition by recognizing that joylessness and spiritual flatness are real disorders — not mere moods — that the rhythm of the Church's year is designed to remedy.
• ✓Points toward redemption through the concrete bodily practices of celebration: shared meals, sacred time, and communal memory that re-order disordered desire toward gratitude and worship.
• ✓Trains the virtue of religion (justice-worship) by showing how festivity is an act of giving God what is due rather than an indulgence to be justified.

⚠ Considerations

• ⚠Books in this genre can domesticate the liturgical calendar into lifestyle aesthetics; if Ave Maria Press's editorial framing is primarily devotional rather than theological, the Fallen dimension of the person may receive insufficient attention.