Pious exercise

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Rosary prayer before the exposed Blessed Sacrament

Pious exercises (Latin: Pia exercitia ) are forms of worship : processions , devotional exercises , pilgrimages and the like. Unlike the Holy Mass and the Liturgy of the Hours , they do not belong to the liturgy of the Roman Catholic Church , but the Church strongly recommends that the faithful participate in the pious exercises, as they serve to deepen and consolidate the faith and the drive to lead a corresponding Christian life respectively.

The pious exercises include the supplication and corridor processions , forty-hour prayer, eternal adoration , Saturday Marian devotions, the prayer of the Way of the Cross , the rosary , the angel of the Lord and the approved litanies , the keeping of novenas , the Friday of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the seven Sundays of St. Joseph , the hour of the Mount of Olives , observing the month of the Rosary in October and the month of Mary in May. Some of the pious exercises are at the same time sacramentals , signs that have an effect on salvation.

The Church describes the pious exercises as “an echo of what is celebrated in the liturgical process”. They are to “flow out of it [the liturgy], as it were, and lead the people to it”. The pious exercises should also correspond to the time of the church year .

The pia exercitia are divided into

  • ordained by the Apostolic See
  • pious exercises of the respective local church
  • those that are carried out according to proper law or tradition by religious orders , brotherhoods or in other associations of believers , often with express ecclesiastical approval
  • the private devotional exercises of the individual or family

Sometimes the boundary between liturgy and pious practice is fluid in a service. On the solemn festival of Corpus Christi, for example, Holy Mass is part of the liturgy, while the subsequent Corpus Christi procession with the Holy of Holies is a pious exercise.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy Sacrosanctum Concilium , 13; see. also Dogmatic Constitution on the Church Lumen Gentium , 67.
  2. ^ Congregation for Divine Worship and the Order of the Sacraments: Directory on Popular Piety and the Liturgy , 2001, No. 13
  3. ↑ SC, 13