Against a backdrop of drought, infernal heat, and plagues of locusts—wrapped up in scientific considerations on global warming—forms of popular piety that we thought had been forgotten are making a comeback. Novenas and processions to change the weather, supplications known as rogations, have the merit of reminding us how small man is in the face of the elements, and how great God is.
It’s an accepted fact that has now acquired the status of near-revealed truth: we have entered the era of climate change. Reports, such as this one from Unicef, remind us that it’s raining when and where it shouldn’t be; that in places where there was water, water has become undrinkable or is simply running out. We suffocate under stifling summer heat, more than we should. Mainstream media, our modern-day prophets of ill omen, claim that these ills are man-made.
We have no intention here of getting involved in a scientific dispute. That is beyond our ken. We would simply like to remind our readers, who still retain some common sense, that the scientific consensus on these issues is far from established, and that man remains a very weak creature in the face of the elements that are unleashed. If the actual weather afflictions aren’t enough to crush the body, computer screens and newspapers will try to crush the spirit.
While the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) experts are busy holding forums and conferences and publishing reports, ordinary citizens are choosing other ways to free themselves from climate anxiety, or ‘eco-anxiety’ to use the current term. They are bringing statues with peeling old paint out of their attics. Banners adorned with gold and purple fringes are brought out of the trunks. They unfurl silk parasols weighed down by dust. Little by little, they recall ancient and solemn prayers to venerable saints who watched over their lands and fields before they were swept away by the winds of modernity.
And so it was that on 18 March 2023, in Perpignan, in the south of France, a few kilometres from the Spanish border, a procession set off for the first time in 150 years to ask for rain to water a land ravaged by a drought lasting several weeks.
For six months, all the indicators had been in the red: over that period, the city had recorded just 130mm of rainfall. Faced with the unprecedented scale of the water shortage and the disastrous wrath coming for his vines, a winegrower summoned up the courage to knock on the door of Perpignan Cathedral to try and find a solution to his misfortune. He was thinking of one that the climate experts would have been hard pressed to suggest: the resurrection of a Visigothic tradition dating back nearly a thousand years—a procession in honour of Saint Gaudérique, patron saint of farmers. Since 1014, no fewer than 800 processions between Saint-Martin du Canigou and Perpignan have been recorded, according to the local press. The practice came to an end at the close of the 18th century.
No matter: it’s time to pick up the thread cut by time. “If there isn’t a deluge for 3 days, we won’t make it. All we can do now is pray,” said the good man.
Thanks to his insistence, the procession got organised and set off from the cathedral to the banks of the little river Tet, where a blessing of the waters was held. Two stretchers supporting the statue of Saint Gaudérique and the saint’s relics were proudly carried by local farmers.
“Tradition dictated that the statue should be submerged,” explained Jean-Luc Antoniazzi, president of the cultural association of the cathedral of Saint-Jean, “but originally it was made of silver covered in wax, and today it is made of gilded wood, so it is symbolically carried on the water … The archpriest of the cathedral then proceeds, according to the Visigothic ritual, to bless the area at the four cardinal points, with a relic of the True Cross,” added Abbé Lefebvre, the cathedral’s first vicar.
The procession went ahead, and that very evening the equivalent of three weeks’ rain fell in the space of three hours, well in excess of the day’s forecasts.
It was a perfect, beneficial rain, not a ridiculous drizzle or a storm that flooded everything in its path, but a beautiful, good rain that deeply irrigated the earth. For the rector of the cathedral, there was no doubt about it: “the rain is a beautiful response from Heaven.”
The procession brought together over 600 people, not all of them regular practising Catholics. “Over the last two or three years, this world that thought it was all-powerful has begun to appreciate its vulnerability, to realise how fragile it is in the face of nature and therefore in the face of its Creator,” says the parish priest. But behind the success of this initiative—which is not an isolated one—lies a deeper message than a simple epidermal manifestation of ‘eco-anxiety’ that has found an unlikely outlet. It’s about the essential role played by popular piety, which for decades has been dismissed as contemptible superstition, to be replaced by a more ‘adult’ faith. A faith that is perhaps more constructed, more conceptual, but also more arid, and ultimately, despite its stated intentions, much more elitist.
In countries rich in Catholic tradition, the entire liturgical year was punctuated by these encounters between man, the earth, and God—like so many irruptions of the divine presence into daily life, otherwise punctuated by the seasons and agricultural life, which manifested the return of the eternal cycle of life and nature. The Tridentine calendar gave pride of place to these prayers of petition, particularly at the time of the ‘Rogations’—from the Latin rogare, to ask—in the three days preceding the Ascension. These three days of processions, blessings and songs in the middle of the fields, were instituted in the fifth century of Christianity in southern Gaul and then extended to the universal Church in the ninth century.
The advent of scientific ‘progress’ and the marginalisation of the farming world have given the illusion that we can do without them. What’s the point of praying to Saint Eloi or San Isidro when you’ve got nitrogen fertiliser to do the job, and the supermarket shelves will be stocked with imported fruit and vegetables anyway? The liturgical reform of the 1960s did the rest, and rogations, which had become anecdotal, disappeared from the Church’s fixed calendar, while the gilded wooden statues of saints carried in processions were relegated to the attics of country churches. Climate change has put things back in their proper place, and we are seeing the return of rogations and processions in rural dioceses, particularly in France and Spain.
Not everyone is happy about this, however, as the French-speaking Swiss theologian Pierre Gisel takes offence at what he sees as a dangerous “conservative slant” taken by part of the Church today when it revives these age-old practices. In an interview with the regional Provençal newspaper Var-Matin in May, he expressed his indignation: “Praying for it to rain is something that seems a little strange to me … If, at the end of the Council, the Council Fathers had been told that rogations would be perpetuated again in 2023, they would clearly have been astonished.”
Gisel is indignant that people are once again praying for rain, a practice he describes as an “archaic return,” even esotericism, and which he puts on the same level as the recourse—in his view, folkloric—to exorcisms. Isn’t the devil’s greatest trick to make people believe he doesn’t exist? Clearly, Mr. Gisel no longer believes in Satan, nor does he believe in the miracles of rain falling from the sky. The poor man.
But there’s nothing archaic about these practices, or else you’d have to consider that God’s Creation is itself an archaism. On the other hand, there is a great deal of arrogance and blindness in believing that progressive mankind, with the enlightened conscience that Mr. Gisel and his friends worship, is the measure of all things and can rationally command the elements by using electric car batteries and recycling waste.
At the heart of our scorching summer, as we roam the golden fields and tread the weary earth with our feet, let us not forget to turn our gaze towards Heaven with these simple words coming from the depths of time: “O Lord, grant us the fruits of the earth and preserve them, we beseech you, hear us.”
