Catholic piety is far too wide a topic for me to say anything particularly useful about it in general. In any case, my experience of it in suburban America has been that, if anything, it is decorous and restrained. And so I was struck by a passage in Ronald Chapman’s biography of Fr Frederick William Faber, describing the attitudes of mid 19th-century London:
"To decorate a Lady altar with flowers or to burn lamps or votive candles before her picture was absolutely unheard of. This sort of thing might go on in backward countries and for the benefit of emotional Italian peasants – but in the middle of London it was a positive incentive to disbelief."
