Er… chaplets, not “chapters.” (Yeah, I don’t get along well with the “predictive text” on my tablet.)
I forgot to mention St. Dominic’s famous “
Nine Ways of Prayer.” He was a guy who liked to pray in all kinds of different body positions, many of which would tend to surprise people if they saw somebody doing it in a parish church before Mass, and his friars recorded these habits. I always thought that running across this had just provided me with academic knowledge. But if you live long enough, you might occasionally see someone praying prostrate before the Blessed Sacrament tabernacle, or using some of the other postures. So if you’re sure they’re okay and not sick, it’s good to recognize what they’re doing and not be bothered by it.
Also, I forgot to mention that there’s an old mystery novel that uses the multiplicity of chaplets as a plot point. It’s Anthony Boucher’s book, Nine Times Nine.
Boucher was Catholic, and he had a short series with a religious sister as detective. (There are also a couple short stories with Sister Ursula, if I recall correctly. I forgot to say that she also appears in Rocket to the Morgue, best known for Boucher’s loving parody of all his best science fiction writer friends, and for his depiction of the odd intersection of JPL’s founder with some very odd occult groups.)
The series actually takes seriously the fact that a sister can’t get out and go detecting every five minutes, so Boucher had to be a little bit ingenious about how to have it work.) He also created a fictional chaplet devotion for the book, with a fictional history set in the Old West. And of course the nun was a member of the fictional Order of Martha of Bethany, which also had a fictional history that we hear about!
Unfortunately, I don’t see any ebook reprints of The Case of the Seven of Calvary (his first mystery, with a linguistics student at the conservative Berkeley of his day as the hero) or of Nine Times Nine, and I think it’s been a while since his other novels have been reprinted even in paperback. But they are all good (and have good morals), although some of them are very disconcertingly different from what we think a 1930’s or 1940’s American mystery “should be” like. (But he was a very good editor and anthology-story-picker, so keep an eye out for his anthologies, too.)
Anyway… I guess I just wanted to say that proliferation of devotions is a Catholic cultural marker, in some ways. We should be friendly or neutral toward this tendency, unless people are really freaking out about it.
(Corrected some mistakes I made. It’s been a while since I read my copies of Boucher!)
