Through this column and her books, Martin is helping thousands, even tens of thousands of Americans to recover the basics and even the finer points of a lost sense of etiquette. Catholics also have gone through a period of loss of religious etiquette. Most of us seem no longer to know how to behave when we come alone to or gather as a family in God's house. We do not know how to be courteous to God, to His Mother, and to His friends and children, the Saints and Angels. We seem not to care about sparing the feelings of others in church.
Catholic practices are our rules of etiquette.
It is attention paid to our Father and to His children here and in heaven, attention especially due in God's own house. It is faith exercised in the humblest way, but we cannot mount the heights of faith if we are careless of these little things. Courtesy is the first ingredient of love. Church manners or practices enlist the body in the service of God in an eminently practical and really easy way. Prayer grows in the mind as the body is reverently disposed.