American Patroness: Marian Shrines and the Making of US Catholicism (Catholic Practice in the Americas) [1 ed.] 1531504876, 9781531504878

Citation preview

American Patroness

catholic practice in the amer­i ­c as John C. Seitz and Jessica Delgado, series editors ser ies a dv isory boa r d: Emma Anderson, Ottawa University Kathleen Sprows Cummings, University of Notre Dame Jack Lee Downey, University of Rochester Thomas Ferraro, Duke University Jennifer Scheper Hughes, University of California, Riverside Brianna Leavitt-­A lcantara, University of Cincinnati Mark Massa, Boston College Kenneth Mills, University of Michigan Paul Ramirez, Northwestern University Thomas A. Tweed, University of Notre Dame Pamela Voekel, Dartmouth University

American Patroness marian shrines and the making of us c atholicism

Katherine Dugan and Karen E. Park, Editors

for dh a m u ni v er sit y pr ess New York 2024

​Copyright © 2024 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—­electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—­except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Frontispiece: Our Lady of the Americas, clipped from an unknown publication. From the Marian Library collection at the University of Dayton. Used with permission. Cover: Image of National Shrine Basilica of Our Lady of Fatima in Lewiston, New York, pictured here in an advertisement for glass blocks to be used as building materials, from Architectural Record magazine, April 1967. From Karen E. Park’s personal collection. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the per­sis­tence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-­party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or w ­ ill remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Visit us online at www​.­fordhampress​.­com. Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data available online at https://­catalog​.­loc​.­gov. Printed in the United States of Amer­i­ca 26 ​25 ​24   5 ​4 ​3 ​2 ​1 First edition

f​ rom Karen To the memory of my friend Sarah Sadowski (1971–2016), whom I met in a class on ­women and Chris­tian­ity in gradu­ate school long ago and who was both a g­ reat scholar and a ­great lover of life. On our last visit together, not long before she died, we went to the Our Lady of La Salette shrine in Attleboro, Mas­sa­chu­setts. Our Lady of La Salette is a power­ful, angry, and grief-­stricken Mary, and being ­there with Sarah during that difficult time forever helped me to understand why ­these sites mean so much to t­ hose who visit them. from Katherine To the many pilgrims, visitors, and tourists who have made and continue to make Marian shrines the incredible places they are.

Contents

Introduction Katherine Dugan and Karen E. Park

1

part i: mapping marian pl aces

“Lourdes of the Southwest”: The Borderlands Transformation of a Nineteenth-­Century French Shrine Adrienne Nock Ambrose

21

“Guadalupe Represents La Cultura”: A Mexican American Mural-­Shrine in California Lloyd Barba

44

A Global Odyssey: Our Lady of Perpetual Help and the Promise to “Make Her Known” Patrick J. Hayes

67

The ­Battle of Bayside: Contesting Religious Topographies in an Urban Apparition Site Joseph P. Laycock

92

part ii: shifting marian meanings

Fatima ­Family Shrine: Reinterpreting Mary on the South Dakota Prairie Katherine Dugan

117

Consolation’s Many ­Faces: Ethnic Intersections at the National Shrine of Our Lady of Consolation in Carey, Ohio David J. Endres

139

American Czestochowa: Polish Piety and Haitian Hybridities of Marian Meaning in Pennsylvania Terry Rey

159

x  con ten ts

The National Shrine Basilica of Our Lady of Fatima: Meaning Making at a Cold War Niagara Falls Tourist Shrine Karen E. Park

183

part iii: devotional creativit y at marian shrines

Digital Devotion: Marian Shrines Online Kayla Harris

205

Our Lady of the Underpass: Sacred and Social Space in the City Stephen Selka

222

Materiality and Attachment: Universality and Locality at Roman Catholic Pilgrimage Sites Claire Vaughn and James S. Bielo

244

“­These Are Our Saints”: A Lourdes Shrine, the St. Coletta School for Exceptional ­Children, and the Catholic Remaking of Cognitive Disability Andrew Walker-­Cornetta

261

Acknowl­edgments

287

Bibliography

289

List of Contributors

307

Index

309

figure 1. Map of Marian Shrines in the United States. (Image created by editors.)

Introduction k atherine duga n a nd k a ren e. pa rk

Marian shrines are as varied, dynamic, and wide-­ranging as U.S. Catholicism itself. In the mid-­twentieth ­century, the ­children of Italian and Polish Catholic immigrants built a shrine to Our Lady of Fatima made of concrete and plexiglass in upstate New York and huddled inside, praying for her protection from Cold War nuclear annihilation. In con­temporary Chicago, the appearance of Mary u ­ nder an interstate drew thousands of p­ eople to create an impromptu shrine to this image. What was originally a site for Polish Catholic pilgrimage, the National Shrine of Our Lady of Czestochowa outside Philadelphia, now attracts Haitian Catholics. In the early twenty-­first ­century, the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception added digital prayer spaces to their pilgrimage experience. When the COVID-19 pandemic began in the spring of 2020, Marian shrines across the United States closed to visitors, moved ­services online and then outside, and shared messages from Pope Francis that invoked Mary’s intercession for a swift end to the pandemic.1 Examples of dynamic adaptations to the pandemic abound: Our Lady of La Leche National Shrine in St. Augustine, Florida, canceled their 455th anniversary of the founding of the oldest Marian shrine in the country, moved a series of Rosary-­themed events online, and asked all the devout to pray for an end to the pandemic.2 While in rural Iowa, Shrine of the Grotto of Redemption, which typically hosts campers during the summer months, shifted communication to their Facebook page, offering prayers and updates through social media.3 ­These examples of Marian shrines’ pandemic adaptations illustrate how ­these spaces are, at once, malleable, responsive, and also steadfast. The fact that Marian shrines swiftly figured out ways to adapt is not surprising, ­because adaptation is one of the key characteristics of Marian shrines in the U.S. This collection takes that dynamic malleability of Marian shrines as a starting place for studying U.S. Catholicism. The author of each chapter

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asks, from the vantage of this one shrine, with all of its interpretations of Mary and Marian devotions and its layered histories: What is revealed about U.S. Catholicism and about American religion? From a range of methodological perspectives—­including historical, ethnographic, and comparative—­each chapter takes a Marian shrine as an entry point into the landscape of U.S. Catholicism. Taken together, ­these chapters examine why and how Marian shrines persist in the twenty-­first c­ entury. T ­ hese essays contribute to a rereading of con­temporary Catholicism in the U.S.

Outline of American Patroness The chapters of American Patroness are ­organized into three sections. Part I, “Mapping Marian Places,” centers on Marian shrines in American religious history, analyzing how they have both s­ haped and been s­ haped by broader cultural contexts. This section maps that history as a series of overlapping narratives and retells the history of Catholics in the U.S. through the lens of Marian shrines. Adrienne Nock Ambrose’s “ ‘Lourdes of the Southwest’: The Borderlands Transformation of a Nineteenth-­ Century French Shrine” is a history of competing Marian devotions. As Lloyd Barba examines the contested location of the Guadalupe murals in Southern California, his study, “ ‘Guadalupe Represents La Cultura’: A Mexican American Mural Shrine in California,” forces a reconsideration of what counts as “Amer­i­ca.” Patrick J. Hayes’s chapter, “A Global Odyssey: Our Lady of Perpetual Help and the Promise to ‘Make Her Known,’ ” reveals another layer of how Catholics, through Mary, ­shaped the history of Boston. Joseph P. Laycock’s “The ­Battle of Bayside: Contesting Religious Topographies in an Urban Apparition Site” paints a rich portrait of the kinds of power strug­gles that are always at stake in the creation and maintenance of Marian shrines. Part II, “Shifting Marian Meanings,” examines the way the meanings of Marian shrines have shifted—­and continue to shift—as their social, economic, and religious contexts change. Katherine Dugan’s “Fatima ­Family Shrine: Reinterpreting Mary on the South Dakota Prairie” demonstrates how the ubiquitous Fatima apparition has become a container for pro-­life politics and a prescription for family-­values-­focused Catholic identity. In his chapter, “Consolation’s Many F ­ aces: Ethnic Intersections at the National Shrine of Our Lady of Consolation in Carey, Ohio,” David J. Endres

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argues that the overlapping immigrant groups in rural Ohio have s­ haped and reshaped local Marian devotions. Likewise, Terry Rey’s study of Philadelphia’s famous National Shrine of Our Lady of Czestochowa examines the shifting demographics of the devout—­from mostly Polish to mostly Haitian. Karen E. Park’s “The National Shrine Basilica of Our Lady of Fatima: Meaning Making at a Cold War Niagara Falls Tourist Shrine” examines the intersection of anxiety and optimism in a par­tic­u­lar place and the ways that Fatima devotion defines and circumscribes it. ­These chapters show that Marian shrines are both changing sites of devotion and fixed physical locations. Part III, “Devotional Creativity at Marian Shrines,” explores the irascible nature of Marian shrines in the U.S. Kayla Harris’s “Digital Devotion: Marian Shrines Online” analyzes how online shrines creatively rework expectations of shrinescapes and devotional practices. Stephen Selka’s study in “Our Lady of the Underpass: Sacred and Social Space in the City” examines the surprisingly temporal nature of shrines. Claire Vaughn and James S. Bielo look to shrines’ gift shops in “Materiality and Attachment: Universality and Locality at Roman Catholic Pilgrimage Sites” to understand how the materiality of shrines gets extended long past a pilgrimage to a shrine. In his chapter, “ ‘­These Are Our Saints’: A Lourdes Shrine, the St. Coletta School for Exceptional ­Children, and the Catholic Remaking of Cognitive Disability,” Andrew Walker-­Cornetta analyzes how a small shrine tucked away at a home for ­children with disabilities requires rethinking of Marian relationships. The shrines studied in this section push the bound­ aries of what constitutes a shrine while shedding light on how Catholics continue to creatively mediate their experiences of Mary. The ways ­these twelve shrines have been built, sustained, reinterpreted, and visited across the country reflect how Catholics continue to navigate their position on the U.S. religious landscape. The chapters in this collection examine the rich tapestry of Catholic devotions at Marian shrines across the country while also interrogating why Marian shrines have—­ and do—­shape U.S. Catholicism as integral parts of the landscape of U.S. religious life. T ­ hese shrines occupy physical space, attract visitors, and ­matter to local communities. The making and maintenance of Marian shrines constitute an impor­tant part of American religious life.4 Each of the shrines represented in this volume demonstrates ways Catholics have proclaimed Catholic presence in the U.S. across generations

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and changes in demographics. Several of ­these essays explore the shift of Catholics from outsider immigrant minorities to comfortably integrated middle-­class Americans. Funding, building, and sustaining Marian shrines helped make that pos­si­ble. When Catholic immigrants began building the shrine to Our Lady of Perpetual Help in 1869, they claimed Catholic space in the old-­line Protestant city of Boston. More than a c­ entury ­later, devotees of Our Lady of Fatima marked the rural landscape of South Dakota as Catholic each summer during the shrine’s annual conference, which drew thousands throughout the 1980s. And even now, when Mexican Catholics, many of them mi­grant workers, paint murals of Guadalupe on the sides of buildings in Southern California, they mark out their presence in ­these spaces. Catholics use Marian shrines to stitch themselves into the history and con­temporary life of places where they find themselves. In the mid-­ twentieth c­ entury, Catholics often proclaimed their presence in large, spacious suburban shrines. Catholics in the twenty-­first ­century claim underpasses, digital spaces, and urban murals. In spaces both formal and informal, virtual and physical, Marian shrines allow Catholics to refine and define their identities and priorities. Studying Marian shrines and how they function—­including why they exist and persist—is an impor­tant part of understanding American religious life. On a broader level of complex cultural narratives and networks of power, Marian shrines can frame the most liberating aspects of Catholic life and tradition, as well as the most deeply suspicious examples of hierarchical control over morality and discourse.5 ­These shrines—­and the Marys that the devout visit t­ here—­are tied up with ethnic identity, p­ olitical motivations, and the deepest hopes and fears of the ­people who venerate her. Evidenced by the number of visitors, amount of money required for upkeep, and the constant reinterpretations, t­ hese places continue to ­matter to ­people. The chapters in this volume share the conviction that relationships are mediated at t­ hese shrines. Marian shrines have been and continue to be destinations for hundreds of thousands of American Catholics and many non-­Catholics. For the individual pilgrim or visitor, Marian spaces provide comfort, hope, and validation for a par­tic­u­lar experience of or orientation t­ oward the world. The lives of ­these shrines do not happen outside or beyond the p­ eople who visit them. Instead, shrines are dialogical. Marian

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shrines require interactions between visitors and the Marian spaces. Mary is the reason ­these shrines exist, but what happens at shrines exceeds Marian devotion. The explorations in this volume show that Marian devotion enables the existence of t­ hese places, but Marian devotion is not always the primary motivator for ­people who frequent the shrines. They can be sites of tourist attraction, like the National Shrine Basilica of Our Lady of Fatima in Niagara Falls, and sites of architectural curiosity, like the Ave Maria Grotto in Cullman, Alabama. Shrines are full of vari­ ous meanings, often determined by visitors’ experiences. While Marian shrines are not contained by the bound­aries of Marian devotion, in a similar way, Mary cannot be contained by the official dogmas of Catholicism. Instead, Mary overflows the bound­a ries of Catholic practice and expectation. Encounters with her are visual, sensual, and highly emotional. Mary does appear to some of her devout. But for most, she is made tangible through art, architecture, devotional objects—­and shrines. Marian shrines are essential to this undertaking b­ ecause they are specially dedicated public spaces where t­ hose participating in a relationship with Mary meet and interact with one another and with her. At a shrine, t­ hings happen to devotees that cannot happen elsewhere: Prayers are answered, devotional objects and souvenirs are blessed and imbued with a par­tic­u­ lar meaning, and reciprocal exchanges occur. At Marian shrines, power dynamics between the hierarchy and the laity are both defined and challenged: A shrine may be started with any number of intentions and ideas about its meaning, but inevitably, it is the meaning given to the place by ­those who visit which defines the sites. This collection works to make sense of the sometimes overwhelmingly diverse phenomenon of Marian shrines in the U.S. We understand ­these places not as roadside curiosities or relics from an aesthetically quaint Catholic past but as impor­tant ele­ments of what constitutes con­ temporary Catholic life. Marian devotion is often assumed to be the primary territory of traditionalist or conservative Catholics. While that is sometimes the case, t­ hese chapters demonstrate that the phenomenon of Marian devotion as practiced at Marian shrines is much more complicated. It was not conservative traditionalist Catholics who turned a salt stain ­under a highway overpass in Chicago into a Marian shrine. As Selka demonstrates, the work of meaning making was undertaken by many ­people in the city, from residents dealing with the displacement of

6  k ather ine duga n a nd k a r en e. pa r k

gentrification to the Department of Transportation determining how to treat the image. Many of ­these ­people w ­ ere not Catholic or particularly devoted to Mary, yet her presence at the underpass shrine was transformative for the neighborhood. The enduring legacy of white supremacy within Catholicism and Catholic practice continues to operate at and through these sites. This is evident, for example, in Ambrose’s chapter on the history of a Marian shrine in San Antonio, Texas, where Our Lady of Lourdes was treated as a universal and archetypal Marian devotion, while Our Lady of Guadalupe was seen as simply a local devotion. In Rey’s chapter on the National Shrine of Our Lady of Czestochowa in Pennsylvania, Polish Masses are held upstairs in the main sanctuary, while Haitian Creole Masses take place downstairs. T ­ hese patterns regarding presumed racial hierarchies are repeated and interrogated at many of ­these sites. Marian shrines continue to be sites where racial minorities and immigrants create meanings for themselves and their communities while negotiating the ongoing effects of racism and colonialism. Marian shrines in this collection reflect Catholic immigration patterns of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Many w ­ ere established by newly arrived Irish, Italian, and Polish Catholics who built shrines to their versions of Mary. ­Today, Catholic power resides with ­these formerly ­European immigrant groups. New immigrant groups have to, as Timothy Matovina describes Latino Catholics bringing Guadalupe into parishes, “attempt to establish and nurture structures of Catholic life that enable them to move from, at best, feeling hospitality in someone e­ lse’s church to a sense of homecoming in a church that is their own.” 6 This has caused what Brett Hoover has described as the emergence of “parallel congregations” within Catholic parishes, where Latinos and Haitians and Filipinos worship in their own languages, often in basements or side chapels. White Catholics tend to attend Mass in ­English upstairs, in the main sanctuary, and the two communities often have very ­little interaction.7 In some cases, Marian shrines are spaces claimed by non-­European-­Catholic practices. They are capacious enough for an Èzili-­infused version of Czestochowa, dark-­skinned Guadalupes, or Chaldean ex-­votos to Our Lady of Consolation. Several shrines in this collection manage to elude the reach of white Catholic power as they carve out opportunities for abundant devotional practices.

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Entering the Conversation: A Framework for Interpreting Marian Shrines What is a Marian shrine, and why is it dif­fer­ent from other types of religious spaces? We understand Marian shrines to be sacred spaces ­organized around a range of ideas about Mary. Shrines are, in some way, separated and marked out from the surrounding landscape. They are places to which ­people travel to be closer, in some tangible way, to Mary. Marian shrines respond to a par­tic­u­lar desire to be in physical contact with Mary. Thomas Tweed’s work on shrines and sacred spaces informs our understanding of what Marian shrines are and how they function. He asserts that a shrine is a “sacred site that h ­ ouses holy artifacts, promotes ritual practice, and attracts religious travelers who often mark the time and extend the space of the journey by returning home with mementos.” 8 Tweed understands shrines as involving motion, both vertical, as devotees move up ­toward gods and saints and t­ hese divine beings move down t­oward the earthly realm, and horizontal, as ­those who visit shrines move outward into the social terrain situating themselves with regard to their personal and community identities. Shrines mediate identities and relationships. Tweed classifies shrines according to religious tradition, geography, and origin and function. This third category is subdivided into several types of shrines in this collection: Some of the shrines commemorate special healings; some mark miraculous apparitions or encounters; ­ others exist ­because of the objects the devout find in that space. Some imitate shrines first erected in other places, and ­others proclaim national identities.9 Building on this classification system, we add in this volume another category: the central devotional figure. Christian shrines may be devoted to a saint or a depiction of Jesus. The shrines in this collection center on Mary, which makes them unique among Christian shrines.10 Mary is dif­ fer­ent from other saints or holy figures in the Christian tradition. Not only is she far more power­ful, but she was conceived without sin, bodily assumed into heaven, and has special intercessory powers when it comes to her son. Marian shrines accommodate abundant practices ­because of Mary’s expansive presence and capacities and require a category of their own. In addition to the contention that Marian shrines represent a distinct category among religious shrines, we propose a meta­phorical framework for understanding them—­namely, a Marian shrine is a complex and

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far-­ranging conversation. This m ­ etaphor of shrines as conversations allows for both listening and interpreting and includes the multiple voices that characterize ­these sites. Shrines are material spaces around which complex and ongoing dialogue with and about Mary can be centered. Each visit to a shrine is akin to dropping into a conversation for a while. In any conversation, some voices are dominant, and some are quieter. Some conversations are pointed and focused on one or two topics. Other conversations meander and new topics are added and dropped, depending on who is participating and where their priorities and interests lie. Some conversations are welcoming and affirming, while o­ thers are strident and condemnatory. Some conversations fascinate and engage us, and o­ thers leave us looking for an opening to back out politely and move on to something ­else. A similar experience happens at Marian shrines. Employing the m ­ etaphor of conversation as we approach the study of ­these shrines allows us to set aside the vexing prob­lem that always seems to surface when trying to understand and interpret a shrine. Where to start telling the story? What history ­matters most ­here? Do we focus on geography? Or history? Is it some aspect of culture or economics that best orients this shrine? Most of the titles of Mary ­under which she is venerated did not begin in the Amer­i­cas, and certainly not in the United States. Our Lady of Fatima appeared to three c­ hildren in Portugal in the early twentieth c­ entury, and Our Lady of Czestochowa is the ancient Patroness of Poland. Our Lady of Lourdes appeared with healing w ­ aters in rural France and Our Lady of Guadalupe in what is now rural Mexico. Must we accurately trace Mary’s many migrations to understand her shrines? As Sandra L. Zimdars-­Swartz’s field-­defining work in Encountering Mary: From LaSalette to Medjugorje demonstrates, that is an impor­tant method of studying Marian devotion and shrines.11 But it is also impossible to decide where to start when telling the story of a shrine. In almost all of the chapters that follow, the authors had to decide where to begin. Some authors, like Rey in his work on Our Lady of Czestochowa, include the story of the original apparition in the fifteenth c­ entury before turning to the layering of immigrant stories in a Philadelphia shrine. Other chapters begin not with Mary’s apparitions but with the pilgrims who make a shrine pos­si­ble, as in Selka’s analy­sis of the apparition-­shrine ­under the overpass in Chicago and Barba’s description of the mural-­shrine of Guadalupe in Weedpatch, California. But it is not always necessary to know the entire

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history of a shrine to interpret and understand it. Sometimes, like guests arriving at a party already underway, it is pos­si­ble to join a conversation midstream and see where it goes. Each chapter enters the story of the shrine at a par­tic­u­lar moment and tells a small part of the shrine’s history or con­temporary life. The devout who show up in t­ hese chapters are temporary yet significant to that story. Just as conversations between old friends tumble forward, building on the past and shifting in response to the con­temporary moment, ­these shrines are part of a long-­standing but constantly evolving conversation about Mary. At times, authority figures like bishops and diocesan leaders are ­eager to manage t­ hese conversations from the top down. One example of this phenomenon is the Fatima ­Family Shrine in South Dakota. The conversation taking place at that shrine was developed and controlled by the shrine’s f­ ounder, Fr. Robert Fox. He dictated details like the guide to praying the Rosary at the shrine and all decisions about which devotions to include. This is a hierarchy-­driven shrine focused on prescribing a par­tic­ u­lar way of being Catholic. As Park has argued elsewhere, it is an example of an “intra-­Catholic identity shrine,” which broadcasts traditionalist Catholic priorities to a like-­minded audience. But this kind of hierarchical control over ­these shrines is unusual. Most shrines, including many in this volume, are sites where conversation flows freely, guided only loosely by voices, both lay and ecclesial, and allowed to evolve and change with changing cultural landscapes.12 Indeed, most Marian shrines seem to resist ecclesial control and regularly overflow strict expectations or guidelines. As we have worked on this collection, we, too, have had to resist the impulse to tidy up t­ hese shrines and their devotions. We have had to stop ourselves from looking for the “real” story of the shrine or the “true” history and meaning. ­These sites are dynamic, not static. Sorting through their multiple meanings reveals sites that are complex, even messy. But we have come to understand that the messiness of shrines like the Lourdes Tepeyac Grotto in San Antonio, dedicated to two versions of Mary, or Our Lady of the ­Roses in Bayside, New York—­condemned by the homeowners’ association for the literal mess left ­behind by pilgrims—­are not aberrations. Instead, the messiness is essential. The fact that the shrines refuse to be placed into ca0refully ­organized, linear structures of theological and social meaning is part of what makes ­these shrines meaningful. The productive unruliness of

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free-­ranging conversations echoes in the piles of meaning produced at messy shrines.13 Conversations are often weighted with undeniable power dynamics—­ one person may be more comfortable, another uneasy with the topic at hand. Yet another may be new to the subject. During a conversation, ­these power dynamics can be made transparent, but not without careful efforts to do so. Likewise, the power dynamics of shrines can easily be obfuscated by encouraging lay devotion or dictating par­tic­u­lar kinds of devotions. In many of ­these chapters, the authors explore the historical and con­temporary resonances of power. Whenever we step into a new conversation, we do not necessarily need to know when or how it began in order to follow along. We can introduce ourselves, listen for a while, contribute what we can, learn something or gain new insights, and move on. ­These chapters are not intended to serve as the final word on any of ­these shrines but as contributions to ongoing conversations about the practices, Marys, and religious lives coalesced around ­these sites.

Making Meaning and Catholic Identity at Marian Shrines The ­metaphor of conversation helps frame our interpretation of what a shrine is but also shapes how we understand the work of meaning making and identity formation that occurs around t­ hese shrines. Mary has been a central figure in American Catholicism, particularly concerning the strug­gle of ­people who have been excluded from access to power by their gender, ethnicity, class, or a combination of t­ hese f­ actors. Shrines to Mary allow p­ eople to define and stake out a place in the American landscape in a way that gives it transcendent and symbolic meaning. For some indigenous inhabitants of the Amer­i­cas who w ­ ere conquered and converted in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as well as for ­those who immigrated ­here in l­ater centuries, marking places and spaces as Marian has offered a way to define the self and the community on terms that ­were not solely dictated by ­those holding the p­ olitical and theological power. To be Catholic in the U.S. is to be engaged in a dynamic and creative proj­ect. Shifting norms and standards about what it means to be “American” forced Catholics to find ways to stake out their identities and assimilate. For example, Our Lady of Fatima, who appeared to three Portuguese

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c­ hildren in 1917, became extraordinarily ­popular in mid-­twentieth-­century Amer­i­ca. Fatima shrines sprang up around the country, allowing Catholics ­eager to demonstrate their patriotism and opposition to Communism in a particularly Catholic way. This fear was made vis­i­ble in dramatic fashion at the National Shrine Basilica of Our Lady of Fatima in Lewiston, New York, as Park describes it in her chapter. But when widespread fear of nuclear annihilation faded ­after the Cold War, Our Lady of Fatima could be re­imagined and interpreted as a champion of “­family values” believed to be u ­ nder attack in the 1980s and 1990s, as Dugan demonstrates in her chapter. Building a shrine to Mary has often been a way for Catholics to say “we are h ­ ere” and communicate to both themselves and the wider community who they are and what m ­ atters most to them. In his chapter about a mural-­ shrine of Guadalupe in California, Barba explores some of the deep meanings of Guadalupe among Mexican mi­grant workers in Southern California. This mural-­shrine functions as a hidden transcript, a way for dominated ­people to make public statements in ways that are not fully comprehensible to the dominant group. “We are ­here,” local Guadalupe murals say, in a visual language that is subversively counter-­colonial and counter-­imperial. Shrines are often contested sites, and the Guadalupe mural in Barba’s chapter has been repeatedly defaced by white nationalists, whose attempts to desecrate the sacred shrine have made it more sacred to the Chicana / o community, who read in it both their sense of communal pride and their par­tic­u­lar experience of suffering. Many of t­ hese conversations about meaning and identity are also about negotiating vari­ous types of power. Power-­infused tensions around ­Marian shrines often revolve around money, social class, and ecclesial and lay authority. In Laycock’s chapter on the 1970s Bayside Marian apparitions and shrine in Queens, the messiness of the shrine’s apparitions and its devotees clashed with the aspirational upper-­middle-­class aesthetics of neighborhood residents who resented the spectacle of busloads of shrine pilgrims desecrating their carefully manicured boulevards and streets with their litter and overall commotion. The narrow strips of grass in the center of the streets surrounding the site of the Bayside apparition became a contested space, where the clashing groups of Catholics (some devotees of the Bayside apparition and some not) faced each other down in a b­ attle over who got to define the neighborhood and the nature of religious belief and practice t­ here.

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But power strug­gles do not solely happen between lay and ecclesial authorities; tensions between secular authority and religious ideas are often also part of the conversation. Is a mural or salt stain sacred, or just graffiti? State and local officials are left to puzzle this out, weighing many ­factors as they do. Shrines are both holy sites and tourist attractions. This means that decisions about what kinds of merchandise to stock in the gift shops or how and where to advertise ­these places reveal the complex interplays between the sacred and secular realms in ­these spaces, as Vaughn and Bielo make clear in their chapter, “Materiality and Attachment: Universality and Locality at Roman Catholic Pilgrimage Sites.” ­Because so much about Marian shrines requires ongoing interpretation, ­those interpretations can provide clues about who is speaking to whom at and through the site, who is marking the space and claiming it, and on what terms. Commemorative plaques, dedicated benches, and nameplates such as “In Memory of our Parents, Bernice and Dennis” are more than a way for shrines to raise money for upkeep and renovations. They are a way for families to leave a mark, to say that they or their loved ones w ­ ere ­here, that real ­people visited and prayed at the site, and that the site belongs to them. But commemorative plaques and benches are often aesthetically tacky or messy, and this messiness of Marian devotion is on display in vari­ous ways in each of ­these chapters. For example, even though most of t­ hese shrines have a par­tic­u­lar apparition or devotion to Mary in the official title, the ­actual shrine usually has more than one Mary piled around the central figure. This variety is most evident in the chapters like Rey’s study of the shifting devotions pre­sent at Our Lady of Czestochowa in Philadelphia and in Endres’s descriptions of ex-­votos at the shrine to Our Lady of Consolation in rural Ohio. ­There, the changes in the Catholic demographics of the area around the shrine are reflected in the kinds of Marys that show up on the grounds. Mary shows up at ­these shrines in untamable ways. Her vari­ous f­ aces, her many interpretations, and the way that the devout pile on statues and other devotional items make t­ hese shrines literally and devotionally messy. ­There is a cluttered aesthetic at ­these shrines that resists even the most complex theological interpretations. Several chapters in this book refer to the other Marys that appear at shrines. The ubiquitous presence of Fatima and Guadalupe in t­ hese chapters gestures to their abundance in the American Catholic imagination.14 Vaughn and Bielo’s chapter is quite explicit

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about this, as they describe the ways that Mary at Knock and Mary at Fatima pile on at Alabama’s Ave Maria Grotto and Ohio’s Sorrowful ­Mother Shrine. Perhaps most striking is just how much of a non-­issue this piling on of Marys is. Pilgrims mentioned in t­ hese chapters that show up—­and that we ourselves have seen at many visits to t­ hese shrines—­are nonplussed by all the Marys at Marian shrines. As Vaughn and Bielo argue, “While [the Marys] are each irreplaceable, they are also replicable.” Official Catholic teaching is clear: T ­ here are many apparitions and appearances of the Virgin M ­ other of Jesus, and they are all the same Mary. Baked into ­these Marian shrines and Marian devotion is ­acceptance of the manyness of Mary’s appearances. The many f­ aces of the Virgin are to be expected—­her mutability might be part of the attraction and is on display at shrines across the U.S. Shrines begin as sites devoted to a par­tic­u­ lar Mary but quickly widen to reflect the many personalities of the Catholic cloud of witnesses. This multiplicity is necessary ­because of the endless range of ­people devoted to her. Marian shrines are created and sustained by the stories of ­people who go t­ here.

Shrinescapes: Place ­Matters The experience of arriving at a shrine can be full of emotions—­anticipation, hopefulness, and curiosity but also wariness, won­der, and sometimes skepticism. At a previously unvisited shrine, ­t here is an expectation of experiencing perhaps a new ­a ngle on Marian devotion. Arriving at a beloved, oft-­v isited shrine invokes nostalgia and embedded memories. The physical spaces of shrines—­what we call ­here “shrinescapes”—­ mediate the experience of Marian devotion. ­There is a rough blueprint for the structure of Marian shrines in the U.S. The dynamism of Marian shrines is always in balance with a certain amount of place-­based stasis. The par­tic­u­lar Mary of the devotion is usually central—­whether that is Lourdes or Fatima or Guadalupe or Czestochowa—­and the shrinescapes tend to share three characteristics: a layering of many Marian personalities and devotions, a pedagogy that instructs pilgrims in what to do at the shrine, and an abundance of objects that visitors both bring to and take with them from the shrine. ­These three characteristics make the experiences of Marian shrinescapes real for pilgrims.

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Mary is rarely alone within shrinescapes. For example, at a Lourdes shrine in rural Connecticut, the first statues to welcome visitors are not Mary but a pair of saints: St. Jude and St. Louis de Montfort guarding the entrance to the shrine. Likewise, the Czestochowa shrine in Philadelphia has statues of Fatima, Saint Anne, and Pope Saint John Paul II. At the Our Lady of Fatima Shrine in Lewiston, New York, an entire neighborhood of saints has evolved from an original “ave­nue of the saints” placed ­there by the Polish and Italian American families who first frequented the site. When the authors in this book describe the Mary at the center of the shrine, they use numerous adjectives ­because the shapes, colors, and accoutrements of Mary reflect the material abundance of shrinescapes. But this is not the same as saying that anything goes at t­ hese sites. At the Our Lady of Good Help Shrine in Champion, Wisconsin, the only “approved” Marian apparition site in the U.S., a new statue of Mary commissioned by Bishop Ricken to replace the old statue has never caught on with pilgrims who prefer the old one. The new one feels “false,” according to many pilgrims. The largely rejected new statue resides in a decidedly “unsacred” corner of the newly built conference center, while the old statue continues to occupy the holiest space on the lower level of the church.15 In addition to the many saints and versions of Mary at ­these shrines, their layouts are explicit about how visitors ­ought to move through the place. Maps are widely available and serve to guide visitors. Signs offer explanations of a par­tic­u­lar devotion, and candles request donations before being lit. Visits to shrines are often pilgrimages, but rarely are they only pilgrimages.16 Endres’s chapter, for example, describes how changing immigrant presences at the Our Lady of Consolation Shrine makes dif­ fer­ent meanings of their pilgrimages to the site. Pilgrims shape their experience of a shrine, and the physical space of shrines also shapes visitors’ experiences—­from the maps to the way the flow of the parking lot and layout directs visitors to follow paths through the shrine, to the signage and directions that guide a visitor’s experience. ­These aspects of each shrine’s architecture and design affect how someone moves physically through a shrine. Shrinescapes take for granted the physical presence of the devout. Being at, moving through, and praying in the spaces of shrines are essential to shrines. Quite pragmatically, parking lots are designed to

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hold larger crowds for Sunday morning or feast-­day Masses, and many of the paths at shrines now accommodate wheelchairs and other accessibility features. When shrines closed to visitors and moved ­services online in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, devotees felt the loss of that physical space, which, as Harris shows in her chapter, is difficult to replicate online, despite the c­ onvenience of online shrine access. Shrinescapes also reflect the pragmatic concerns of ­these sites, both financial and physical—­ things like fund­rais­ing, managing garbage, bathrooms, and picnic spaces. ­These spaces incorporate the finances of devotion in a range of ways. Online giving is increasingly available at shrines—­the devout can e­ ither put money in at the votive or scan a QR code and donate online. Shrines’ websites are also increasingly savvy with online contributions. The experience of visiting a shrine is both an embodied experience of pilgrimage and a temporary experience whose power is in the retelling. Souvenirs purchased in gift shops can materialize ­these experiences. The stuff, the place, the way of moving bodies through them, and the commemorative bricks left b­ ehind are all critical in the world of Marian shrines.

Conclusion The conversation that unfolds in t­ hese chapters crosses time, space, and communities, and each chapter is a part of that ongoing conversation. Understanding ­these shrines—­the sacred destinations for hundreds of thousands of American Catholics and non-­Catholics alike—is an impor­tant part of understanding American religious life. Pilgrimages and trips to shrines are impor­tant ways for Catholics to articulate Catholic identities; piling on vari­ous Marys at shrines to Fatima expresses a desire for connection, and reinterpreting the physical spaces of shrines enlivens the malleability within tradition. Despite their geographic, aesthetic, and historical differences, the fact that each shrine is dedicated to the Virgin Mary reminds us again how significant Marian devotion is to Catholic lives. T ­ hese places exist b­ ecause Mary exists. How t­ hese Marian shrines are studied h ­ ere also sheds light on the contestation over power, control, and definitions. Shrines are not neutral—­ they reflect the finances of ­those involved, the elastic yet strict bound­aries of what counts as Catholic identity, and who controls prayer practices.

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Mary can frame the most liberating aspects of Christian life and tradition and the most suspicious examples of hierarchical control over morality and discourse. Sometimes she does both at the same time and in the same place. Taken together, ­these chapters reconsider the American religious landscape from the perspective of one of thousands of shrines to Mary. American Patroness demonstrates that Marian shrines continue to be sites of creative working on American Catholic identity, locations of power negotiations, and the intimately public spaces of Marian relationships. Notes 1. “Pope Francis’ Prayer to Virgin Mary for Protection from Coronavirus,” Vatican News, March  12, 2020, https://­www​.­youtube​.­com​/­watch​?­v​=­D2wxD3YvfeQ. 2. “National Shrine of Our Lady of La Leche at Mission Nombre de Dios,” https://­missionandshrine​.­org​/­. 3. The Shrine of the Grotto of the Redemption, https://­w ww​.­westben​dgrotto​ .­com​/­. 4. James O’Toole, ed., Habits of Devotion: Catholic Religious Practice in Twentieth ­Century Amer­i­ca (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005); Thomas Tweed, Amer­i­ca’s Church: The National Shrine and Catholic Presence in the Nation’s Capital (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Thomas Tweed, Our Lady of the Exile: Diasporic Religion at a Cuban Catholic Shrine in Miami (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Anna-­Karina Hermkens, Willy Jansen, and Catrien Notermans, eds., Moved by Mary: The Power of Pilgrimage in the Modern World (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009); Timothy Matovina, Theologies of Guadalupe: From the Era of Conquest to Pope Francis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). 5. While many of the shrines in this book commemorate Marian apparitions, Marian apparitions themselves are not the subject of this book. Recent notable examples of scholarship on Marian apparitions include Deirdre de la Cruz, “­Mother Figured: Marian Apparitions and the Making of a Filipino Universal” (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2015); Jeffrey S. Bennett, “When the Sun Danced: Myth, Miracles, and Modernity in Early Twentieth-­ Century Portugal” (University of ­Virginia Press, 2012); Jill M. Krebs, Our Lady of Emmitsburg, “Visionary Culture, and Catholic Identity: Seeing and Believing” (Lexington Books, 2016); and The Journal of New Religious Movements, Nova Religio, which dedicated an entire issue to Marian apparitions in 2017. Apparitions are complex phenomena involving diverse social, p­ olitical, and psychological modes. But unlike the shrines they often engender, apparitions

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involve fundamentally unseen phenomena. Shrines, on the other hand, are material spaces which can be visited, rebuilt, renovated, and fall into ruin. Apparitions attract a g­ reat deal of skepticism on the part of ecclesial authorities b­ ecause they represent, in all cases, a competing authority (that of the seer and the locutions she receives directly from Mary). Indeed, despite t­ here having been many Marian apparitions in the U.S., only one has ever been deemed worthy of belief by the Church, and that is the Our Lady of Good Help Shrine in Champion, Wisconsin. This shrine commemorates an apparition that took place in 1859. It was proclaimed “worthy of belief” by Bishop David Ricken of the Archdiocese of Green Bay, Wisconsin, in 2010. Marian shrines are much less likely to compete with ecclesial authority and instead are often used to refine and bolster it, although, as many chapters in this book demonstrate, the shrines themselves are locations where intense negotiations about truth and meaning take place. 6. Timothy Matovina, Latino Catholicism: Transformation in Amer­i­ca’s Largest Church (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2012), 51–53. 7. Brett Hoover, cited in Matovina, Latino Catholicism, 108. 8. Thomas A. Tweed, “John Wesley Slept H ­ ere: American Shrines and American Methodists,” Numen 47, no. 1 (2000): 41–68, http://­w ww​.­jstor​.­org​ /­stable​/­3270360. 9. Tweed, “John Wesley Slept H ­ ere,” 45–46. Tweed summarizes this third type of shrine into six subcategories: commemorative, miraculous, built or found-­object, ex-­voto, imitative, and identity shrines. 10. For Catholics, Mary is the main draw when it comes to t­ hese shrines. Even when a Catholic shrine is not explic­itly dedicated to Mary, the faithful often seek her out and ­t here is almost always a grotto or other Marian ele­ment to make the space complete. The M ­ other Cabrini shrine in Golden Colorado once included a grotto to Our Lady of Lourdes which was demolished in 1959. A “­Mother Cabrini altar” was subsequently built in its place, but Mary herself was not eliminated; according to the website, this altar is a place where many come to ask ­Mother Cabrini to intercede on their behalf  to Mary: http:www​.­mothercabrinishirine​.­org​/­t he​-­shrine. This appears to be true even if the shrine is dedicated to Jesus himself, as at the Shrine of the Most Holy Redeemer in Las Vegas which includes on its grounds a shrine and chapel dedicated to Our Lady of Guadalupe, http://­ www​.­t heshrinelv​.­org. 11. Sandra L. Zimdars-­Swartz, Encountering Mary: From La Salette to Medjugorje (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1991). 12. Karen E. Park, “ ‘Citadel of Orthodoxy’: Meaning, Message, and Pilgrimage at Our Lady of Guadalupe Shrine in La Crosse, Wisconsin,” American Catholic Studies 128, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 1–16.

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13. “Messiness,” as we use it h ­ ere, is an analytic tool to describe the ways shrines refuse to be tamed into tidier religious norms. The term is not pejorative; nor is it necessarily describing the space. Instead, messiness is a way of understanding the overflowing nature of the Marian shrines in this collection. 14. Robert A. Orsi, “When 2 + 2=5,” Spring 2007, The American Scholar, https://­theamericanscholar​.­org​/­when​-­2​-­2​-­5​/­. 15. Field notes, Karen E. Park, visit to Our Lady of Good Hope Shrine in Champion, Wisconsin, May 2021. 16. Hermkens, Jansen, and Notermans, Moved by Mary, 2.

Part I: Mapping Marian Places



“Lourdes of the Southwest” The Borderlands Transformation of a Nineteenth-­Century French Shrine a drienne nock a mbrose

On the same December morning that bombs fell on Pearl Harbor, hundreds of faithful Catholics gathered on the outskirts of San Antonio, Texas, to witness the dedication of a new Marian shrine. Despite such a resonant historical and geo­graph­i­cal setting, the shrine reflected neither the crisis of impending war nor the religious complexity of south-­central Texas. Instead, this replica of the famous Lourdes Grotto in France expressed the devotional ties and missionary ambitions of the religious order that sponsored it.1 Like that foundational site, the San Antonio replica commemorated the Virgin Mary’s 1858 appearances to the young French peasant Bernadette Soubirous. Also, like its prototype, the Oblate’s grotto invoked the papal dogma with which ­those apparitions ­were linked: the Immaculate Conception. ­These doctrinal and devotional ties had captured the attention of a San Antonio priest during his visit to France nine years prior. As a member of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate and director of its missionary ­organization, F ­ ather Cullen Deckert was imbued with the Marian piety of his religious order. Visiting Lourdes during a break from his duties, Deckert had been impressed by the devotion it inspired and became determined to build a replica back home. He led a successful fund­rais­ing effort for the proj­ect, and a groundbreaking ceremony was held on January 1, 1940.2 It is not difficult to see why a grotto replica was so attractive to Deckert and his supporters. The proj­ect reflected the Oblate’s French origins, affirmed the order’s devotional ties to the Virgin, and served to embody its missionary vision for Texas. Although ­these motives proved compelling, they ultimately failed to fully explain the decision to import a nineteenth-­century French devotion to south-­central Texas. Why did the expensive proj­ect, dubbed the “Lourdes of the Southwest” by the English-­ language press, become an institutional priority at the time? Even more impor­tant, how was its reception s­ haped by the borderland and w ­ artime 3 context in which it arose?

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figure 2. ­Father Cullen Deckert poses at the Grotto. (Used with permission from the Southwestern Oblate Historical Archives, San Antonio, Texas.)

Oblate rec­ords indicate that the reigning archbishop of San Antonio, Arthur Jerome Drossaerts, officially approved the Grotto proj­ect in 1939. He endorsed the site as an expression of Marian devotion consistent with the Oblates’ regional missionary work. Its proposed location at the Oblate scholasticate was also perceived as advantageous, as its sanctioned spirituality could thus influence both ­future seminarians and pilgrims.4

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figure  3. Grotto Dedication Mass. (Used with permission from the Southwestern Oblate Historical Archives, San Antonio, Texas.)

The archival account also describes three Oblate provincial leaders and a clerical official from Rome as affirming Deckert’s efforts. Again, such institutional support for the Grotto proj­ect is not surprising.5 The Oblates ­were an established presence in south-­central Texas, having ministered in the region for nearly a hundred years. Their efforts had recently gained momentum with a new seminary, the De Mazenod Scholasticate, completed in 1927. What bears scrutiny is the widespread assumption among church leaders that Marian devotion in San Antonio required the stimulation that the new shrine would provide. Although Fr. Deckert and Archbishop Drossaerts seemed largely uninspired by its presence, devotion to the ­Mother of Jesus had thrived in San Antonio since the city was founded in the early eigh­teenth c­ entury. The archbishop himself had previously acknowledged as much, describing the affection of Mexican-­descent Catholics for Our Lady Guadalupe as “deeply ingrained in their soul.” 6 Yet the surviving account of the Grotto’s history barely mentions any preexisting Marian

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devotion, registering its influence only in a passing reference. This reticence suggests that planners did not see Guadalupan devotion as a spiritual foundation on which the Grotto could build, San Antonio’s unique context in the borderlands notwithstanding. Reflecting racist, anti-­Mexican assumptions that have often plagued the American Catholic Church, the Marian manifestation at Lourdes was upheld as universally relevant for all American Catholics, whereas the significance of Our Lady of Guadalupe was perceived as an exclusively Mexican phenomenon. Long-­standing ecclesial biases w ­ ere reflected both in the reverence reserved for E ­ uropean devotional traditions and in the suspicion inspired by Mexican practices. If this ­were the extent of the Oblate Grotto’s story, the San Antonio site would be yet another of countless examples in which the Eurocentric tendencies of American Catholicism prevailed. The site would then justifiably be lamented as a triumph of colonialism, in which Old World religiosity was imposed on a new environment, suppressing local devotion. However, la Virgen and her devotees had other plans for the shrine. Her regional influence, along with a cluster of mid-­century developments—­including the war and a change in Church leadership—­led to the site’s transformation and, ultimately, to its endurance. Although the focus of this essay is on the shrine’s origins, its continued vitality in the pre­sent suggests that much work remains before its importance can be fully understood. Ethnographic work, for example, could contribute much to our understanding of the site and its significance for American Catholicism. Just four days ­after the Grotto dedication and a few miles south of the site, the vitality of local devotion to la Virgen was on full display. Beginning with a pro­cession of rose-­bearing devotees on the ­evening of December 11, hundreds of worshippers gathered downtown at San Fernando Cathedral to celebrate the multi-­day feast of La Virgen de Guadalupe. By 1941, the year in which the Lourdes Grotto was dedicated, San Antonio Catholic’s devotion to Guadalupe had reached a high point. Fueled by a steady influx of émigrés from the Mexican Revolution and the subsequent Cristero Rebellion, Guadalupan cele­brations had expanded into a triduum just a generation before.7 Since 1914, a three-­day-­long festival commemorated Guadalupe’s appearance, reviving a tradition of expansive observances that went back to the city’s foundation in the early eigh­teenth ­century.8 On the ­actual day of the feast, December 12, festivities came to a climax as

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“the Mexican population carried a statue of La Virgen de Guadalupe in parade fashion through the streets.” 9 Although the cele­bration at the cathedral was the grandest in the city, local parishes, including the West Side church of Our Lady of Guadalupe, held their own cele­brations as well.10 While the four days between ­these two Marian events in San Antonio made it logistically pos­si­ble for devotees to attend both cele­brations, it is unlikely ­there was much overlap in participation. At the time of the Grotto dedication in 1941, the city was characterized by deep-­rooted and multilayered segregation. Neighborhoods, schools, businesses, and churches all functioned to keep Anglo-European and Mexican-­descent residents in separate and unequal spheres. Admittedly, the new Grotto’s location was in a less densely settled area of the city and thus somewhat removed from ­these established divisions. Nevertheless, the site’s origins ­were s­ haped by the dynamics of segregation and the assumption of Anglo-European superiority that they reflected. When the Grotto’s ­founders expressed the hope that the site would attract pilgrims “from vari­ous parts of our mission field,” they ­were seeking to ensure that their ­European Catholic perspective would continue to influence the city’s religiosity as its bound­aries expanded.11 This vision for the site, however, would not prevail. New ecclesial leadership, w ­ artime developments, and the unique power of Guadalupe combined to challenge the dominance of European-­influenced Marian devotion.

Oblate Origins and Our Lady of Lourdes By the time of the Grotto’s dedication in 1941, the Oblates of Mary Immaculate had been in Texas for nearly a ­century. Members of the religious order, founded in early nineteenth-­century France, first arrived in the region in 1849, just three years ­after the annexation of Texas by the United States. Known as “specialists of the most difficult missions,” the Oblates had been recruited by Texas’s first bishop, also a Frenchman. A shortage of clergy in the Southwest created circumstances that closely aligned with the Oblates’ foundational charism: “the salvation of the poor and abandoned.”12 Mexican residents, many having lost their land and status during annexation, ­were the primary targets of their ministrations. The missionaries faced many obstacles: Much of Texas’s vast territory was unsettled, most residents had neither access to nor need for formal

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education, and the priests often lacked basic resources.13 However, they persevered by building churches and schools, administering the sacraments on far-­flung ranchos, and helping to develop towns along the new border between the U.S. and Mexico. In 1904, the Oblates’ Southwestern province was established, with San Antonio as its headquarters. The fast-­ growing city was an ideal hub from which Oblate priests could minister to isolated towns and villages across the state and border. Their many contributions reflect the colonizing spirit of the era, in which ­European Catholicism was the standard by which all religious expression was judged. The following description of the Oblates’ initial work in the region demonstrates the widespread assumption of E ­ uropean supremacy and the tendency to dismiss all preexisting religiosity: “For a priest who had studied religion in the Summa, it was no easy task to teach . . . ​the bare essentials of religion to ­children who had never attended school.”14 The Oblates ­were part of a colonizing missionary wave of ­European, mostly non-­Spanish-­ speaking clergy and religious o­ rders who went on to build “the core of institutional Catholicism” in the region.15 The ­founder of the Oblate order, Eugene de Mazenod, chose Mary Immaculate as the order’s patroness in 1825. This foundational bond was ­reinforced by the Oblate missionaries when they arrived in Texas two ­decades l­ater. They celebrated their first Mass in Texas on December 8, 1849, the feast of the Immaculate Conception, and continue to recognize that date as the beginning of the Oblate foundation in the Southwest.16 ­Decades l­ ater, members of the Southwestern province launched the Mary Immaculate Magazine to promote their missionary work and to represent the Mary Immaculate League, the order’s missionary outreach organization, further reinforcing doctrinal and devotional ties l­ater embodied at the Grotto. Of course, the Oblates w ­ ere not the only American Catholics for whom the Marian apparition at Lourdes and its identification with the Immaculate Conception held special significance. As Colleen McDannell’s research on the distribution of Lourdes w ­ ater has shown, interest in the French shrine was widespread among Anglo-­American Catholics beginning in the late nineteenth c­ entury.17 McDannell documents how a p­ opular Lourdes replica on the University of Notre Dame campus became a distribution site for ­water shipped from the French shrine, thereby fostering a sense of connectedness among a coterie of American Catholics. As

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petitioners sent letters and donations to the site in exchange for vials of its ­water, they helped create a network of the faithful that extended far beyond the shrine’s geo­graph­i­cal location and tied “the individual to a world beyond his or her immediate circle.”18 Like the Lourdes Grotto in South Bend, Indiana, the San Antonio replica aimed to engage Catholics in “a worldwide community that did not recognize the limits of time and space.”19 The magazine published by the Mary Immaculate League—­a long with the indulgences and privileges publicized in its pages—­aimed to broaden the reach of the site. The Oblates had reason to expect success for their approach, as American interest in Lourdes remained high well into the twentieth ­century. Just a few months ­after the dedication of San Antonio’s Grotto, an ­English translation of the novel Song of Bernadette (1942) was published to rave reviews and robust sales.20 The Acad­emy Award–­winning film of the same name came out the following year and was p­ opular with audiences and critics alike.21 Yet McDannell’s claim that “Notre Dame’s outreach program touched Catholics throughout the United States and forged a national Marian piety” does not tell the ­whole story. Although the Lourdes Grotto in northern Indiana functioned as a symbol of universality and connectedness for the Catholics she studied, the paucity of letters from Southwestern devotees in the archives is revealing;22 not all American Catholics ­were equally devoted to Our Lady of Lourdes. Many found devotion to Guadalupe more compelling, though a church tainted with assumptions of white, ­European supremacy was slow to recognize their preference. Despite this institutional reluctance, however, the San Antonio shrine would become a site where such racist assumptions could be contested.

La Virgen de Guadalupe in San Antonio Like Our Lady of Lourdes’s Grotto, the shrine of La Virgen de Guadalupe is rooted in a series of Marian apparitions to a h ­ umble recipient. Juan Diego was an Indigenous peasant to whom Mary appeared at Tepeyac, a hill then on the outskirts of Mexico City. Speaking in Nahuatl, his native language, Guadalupe requested Juan Diego’s help in establishing a shrine at the site. When Juan took her request to the bishop, the cleric doubted Juan’s account of this encounter. In response, la Virgen provided him with signs to offer as proof, including her brown-­skinned image that appeared

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miraculously on Juan’s tilma. The tilma, enshrined at Tepeyac since at least 1556, became the anchoring symbol of the devotion; replicas of the miraculously imprinted image ­were the primary means by which it spread.23 Described as “the foundational myth of the mestizo Mexican ­people,”24 the account of Guadalupe’s apparitions has long held essential truths for ­those who preserve it. Guadalupe’s appearances to Juan Diego enacted the collision of Old and New Worlds while also transforming the significance of that encounter. Originally the recipient of devotion in Spain, La Virgen de Guadalupe appeared at Tepeyac as an Indigenous ­woman to an Indigenous convert. Her promises of protection and advocacy affirmed the dignity of Juan and the larger community to which he belonged, challenging the forces of exploitation by Spanish colonizers. Sometimes affectionately known as La Morenita, “her appearance publicly signaled the divine election of the Mexicans—­Indians, mestizos, and criollos.”25 The endurance and enthusiasm of San Antonio’s Guadalupan cele­ brations reflect the power­ful affinity between la Virgen and most Catholics in that city. Established in 1731 as a defensive outpost on the northern periphery of the Spanish empire, San Antonio’s location and complex history created a receptive environment for Guadalupe’s communal symbolism. Located in South Central Texas, the city belongs to a region that incorporates ele­ments of the South, the West, and Mexico, creating “a unique borderlands culture.”26 Its first settlers “­were a racially mixed group with varied combinations of African, Native American, and Spanish blood lines,” described by a missionary Franciscan at the time as “ ‘mulatos, lobos, coyotes, and mestizos.’ ”27 In the centuries since its establishment, a variety of groups “have left their cultural mark [on the region] with such g­ reat social heterogeneity and hybridity that one geographer has referred to it as a ‘shatter ­belt.’ ”28 Potentially disorienting, this hybridity has instead been embraced, with the symbol of Guadalupe being essential in that ­process: “Mexican Americans are the dignified ­bearers of a rich mestizo heritage—­neither Spanish nor Indigenous, neither Mexican nor North American.”29 As Timothy Matovina’s research has shown, San Antonio’s commitment to Guadalupe has been a stabilizing force throughout the vagaries of its history.30 This enduring commitment is evident from the city’s origins when its first congregation chose her as a patroness. D ­ ecades l­ater, insurgents in the Mexican fight for ­independence from Spain rallied ­under

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Guadalupe’s banner and attributed their victory to her intercession. Subsequently, devotion to Guadalupe took on new importance throughout the new Mexican Republic, including in the settlement that eventually became San Antonio. This alliance remained strong even a­ fter Texas won ­independence from Mexico and San Antonio’s dominant power structures ­were wrested from their mestizo foundations. During the ­decade of Texas ­independence (1836–1846), Anglo-­ Americans and ­European immigrants began to arrive in San Antonio in ­great numbers. Exhibiting the sense of entitlement that characterized settlement of the American West, they “wrested control of San Antonio’s ­political, economic, and social life” from families of Mexican descent who had lived in and farmed the area for generations. Despite this demographic shift and corresponding loss of ­political power, devotion to Guadalupe by Texas Mexicans—­increasingly known as Tejanos—­was expressed as ­fervently as ever. ­After Texas was annexed by the U.S. in 1846, even greater numbers of Anglo-­American and E ­ uropean immigrants arrived, further reducing the status of Mexican-­descent residents. Despite t­ hese setbacks and some r­ esistance from newly arrived E ­ uropean clergy, “the annual rituals and festivities in honor of Our Lady of Guadalupe continued.”31 ­After a gradual decline in devotion following annexation, a Guadalupan revival occurred with the arrival of exiles from Mexico’s revolution in the early twentieth ­century. During the Cristero Rebellion (1926–1929) that followed, hundreds of Catholic clergy and laity fled Mexico and that government’s restrictions on religious expression. Once in San Antonio, the émigrés expanded the annual Guadalupan cele­brations, adding a ­rose pro­cession on December 11 and enlarging the feast day pro­cession on December 12.32 The new West Side parish church of Our Lady of Guadalupe was also established during this period. The presence of religious exiles “paved the way for the prolonged influence of Guadalupan devotion” on Mexican American Catholics. “Long ­after the intensity of the exile experience faded, the exiles’ core belief that they ­were Guadalupe’s privileged sons and d­ aughters endured, strengthening succeeding generations as they continued to negotiate the transition from being Mexican exiles to Mexican Americans.”33 ­Later, as large numbers of Mexican American men went off to fight in World War II, devotion to Guadalupe acquired new resonance. Revered as a protectress in times of communal distress, Guadalupe was the recipient

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of prayers for “victory, peace, and the safety of the men on the ­battle fronts.” The local Catholic newspaper noted that feast day cele­brations held in December 1942—­one year a­ fter the Oblate Grotto dedication—­ were characterized by “even greater devotion and solemnity than usual.”34

A Segregated City Such favorable coverage of Guadalupe cele­brations in the local Catholic press obscures the fact that they occurred in a city characterized by rigid segregation. A legacy of colonization, war, annexation, and industrialization, divisions between Anglos and Tejanos penetrated ­every sector of life in San Antonio. Nineteenth-­century Anglo and E ­ uropean settlers in the area had brought a construction of whiteness that rarely included p­ eople of Mexican descent and often discriminated against them in the emerging dominant culture of central and south Texas.35 When waves of Southern and Eastern ­European immigrants arrived in the early twentieth ­century, the concept of American whiteness expanded to include them, while non-­Europeans w ­ ere perceived as non-­white.36 Racial, economic, ­political, and cultural developments all combined, creating “an ethnic cleavage . . . ​between Mexicans and non-­Mexicans in the city.” By 1900, demographers noted that “the Anglo ‘new breed’ became the dominant class in San Antonio.”37 Although the new Anglo elite monopolized power during the first four ­decades of the twentieth ­century, explosive population growth threatened their numerical dominance. San Antonio’s overall population more than qua­dru­pled between 1900 and 1940, with the greatest growth occurring among residents of Mexican descent. Although the Anglo population had been 60 ­percent of the total at the beginning of the ­century, by 1940, their majority status had virtually evaporated.38 Historian David Roedinger explains that “[t]he rise in Mexican immigration . . . ​generated an acceleration of efforts to separate Mexican Americans categorically from the white race, with the Census Bureau briefly making Mexican a ‘racial’ category for the 1930 census.”39 Twelve years ­later, a 1942 government report found that “Hispanics in Texas ­were subject to the same systematic pattern of discrimination and prejudice as Blacks in the South.” 40 ­Because a majority of ­those identified as Mexican ­were Catholic, their population growth profoundly impacted the Church. Of the estimated 195,000 Catholics in

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the San Antonio archdiocese in 1941, more than 65 ­percent w ­ ere listed as “Mexicans,” and during the war their numbers increased. Although this growth was perceived as problematic by Archbishop Drossaerts, who had approved the Grotto proj­ect, his successor, Archbishop Robert Emmet Lucey, was inspired by the demographic shift. Attuned to the consequences of systemic injustice, Lucey advocated for Catholics of Mexican descent. He recognized the historical basis of the prob­lem, writing that “the greatest root of the trou­ble is that the first English-­speaking p­ eople came ­here as conquerors and have tried ever since to rule as oppressors.” 41 As we ­will see, his awareness helped create new possibilities for Catholic expression in San Antonio. Although the ­European origins of San Antonio’s Grotto initially reinforced religious segregation, it ­wasn’t long before Our Lady of Lourdes had to share her space. Understanding the historical role of Catholicism in establishing San Antonio’s racial and ethnic divisions can help disentangle the overlapping ­causes. Following the annexation of Texas, European-­born clergy had arrived in the state in significant numbers, including the Oblates from France in 1849. San Antonio traditions like t­ hose related to the Feast of Guadalupe w ­ ere unfamiliar to “[m]any of the newly installed, non-­Spanish-­ speaking clergy.” 42 This lack of familiarity often led to misunderstanding and conflict, including “prolonged clashes over fandangos, public pro­ cessions, bell ringing, cannonading, and other Tejano practices.” 43 As a result, ­there was a hardening of “perceptions of difference and lines of separation between Tejanos and other San Antonio residents.” This segregation became symbolically expressed in the shift of the Guadalupe feast “from a community-­wide to a strictly Tejano cele­bration.” 44 Originally a symbol of community cohesion, by the early 1900s, Guadalupan cele­ brations had become a reminder of social divisions. Residential and educational segregation accompanied the widening ­religious differences. Already by the late nineteenth c­ entury, economic developments had established a framework for systemic segregation and discrimination in the city. The influx of Anglos who arrived following Reconstruction and the railroads increasingly occupied the central business district, displacing Tejano residents. This eventually led to the formation of a Mexican colonia or barrio on the West Side.45 The emergence of a distinct Mexican neighborhood reinforced the formation of “two socie­ties, one Anglo and the other Mexican.” 46 Many of t­ hose who left Mexico in

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the wake of the Mexican Revolution in 1910 ended up settling in this West Side neighborhood, and by 1930 the overwhelming majority of Mexican and Mexican Americans, between 90,000 and 100,000 residents, lived ­there.47 San Antonio’s barrio encompassed approximately four square miles of primarily substandard dwellings. Although the north end section attracted more prosperous professionals, the densely populated, impoverished center became the neighborhood’s trademark. In the late 1930s, local priest ­Father Carmelo Tranchese attempted to secure federal funds for more adequate housing, drawing the attention of journalists and policymakers to the neighborhood’s poverty. A 1939 article, “San Antonio, the Shame of Texas,” described the West Side as a “Mexican slum, often mentioned as the worst in Amer­i­ca.”  48 A San Antonio author in the mid-1940s echoed that assessment, describing the area as “dirtier, poorer, more congested even than the slums of Mexico.” 49 Substandard dwellings typically lacked plumbing and electricity, streets ­were unpaved, and city ­services w ­ ere virtually 50 ­nonexistent. The area’s living conditions contributed to a health crisis; when Eleanor Roo­se­velt visited in March 1939, she spoke publicly about San Antonio’s rate of tuberculosis, the highest in the U.S. at the time.51 The situation had not improved three years l­ater when a government study confirmed that San Antonio continued to have the highest rate of tuberculosis of any large U.S. city. The poor living conditions of the West Side w ­ ere to blame for the pervasiveness of the disease.52 Exacerbating this ­inequality ­were discriminatory housing policies, including the widespread use of racially restrictive real estate covenants. ­These agreements had been established between realtors, developers, and private citizens in the 1920s and “became a ‘constitution-­proof’ way to discriminate” ­under the guise of preserving home values.53 A prominent local ­lawyer collected affidavits in the early 1940s, documenting the impact of t­ hese covenants on Mexican residents of San Antonio.54 Even the widely celebrated housing proj­ect championed by Tranchese inadvertently contributed to residential segregation. Although the housing units at the Alazán-­Apache Courts represented a vast improvement over the jacales that had previously dominated the West Side, their construction reflected a two-­tier federal housing policy that effectively reinforced neighborhood segregation and the inequalities that accompanied it.55 New Deal policies provided white communities access to federal funding to support mortgage

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loans and private home owner­ship while subsidizing high-­density, public housing for racial minorities.56 Although postwar developments helped to undermine restrictive housing policies, real estate covenants remained on the books u ­ ntil the 1960s.57 Power­ful educational prejudices reinforced residential segregation. Spanish-­speaking students in the public school system ­were often labeled as being slow to pro­gress. English-­speaking c­ hildren of Mexican descent ­were typically handicapped by impoverished living conditions and the need to earn income for their families. An influential study of education in San Antonio identified a majority of students in West Side schools as “retarded,” leading to the creation of alternative curricula and educational tracks. Members of the West Side community often internalized the flawed assessment of their potential: “This educational separation and emphasis on vocational education helped to develop in the consciousness of both the Mexican and the non-­Mexican population the image and myth of the Mexican as someone who was only suited to be . . . ​a semiskilled or skilled worker.”58 This false perception suited Anglo agriculturalists, who had learned that an undereducated, disempowered Mexican ­labor force was much easier to underpay.59 Catholic schools further reinforced segregation, with Mexican and black c­ hildren often being refused admission to schools outside the West Side b­ ecause of color, race, or class.60 Catholic clergy often reinforced rather than challenged widespread prejudice and discrimination. Archbishop Drossaerts, for example, frequently expressed paternalistic and racist attitudes. Dutch-­born Drossaerts headed the San Antonio archdiocese from 1918 to 1940, during which the city’s Mexican population had risen most dramatically. By the end of his term, Mexican Catholics made up two-­thirds of his diocese, and Drossaerts’s racist biases left him ill-­equipped to adjust to the demographic shift. He referred publicly to “this Mexican prob­lem” as shorthand for the thorny issues of inadequate housing, substandard education, and religious disaffection. Not only did he fail to grasp the role of discrimination in creating i­ nequality, but he was also firmly convinced of the superiority of Anglo-European Catholicism. He argued that the Catholic school was “the only effective means . . . ​to lift up ­these poor, ­simple c­ hildren from their ignorance, superstition, and slovenly habits.” 61 He repeatedly referred to Mexicans as “childlike, ­humble and swarthy” and claimed that Mexicans “[l]eft to themselves . . . ​can do nothing, build

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nothing, support nothing. They need the help of their more favored Anglo-­American brethren.” 62 Drossaerts had internalized damaging racist attitudes and powerfully perpetuated them as archbishop.

San Antonio’s Grotto Transformed Although Archbishop Drossaerts formally approved the construction of the Grotto, he died just months before its completion in 1941. His successor, Robert Emmet Lucey, presided at the dedication of the Grotto shortly ­after being made archbishop. Unlike his ­predecessor, Lucey brought to his position a lifelong commitment to the princi­ples of Catholic Social Teaching, especially as they applied to the dignity and rights of workers.63 His previous posts had been in Los Angeles and Amarillo, where Lucey had witnessed the strug­gles of many families of Mexican descent, along with the sustenance provided by their community-­based faith traditions.64 He was quick to employ his administrative skills to advocate for Mexican Catholics ­a fter arriving in San Antonio, establishing the first Bishops’ Committee for the Spanish-­Speaking, lobbying for the rights of mi­grant workers, and eventually ending segregation in parochial schools.65 His efforts contributed to a gradual and partial shift in racial / ethnic dynamics that began in the early 1940s and continued to reverberate long a­ fter. As we w ­ ill see, the small shrine for La Virgen de Guadalupe, added to the Grotto site in 1943, symbolizes the hope and promise that this period represents. Once only a modest plaque replica of the tilma image, Guadalupe’s presence at the site would expand, eventually matching—if not eclipsing—­that of Our Lady of Lourdes. In 1999, t­ hese life-­sized bronze statues of Guadalupe and Juan Diego replaced the 1943 plaque. The early 1940s w ­ ere years of incremental transformation in San Antonio. ­Wartime circumstances contributed to a gradual—­albeit partial—­ “erosion of segregation,” particularly as it impacted Mexican communities.66 Many Mexican Americans who served during World War II returned proud of their ­service. Mexican American soldiers ­were considered by some to be “the most decorated ethnic group in the armed ­services, winning seventeen Medals of Honor,” 67 and t­hose who had previously tolerated discrimination “acquired new courage,” becoming “more vocal in protesting . . . ​restrictions and inequalities.” 68 Mexican American veterans “used the legitimacy they earned in World War II to press their

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figure  4. Bronze image of La Virgen de Guadalupe. (Photo­graph by Adrienne Nock Ambrose.)

claims to full citizenship.” Archbishop Lucey also harnessed ­wartime energy in several speeches to predominantly white audiences, drawing “an analogy between the master race ideology of Nazism and the treatment of Blacks and Hispanics in Texas.” 69 In his opening address to a 1943 conference on “Spanish-­Speaking ­People of the Southwest,” Lucey expressed

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the hope the war against fascism would lead to greater attentiveness to the injustices of discrimination at home.70 In the economic realm, a growing percentage of San Antonio’s Mexican population began to achieve middle-­class status. As one historian noted, “In absolute numbers this ­middle class was small (approximately five thousand), but its influence went beyond its numbers ­because of income, status, business holdings, and the ability to articulate ideas.” 71 ­Wartime industrial jobs provided new opportunities and began to chip away at the racial segmentation that had characterized the agriculturally focused Texas l­abor market. ­After the war, “returning veterans, via the GI Bill of Rights and college degrees, formed the base for the expanding ­middle and skilled working classes among Texas Mexicans.” 72 Two San Antonio business o­ wners provide an early example of the social mobility that would become more widespread during the 1940s. ­Brothers James and Louis Rodriguez w ­ ere born in San Antonio and grew up “the poorest of the poor.” In 1908, they both took jobs at San Antonio Circle Monument Co., accepting a pay cut in exchange for training. ­A fter learning their trade, they opened a successful business and began supplying monuments and gravestones for churches and cemeteries throughout the city. When the Oblates needed statues of Mary Immaculate and Bernadette to anchor their Grotto replica, they took their business to Rodriguez Bros. Memorial.73 James and Louis Rodriguez are representative of an increasing number of Mexican Americans who obtained training in semiskilled and skilled positions in this period, leading to an overall increase in the standard of living. A report compiled by city leaders in 1940 affirmed that ­“[n]­ew self-­knowledge and power on the part of the Mexican Americans was beginning to bring about integration and some p­ olitical and social recognition.” The influence of Mexican American Catholics in the area made it inevitable that La Virgen de Guadalupe would become part of the Grotto replica. Less than two years a­ fter the Grotto’s dedication, during a Solemn High Mass on M ­ other’s Day in 1943, “the new Shrine and Plaque of Our Lady of Guadalupe” was blessed at the top of the Grotto. Few details about the new shrine are preserved in the surviving account in Mary Immaculate Magazine, which devotes more attention to Our Lady of Lourdes than it does to honoring Guadalupe’s arrival. The account describes the opening pro­cession in detail, noting that “[m]archers sang the Lourdes

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hymn and recited the Rosary . . . ​creating a picture that could only be equaled during pilgrimages at the Lourdes of France.” The blessing of the new shrine to Guadalupe merits only a brief paragraph.74 Details of the history of the Grotto are also noticeably absent from the account, which merely notes in an undated reference that the “north side of the Grotto . . . ​ was landscaped to represent the Hill of Tepeyac in Mexico.” T ­ here is no description of the image of Guadalupe or of the Mass at which it was blessed, and the placement and wording of the reference strongly suggest it was an afterthought. Nevertheless, many San Antonians took notice, as the account acknowledges the new Guadalupe shrine subsequently became “very ­popular, especially with our Spanish-­speaking p­ eople.” 75 It is pos­si­ble to dismiss the 1943 addition of Guadalupe’s image to the Grotto as nothing more than a strategic and superficial concession to San Antonio’s Mexican-­Catholic majority; the surviving internal accounts treat it as an afterthought. Comparison with a more recent Tepeyac shrine therefore suggests how differently the San Antonio site might have functioned if Guadalupe occupied it on her own. Although at a considerable remove in time and space, the Guadalupe replica in Des Plaines, Illinois, suggests the potential of a site not divided between two Marian manifestations.76 Established in 2001, the Tepeyac replica at the Church of Maryville is twenty miles northwest of downtown Chicago. The site features a reproduction of Juan Diego’s tilma b­ ehind bulletproof glass and bronze repre­sen­ta­tions of the second and fourth appearances of Guadalupe. Officially sanctioned by Mexican Cardinal Norberto Rivera Carrera, the site has been designated the “second Tepeyac of North Amer­i­ca.” Additional institutional support was forthcoming in 2008, when Chicago’s cardinal designated almost sixty-­three acres to the shrine. It “maintains close ties . . . ​w ith its counterpart in central Mexico.” In 2006, leading church officials from the Mexican basilica traveled to Chicago to participate in a blessing of the site.77 Attendance at its annual Feast of Guadalupe cele­brations reaches up to three hundred thousand, and an even larger audience participates in the event through t­elevision and radio broadcasts.78 Despite more modest beginnings and a shared space, Guadalupe’s presence at the Oblate Grotto attracted consistent support and growth, gradually transforming the site. Increased devotion to Guadalupe was not the only evidence of transformation; developments at the shrine have coincided

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with punctuated periods of hopeful pro­gress for Latinx San Antonians. Just two months ­after the M ­ other’s Day dedication of the Guadalupe Shrine at the Grotto, for example, Lucey hosted the first-­ever national conference on “Spanish-­Speaking P ­ eople of the Southwest” at what was then Incarnate Word College. Despite its awkward and misleading name, the 1943 conference articulated visionary goals, including “the recruitment of ministers from among the Hispanic community [and] special seminary training to prepare Anglos for work with Hispanics.” 79 Although much of the conference’s agenda remained unrealized, Guadalupe’s arrival at a seminary and pilgrimage site represented hope for the ­future. Having become “very ­popular,” the shrine expanded in its second ­decade. By the mid-1950s, the Novena chapel in the Grotto had become too small for pilgrims, who “would come from vari­ous parts of Texas or pilgrimages passing through on their way to Mexico.” Initially built to accommodate only twenty-­five worshippers, the chapel was expanded in 1958 to accommodate 125 congregants.80 At the same time, the postwar period of the 1950s saw significant challenges to the structural racism that had characterized San Antonio. Acting on his conviction that racism was a sin, Lucey led the way as San Antonio became the first Texas diocese to integrate its parochial schools.81 This was also at the height of Lucey’s activism on behalf of mi­grant workers. During the 1950s, Lucey “turned the Bishops’ Committee into a virtual farm workers’ ­organization, using it to expose the mi­grants’ plight and broaden the Church’s involvement in confronting this injustice.” 82 As early as 1950, Lucey articulated his vision of parishes and clergy actively facilitating the ­unionization of Hispanic mi­grants. ­These initiatives coincided with greater recognition of Guadalupe at the archdiocesan level. In 1956, “the San Antonio archdiocese’s Catholic Council for the Spanish Speaking o­ rganized an archdiocesan Guadalupe cele­bration with some thirty-­five thousand participants in what the archdiocesan and secular press hailed as the ‘largest mass religious demonstration in the history of San Antonio.’ ” 83

Conclusion The complex history of ­these two manifestations of Mary at the Grotto is reflected in the con­temporary name of this space: Lourdes Grotto & Guadalupe Tepeyac. The shrine is located on the campus of what is now the

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Oblate School of Theology—an institution that has become much more supportive of Mexican American Catholicism than its Eurocentric origins would have suggested. In addition, thanks to the contributions of pioneers like Virgilio Elizondo and former Archbishop Patrick Flores, the city of San Antonio became a significant site of liberation theology.84 The presence of ­these two Marys at San Antonio’s Lourdes Grotto and Guadalupe Tepeyac shrine speaks to ways that American Catholic history is a long contestation over identity, devotion, and practice. Notes 1. Fr. Bill Morrell, OMI, “Oblate Grotto Celebrates Its 75th Anniversary,” OMI USA 20, no. 1 (January 2017): 11. 2. “Lourdes Shrine in Texas Tied to Shrine in France,” The Oblate World (June 1977), 7. Newspaper clipping from Oblate School of Theology (OST) Oblates of South Texas archives. “History of the League of Mary Immaculate, the Grotto Shrine to Our Lady of Lourdes . . . ,” Southwestern Oblate Historical Archives, 5. (Hereinafter “History of the League”). 3. Initial fund­rais­ing efforts amassed $12,000 to begin construction on the Grotto (more than $200,000 in 2021 dollars); “History of the League,” 7. 4. “History of the League,” 5–7. 5. Barbara Corrado Pope details the Catholic Church’s support for European-­based Marian devotion by noting that “so ­great was this revival that leaders of the church call the years between 1850 and 1950 the Marian Age,” in “Immaculate and Power­ful: The Marian Revival in the Nineteenth C ­ entury,” in Immaculate and Power­f ul: The Female in Sacred Image and Social Real­ity, ed. Cla­ris­sa W. Atkinson, Constance H. Buchanan, and Margaret R. Miles (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985), 173. 6. From 1928 American Board of Catholic Missions report, cited in Timothy Matovina, Guadalupe and Her Faithful: Latino Catholics in San Antonio, from Colonial Origins to the Pre­sent (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 96. 7. On Guadalupe cele­brations during this period, see Matovina, Guadalupe and Her Faithful, 114–127. 8. On the prominence and unifying force of eighteenth-­century Guadalupan cele­brations, see Matovina, Guadalupe and Her Faithful, 53–54, 60. 9. Richard A. Garcia, Rise of the Mexican American M ­ iddle Class, San Antonio, 1929–1941(College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1991), 20. 10. A feature article on Fr. Carmelo Tranchese notes his activity leading up to “the Solemn Anniversary Cele­brations in honor of Our Lady of Guadalupe

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[which] must be planned in infinite detail.” George Sessions Perry, “Rumpled Angel of the Slums,” Saturday ­Evening Post 221, no. 8 (August 21, 1948): 47. 11. “History of the League,” 8. 12. Jean Leflon, Eugene de Mazenod: Bishop of Marseilles, F­ ounder of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, Vol. II: 1812–1837, trans. Francis D. Flanagan, OMI (New York: Fordham University Press, 1966), 153. See also Bernard Doyon, OMI, The Cavalry of Christ on the Rio Grande, 1849–1883 (Milwaukee, WI: Catholic Life Publications, 1956), 13. 13. St. Eugene de Mazenod, ­founder of the Oblates, lamented the “cruel Texas mission,” in a letter to a priest stationed t­ here. Eugene de Mazenod, Letters to North Amer­i­ca, 1851–1860, trans. John Witherspoon Mole, OMI (Rome: General Postulation OMI, 1979), 202. 14. Doyon, Calvary of Christ; emphasis added. 15. David A. Badillo, “Between Alienation and Ethnicity: The Evolution of Mexican-­American Catholicism in San Antonio, 1910–1940,” Journal of American Ethnic History 16:4 (Summer 1997), 63. On establishment of Southwestern province, see Fr. Matt J. Menger, OMI, Of T ­ hese Men: The Oblates in Texas (1979), 21. 16. Menger, Of T ­ hese Men, 5. 17. Colleen McDannell, “Lourdes W ­ ater and American Catholicism,” in Material Chris­tian­ity: Religion and ­Popular Culture in Amer­i­ca (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 132–62. 18. McDannell, “Lourdes W ­ ater,” 149. 19. McDannell, 160. 20. Katherine Woods, “Mr. Werfel’s Stirring Novel about the Saint of Lourdes,” New York Times, May 10, 1942, BR3. 21. Paula M. Kane, “Jews and Catholics Converge: The Song of Bernadette (1943),” in Catholics in the Movies, ed. Colleen McDannell (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 83–105. 22. McDannell notes that nearly half of the letters w ­ ere from East, another nearly half came from the Midwest, and only “a smattering” of letters came from the South and West; McDannell, “Lourdes W ­ ater,” 144. 23. On “shrine-­establishment apparitions,” see Sandra L. Zimdars-­Swartz, Encountering Mary: From La Salette to Medjugorje (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1991), 8. 24. Luis D. León, La Llorona’s ­Children: Religion, Life, and Death in the U.S.-­Mexican Borderlands (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 61. 25. León, La Llorona’s C ­ hildren, 62. 26. Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 2. The definitive work on the borderlands experience is Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 4th ed. (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2012)

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27. Matovina, Guadalupe and Her Faithful, 48. 28. Foley, White Scourge, 2. 29. Fr. Virgil Elizondo, paraphrased in Matovina, Guadalupe and Her Faithful, 157. 30. The following segment is indebted to Matovina’s synthesis in Guadalupe and Her Faithful, 65–94. 31. Matovina, 65–94. 32. Matovina, 115. 33. Timothy Matovina, “Natives and Newcomers: Ethnic Mexican Religious Convergences in 1920s San Antonio, TX,” U.S. Catholic Historian 37, no. 3 (Summer 2019): 18. 34. Alamo Register, December 18, 1942 (quotations), cited in Matovina, Guadalupe and Her Faithful, 149. 35. Foley, White Scourge, 24, 106; see also, Chap. 4,n72. 36. On this ­process, see David R. Roediger, Working t­ oward Whiteness: How Amer­i­ca’s Immigrants Became White (New York: Basic Books, Reprint, 2018), 20. 37. Garcia, Mexican American ­Middle Class, 22. 38. In 1940, San Antonio’s total population was 254,053, with 46.7 ­percent identified as Anglo, and 46.3 ­percent identified as Mexican. Garcia, 59. 39. Roediger, Working ­toward Whiteness, 154. 40. Stephen A. Privett, SJ, The U.S. Catholic Church and Its Hispanic Members: The Pastoral Vision of Archbishop Robert E. Lucey (San Antonio, TX: Trinity University Press, 1988), 57. 41. Draft of a pastoral letter co-­written by Lucey and Fr. Raymond McGowan of the Social Action Office of the National Catholic Welfare Conference. The clerics submitted the draft to Southwestern bishops in 1945 as a foundational document of the Bishops’ Committee of the Spanish Speaking. Facing opposition from the other bishops, the letter was never published. Reprinted in Privett, Pastoral Vision, Appendix C, 218. 42. Badillo, “Between Alienation and Ethnicity,” 63. 43. Matovina, Guadalupe and Her Faithful, 79. 4 4. Matovina, 79. 45. Badillo, “Between Alienation and Ethnicity,” 65. See also David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836–1986 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987), 92–95. 46. Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans, 95. 47. Garcia, Mexican American ­Middle Class, 15–53. 48. Ralph Maitland, “San Antonio, the Shame of Texas,” Forum and C ­ entury 102, no. 2 (August 1939): 51. 49. Green Peyton, San Antonio: City in the Sun (New York: McGraw Hill, 1946), 147 (available as Kessinger Legacy Reprints).

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50. Garcia, Mexican American ­Middle Class, 39. 51. Garcia, 42–43. 52. Public Health Reports, 1945 Feb 2; 60(5): 117–144, https://­w ww​.­ncbi​ .­nlm​.­nih​.­gov​/­pmc​/­articles​/­PMC1976045​/­​?­page​=­1. 53. Roediger, Working ­toward Whiteness, 170. 54. Badillo, “Between Alienation and Ethnicity,” 69. See also Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans, 265. 55. Garcia notes that Tranchese was known locally as “the f­ ather of public housing”; Garcia, Mexican American ­Middle Class, 165. 56. Roediger, Working ­toward Whiteness, 224–234. 57. The development of racially restrictive real estate covenants is discussed in Roediger, 158–177. On Texas legislation that put an end to ­these policies, see Montejano, 286. 58. Garcia, Mexican American ­Middle Class, 180–181. See also Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans, 191–196. 59. J. F. Bobbitt, The San Antonio Public School System: A Survey (San Antonio School Board, 1915), 194–145. See also Garcia, Mexican American ­Middle Class, 177. 60. Not ­until 1954 was Archbishop Lucey fi­nally successful in integrating San Antonio’s Catholic Schools. Garcia, Mexican American ­Middle Class, 198 and 347,n55. On the “culture of segregation” that prevailed in Texas during the first four d­ ecades of the twentieth c­ entury, see Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans, 220–234. 61. Quoted in Garcia, Mexican American ­Middle Class, 173. 62. Garcia, 173, 340–41,n6. 63. In reporting on Lucey’s San Antonio appointment, Time magazine described him as “the most socially conscious” member of the Catholic hierarchy, cited in Privett, Pastoral Vision, 15. 64. In Los Angeles, Lucey had served u ­ nder Archbishop Cantwell, who was known for his support of Guadalupan devotion. See León, La Llorona’s ­Children, 96, 100–101, 103, 104. 65. The committee, made up of bishops from the seventeen Southwestern dioceses, was the “U.S. bishops’ first collaborative effort in Hispanic ministry”; Matovina, Guadalupe and Her Faithful, 136. 66. The phrase is Montejano’s, Anglos and Mexicans, 260. For a particularly nuanced assessment of this period, see David G. Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 117–151. 67. Ricardo Romo, quoted in Garcia, Mexican American ­Middle Class, 303. Within Texas, the American GI Forum, a Mexican American ­organization founded by World War II veterans, contributed to the momentum at the state level.

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68. Paula Kibbe, cited in Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans, 270–271. Kibbe was executive director of Texas’s first Good Neighbor Commission. 69. Privett, Pastoral Vision, 15–16. 70. His full address is printed in Alonso S. Perales, Are We Good Neighbors? (San Antonio, TX: Artes Graficas, 1948), 11–16. 71. R. Garcia, Mexican American ­Middle Class, 84. 72. Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans, 260 (first quote), 280 (second quote). 73. “History of the League of Mary Immaculate,” 8; Joe Holley, “­Family Carved Solid Lives in San Antonio,” Houston Chronicle, August 25, 2013, https://­w ww​.­houstonchronicle​.­com​/­news​/­columnists​/­native​-­texan​/­article​ /­Family​-­carved​-­solid​-­lives​-­in​-­San​-­Antonio​-­4758778​.­php. 74. “­Mother’s Day, a Most Beautiful One at the Grotto Sanctuary at Our Lady of Lourdes,” Mary Immaculate Magazine, July–­August 1943, 209. 75. “History of the League,” 11. 76. For a model account of the site, see Elaine A. Peña, Performing Piety: Making Space Sacred with the Virgin of Guadalupe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). 77. Peña, Performing Piety, 12, 34. 78. Peña, 40. Peña cites attendance from 2005 at 160,000, but more recent statements in media and church website claim 300,000. 79. The name of the conference represented a compromise following a “heated but unavoidable debate,” and was only accepted “with the caveat that it not be interpreted so literally as to exclude t­ hose Hispanics who spoke only ­English and ­were full citizens of the United States,” Privett, Pastoral Vision, 59. 80. “History of the League,” 12–13. 81. Privett, Pastoral Vision, 19. 82. Saul E. Bronder, Social Justice and Church Authority: The Public Life of Archbishop Robert E. Lucey (Philadelphia: T ­ emple University Press, 1982), 76. 83. Matovina, Guadalupe and Her Faithful, 149. 84. Beginning in the 1970s, Catholic San Antonio leaders, including F ­ ather Virgil Elizondo, embraced the city’s Mexican roots with a newfound enthusiasm. Responding to “strug­gles, frustration, and disappointments” in the face of a failure to recognize the distinctive gifts of Mexican American Catholics, Elizondo established the Mexican American Cultural Center (MACC) in 1972. During his more than ten years as president, Elizondo helped MACC become a national resource for what he described as “Hispanic ministry, rights, theology, and religious traditions.” A ­ fter Patrick Flores became the first Mexican American Catholic bishop, he appointed Elizondo as rector of San Fernando Cathedral; in that role, Elizondo made “extensive efforts to foster pride in Mexican American heritage and identity, especially through the revitalization and reinvention of public ritual traditions”; Matovina, Guadalupe and Her Faithful, 145.



“Guadalupe Represents La Cultura” A Mexican American Mural-­Shrine in California lloyd ba rba

Guadalupe in Lamont: Introduction Even the most casual drive along Weedpatch Highway in Lamont, California, gives the immediate impression of having entered a deeply Mexican place. Without looking too hard in this unincorporated community made up of industrial-ag farms, the Virgin of Guadalupe can easily be found. In fact, chances are that the Spanish spelling “La Virgen de Guadalupe” might be more common. At Fiesta Market on the northern stretch of the dusty highway, her likeness can be spotted in abundance among other votive candles. Halfway down the small city center, her presence might be a bit more obvious. Just across from where the historic County Fair Market once stood, Botánica Natura Mex draws in clientele comprising both seekers and prac­ti­tion­ers. ­There, they purchase Guadalupan paraphernalia along with that of other intermediaries. Fi­nally, approaching the southern boundary and across the row of buildings constituting the old business district, la Virgencita (the ­little virgin) graces an entire outdoor side panel of Garcia Market. Most of Lamont’s fifteen thousand residents have welcomed Guadalupe. Such warm reception should not surprise anyone, considering that more than 94 ­percent of the population is Hispanic / Latinx, and most are of Mexican descent.1 Where Guadalupe stands ­free of the strictures of commodification, the Catholic faithful in Lamont freely gather to venerate her at a large mural-­ shrine immediately off Weedpatch Highway. On an unassuming cinderblock wall on the corner of Hall Road and San Emidio Street, one finds one of the largest Marian Murals in the Central Valley. ­There, Lamont-­ based artist Jorge Guillén completed a mural of Guadalupe in stages from 2006 to 2016, with occasional minor touch-­ups since then.2 Like so many murals of Guadalupe throughout California, it has become a mural-­shrine adored and maintained by the faithful in the community.

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figure  5. The mural-­shrine in Lamont partially wraps around a street corner. Positioned at a well-­trafficked intersection, the large concrete wall is a prime site for space claiming, be it in the form of graffiti or Guillén’s mural. In this photo­graph, one can see the graffiti as well as the billowy blue additions on the flanks added by another muralist apparently in hopes of keeping the graffiti further away from Guadalupe. (Photo­graph by Lloyd Barba, April 2018.)

Guillén, a Chicano muralist based out of Lamont, is no stranger to expressing the politics of race and class through art. Before our interview in early August 2019, we met at Rexland Acres (in nearby Bakersfield), the site of his most extensive mural proj­ect. In this larger work, he painted a story of race, religion, and culture, showcasing prominent figures (Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sojourner Truth, Dolores Huerta, Benito Juárez, Huey Newton, and Mexican American astronaut Jose Hernandez, among many ­others) and the ­popular foods from the surrounding neighborhood. Guillén majored in history, minored in art history, and took vari­ous upper-­ level courses in studio art at California State University, Bakersfield, ­under the mentorship of Ted Kerzie and George Ketteral. He further drew inspiration and techniques from Los Angeles–­based muralist Eloy Torres. Guillén’s murals (excluding the one studied in this chapter) have enjoyed

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figure 6. Guadalupe can be found in many places along the main highway. ­Here she occupies a main panel at Garcia’s Market, where the local Signs and Log­os com­pany followed a traditional rendition. This mural operates primarily to ward off graffiti from the store. It does not attract a steady stream of devotees like the mural-­shrine in Lamont. (Photo­graph by Lloyd Barba, April 2018.)

sponsorship from The Arts Council of Kern and vari­ous local patrons. His work embraces hard histories and complex stories of identity. The painting and enshrinement of Guillén’s mural in Lamont color the larger picture of Marian murals found in Latinx barrios throughout the Southwest. This chapter offers interpretive frameworks for conceptualizing a Marian mural-­shrine, as it holds in sharp relief the ­political and spatial realities inherent to its making and maintaining. For the purposes of this chapter, a mural-­shrine may be conceived of as a mural that, w ­ hether intended or not by the artist, becomes enshrined by religious acts of devotion.3 The mural-­shrine might simply begin as a mural (with all of the attendant ethno-­cultural meaning described below), but as it becomes a receptacle of devotion, it assumes new life as a mural-­shrine. In the case studied in this chapter, Guillén fashioned a mural of Guadalupe simply intending to complete a proj­ect left undone. But upon completion, the

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Guadalupan faithful brought their prayers, petitions, candles, and flowers to the mural, transforming it into a p­ opular shrine. To contextualize the mural-­shrine and interpret its making and remaking, this chapter draws from studies on Guadalupe from a range of fields including anthropology, Chicanx studies, history, religious studies, and theology. A study of a small community’s mural-­shrine of the most widely venerated Marian apparition in the Amer­i­cas tells us a ­great deal about the meaning that mural-­shrines often possess by virtue of the community that accords it sacred value. For at least the past four d­ ecades, the politics of race and public-­space claiming have animated economically-­embattled Lamont. It is one of several Kern County communities (towns and unincorporated communities) that, beginning in the 1930s, received a large influx of Dust Bowl or “Okie” mi­grants seeking reprieve from the eco­nom­ically and ecologically devastated areas of Oklahoma and surrounding states.4 The fictional ­Joad ­family vividly portrayed by John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath arrived at the nearby Weedpatch Camp a­ fter they descended from the Tehachapi Pass. In fact, if not for the historical Weedpatch Market, most visitors would likely be unaware that they had crossed over from Lamont to Weedpatch. Though a population once heavi­ly discriminated against, Okies in turn discriminated against Mexican arrivals whose numbers trended upward beginning in the 1980s.5 Okies eventually constituted the overwhelming portion of the population, and they inculcated into the community the saga of the Dust Bowl migration. Such histories effectively obscured ­those of Mexican mi­grant laborers who have worked the same fields but have not climbed ­toward proportional ­political repre­sen­ta­tion ­until recent ­decades.6 Whereas once upon a time the forlorn Mi­grant ­Mother (of Dorothea Lange’s famous photo­graph) captured the pathos of an Okie, Depression-­ era white American Madonna figure, ­today no female symbol looms larger in the Lamont than Guadalupe.7 As Latin Americans (mostly Mexicans) continue to arrive in the area for agricultural jobs, they bring their religious practices and devotions with them. Catholicism remains the majority religious tradition, and renewed waves of immigrants into the area reinvigorate Catholicism with Guadalupan sensibilities.8 But the Mexican Marian Madonna is much more than a religious symbol. My initial informal inquiry sent to the artist generated a profound response about what his mural represents. Guillén intoned that “Guadalupe represents la cultura.”

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How She Came to Represent La Cultura: The Apparition and Appropriation Chicanx murals reflect a deep community ethos. But of all the dif­fer­ent figures and symbols in t­ hese murals, none draws the same kind of attention that Guadalupe does. Her image beckons faithful observers to devotion. Guillén notes that in Lamont, many perform the sign the cross ( persignar) as they pass the mural-­shrine. ­Those who pass at night also see her clearly, as the mural sits directly beneath a street light. Devotional acts—­regardless of how short-­lived, sustained, or recurring they may be— in effect, do the performative work of sanctifying space.9 Arguably, t­ here is no symbol in the Chicanx muralist tradition that summons its beholders to devotional acts more than Guadalupe. To draw Guadalupe on a public wall is to tap into the devotional registers of the Guadalupan devout. In short, murals of Guadalupe, to varying degrees, often become shrines. And, given the ubiquity of such shrines in the U.S.-­Mexico borderlands, Guadalupan mural-­shrines no doubt qualify as one of the most nationally recognized Marian shrine images in the U.S. The mural-­shrine described in this chapter stands as an indubitable symbol of ethnic empowerment and history. But how did this come to be? Guadalupe has traveled with her faithful from their many places of origin. Sociologist Peggy Levitt reminds us that religion is the “ultimate border crosser.”10 And the Virgin of Guadalupe, in par­tic­u­lar, according to anthropologist Elaine Peña, culturally constitutes a symbol that “exceeds national bound­aries.”11 Canonical Catholic history affirms that the Virgin of Guadalupe first appeared on December 9, 1531, to the Indigenous peasant Juan Diego. As Diego passed the Indigenous sacred grounds of Tepeyac Hill, he heard beautiful m ­ usic in the distance, and when he drew nigh, Guadalupe appeared to him and requested that he build a chapel in her name. Diego made haste to testify of the event to Bishop Juan de Zumárraga, who rebuffed Diego. On December 12, the last of four apparitions, Guadalupe ordered Diego to the thorny and rocky top of the Tepeyac Hill, where, in his tilma, he gathered flowers, which miraculously grew in that area out of season. He then straightway returned to Zumárraga, and when he unfurled his tilma, the flowers fell onto the ground revealing on his tilma a miraculously imprinted image of the Virgin of Guadalupe.12 ­Today Diego’s tilma bearing the miraculous image is displayed at the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City.

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And for centuries now, Guadalupe has represented Mexicans’ mythologized histories of race, peoplehood, and nation. Understanding Guadalupe’s prevalence in Mexico and the U.S., scholar Jeanette Rodriguez claims that “to be of Mexican descent is to recognize the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe.”13 Guadalupe represents among the oldest and most ubiquitous devotions in Latin Amer­i­ca—­from her declaration as Patroness of New Spain in 1754 to her elevation as Queen of Mexico and Empress of the Amer­i­cas in 1945.14 The steady stream of mi­grants from Latin Amer­i­ca to the U.S. carried her into the center of private and public life. To be sure, her devotions in the American Southwest precede U.S. annexation, and twentieth-­century mi­grants further transformed her devotion into a transnational phenomenon.15 Among Mexicans in the U.S. ­today, Guadalupe stands out as a “master symbol.”16 Activists, politicians, and even military leaders have long turned to Guadalupe as a banner to rally together Mexicans.17 Her ability to resonate so deeply reflects her enormous influence on the everyday life of Latinx observers.18 Guadalupe is, thus, mixed into the ordinary affairs of Latinx communities. To remove Guadalupan imagery from ­these contexts would be to fundamentally alter the cultural composition of t­ hese communities. A ­ fter all, Mexican American Catholic devotion to Guadalupe is like café con leche (coffee with milk): Once mixed, one cannot separate the two.19 It is ­little surprise, then, to find that scholars have paid much attention to Guadalupe, her devotion, and her imagery in their studies on Mexican American Catholic communities throughout the U.S.20 In all, Guadalupe symbolizes la cultura in ways that transgress traditional bound­aries of the sacred and the profane.

­Resistance: Murals Made in the Image of Mexicans Chicano muralists gained popularity in the late 1960s and 1970s. Within a few short years, California boasted more murals than any other state. (Many murals, however, have since been whitewashed or their buildings demolished over the greater part of its past half-­century).21 The Chicano Movement of the 1960s and 1970s articulated the sentiments and strength of its communities through muralism. Artists drew inspiration from the ­great muralists of Mexico, such as José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Mexican American muralism, then, can be understood as a revival of the celebrated Mexican tradition. While the former enjoyed government sponsorship, Chicano muralism arose from

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grassroots movements and found a­ cceptance in Mexican barrios.22 Los Angeles holds the distinction as “the mural capital of the world,” but in the nearby Central Valley, artists have also taken their talents to walls for well over half a c­ entury.23 Several patterns emerged from the early muralists’ masterpieces scattered about from the City of Angels to the dusty farm towns of the Central Valley. Guadalupe figures among the earliest and most prominent.24 The omnipresent image of Guadalupe has assumed its place as the preeminent symbol of Mexican nationalism in the U.S., even in lieu of the Mexican flag itself. As a religious symbol that si­mul­ta­neously articulates a ­political and ethnic identity, Guadalupe reads as a type of “hidden transcript.” P ­ olitical scientist James Scott coined this term to describe the covert ways subaltern groups make public statements whose full meaning is understood by ­people within ­these communities but hidden to ­those outside them and in dominant positions of social power. The late biblical and Latinx studies scholar David Sánchez argues that whereas flying the Mexican flag is far too con­spic­u­ous as a national symbol b­ ecause of the proximity of the U.S. to Mexico, Guadalupe can more subtly convey Mexican nationalism. Sánchez argues that “the appeal to the iconography of the Virgin of Guadalupe represents a subversive form of countercolonial and counterimperial r­ esistance.”25 Guadalupe’s presence in the barrios of the Southwest, then, indicates not just presence but also reclamation.26 Such hidden transcripts do not elude the grasp of Jorge Guillén’s creative hand. In fact, Guillén clandestinely carried out his early work as unsanctioned “guerrilla art.” Lacking formal approval from community ­organizations, he began his artwork intending to beautify Latinx neighborhoods with resonant art. Guillén’s first artistic foray in the area began with a painting of a small yet elaborate cross. Shortly ­after he completed the much smaller mural of the cross in 2006, a Lamont local asked a dif­ fer­ent artist to paint a basic outline of Guadalupe. It, too, lacked approval. Guillén reported to me that it appeared as if an official from the Kern County Sheriff’s Substation in Lamont halted the proj­ect, leaving the mural incomplete and Guadalupe as a basic and faceless outline. In the late 2000s, an antagonist painted a swastika over Guadalupe. To c­ ounter this white supremacist symbol, an unknown person attempted to cover up the swastika by subsuming it into the name “Maria” and thereby tried to salvage the incomplete mural. But it continued to undergo defacement.

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Guillén then took it upon himself, again as a guerrilla art proj­ect, to buff out the graffiti. As he worked on it one night, a volunteer Sheriff Deputy happened upon Guillén and informally told him to “just finish it,” stating that no official would take action against him. Guillén then proceeded to work on the mural ­every other night ­until he sufficiently outlined the Guadalupan image. He enhanced the original mural, adding details that the first artist perhaps never envisioned. Over several years he continued to touch up the mural, thanks to paint donations by the county waste management and monetary gifts made by community members watching him at work.27 Shortly a­ fter Guillén “cleaned up” the mural, devotees began to bring flowers and their petitions to the mural. A deeper devotion was underway. While this par­tic­u­lar mural is not a “national shrine,” it is a shrine of ethnic nationalism in which vari­ous forms of Chicano and Mexican nationalism can be publicly projected in the public margins. “Through Her intercession,” as put by Chicano writer Rubén Martínez, “a Mexican remains Mexican in California. . . .”28 The prayers and pilgrimages invite acts of devotion that exceed the expected comportment at a mural. To be sure, murals can be sites of ethnic meaning-­making without engendering pious sentiments. But it is precisely the extraordinary or transcendent language evoked by the Guadalupan mural that prompts a reckoning of the work at hand. It is neither merely a mural nor simply a shrine but is indeed both at once a mural-­shrine. Guillén rendered Guadalupe in a somewhat less heterodox manner. Several noticeable differences surface immediately. His mural is close enough to the canonical image to attract a consistent core of devotees, and it is not too far beyond normal bound­aries so as to repel devotees or draw their ire.29 The unorthodox ele­ments seemingly draw upon overt and covert contextual ­metaphors to become, as religious studies scholar Thomas Tweed describes of the shrine to Our Lady of Charity in Miami, a “receptacle of sacred meaning and power.”30 A closer look at the mural-­shrine reveals impor­tant departures replete with meaning and power. Guadalupe’s hands are shown to be more pronounced and active than usual: off-­color, leathered, and rather large. This portrayal allows for both devotees (and non-­devotees) to sense a special resonance with the kind of ­labor that dominates the area. Residents of Lamont find most of their work in the intensive-­labor side of industrial agriculture. Guadalupe, then, is not

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figure  7. Guadalupe attracts flowers, gifts, and requests year-­round at the mural-­ shrine. Guillén chose to paint a polychromatic base so that no m ­ atter what kind of flowers devotees bring to Guadalupe, they can find a matching background when placed at her feet. (Photo­graph by Lloyd Barba, April 2018.)

merely rendered in a fixed posture of supplication. The evidence on her hands suggests how she works alongside ­those who seek her succor. Guillén’s mural-­shrine bears such strong resonance in part due to its colors. First, consider the browning of Guadalupe. For several centuries now, Indigenous and mestizo (mixed race) p­ eoples of North Amer­i­ca have

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turned to Guadalupe as a symbol of indigeneity. Many have argued that she revealed herself “as the ­Mother of God in Nahua appearance.”31 Theologian Virgilio Elizondo elaborated on the mestiza dimensions of Guadalupe, departing somewhat from the strict indigenous interpretation. He describes how “Our Lady of Guadalupe is a ‘mestiza’ one who ‘is neither an Indian goddess nor a E ­ uropean Madonna’; she is something new. She is neither Spanish nor Indian and yet she is both and more . . . ​[s]he is the first truly American person and as such the m ­ other of the new genera32 tion to come.” Both the Indigenous and mestiza discourses have dominated artistic grassroots renditions, especially since the late-­t wentieth ­century. Over the years, Guadalupe, known affectionately as La Morenita (the ­little dark one), has gradually become darker in art. This is in no small part due to portrayals by Mexican and Chicanx artists who have exercised a creative license.33 A Guadalupe who looks more like the local community attracts more intimate devotions and stands as a symbol of liberation for brown folks.34 Guillén’s own rendition of Guadalupe partakes in this tradition of the browning of Guadalupe.35 Guadalupe’s countenance conveys cultural clues about the community. Around 2014, an unknown artist added a face to the Guadalupan mural. Guillén had not originally intended to paint Guadalupe’s face, but, seeing that the additions to her face had been done by what appeared to be a ­novice muralist, Guillén again committed to improving the mural. His touch-­ups further invoked localized ­metaphors. Guadalupe’s lips appear to be much redder than in most renditions. Rather than claiming that la Virgen is wearing makeup (a potentially provocative move), Guillén was careful to match her lips to the color of the ripe tunas (prickly pears) on the cactus immediately next to her. Guadalupe, like the ­people she watches over in the hottest climes in the Sonoran Desert, eats the few comestible items that the unforgiving terrain has to offer. Second to Guadalupe, perhaps the most depicted Mexican ­woman on murals is Frida Kahlo, the renowned twentieth-­century artist. As an homage to Kahlo and her prominence among Chicanx artists, Guillén fashioned Guadalupe’s eyebrows to be “Frida-­esque.” While Guadalupe does not have the full-on unibrow that perhaps most characteristically defines Kahlo’s prominent facial features, Guadalupe certainly has much thicker eyebrows in Guillén’s rendition. The fact that Guadalupe is fashioned to appear like the Latina inhabitants of the area shows that the mural-­shrines call observers to behold and approach her.36

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figure 8. In most murals, Guadalupe’s hands are soft, match her face, and are upheld in supplication. In Guillén’s mural, her hands appear much larger and more worked than usual. Such rendition may very well resonate with members of the community composed overwhelmingly of farmworkers. (Photo­graph by Lloyd Barba, April 2018.)

Like many Mexican American vernacular shrines, the brilliant chromatic schemes color the street corner.37 Guillén, in keeping with Chicano muralists of previous generations, does not seek to imitate ­European conventions of art. A ­ fter all, at the heart of Chicano muralism is a critique of 38 such practices. In fact, he intentionally brought out a mix of purple and

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violet along the base of the mural so that devotees who had already made a habit of leaving flowers could continue to do so and always match the mural. Guillén states that “[s]ome of ­these flowers ­aren’t real, so ­there’s certain hues that are synthetic, but that [the purple and violet mix] I just wanted to add so that it d­ idn’t m ­ atter what kind of flowers you brought to the Virgen.” The wider base extending well beyond Guadalupe opened additional space for devotees to bring their flowers, candles, and petitions directly ­under the shrine’s wall space. The orange and red hues, which light up the sky around Guadalupe, provide a match for the color of items that devotees lay at her feet. Guillén’s vision ultimately encouraged such devotion: “[It] ­didn’t ­matter how big the shrine got—­all the colors of the flowers ­were in the clouds.” Beyond creating a more colorful devotional scene, Guillén’s choice to blend in the color of the flowers with the sky speaks to the miraculous dimensions of Guadalupe’s apparition to Juan Diego. The Guadalupan story and Guillén’s rendition hold fast to the idea that “the image [of Guadalupe] was created when Juan Diego picked the wild ­roses and they bled into his sarape. Legend has it the image was created with the tint of the flowers.”39 ­Because the flowers colored Diego’s tilma (which Guillén calls a sarape, a traditional Mexican tunic), the flowers of the devotees in like manner transplant themselves onto the mural.40 Guillén’s intentional design exists as a canvas to encourage a colorful devotion.

Mural-­Shrine: A Passion of Devotion and Posture of Defense Guillén’s practice of fashioning a mural of Guadalupe plays into a much deeper history of Chicanx public repre­sen­ta­tion. The devotion at the mural-­shrine cannot be separated from the larger politics of space pronounced by Chicanx muralists. Consider that Chicano muralism distinguished itself as a primary artistic practice of the broader Chicano civil rights movement. Murals, moreover, perform par­tic­u­lar kinds of work in Latinx communities. According to Sánchez, murals invite viewers to “dream and / or challenge the emerging repre­sen­ta­tion of a ­people” and “ponder the stories of a p­ eople who have not been privileged in mainstream venues such as the media, museums, the acad­emy, or lit­er­a­ture.” As a grassroots artistic expression, muralism responds to power­ful arbiters of taste by beautifying their own space with expressions that had long been denigrated, reminding the community of the rights and dignity of

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all ­people. Murals, then, b­ ecause of pervasive exclusionary politics “play the functional role of a public repository for the alternative, ­counter history.” 41 They serve as a primary way of enunciating the politics of ethnic identity. According to the Chicanx art scholar Tomás Ybarra-­Frausto, Chicano murals and other public arts represent concerns of local neighborhoods, and artists therefore sought to create pieces that “strengthened the ­w ill, fortified the cultural identity, and clarified the consciousness of the community.” 42 Accordingly, then, Sánchez interprets murals as a “defense strategy” which “sought to c­ ounter portrayals of Mexicans and Chicanas / os by the dominant culture of the United States” and as an “offensive strategy” in how murals “framed the discourses as a production of our own Chicana / o cultural generation.” 43 The sacred acts of devotion that occur as a result of painting a Guadalupan mural in Lamont, I contend, offer a sacred yet offensive strategy. Sacred sites are also contested sites. Contestations assume both offensive and defensive postures. Contestation, moreover, can assume religious dimensions inextricably linked to the sociopo­liti­cal context at hand. In this way, the mural-­shrine placed out in the open on a well-­trafficked T-­intersection has proven to be a contested sacred site. As described ­earlier, a vandal painted a swastika immediately next to Guadalupe. While defacement was not entirely unusual, that time around, the vandalism assumed racist dimensions. That the swastika had been chosen as the symbol to desecrate the shrine speaks to the white nationalist sentiments harbored in that region of California, often dubbed the Deep Red South.44 To contest the desecration, an unknown artist morphed the swastika into a graffiti-­stylized script that read “Maria”—­apparently in hopes of rectifying the symbolic language on the wall. Around 2014, Guillén recounts, an unknown arsonist set fire to the mural and consecrated objects, ultimately burning approximately 40 ­percent of the mural. With nothing e­ lse in sight set ablaze, it was apparent to Guillén that the arsonist had clearly intended to desecrate the shrine.45 When murals—­inherently symbols of defense—­take on a new life as shrines, they acquire a much greater meaning, perhaps unintended by the muralist. In fact, it has often been the case that the impact of Guadalupan murals exceeds an artist’s intention. To this end, Roberto Lint Sagarena reminds us how murals, such as t­ hose of La Virgen de Guadalupe in Los

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Angeles, possess the power to si­mul­ta­neously function as “communal markers” and “responses of suffering.” 46 Suffering in such contexts is often communal. The mural-­shrine in Lamont regularly draws in the devotion of locals as they leave votive candles, flowers, notes, and personal items at Guadalupe’s feet. In this way, the shrine which has developed on this public street corner also serves as a link between the domestic devotional spaces.47 The array of devotional paraphernalia left at the shrine, such as flowers, candles, and petitions, include the same kinds of items that can be found at indoor shrines. In the same way that home altars are an assembly of religious and personal images, so, too, the Guadalupan mural-­shrine became a sacred site.48

“­We’re All Juan Diegos”: The Tepeyac Hill in Lamont Guillén completed the mural in stages over almost a ­decade. He most memorably recalls two distinct moments of devotional importance expressed by the community. First, he remembers how, shortly ­after finishing his first take of the mural around 2006, “­people just started leaving flowers . . . ​in front of the Virgen.” By 2010, the mural became a de facto shrine as pilgrims began to routinely (biweekly or even weekly) replenish the flowers. T ­ hese acts of consecration sacralized the mural and its immediate space. Guillén came to understand that the mural, which also turned into a shrine, transformed into a multimedia proj­ect. From the correct a­ ngle, the light pole resembles an arm of a saguaro cactus, and the flowers match the base and sky that support and surround Guadalupe. Locals took it upon themselves to maintain the mural-­shrine. For Guillén, that interaction between the shrine and observers assumed a new resonance in his completion of the mural, as it is set in a simulacrum of a desert landscape with the Virgin not too far elevated above spectators on the corner. Guillén contends that “­we’re all Juan Diego; ­we’re all on Tepeyac.” He could have very well included Juan Diego in the mural so that devotees could stand alongside him to behold La Virgen. But instead, Guillén maintained that “the reason you d­ on’t see Juan Diego is b­ ecause when ­you’re driving, ­you’re cruising and you pass this intersection, but in par­ tic­u­lar when ­you’re walking, the perspective is that every­body who walks

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past the Virgen is Juan Diego. So, when y­ ou’re walking past it, b­ ecause it’s so big and g­ iant, w ­ e’re on top of the Tepeyac. ­We’re not leaning up or looking up ­toward. W ­ e’re already at the top with her.” 49 Murals function as didactic tools which remind communities of their historical past.50 Guillén’s mural-­shrine, in par­tic­u­lar, possesses translocal and transtemporal valences as it moves observers across space and time.51 Devotees nearly five hundred years ­after the canonical 1531 apparition can also stand atop the holy hill and behold Guadalupe a­ fter the similitude that Diego regarded her. Guillén proudly shared how the mural-­ shrine is “very ­popular among the older ladies and abuelitas . . . ​[in a] new country; this is a piece of home.”52 In a community where so many, ­because of immigration status, cannot return to their parishes in Mexico or journey to the basilica, the mural-­shrine offers an alternative pilgrimage site that moves devotees across place and time. In 2016 Guillén timed his final touches to the mural to coincide with Guadalupe’s feast day. His recollection of finishing the mural on December 12 merits a fuller quotation h ­ ere, as one can note in his own words the consummation of the mural-­shrine. December 12th, I was finishing the hands, finishing the crown, and pretty much putting finishing touches on her. As they w ­ ere singing a rosario [rosary] for the Virgen, it was a ­whole day. They ­organized an entire gathering. They had danzantes come out, and [the] danzante [folk dancers] gave us the blessing of the four winds. A ­ fter that, they had a rosario, and then literally a­ fter that, they hosted Mass right across the street. But the entire time that I’m finishing painting her, I’m up on a ladder and I’m still working on her. And the coolest t­hing about this, the coolest thumbs-up that I’ve ever gotten, was my mom . . . ​turning left and just smiling, knowing that I’m d­ oing something for the community; the ­people came and found me. And she gave me a thumbs-up, ­didn’t say anything, just gave me a thumbs-up as she cruised on by. And that was pretty dope. Another cool part was my dad had the option to go to the St. Augustine church mañanitas, he had the option to go to another mañanitas in Bakersfield, and he de­cided to spend the day de la Virgen right ­there with me as I’m painting.53

The way the community gathered on that December day reminds us how “[t]o study the mural is indeed to study a sensibility of collective formation.”54

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Indeed, as Juan Diegos all, the sensibility of collective formation is decidedly pious in this case. The fact that some chose to spend the feast day of Guadalupe at the mural-­shrine instead of at the church a few blocks away bears witness to how Guadalupan devotees (as ­those in the Chicago area) effectively show us new ways of imagining “diasporic ethnoreligious community formation.” They demonstrate this formation in the same manner they “develop a place of worship on public property, as opposed to institutionally sanctified space.”55 By recreating the scene of Tepeyac Hill, Guillén facilitates the pilgrims’ devotions to symbolically travel to the place of the Virgin’s apparition. While many are denied that b­ ecause of the precarity and uncertainty that would result from leaving the U.S., Guillén’s mural-­shrine effectively creates a preeminently meaningful translocal site. Guillén brought Tepeyac to the Catholic faithful, in part, satisfying the need that many of them feel to venture out on a pilgrimage to the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe. ­These visits to the mural-­shrine constitute a pilgrimage, even if the pilgrims are locals. Sites of pilgrimage need not be in a faraway place. Guillén’s mural—­consistently filled with devotional items and especially on December 12—­constitutes a pilgrimage site in its own right. It is a site that illustrates the rituals that accompany extraordinary religion.56 The pilgrims who leave their devotional items t­ here make it holy. The “social ­process of pilgrimage” affords the site a degree of sacrality, for without pilgrims and devotees, it would just stand as another mural of religious significance. Indeed, this street corner is out of the ordinary and distinguished by the sacredness that the pilgrims bestow upon it and that they encounter ­there.57 As with other replicas, the space becomes sacred “only when devotees’ embodied p­ erformances . . . ​inscribe their histories, beliefs, and aspirations on the environment.”58 Moreover, the kind of spiritual significance that is accorded to the space h ­ ere m ­ atters. The religious ele­ments further engender an elevated sense of ethnic awareness, seeing that Guadalupe is distinguished as the most ubiquitous symbol of Mexican and Chicano nationalism. As late as 2018, the mural-­shrine continued to attract pilgrims on the Virgin’s feast day. Guillén reports that close to one hundred observers of the feast of Guadalupe came to adore her atop Tepeyac at the T-­intersection in Lamont. Danzantes also arrived to perform sanctifying pre-­Colombian dance rituals. Peña noted how, in the Chicago area, Guadalupan danzantes,

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too, played a role in “legitimiz[ing] sacred space and perform[ing] cultural subjectivities by combining their suffering / devotion with artistic expression.”59 In such cases, devotees and ­those engaged in the demonstrable sacralization of the Tepeyac Hill of Lamont make themselves “overpresent.” 60 This p­ opular response is not uncommon for Catholics who have moved their devotions beyond the walls of a church.61 For the foreseeable f­ uture, Guillén’s mural-­shrine w ­ ill continue to beckon more pilgrims.

Guadalupe in Lamont and the World: Conclusion The faithful who gather at the Guadalupan mural-­shrine in the small and ­humble unincorporated community, in effect, become incorporated into the global devotion to Guadalupe. While the mural-­shrine packs the power to represent la cultura in Lamont and throughout Latinx contexts in the U.S., vernacular shrines to Guadalupe of the non-­mural types animate key devotional sites in the Américas.62 Her imagery boasts remarkable malleability as a symbol in shifting national contexts. Indeed, the mural that Guillén perfected—­and the shrine that devotees made of it—­enjoys the com­pany of diasporic Guadalupan devotional sites across the globe. In places as far south as the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Santa Fe, Argentina, up to far-­flung reaches of the North American continent in Johnstown, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Guadalupe’s sacred image attracts a following. Her faithful have also dedicated an altar to her in the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, a chapel at Saint Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican, and a parish church in Puchong, Malaysia.63 ­These Guadalupan-­centered sacred spaces are “transnationally linked by doctrine, tradition, aesthetic / physical replication, and early twentieth-­century ­labor cir­cuits.” 64 By turning to sites such as Guillén’s mural-­shrine in Lamont, we do the necessary work of looking to the shadows of an American empire in which Latinx communities are driven into dire poverty in both rural farm communities and urban ghettos. Nevertheless, we find rich religious expressions of ethno-­religious placemaking in t­ hese sites. Such placemaking could hardly be more evident than in the mural-­shrine of Guadalupe in Lamont. The unsanctioned mural-­shrine runs the continual risk of defacement or pos­si­ble whitewashing. Such threats, however, do not ­hazard what remains b­ ehind the time-­tested truth of Guillén’s shrine: Guadalupe represents la cultura.

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Notes 1. This chapter uses the spelling of “Latinx” and “Chicanx” as more inclusive terms but preserves the spelling of “Chicano” when describing a historical moment or movement in which the term was used. Furthermore, note that the term “Mexican” in this chapter includes both Mexican nationals, immigrants, and their descendants in the U.S. 2. A ­ fter my visit and interview with Jorge Guillén in 2019, unknown vandals again defaced the mural. 3. All murals referenced in this chapter are public murals. By describing the murals as “public,” I wish to differentiate them from ­those that may be commissioned for private audiences, such as in backyards or in homes. 4. The term “Okie” has historically been leveraged as an epithet against impoverished Depression-­era arrivals from Oklahoma and surrounding states. 5. James Gregory, American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). The arrival of ethnic minority workers during and ­after World War I alarmed state officials and camp operators, triggering housing, food, and workplace safeguards to keep white workers spatially separated from non-­whites; see Don Mitchell, The Lie of the Land: Mi­grant Workers and the California Landscape (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 84; Kathryn S. Olmsted, Right Out of California: The 1930s and the Big Business Roots of Modern Conservatism (New York: The New Press, 2015), 52–53; early on, the DiGiorgio Camp in the immediate Lamont area did not hire Blacks and segregated its Mexican and Filipino workforce from Okies who reportedly “[did] not take more kindly to Mexicans than to Negroes”; see Ernesto Galarza, Spiders in the H ­ ouse and Workers in the Field (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1970), 20–21. 6. Ruth Leon Barba with Mary Louise Durham, Arvin, Lamont, and Weedpatch (Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2019), 8; it is notable that most white residents descended from Dust Bowl mi­g rants and / or their kin. The Dust Bowl festival, a staple in the community from 1989 to 2019 held on the ground of the Weedpatch l­ abor camp (now Sunset L ­ abor Camp and Sunset School Schools) further reinforced the Dust Bowl identity in the area. 7. Kern County attracted a disproportionately large number of Okies. See fn. 6. 8. The recent immigration of Mexicans from the southern states (especially Oaxaca) and Central Americans (especially Salvadorans and Guatemalans) challenge the area’s Catholic hegemony. New arrivals have increasingly brought Evangélico traditions, including Pentecostalism. 9. Elaine A. Peña, Performing Piety: Making Space Sacred with the Virgin of Guadalupe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011): 59–60.

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10. Peggy Levitt, God Needs No Passport: Immigrants and the Changing American Landscape (New York: The New Press, 2007), 12. 11. Peña, Performing Piety, 149. 12. The historical veracity of the 1531 date, the figure of Juan Diego, the immediacy with which the devotion to Guadalupe grew, and thus the apparition itself garnered much debate when the Vatican moved to beatify and l­ ater canonize Juan Diego. Nevertheless, over the centuries the devotion has amassed too strong of a following for such critical claims to seriously compromise the devotion’s standing. On this controversy, see Stafford Poole, C.M., Our Lady of Guadalupe: The Origins and Sources of a Mexican National Symbol, 1531–1797 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1995); Stafford Poole, C.M., The Guadalupan Controversies (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006). 13. Jeannette Rodriguez, Our Lady of Guadalupe: Faith and Empowerment among Mexican-­American ­Women (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993), xxv. 14. The honorifics largely reflect the importance of her devotion. Guadalupe became a key symbol of r­ esistance against the Spanish in the Mexican War of I­ ndependence (1810–1821). In 1895 she enjoyed a solemn coronation offered by Pope Leo XIII. The twentieth-­century proved to be an especially impor­tant moment for Guadalupe, as her shrine earned a new status as a basilica and Pope Pius X proclaimed her patroness of all Latin Amer­i­ca in 1904 and 1910, respectively. On the semi-­centennial of her coronation in 1945, Pope Pius XII declared her Queen of Mexico and Empress of the Amer­i­cas. During his 1979 visit to Mexico, Pope John Paul celebrated the Mass at the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and Pope Francis followed in 2019 as the second pope to offer the eucharist at the Basilica. See Timothy Matovina, Theologies of Guadalupe: From the Era of Conquest to Pope Francis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 159; Latino Catholics in San Antonio, from Colonial Origins to the Pre­sent (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 1–23. 15. Timothy Matovina, Guadalupe and Her Faithful: Latino Catholics in San Antonio, from Colonial Origins to the Pre­sent (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005). 16. Eric R. Wolf, “The Virgin of Guadalupe: A Mexican National Symbol,” The Journal of American Folklore 71, no. 279 (Jan–­Mar 1958): 34–39. 17. Activists and revolutionaries also appropriated her power­ful symbol. In the Mexican War of ­Independence ­Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla voiced the famous Grito de Dolores, crying aloud “Viva la Virgen de Guadalupe.” Nearly a ­century ­later, the Mexican Revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata famously paraded a banner of La Virgen de Guadalupe in his land revolt ­battles. Catholic soldiers and clergy of the Cristero Rebellion (1926–1929) also displayed the power of La Virgen, bearing flags with her image into b­ attle. Mexican Americans farmworkers invoked the Guadalupan imagery as Cesar Chavez and

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Dolores Huerta led a pilgrimage from Delano, California, to Sacramento. At the front of the long line of pilgrims trekking 250 miles across the Central Valley, t­ here stood a banner of the Virgin of Guadalupe. 18. Guadalupe’s influences pervade quotidian life as one of the most ubiquitous symbols of Latinx culture in U.S. homes, from Spanish-­language channels (e.g., the p­ opular show La Rosa de Guadalupe) to the placards on the homes of some Catholics declaring “Este Hogar Es Católico. No Aceptamos Propaganda Protestante Ni Otras Sectas ¡Viva La Virgen de Guadalupe Madre de Dios! (This is a Catholic Home. We Do Not Accept Protestant Propaganda nor That of Other Sects. Long Live the Virgin of Guadalupe, the ­Mother of God!). Guadalupe further appears on everyday objects, including refrigerator magnets, calendars, ­T-shirts, and keychains. Outside of the home, images of Guadalupe appear everywhere, too, ­whether on billboards, bumper stickers, or in pulqueria-­styled murals on restaurants and businesses. On the religious objects, such as retablos ex-­votos, see Jorge Durand and Douglas S. Massey, Miracles on the Border: Retablos of Mexican Mi­grants to the United States (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1995); on the genre of pulqueria art as a hallmark of southwestern Chicano art, see Tomás Ybarra-­Frausto, “Arte Chicano: Images of a Community,” in Signs from the Heart, ed. Eva Sperling Cockcroft and Holly Barnet-­Sánchez, 2nd ed. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993), 57–61; also see Roberto Lint Sagarena, “Making a T ­ here ­There: Marian Muralism and Devotional Streetscapes,” Visual Resources 25, no. 1 (2009): 100–104. 19. María Del Socorro Castañeda-­Liles, Our Lady of Everyday Life: La Virgen de Guadalupe and the Catholic Imagination of Mexican ­Women in Amer­i­ca (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 53–82. 20. Castañeda-­Liles, Our Lady of Everyday Life; Kristy Nabhan-­Warren, The Virgin of El Barrio: Marian Apparitions, Catholic Evangelizing, and Mexican American Activism (New York: New York University Press, 2005; Rodriguez, Our Lady of Guadalupe; Peña, Performing Piety; Theresa L. Torres, The Paradox of Latina Religious Leadership in the Catholic Church: Las Guadalupanas of Kansas City (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Alyshia Gálvez, Guadalupe in New York: Devotion and the Strug­gle for Citizenshp Rights (New York: New York University Press, 2009); Matovina, Guadalupe and Her Faithful. Also consider Virgilio Elizondo’s theological and cultural corpus of books, including La Morenita: Evangelizer of the Amer­i­cas (San Antonio, TX: Mexican American Cultural Center, 1980), and Guadalupe: M ­ other of the New Creation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1997); Elizondo elaborates on the implications of this mestizaje for Mexican Americans in Virgilio Elizondo, The F­ uture Is Mestizo: Life Where Cultures Meet, rev. ed. (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2000). 21. Further exacerbating her erasure, the City of Los Angeles, from 2002 to 2013, enacted a moratorium on murals on private property. As older Latinx

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populations are uprooted b­ ecause of gentrification, Guadalupe, too, is deracinated. Javier Rojas, “L.A. Was the Mural Capital of the World, What Happened?,” Daily Chela, October 15, 2020; Andrew Gumbrel, “ ‘ Whitewashed’: How Gentrification Continues to Erase LA’s Bold Murals,” Guardian, January 26, 2020. 22. Eva Sperling Cockcroft and Holly Barnet-­Sánchez, “Introduction,” in Signs from the Heart, ed. Eva Sperling Cockcroft and Holly Barnet-­Sánchez, 2nd ed. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993), 9–16. 23. Jenifer Garcia Peacock, “The Chicana / o Countryside: A Visual History of California’s Central Valley, 1965–1985,” (Ann Arbor, MI: PhD Dissertation, 2017). 24. Shifra M. Goldman, “How, Why, Where, and When It All Happened: Chicano Murals of California,” in Signs from the Heart, ed. Eva Sperling Cockcroft and Holly Barnet-­Sánchez, 2nd ed. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993), 29. 25. David A. Sánchez, From Patmos to the Barrrio: Subverting Imperial Myths (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2008), 1–2. 26. Sánchez, From Patmos to the Barrrio, 1, 111. 27. Jorge Guillén, in interview with the author, 2019. 28. Rubén Martínez, “The Undocumented Virgin,” in Goddess of the Amer­i­cas La Diosa de las Américas, ed. Ana Castillo (New York: Riverhead Books, 1996), 101. 29. Chicana and feminist perspectives and renditions by artists such as Ester Hernandez, Yolanda López, and Alma Lopez triggered a hailstorm of outcies; see Castañeda-­Liles, Our Lady of Everyday Life, 38–48; Matovina, Theologies of Guadalupe, 173–179. 30. Thomas A. Tweed, Our Lady of the Exile: Diasporic Religion at a Cuban Catholic Shrine in Miami (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 100. 31. Matovina, Theologies of Guadalupe, 160, 182; also see vari­ous essays in Ana Castillo, ed., Goddess of the Amer­i­cas La Diosa de las Américas: Writings on the Virgin of Guadalupe (New York: Riverhead Books, 1996). 32. Elizondo, ­Future Is Mestizo, 65. 33. Felipe Ehrenberg, “Framing an Icon: Guadalupe and the Artist’s Vision,” in Goddess of the Amer­i­cas La Diosa de las Américas, ed. Ana Castillo (New York: Riverhead Books, 1996) 170–177; for Chicana renditions of Guadalupe with some reference to her heightened indigeneity, see Laura Perez, Chicana Art: The Politics of Spiritual and Aesthetic Altarities (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 257–296; the darkening of the Virgin is also detectable in Mexican art with more noticeable shifts in the twentieth ­century as Guadalupan art became more common in vernacular arts; see Centro Cultural / Arte Contemporáneo (Mexico), Imágenes Guadalupanas Cuatro Siglos (Fundación Cultural Televias A.C. 1987), 308–351; the darkening of Guadalupe occurred across Mexico and the U.S., but her initial sixteenth-­century transplantation into New Spain was itself a

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lightening of her complexion, as her devotions hail from Extremadura, Spain, where she is one of the several black Virgin Mary devotions in ­Europe. Guadalupan art assumed overt racial dimensions in the Indigenous Amer­i­cas; see Jeanette Favrot Peterson, Visualizing Guadalupe: From Black Madonna to Queen of the Amer­i­cas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014), 17–68; writer and literary critic Richard Rodriguez understands the browning of Guadalupe as a testament of the strength of Indigenous traditions to take on Catholic ele­ments; see Richard Rodriguez, “India,” in Goddess of the Amer­i­cas / La Diosa de las Américas, ed. Ana Castillo (New York: Riverhead Books, 1996), 17–24. 34. Nabhan-­Warren, Virgin of El Barrio, 189–191. 35. Theologians have also reflected on the meaning of Guadalupe’s darker skin; see Elizondo, La Morenita. 36. Nabhan-­Warren, Virgin of El Barrio, 182. 37. Nabhan-­Warren, 184; Sagarena, “Making a ­There ­There.” 38. Sánchez, From Patmos to El Barrio, 107 39. Guillén, interview. 40. The imagery of flowers also bears deep roots in Nahua poetic discourse known as Flor y Canto; see Matovina, Theologies of Guadalupe, 166–167; Guillén also described his addition of orange and black swirls in the background drew inspiration from Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night. 41. Sánchez, From Patmos to El Barrio, 1, 105; Ana Maria Pineda, R.S.M, “Imagenes de Dios en el Camino: Retablos, Ex-­Votos, Milagritos, and Murals,” Theological Studies 65 (2004): 376. For a classic example of the politics of place, consider, the story of the rise of Chicano Park in San Diego’s Barrio Logan, home of the largest concentration of Chicanx murals. Guadalupan murals are among the largest at Chicano Park, and like Guillén’s mural in Lamont, they function as mural-­shrines. The robust collection of murals at Chicano Park further demonstrates the difference of how some murals do not acquire the status of mural-­shrines. The rise of Chicano Park is intimately tied to the story of reclaiming space, as the Barrio in the area was split by the construction of Interstate 5 and the Coronado Bridge. The piers of the bridge double as canvases for the many murals. 42. Ybarra-­Frausto, “Arte Chicano,” 67; 43. Sánchez, From Patmos to El Barrio, 106. 4 4. Shawn Schwaller, “Greetings from Bakersfield!: Law Enforcement Corruption, White Supremacy, and Latinx Lives in California’s Deep Red South,” Boom: A Journal of California (October 16, 2018), https://­boomcalifornia​ .­org​/­2018​/­10​/­16​/­greetings​-­from​-­bakersfield​/­#​_­edn22; Nicholas Belardes, “South Bakersfield’s Confederate Remains,” Boom: A Journal of California (June 2, 2020). 45. Guillén, interview. 46. Sagarena, “Making a T ­ here ­There,” 95.

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47. Nabhan-­Warren, Virgin of El Barrio, 184. 48. Kay F. Turner, “Mexican American Home Altars: ­Towards Their Interpretations,” Aztlan 13, no. 1 (1982): 309–326. 49. Guillén, interview. 50. Ybarra-­Frausto, “Arte Chicano,” 59. 51. Tweed, Our Lady of Exile, 94–142. 52. Guillén, interview. 53. Guillén, interview. 54. Sánchez, From Patmos to the Barrio, 105. 55. Peña, Performing Piety, 117–118. 56. H ­ ere I draw on Catherine Albanese’s use of “extraordinary” religion; Catherine Albanese, Amer­i­ca: Religion and Religions (Beverly, MA: Wadsworth, 1995), 8. 57. Nabhan-­Warren, Virgin of El Barrio, 187–193 58. Peña, Performing Piety, 43. 59. Peña, 45–46; t­ hese kinds of consecration rituals at murals are not entirely uncommon, especially when the images bear religious significance; see Alejandra Molina, “In This LA neighborhood, Residents Unite to Bless One of Its Most Sacred Murals,” Religion News S­ ervice, Feb. 5, 2020, https://­religionnews​.­com​ /­2020​/­02​/­05​/­in​-­this​-­la​-­neighborhood​-­residents​-­unite​-­to​-­bless​-­one​-­of​-­its​-­most​ -­sacred​-­murals/ 60. Peña, Performing Piety, 117–118. 61. Meredith B. McGuire, Lived Religion: Faith and Practice in Everyday Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 45–66; Nabhan-­Warren, Virgin of El Barrio. 62. As one might suspect, Mexico City is unmatched in this re­spect, see Esther Kersley, “Street Altars in Mexico City,” Constellation, MAVCOR Journal 2, no.  1 (2018), doi:10​.­223322​/­mav​.­con​.­2018​.­1 63. Matovina, Theologies of Guadalupe, 150, 160. 64. Peña, Performing Piety, 149; Sagarena further shows how Guadalupan imagery and murals reinforce everyday transnational linkages, Sagarena, “Making a T ­ here ­There,” 100–102.



A Global Odyssey Our Lady of Perpetual Help and the Promise to “Make Her Known” patrick j. h ayes

The icon of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, depicting the Blessed Virgin Mary holding her child, Jesus, while the archangels Michael and ­Gabriel flutter on e­ ither side, enjoys a global following of devotees. Variously known as Our M ­ other of Perpetual Help or Our Lady of Perpetual Succor (hereafter, OLPH), the original painting—­attributed by the devout to be the work of St. Luke and attested by Theodore the Lector and John Damascene—­has been lost, though the most au­then­tic reproduction is ensconced above the main altar in the Redemptorist Church of Sant’Alfonso in Rome. Miracles have been attributed to it, as when it was pro­cessed through the streets of Rome to its pre­sent location.1 Following a privilege granted by the pope, several copies around the world have been crowned with precious gems. Each is venerated according to local custom. The icon is in the Byzantine style and, thanks to the injunction of Pope Pius IX to “make her known,” the members of the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer (Redemptorists) have made it the most replicated image of the Virgin and Child in existence.2 Consequently, the OLPH icon is t­oday pre­sent in other places. Devotions that have emerged ­because of it have yielded spectacular spiritual fruit. Weekly novenas to OLPH, said before the image in churches around the world, have drawn millions. Some municipalities have had to significantly alter their transportation infrastructure to accommodate the devout. For example, beginning in July 1922 at St. Louis, Missouri, at the Redemptorist Church of St. Alphonsus (also known as the “Rock Church”), the city altered bus s­ ervice to accommodate the throngs of worshippers—­ sometimes upward of ten thousand ­people—­who attended novenas each Tuesday after­noon. The weekly devotion was taken by American Redemptorist missionaries around the world. In this effort, they have been aided, ironically, by war and forced migration. They have distributed pocket-­sized cards with the image by tens of millions, enabling soldiers to carry her in

figure 9. High Mass with the Our Lady of Perpetual Help Icon. (Used with permission from the Redemptorist Archives.)

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their helmets or evacuees in their rucksacks. B ­ ecause of this movement, the OLPH icon has not been held back by temporal or spatial bound­aries. She has crossed borders with relative ease and infused cultures with her presence. To the devout, she remains a power­f ul intercessor. Wherever anxiety perdures, OLPH has been a tonic and consolation. This chapter examines how the OLPH devotion spread from one continent to another, with specific attention given to the development of the OLPH shrine on Boston’s Mission Hill, at the Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help. Miracle narratives come in for special treatment, together with how they ­were engaged by the ethnic Irish, then making their way into a predominantly Northern, Protestant culture. Archival materials in Rome and Philadelphia are the primary sources. I then w ­ ill turn to the leap made from the American phenomenon to the exponential growth of the OLPH devotion in the Philippines. First, I begin with a short rendition of the OLPH icon in Rome, from which all ­others stem.

OLPH on the Via Merulana Among the icon’s historians was Redemptorist F ­ ather Clemens Henze, C. Ss.R., whose studies between the 1920s and 1940s still stand the test of time.3 Henze claimed it was painted by an unknown Greek artist in the thirteenth or ­fourteenth c­ entury, prob­ably of a Cretan school, perhaps a Greek monk, done while contemplating the “Hodegetria” icon. It came to Rome through the stealthy influence of a merchant around 1490 who, ­after absconding with it from the island of Crete, confided it to a Roman. A legend has it that this man did l­ittle except store the painting and, for dishonoring the icon in this way, died a horrible death. His six-­year-­old ­daughter had a vision in which Mary asked that her portrait be placed between the Basilicas of St. Mary Major and St. John Lateran and publicly venerated. Subsequently, it was moved to the old Church of San Matteo on the Esquiline Hill around March 1499. The first miracle attributed to the portrait rec­ords that a paralytic was restored immediately a­ fter. The cult grew, and clients streamed into the church to petition the miraculous icon for aid. Scores of cures followed, albeit ­under the banner of the Madonna of San Matteo. Between 1739 and 1798, a group of Irish Augustinians in exile made this church and adjacent monastery a h ­ ouse of formation. But this tranquil

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setting gave way to conflict in Rome, and the monastery was suppressed. Some of the Augustinians moved to the United States, while ­others remained in Rome. The latter took care to move the icon, in 1819, to the Church of St. Mary in Posterula, near the Umberto I bridge in the northeastern end of Rome’s Ponte district. ­There it was, ensconced in a private chapel in the monastery. It gathered dust ­there, but one of the friars from San Matteo communicated its significance to a young friend— an altar boy named Michael Marchi. The icon’s story remained dormant except in Marchi’s memory. In December 1855, Marchi entered the Redemptorists’ novitiate at the newly constructed general ­house at the former Villa Caserta. Marchi went on to be ordained a Redemptorist priest. He never forgot his youthful encounter with the Augustinian ­brother who had introduced him to the icon and ­later wrote of the impression it left on him: This good ­brother used to tell me with a certain air of mystery and anxiety, especially during the years 1850 and 1851, ­these precise words. “Make sure you know, my son, that the image of the Virgin of St. Matthew is upstairs in the chapel: ­don’t ever forget it . . . ​do you understand? It is a miraculous picture.” At that time, the b­ rother was almost totally blind. “What I can say about the venerable picture of the ‘Virgin of St. Matthew’ also called ‘Perpetual Help,’ is that from my childhood ­until I entered the Congregation (of the Redemptorists) I had always seen it above the altar of the h ­ ouse chapel of the Augustinian ­Fathers of the Irish Province at St. Mary in Posterula. ­There was no devotion to it, no decorations, not even a lamp to acknowledge its presence. It remained covered with dust and practically abandoned. Many w ­ ere the times, when I served Mass ­there, that I would stare at it with g­ reat attention.4

Marchi was instrumental in securing the icon for the Redemptorists. Naturally, this religious order was curious about the Villa they now occupied and what existed before their arrival. They had received clues about the former buildings or t­ hose that had fallen into disrepair. Word reached them that on February 7, 1863, a famous Jesuit preacher, ­Father Francesco Blosi, spoke publicly about a Marian icon that “had been in the Church of St. Matthew on Via Merulana and was known as the Virgin of St. Matthew, or more correctly as the Virgin of Perpetual Help.”5

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Other references to the Madonna began to surface. The Redemptorists’ ­house chronicler found remarks about the icon at the former church which enjoyed “­great veneration and fame for its miracles.” 6 This par­tic­ u­lar citation described how the Church of St. Matthew existed in what is t­oday the garden of the general h ­ ouse. When the chronicler mentioned this in the presence of ­Father Marchi, he recalled the injunctions given him by his Augustinian friend. Marchi explained where the icon was then located, and a p­ rocess was set in motion to secure it for the Church of Sant’Alfonso. At the time, the Redemptorists’ Rector Major was ­Father Nicholas Mauron. It was he who presented a letter to Pope Pius IX petitioning him to grant the Redemptorists the OLPH icon. Not only did the pope grant the request, but on the back of the petition, in his own handwriting, he noted: “December 11, 1865: The Cardinal Prefect of Propaganda ­will call the Superior of the community of Sancta Maria in Posterula and ­w ill tell him that it is Our desire that the image of Most Holy Mary, referred to in this petition, be again placed between Saint John and St. Mary Major; the Redemptorists s­ hall replace it with another adequate picture.” 7 During this same audience, the pope told Mauron: “Make Her known throughout the world!” In January 1866, ­Fathers Michael Marchi and ­Ernest Bresciani went to St. Mary’s in Posterula to receive the picture from the Augustinians. A ­ fter a careful restoration, the icon was pro­cessed through the streets of Rome to its new home on the Via Merulana. Consequently, f­ avors w ­ ere granted to ­those who witnessed the pro­cession. ­Mothers held their infants from the win­dows of the homes along the route, and one malady a­ fter another dis­appeared. The letters of thanksgiving that poured into the Redemptorists signal that OLPH interceded for ­children with croup, deafness, and particularly illnesses of the eyes. On April 26, 1866, it was formally unveiled for public veneration above the main altar in the Church of Sant’Alfonso in Rome. All au­then­tic copies distributed throughout the world have touched the icon at Sant’Alfonso and are labeled on the back with a document indicating the date of issue, destination, number, and signature of the procurator general or major superior of the Redemptorists, all sealed with red sealing wax with the coat of arms of the Congregation.

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Boston’s Basilica: OLPH on Mission Hill Copies of the icon have been touched to the original miraculous icon in Rome and sent to all the corners of the Earth, including to the Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Boston. The importance of physically touching holy objects has a long history and serves to undergird a performative function.8 For the devout, ­there is a real transfer of power or agency from the prototype to the replica through touch. It is demonstrable, vis­i­ble, and so unassailable that the transmission from an icon vested with miraculous power extended to another a ­measure of that same power. Staring into the eyes of OLPH in the copy was as efficacious as if one stood before the original in Rome. The first parish church dedicated to Our Lady of Perpetual Help was formed in Boston in 1871, mainly for German Catholics. By the late 1880s, the parish community and its neighborhood saw a dramatic population shift t­oward Irish Catholics. They dominated in the ensuing ­decades and became a staple for much of the twentieth c­ entury.9 Even as it began in a small frame church in the city’s Roxbury section, it quickly outgrew the space. A more magnificent church was contemplated and begun. Its cornerstone was laid on May 28, 1876, and the pre­sent Romanesque basilica was dedicated in 1878 by Archbishop John Williams of Boston. In the larger church, whose physical construction dominates Mission Hill, the OLPH icon was removed from the main altar to a side altar and shrine of estimable beauty.10 ­Today the Basilica remains the largest church in the Archdiocese of Boston, and its shrine is adorned with the crutches and other mementos left by ­those who enjoyed cures wrought by the miraculous picture. Though it is not the first icon to reach American shores, Boston’s OLPH image became the most famous. Several f­ actors contributed to this. It was first installed over the central altar on May 28, 1871, and celebrated with a triduum culminating on May 31. The first pastor, Rev. Joseph Wissel, C.Ss.R., was intent on spreading the devotion and encouraged Boston’s Catholics to visit and remonstrate with the picture. With Wissel’s zealous admonition to approach the icon prayerfully, he implanted an idea in his congregation: OLPH had the ability to receive ­those prayers and advocate for petitioners before God. This included all ­those physically pre­sent and t­hose suffering souls who w ­ ere physically distant but remembered before the icon. During the third day of the

figure  10. OLPH Altar, Mission Church Boston. (Used with permission from the ­Redemptorist Archives.)

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figure 11. Rev. Joseph Wissel, C.Ss.R. (Used with permission from the Redemptorist Archives.)

triduum, a young girl who, over the previous year, had suffered from swelling in her leg cried out amid church s­ ervices, stood up, and reported her leg healed. This miracle began a long string of cures, culminating in what pointed to the veracity of Wissel’s claims. Redemptorists who followed shared Wissel’s sentiments and exploited the miracle narrative so that they became enmeshed with it. They did so not only with the power of their words but through their own physical bearing. The ­people knew their priests ­were unique among clergy through the style of their habit and their affinity to the Blessed Virgin. Part of the

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Redemptorist habit is a fifteen-­decade rosary tied up at the waist in the form of an “M” for Mary. A Redemptorist could approach a person in silence but for the rustle of their beads. Their presence among the ­people extended from the rectory parlor to the parlors of their own homes, from which scores of priests and b­ rothers came (and many more seminarians), especially ­after the turn of the twentieth ­century.11 “Mary’s Men” ­were part of the fabric of Boston Catholicism and helped saturate the city with mannerisms and customs associated with the Church. They ­were instrumental to the creation of a Catholic subculture, so much so that generations who grew up through the OLPH grammar school and, ­later, its high school played on its sports teams, performed in its theater, attended its socials and suppers, heard lectures in its halls, and, of course, worshipped ­under its spires, would be disoriented to the world outside of it. Scott ­Appleby has called this the “fundamentalism of the enclave.”12 Insofar as it was a mission ­house, the Boston Redemptorists also preached parish missions around New E ­ ngland and Canada, further giving notoriety to their home base and the icon at its heart.13 The Boston Redemptorists became known as the caretakers of “Lourdes in the Land of the Pilgrims.”14 Supplicants’ maladies varied. Severe rheumatism, internal bleeding, palsy, and St. Vitus Dance ­were reported and, in short order, brought to heel. Some illnesses ­were described in terms outside the usual medical lexicon, but for lack of a better phrase, the prob­lems ­were no less real. In this category could be found “lung fever” (perhaps pneumonia) and “milk leg” (or thrombosis of the vein) or “king’s evil” (or scrofula, a bacterial inflammation). Periodically, the faithful received their cures with additional assistance, such as the application of Lourdes w ­ ater or the recitation of certain prayers, such as the Memorare, which reads in part, “Remember, O most gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it known that anyone who fled to thy protection, implored your help, or sought thy intercession, was left unaided.” Momma Mary was ever ready to respond. So w ­ ere the Redemptorists, whose supply of sacramentals was never-­ ending.15 Several instances of thwarted suicide attempts could be traced to the interventions of the Redemptorists, who supplied the anguished with copies of the miraculous picture on a holy card or medal. In still other instances, laws of nature ­were seemingly bent. In November 1872, ­after a tremendous fire consumed block a­ fter block of the City of Boston, including the offices of the Catholic publisher Patrick Donahoe, a man who had

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figure  12. Nuns at the OLPH altar, May 2016. (Used with permission from the ­Redemptorist Archives.)

been employed to sift through the ashes found a picture of OLPH utterly untouched by the flames that had destroyed all e­ lse around it. The image was ­later given to the Redemptorists, where it was framed and hung in the church sacristy and suitably memorialized with a Latin inscription. Between its installation and 1885, more than three hundred cures w ­ ere documented by the Redemptorists, principally by ­ Father William O’Connor, C.Ss.R., a priest not given over to hyperbole, but one intent on accuracy. His accounts now form a two-­volume registry of cures or ­favors located at the Redemptorist Archives in Philadelphia. Doubtless, the most famous cure was number 224—­that of Grace Hanley—in August 1883. So spectacular and widely reported was this cure that it established the Mission Church’s reputation as a site for miracles for generations. The chronicler reported that it “set Boston in a ferment of astonishment, bringing hundreds upon hundreds to our church, crowds to our confessionals, packing up the ave­nues to our Lady’s altar ­every Wednesday, and sending the maimed and the deaf and the dumb to our parlors ­every day.”16

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Grace had been a paralytic since age four and was often bedridden from chronic weakness in her limbs. As a child, she wore a steel corset to keep her spine straight. ­Father Abram J. Ryan, a ­family friend of ­Colonel Patrick T. Hanley, had paid a call to her home before her cure. Ryan was an old friend of ­Colonel Hanley. “The Poet Priest of the South” had his sympathies aroused for the child and was moved to compose some verse about her to express his astonishment at her condition.17 The Hanley f­amily ­were neighbors of the Redemptorists on Tremont Street; their domicile was only two blocks from the church. Friends implored them to make the novena in the hope of helping to form the child’s faith, but also for some solace. ­Every day during the August novena, in the morning, F ­ ather Francis Delargy would lead the p­ eople in reciting the Rosary before the icon. Holy Mass would follow. Grace Hanley joined her ­family in this practice, and each day was wheeled to the church threshold by carriage and assisted by crutches upon entering. A ­ fter receiving Holy Communion, the young girl of sixteen years felt that “a new strength was infused in her.” Standing up, she declared before t­hose assembled, “I am cured,” and, ­after an appropriate thanksgiving to the Blessed Virgin, she turned around and walked out. Grace Hanley’s cure was one of many, but the eyewitness testimony was strong and could hardly be concealed. F ­ amily members—­her ­father, an aunt, and a ­brother, all ­were pre­sent and followed the teenager out of the church. The Redemptorists, too, w ­ ere called to observe the sight. Shortly ­after her miracle, the ­family received a visitor—­a Jesuit professor from Boston College—­who was an old friend. The Jesuit reported to the Boston ­Pilot that he had known her for many years, but upon seeing her “verified the cure.”18 Reports on the cure traveled, even ­after several years. A pamphlet on the miraculous cures at “Our Lady’s Shrine” appeared by the end of 1883, as if to hurriedly capitalize on the moment and the special ­favor the Blessed Virgin had seemed to bestow on this corner of the city of Boston.19 The Hanley cure was echoed by ­others that followed. Another miracle is reported in the testimonial registry the following month. It occurred to a “helpless invalid,” Mary Lizzy Cronin, who saw “in the paper” how Hanley was set ­free from her malady. Cronin “took confidence” and vowed to make the novena for herself. She was cured on the second day. As for Grace Hanley, she ­later entered the ­Sisters of Jesus and Mary and became

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in religion ­Sister Mary of Perpetual Help. Before her death in 1902, the Hanley f­ amily had inserted into the Mission Church two memorials—­ the Hanley stained-­glass win­dow and, on ­Sister Mary’s urging, a silver tablet near the OLPH altar. While memorialization helped to inculcate the devotion, print culture also assisted. Hundreds of thousands of novena books for the OLPH devotions have been given out to the faithful, gratis, to carry the prayers recited back into the home. Accompanying ­these are the OLPH medals, also distributed in the hundreds of thousands, and the consequent blessings of each one by the Redemptorists. While devotions before the icon began long before, they w ­ ere regularized in 1896 with prescribed prayers (such as the Memorare and Litany in Honor of OLPH), a short sermon, and a special blessing to all who gathered at the shrine each Wednesday after­ noon at 3 ­o’clock. The annual novena devotions centering on the feast of Our Lady of Perpetual Help took place between June 11 and June 20, which consisted of a recitation of the Rosary, a short discourse on a Marian theme, the novena prayers, and benediction of the Blessed Sacrament. By the 1930s, to accommodate the crowds, seven s­ ervices w ­ ere conducted throughout t­ hese days—at the 6:00, 6:55, 7:30 (for school ­children), and 8:30 a.m. Mass; at 3 p.m. (for ­mothers); and at 5:30 and 7:45 p.m.20 ­These ­services drew an estimated twelve thousand ­people each Wednesday. The ­evening ­services w ­ ere geared ­toward working p­ eople. More than a few ­couples met during ­these novenas and eventually married. The novena ritual could also render ­favors to OLPH’s supplicants. The miracles themselves follow a traditional pattern of severe and incon­ve­ nient, often painful, bodily trou­ble. A ­humble petition is laid before OLPH, and the sincere client is answered with a cure—­total and inexplicable in the light of natu­ral reason or con­temporary medicine. Other aspects of ­these cures create a sense of the spectacular. Prescinding from the large quantity of recorded miracles, t­ here is a significant tilt t­ oward a gendered hermeneutic of their application. Some cures ­were allotted to men, but the vast majority occurred to ­women, and even t­hose supplied to men ­were often instigated by the petitions of their female relatives. Encouraged and mediated by Redemptorist priests, the devotional piety of w ­ omen grew deeper and more widespread, filling homes throughout the neighborhood with the “cult of true womanhood.” In this domestic space, ­women grew in holiness by exercising their socially defined roles. The sign

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figure 13. Covers of the OLPH Novena. (Used with permission from the Redemptorist Archives.)

or reward of their holiness was a happy home—­content spouses, well-­ mannered and educated ­children, and healthy and eco­nom­ically stable dwellings. A true ­woman was strengthened for her domestic ­labors through the local church—­the locus of rest and renewal to face any daily challenge. They w ­ ere also given reinforcement by the Redemptorists who paid visits to their h ­ ouses—­for social occasions, yes, but also for sick calls, counseling, or charitable work. As Catholic devotional groups emerged in the nineteenth ­century, about two-­thirds of which w ­ ere largely female in membership, the domain that ­women once occupied and ­were confined to now extended to the church.21 Venturing out to attend an OLPH novena, therefore, was a source of liberation from the home and an event that cemented an upright ­woman’s public persona. Gathering with neighborhood w ­ omen around the maternal icon, and praying in concert before it, also provided a unique bonding moment in a w ­ oman’s week. The icon served to rally a common mission: Salvation from life’s drudgery or afflictions came in the com­pany of o­ thers. The prospect of a miraculous intervention could only fuel the need to repeat the ritual. As Kathleen Sprows Cummings and Paula Kane have pointed out, ­connections between church and home ­were inviolate.22 If a ­woman could

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practice her faith well, it would redound to her domestic welfare. In Boston, that link showed itself early and deeply. During the very first OLPH novena in the United States, beginning on Pentecost Sunday, 1871, a ­woman who was afflicted for fifteen years with “pain” sought recourse to OLPH. ­Father Timothy Enright, C.Ss.R., her spiritual counselor, “from a sense of delicacy and other prudential reasons,” would not go into detail about the malady, but he did indicate to the priest-­scribe of the Mission Church’s testimonial registry that her husband had spent hundreds of dollars of the f­ amily’s money on medical professionals. The physicians consulted pronounced her incurable, “especially as it [her sickness] was hereditary.” Enright enjoined her to pray with g­ reat fervor to OLPH. She went home from church on the second day of the novena completely cured. As if to show the permanence of the cure, and hence its authenticity, she reappeared in church ten days ­later, at which time she took Holy Communion in thanksgiving for the ­favor received.23 Her fulfillment came through the church; her cure could be viewed as restoring domestic tranquility.24 The lesson is clear: Spiritual and physical succor is evinced through an interrelationship between domestic and ecclesial settings—­ facilitated by both a male clergyman and the image of the Madonna and Child.25 The variety of the miracles reported impresses the reader in their sheer breath. No one’s difficulties seem insurmountable. OLPH intercedes on behalf of t­ hose with “­mental trou­bles, blindness due to cataracts, painful abscesses of the skull, ulcerated eyes, rheumatic swelling of the entire body, double pneumonia, dimness of sight, cancer of the tongue, malarial fever, fractures, chronic inflammation, hip disease, paralysis, and eczema.”26 The local press took note of the healings on Mission Hill. The Boston American General News printed a front-­page story (above the fold) ­under the headline, “Heaps of Crutches Left at Altar by Afflicted.”27 The paper had glowing words to say about the Redemptorists—­“one of the greatest of all Catholic establishments”—­and their work in building up the church and its shrine. The effects of this w ­ ere to create new ave­nues for cultic veneration. To ­organize them, the Redemptorists, in November 1923, established in each of their churches in the Baltimore Province a Confraternity of Our Lady of Perpetual Help and St. Alphonsus.28 The individual, parish-­based confraternities—­each with their accompanying icon—­would

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aggregate themselves to the Archconfraternity based at the Redemptorist ­mother church in Rome. Upon approval of the local ordinary—­a pro forma approbation—­the parish had to supply members with a booklet of the statutes and rules of the confraternity, which outlined the object, reception, indulgences, and acts of consecration. The Redemptorists in New York arranged for the religious publisher Pustet to develop a Manual of the Archconfraternity of Our Lady of Perpetual Help and St. Alphonsus, which supplied the enrollment form in Latin and E ­ nglish. A Mass would be said for deceased members, preferably during the octave of the feast of Our Lady of Perpetual Help (June 27). ­There w ­ ere other parish socie­ties in Redemptorist churches besides the Confraternity of OLPH. T ­ hese included the Purgatorian Society, Society of the Sacred Heart, and the Confraternity of the Holy F ­ amily, but the rallying point and true devotional loci w ­ ere the icons in each church. Patriotism was also engendered at the Mission Church. During World War I, at the morning Mass, ­children sang a special hymn composed for the spiritual and temporal welfare of soldiers and sailors, asking OLPH to shield them from harm.29 In October 1938, the ­fathers chose Columbus Day, October 12, to begin a “Patriotic Novena” to OLPH. Incorporated into the novena would be special patriotic prayers for the nation and its rulers. The sermon would join the prayers with the national patroness—­ Mary, ­under the title of the Immaculate Conception. F ­ ather Peter Starin, C.Ss.R., explained that he would propose a “public intention” at the ­services “that our National Patroness may bless our Country with Peace and Prosperity.” The targets of the petition w ­ ere unmistakable. The dangers threatening American society included “depressing poverty and bewildering unemployment.” The antidote for ­these social prob­lems was a turn to God and the public intercession of Mary Immaculate.30 Of Starin’s successors who beat the drum for OLPH, perhaps none was more gifted than ­Father Joe Manton, C.Ss.R. Known for his pulpit oratory, he stood out even within an order marked by sacred eloquence. In over five ­decades of ­service (from 1939 into the 1990s) as the regular novena preacher, he gained a reputation throughout the city. His command of the Mission Church pulpit extended into sermons on the Catholic Hour radio program. His books of sermons included several on OLPH, and priests around the nation studied his ability to move audiences with s­ imple and direct themes that w ­ ere, nevertheless, shot through with entertaining vignettes.

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The familiarity of the icon and its connection to the average person, particularly the average ­woman, was something Manton stressed almost from the beginning of his ministry. In one of his earliest sermons, he spoke of its effects on one of Mary’s ordinary clients: When old Kitty Churchmouse, who is very poor, raises her timid eyes to Mary’s and sees that in the Picture the M ­ other of God has turned her back on gold—­for what e­ lse should the golden background mean—­ the old lady feels a warm flush of fellowship and finds comfort in the thought that poor Mary of Nazareth understands the worries of poor Kitty of Nantasket or Roxbury or Revere.

If any of the respectable w ­ omen within earshot of Manton’s voice did not immediately grasp the magnetism of the image for themselves, they could certainly relate to a poor, aging petitioner who could be anyone’s neighbor (or themselves). The honor of Mary’s attention was for such as ­these. The forms of communication of OLPH’s power have kept pace with con­ temporary technology. T ­ oday the novena is broadcast from the Redemptorists’ ­house chapel at the Mission Church via webcast and local Catholic ­television in the Archdiocese of Boston. At the heart of this effort lies the Catholic imagination and, from time to time, the devotional zeal of OLPH’s clients has been scrutinized critically by the Holy See in order to maintain a certain positive sobriety.31 How can the icon’s spiritual benefits be best unleashed? Who is it that is in most need of its aid? It is perhaps a logical consequence of ­these questions that the Catholic Charismatic Renewal has emerged as a power­ful force in the life of this church. Even at pre­sent, the parish’s “Healing Masses” have been a sign of the church’s continued vigor on Mission Hill and a link to past generations of the afflicted who have sought Mary’s aid.

Crossing and Dwelling: A Devotion’s Movement around the Globe Thomas Tweed’s Crossing and Dwelling, suggests a theoretical framework for the OLPH icon’s transmission to Asia.32 Its portability is established somewhat organically by way of “confluences” that “intensify joy and confront suffering by drawing on ­human and suprahuman forces to make

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homes and cross bound­aries.”33 The story of the OLPH icon setting down roots in the Philippines aptly illustrates this theory. During the Second World War, a group of American Redemptorist seminarians formed the Redemptorist Yank Club and started a newsletter telling of the exploits of Redemptorist chaplains in war s­ ervice. Among the last to contribute before the war’s end was ­Father Charley Wallace, a member of the former St. Louis Province.34 Stationed in Calcutta ­until May 30, 1945, the chaplain left for Singapore and then back to American shores. “We have about 8,000 ‘Private novena to O.M. [Our M ­ other] of P.H.’ leaflets on hand,” he announced. “They have the two prayers ‘Behold at Thy Feet’ and ‘O M ­ other of P.H. grant that I may ever invoke.’ ” All of t­ hese leaflets would be dispersed to s­ ervice men, who carried them in a pocket or helmet. Wallace would remain as an Army chaplain for many years ­after the war. He never dreamed of returning to Asia, but in 1948 he was part of an American contingent that helped provide security in the Philippines. It was Wallace who transplanted the idea of the OLPH novena in that land—at least in the version used ­today. Redemptorists had been in the Philippines since 1906 and began introducing the devotion to OLPH through missions and retreats almost immediately a­ fter their arrival. The pioneers w ­ ere Irish and arrived by way of Australia. They went to Manila in 1913 and had a small but ­popular shrine to OLPH t­ here. In 1932, the Redemptorists transferred to Baclaran, on the outskirts of the city, where benefactors had supplied funds for a new high altar that would be adorned with the icon of OLPH.35 During the Second World War, the J­ apanese took control of the Redemptorist convent in Baclaran and chased away the community. One member—­the community superior—­was F ­ ather Francis Cosgrave, C.Ss.R., the chaplain to nearby De La Salle College. Prior to their dispersal, Cosgrave managed to dismount the OLPH icon from the church in Baclaran and took it with him for storage near the college, which had thrown open its doors to evacuees. While giving last rites to ­those assembled ­there, he was wounded several times from a J­apanese soldier’s bayonet strikes during the De La Salle College massacre of February 1945. Left for dead, he survived three days before American troops liberated the college. About seventy died in the attack, including w ­ omen and c­ hildren. The icon was ­housed in a private home at the time, but it, too, fell to ­Japanese aggression. When it was learned that the icon had been in a home

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destroyed by fire, all hope was lost for its retrieval. However, ­after liberation, one of the La Salle ­Brothers happened to go to the old Bilibid Prison, where the J­ apanese had stored some of the valuable articles they took from Filipino homes. He noticed a picture of OLPH and guessed it might belong to the Redemptorists. Informed of this, two Redemptorists, accompanied by a military chaplain, hurried to recover it. Likely, this chaplain was Wallace. The official at the gate insisted that t­ here was no such picture on his list of items and would not let them in. However, the chaplain found another way to get inside, and sure enough, the picture was ­there. The guard let them take it away, saying: “As far as I am concerned, it is not h ­ ere since it is not on my list.” The priests brought it home to Baclaran, where it remains ensconced above the main altar of the pre­sent Church. ­Today it seats 2,000 and allows for another 9,000 who can stand. Both for Eucharistic cele­brations and confession, the Redemptorists at Baclaran are hosts to about 30,000 each Sunday. But it is the Wednesday novena that continues to draw upward of 100,000 each week. Ever since its opening, it has never closed.36 So g­ reat is the flow of humanity to the outskirts of Manila that the shrine’s nearest subway station has had to undergo major improvements to accommodate the masses who travel from the city’s center. In September 2019, the OLPH icon was taken down from its lofty setting to repair the altar, thus permitting a closer inspection by the faithful. Crowds lined up for hours to kiss the icon or observe it at close quarters. It was re-­enthroned in November a­ fter the altar’s restoration.37 The experience of the Baclaran novena has rightly called attention to the shoulder-­to-­shoulder crowds, but also the sense of peace and of leaving the busy city b­ ehind. When one walks through the campus gates, the hum of traffic and shouting vendors immediately subsides. Inside the church, the crush of the devout is felt especially in the transept where rows of candle racks burn intensely. The heat generated in ­these wings—­where few candles are left unlit—­adds to the prayers of the devout. Throughout, however, e­ very individual knows that they are in their strug­gle alongside ­others. Each person has an intention to lay before the icon, but they do so in confident com­pany. In Tagala this is known as bayanihan—an experience of community or comradeship. When one is joined by tens of thousands of ­others in the utterances of their novena prayers, togetherness is the result. The icon’s patronage is never static in this context e­ ither. For Filipinos in Manila and beyond, she is in ­every home and workplace. Wherever her clients are, she dwells with them.

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Conclusion The numbers, when presented as cold data, can often astound. But it is the icon’s maternal invitation that is the consummate draw. Patient in her gaze, comforting in her posture, the icon’s theological manifestation has a timelessness about it. Irrespective of cultural setting or historical epoch, the OLPH icon’s transmission across borders makes it a missionary icon—­ one whose sentiments carry over to each individual heart and mind. Of course, she has help. The theological message written into the icon is static without the personnel and the settings by which the narrative is conveyed and made meaningful. Redemptorists see the icon’s transmission as part of their mission to a wounded world. They form a united front of more than five thousand members worldwide who promote veneration of the icon and urge the faithful to come to it, pray with it, and acknowledge its power. Globally, their OLPH shrine churches have been built to give par­tic­u­lar focus to special objects of devotion or sacred events. But they also provide sacred space by which p­ eople inhabit meaning–­that is, their physical presence inside a shrine gives a sense of being enveloped by holiness, placed in contact with the divine, and shown care. The OLPH icon is evocative by nature, but it is enhanced by the shrine’s artistic trappings. Its ornamentation goes beyond a display of craftsmanship—­though for the OLPH icon, t­ here is ample evidence that surrounding altarpieces are expertly executed. The icon is often borne aloft by angels or adorned in garlands. Its setting is often given elaborate framing, as in the case of Boston, where the putti peak over the frame to observe the devout staring at an icon surrounded by a backdrop of shimmering gold mosaic. The visual impact is arresting. Perhaps ­because it is transnational, t­ here is no National Shrine of Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Amer­i­ca, a technical category defined by the 1983 Code of Canon Law and the par­tic­u­lar law of each conference of Catholic bishops.38 Absent a consensus on just where to locate such a national shrine, Redemptorists have not petitioned the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops to officially designate a site. Already ­there are prominent OLPH shrines established throughout the United States, such as can be found in Boston, St. Louis, Chicago, New Orleans, and Kansas City. Nevertheless, t­ hese places are frequently considered or have been considered pilgrimage sites and many have reported occasional cures. Many interpret ­these sites as shrines, and go to them, light candles, pray

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before the icon, and do all rituals tied to them. The official designation of a national shrine is immaterial to the icon’s performative function and the actions of the devout. P ­ eople simply come to see their M ­ other in times of need, and she lends her ear.

Notes 1. Attestations about t­ hese miracles w ­ ere collected from several Roman families (and their priests) who witnessed the pro­cession and, in invoking its intercessory power, claimed instantaneous and thorough healings. T ­ hese have been preserved in the General Historical Archive of the Redemptorists in Rome (hereafter AGHR), Our Lady of Perpetual Help Collection. 2. For an abbreviated history of the icon, its effects, and devotional centers, see Noel Londaño, ed., Our Lady of Perpetual Help: The Icon, ­Favors, and Shrines, trans. Damian Wall (Rome: Redemptorist, 1997). In the lit­er­a­ture on icons, it has become something of a truism that an icon’s replicability, that is, the instantiation of a sacred or holy meaning that inheres in and reverberates outward from the original to the copy, is a sign that the original’s power can be extended beyond itself. Attraction to such objects not only speaks to its authenticity, but it compels pilgrimage ­toward it. Victor and Edith Turner made this notion of journeying t­ oward a transformative insight foundational to our understanding of icons as pilgrimage-­worthy. See Victor W. Turner and Edith L. B. Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture: Anthropological Perspectives (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978). The Turners focused on Western perspectives on sacred images, but the Eastern tradition has also come in for greater examination. See especially, Annemarie Weyl Carr, “Icons and the Object of Pilgrimage in M ­ iddle Byzantine Constantinople,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 56 (2002): 75–92. 3. See, for instance, Clement Henze, Mater de Perpetuo Succursu: Prodigiosae Iconis Marialis ita nuncupatae monographia (Bonn: Collegium Josephinum, 1926), Das Gnadenbild der Mutter von der immerwährenden Hilfe (Bonn: Hofbauer Verlag, 1933), and Il culto Mondiale della Madonna del Perpetuo Socorrso: fuori del suo Santuario Romano, unpublished Italian manuscript developed in the 1930s and found in the Redemptorist Archives of the Baltimore Province (hereafter RABP), OLPH collection, located in Philadelphia. The bibliography on the OLPH icon is extensive. See also, for instance, Samuel J. Boland, “Australia and Our Lady of Perpetual Help,” Spicilegium Historicum Congregationis SSmi Redemptoris, XXXIX, fasc. 2 (1991): 283–297; Mario Cattapan, “Precisazioni Riguardanti la Storia della Madonna del Perpetuo Soccorso,” Spicilegium Historicum Congregationis SSmi Redemptoris, XV, Fasc. 2 (1967): 353–381; Fabriciano Ferrero, “Nuestra

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Señora del Perpetuo Soccorro: Informacion Bibliografica y Cronologia General,” Spicilegium Historicum Congregationis SSmi Redemptoris, XXXVIII, Fasc. 2 (1990): 456–502; Fabriciano Ferrero, The Story of an Icon, ET of Santa Maria del Perpetuo Soccoro (Cambridge: Redemptorist Publications, 2001). Both fascicles of the Specilegium Historicum for 2016 contain essays devoted to OLPH, but especially noteworthy are the essays of Maciej Sadowski, “Redemptorists as Promoters of the Devotion to Our ­Mother of Perpetual Help,” and Matthew Allman, “A Rediscovered ­Mother: Nineteenth ­Century American Devotion to Our Lady of Perpetual Help,” Spicilegium Historicum Congregationis SSmi Redemptoris LXIV, Fasc. 1–2 (2016): 119–136 and 259–286, respectively. 4. Some of the foregoing has been distilled from http://­w ww​.­iconoflove​ .­org​/­history​-­of​-­the​-­icon​.­html, a website partially arranged in cele­bration of the 150th anniversary of the Redemptorists’ oversight of the OLPH icon. 5. Icon of Love website, http://­w ww​.­iconoflove​.­org​/­history​-­of​-­the​-­icon​.­html. 6. Icon of Love website, http://­w ww​.­iconoflove​.­org​/­history​-­of​-­the​-­icon​.­html. 7. Cited in Londaño, Our Lady of Perpetual Help, 14. 8. On the history of iconic potency, see for instance Annemarie Weyl Carr, “Reflections on the Medium of the Miraculous,” in Viewing Greece: Culture and ­Political Agency in the Medieval and Early Modern Mediterranean, ed. Sharon E. J. Gerstel (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016), 33–52; Kristin Noreen, “The Icon of Santa Maria Maggiore, Rome: An Image and Its Afterlife,” ­Renaissance Studies 19, no. 5 (2005): 660–672; Bissera V. Pentcheva, “The Performative Icon,” The Art Bulletin 88, no. 4 (2006): 631–655; Christopher R. Sweeney, “Holy Images and Holy ­Matter: Images in the P ­ erformance of Miracles in the Age before Iconoclasm,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 26, no. 1 (2018): 111–138; and Alice-­Mary Talbot, “Pilgrimage to Healing Shrines: The Evidence of Miracle Accounts,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 56 (2002): 153–173. 9. The early parish history is aptly told in the master’s thesis of Redemptorist ­Father Peter Sousa, The Mission Church: A Study of the Neighborhood and Parish, 1871–1900 (MA thesis, Boston College, 1980). 10. The story of the Mission Church and its famous icon is brought out in John F. Byrne, The Glories of Mary in Boston: A Memorial History of the Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Help (Mission Church), Roxbury, Mass., 1871–1921 (Boston: Mission Church Press, 1921); and J. F. Eskildson, Our Lady’s Shrine: An Account of Some of the Miraculous Cures (with a History of the Miraculous Picture) Performed at the Mission Church, Boston Highlands, 1870–1873 (Boston: Cashman, Keating, 1883). 11. Generational links between the Church, Redemptorists, and neighborhood are evidenced by ­Father Michael Sheehan, whose ­father supervised the roofing of the pre­sent basilica. In the summer of 1877, when he was just nineteen, Sheehan was enlisted by his ­father to haul slate tile up to the roof. The Church was built, in part, with sweat equity of local p­ eople, including this ­father

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and son. Sheehan went on to a long ­career at the Mission Church, including the cele­bration of thousands of first communions of parish c­ hildren. Among them was a nephew, Francis Connell (1888–1967), who himself became a Redemptorist and was a peritus at Vatican II. See Francis Connell, Reverend Michael J. Sheehan, C.Ss.R.: A Modern Apostle, 1858–1925 (Boston: Mission Church Press, 1926). For more on Redemptorists and their kinfolk, see Patrick J. Hayes, “An Incentive to Serve God More Faithfully: Redemptorists and Their Relations in Religion,” U.S. Catholic Historian 35, no. 2 (Spring 2017): 79–101. 12. See Scott Appleby, “The Fundamentalism of the Enclave: Catholic and Protestant Oppositional Movements in the United States,” in New Dimensions in American Religious History: Essays in Honor of Martin E. Marty, ed. Jay P. Dolan and James P. Wind (­Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1993), 231–260. 13. The work of mission preaching and its relation to OLPH in Boston is recounted in John F. Byrne, The Glories of Mary: A Memorial History of the Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Help (Boston: Mission Church Press, 1921). 14. See “A Lourdes in the Land of the Pilgrims,” New York Herald (March 24, 1901), cited in John F. Byrne, The Redemptorist Centenaries: The Founding of the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer (1732) and Establishment in the United States (1832) (Philadelphia: Dolphin Press, 1932), 329. 15. For instance, Lourdes w ­ ater was thought to have considerable curative properties and the F ­ athers’ use of it was not confined to the h ­ ouse in Boston. In New York, its distribution to the faithful at the Redemptorist parish of Most Holy Redeemer on the Lower East Side was a routine practice and f­ avors granted due to its application litter the ­house annals. 16. For what follows, see the first volume of OLPH Mission Church Testimonials, in RABP, Chronicle Collection, entry number 224, August 9–18, 1883. 17. See the typed extract from the New York Freeman’s Journal in RABP, folder 637: OLPH Devotions, Mission Church, Boston, 1871–1890. The extract is taken from the New York Freeman’s Journal, 49:30 (October 6, 1888). 18. See “Was It a Miracle? A Remarkable Cure Effected at the Mission Church, Boston,” The ­Pilot 46, no. 34 (August 25, 1883): 5. 19. See J. F. Eskildson, Our Lady’s Shrine: An Account of Some of the Miraculous Cures (With a History of the Miraculous Picture) Performed at the Mission Church, Boston Highlands, 1870–1883 (Boston: Cashman, Keating Printers, 1883). Eskildson was a Boston reporter. He dedicated his pamphlet to the Redemptorists of Mission Church, who supplied him with the rec­ords they had thus far assembled on each individual cure. Interestingly, Eskildson noted (vi–­vii) that for the thirteen years of its existence, the Mission Church had been a relatively unknown site for miraculous occurrences, and while E ­ urope had its share of shrines that drew countless pilgrims year a­ fter year, Americans did not have to travel so far to experience the alleviation of their ills. They need only come to

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Boston for their relief. A second edition of Eskildson’s pamphlet, “enlarged and improved,” appeared in 1885. 20. See “Novena Devotions, 1932,” in RABP, folder 637: OLPH Devotions, Mission Church, Boston, 1930–1940. This set of devotions, scheduled to begin October 12, 1932, anticipated the feast of the Immaculate Conception on December 8. See also “Novena Being Conducted at Mission Church,” The ­Pilot (Boston), June 12, 1937. By 1937, the number of opportunities to participate in the devotions w ­ ere reduced to four times daily. 21. See Ann Taves, The House­hold of Faith: Roman Catholic Devotions in Mid-­Nineteenth ­Century Amer­i­ca (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986), 18. 22. Kathleen Sprows Cummings, New W ­ omen of the Old Faith: Gender and American Catholicism in the Progressive Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 5–6; and Paula Kane, Separatism and Subculture: Boston Catholicism, 1900–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 145–148, 153–160. See also Karen Kennelly, “Ideals of Catholic Womanhood,” and Colleen McDannell, “Catholic Domesticity, 1860–1960,” both in American Catholic ­Women: A Historical Exploration, ed. Karen Kennelly (New York: Macmillan, 1989), 1–16 and 48–80, respectively, and Timothy and Joseph Kelly, “Our Lady of Perpetual Help, Gender Roles, and the Decline of Devotional Catholicism,” Journal of Social History 32, no. 1 (Autumn 1998): 5–26. 23. See “A Concise Account of the Beginning and Growth of the Devotion to Our Lady of Perpetual Help at the Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, Boston,” typescript, nd., in RABP, folder 637: OLPH Devotions, Mission Church, Boston, 1871–1880. Cf., “OLPH Shrine Boston Testimonials,” vol. 1, pp. 9–10. 24. That the home could be a kind of paradise was a religious trope propagated by books such as the widely p­ opular Mirror of True Womanhood by F ­ ather Bernard O’Reilly. Set against perceived evils of the age, O’Reilly urged w ­ omen to consider the home as their proper kingdom and to look upon their roles as wife and m ­ other as upholding this t­ emple of blessing. It should be infused with virtue, made bright and cheery, and eschew ostentation and selfishness. O’Reilly pointed to models for ideal be­hav­ior. ­These included some female saints such as St. Margaret of Scotland, but also the Blessed Virgin Mary. As if to put too fine a point on it, if t­ hese w ­ omen did not exactly correspond to the dynamics of the female experience in late nineteenth c­ entury Amer­i­ca, O’Reilly offered the w ­ holesomeness of w ­ omen in Ireland as a proper alternative. See Bernard O’Reilly, The Mirror of True Womanhood; A Book of Instruction for W ­ omen in the World, 6th ed. (New York: Peter Collier, 1878). This and a companion volume, True Men as We Need Them: A Book of Instruction for Men in the World, 4th ed. (New York: P. J. Kenedy, 1883), could be found in rectory libraries across the United States, including t­ hose of the Redemptorists.

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25. Ann Taves has also touched upon ­these connections when she writes that a “disproportionate number of ­women in devotional ­organizations . . . ​ suggests that devotional relationships may have in fact been less problematic for w ­ omen than they ­were for men. At a time when ­women spent most of the lives enmeshed in f­ amily relationships, such devotions may have provided a source of solace and a means of repressing resentments about their familial relationships and responsibilities. The relational character of the devotions, their emphasis on obedience and devotion to idealized super­natural patrons, and their tendency to evoke feelings of dependence correspond closely to the ste­reo­typically ‘feminine’ role which nineteenth-­century w ­ omen ­were expected to assume in marriage.” See Taves, The House­hold of Faith, 87. 26. See “A Concise Account of the Beginning and Growth of the Devotion to Our Lady of Perpetual Help at the Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, Boston,” typescript, nd., in RABP, folder 637: OLPH Devotions, Mission Church, Boston, 1871–1880. 27. See “Heaps of Crutches Left at Altar by Afflicted,” Boston American General News, March 28, 1909, in RABP, folder 637: OLPH Devotions, Mission Church, Boston, 1900–1929. The accompanying photo­graph was headlined, “Scores of Cripples Are Cured at Miraculous Shrine in Roxbury.” 28. The first of t­ hese confraternities had been established in the Redemptorist parish of St. Boniface in Philadelphia, already on September 11, 1877. The confraternity in Philadelphia followed the inaugural Archconfraternity that was erected at the Redemptorists’ Church of Saint Alphonsus in Rome the previous year. By 1930, enrollment in Redemptorist churches in the United States had reached about ninety thousand. See John F. Byrne, Redemptorist Centenaries, 332. 29. See “The Shrine,” The Boston Traveler, June 3, 1938, in RABP, folder 637: OLPH Devotions, Mission Church, Boston, 1930–1940. 30. See “Plan Novena for Welfare of U.S. Nation,” The ­Pilot (Boston), October 8, 1938, np., in RABP, folder 637: OLPH Devotions, Mission Church, Boston, 1930–1940. 31. Among practices that have earned disapproval, the ingestion of Perpetual Help wafers has tended to cause concern in certain Vatican dicasteries. In 1959, the Holy See issued a directive to the Superior General of the Redemptorists “to abolish any publication of and any use of such a devotion, since it does not enjoy the approval of the Holy See.” The Apostolic Nuncio to the United States, Archbishop Egidio Vagnozi, sent a reminder of this and a request to take appropriate steps to discontinue the devotion to then-­provincial ­Father James Connolly, admonishing him that the practice of eating OLPH wafers was to be discouraged. See Vagnozi to Connolly, March 21, 1961 (Prot. No. 53/42), in RABP, folder 637: OLPH Devotions. The practice of consuming a religious image like the OLPH icon or some other holy person or form has been

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a feature of Boston Catholicism from time to time. The case of the grave of ­Father Patrick Power, located in Malden, Mas­sa­chu­setts, was associated with miraculous healings in the wake of the Stock Market Crash of 1929. Ingestion of dirt from the grave site or rain w ­ ater that had collected in a chalice ­etched in the tombstone w ­ ere thought to have restorative properties. See further Patrick J. Hayes, “Mas­sa­chu­setts Miracles: Controlling Cures in Catholic Boston, c. 1929,” in Saints and Their Cults in the Atlantic World, ed. Margaret Cormack (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2007), 111–127. 32. Thomas Tweed, Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). 33. Tweed, Crossing and Dwelling, 54. 34. See Charley Wallace, C.Ss.R., “AROUND THE WORLD by F ­ ather WALLACE!” in Redemptorist Yank Club, Redemptorist Archives of the Denver Province, Philadelphia. 35. For what follows, see Luis G. Hechanova, The Baclaran Story (Quezon City: Claretian Publications/Redemptorist Publications, 1998), 2–3. 36. See Adelino Garcia Paz, Holy Mary of Perpetual Help: vol. 2: Geography and Significance of the Devotion (Singapore: Redemptorist Community, n.d.), 149–152. 37. On the icon’s removal and re-­enthronement, see “Re-­enthronement of the Baclaran Icon of the ­Mother of Perpetual Help in Manila,” SCALA News (November  27, 2019), available online at https://­w ww​.­cssr​.­news​/­2019​/­11​/­re​ -­enthronement​-­of​-­the​-­baclaran​-­icon​-­of​-­the​-­mother​-­of​-­perpetual​-­help​-­in​-­manila​/­. 38. See cc. 1230–1234 on shrines in the 1983 Code of Canon Law, available online at http://­w ww​.­vatican​.­va​/­archive​/­cod​-­iuris​-­canonici​/­eng​/­documents​/­cic​ _­lib4​-­cann1205​-­1243​_­en​.­html. Norms governing the erection of national shrines in the United States may be found at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops website at https://­w ww​.­usccb​.­org​/­committees​/­divine​-­worship​ /­policies​/­norms​-­for​-­national​-­shrines.



The ­Battle of Bayside Contesting Religious Topographies in an Urban Apparition Site joseph p. l aycock

Veronica Lueken (1923–1995) was a working-­class Catholic ­mother of five from the neighborhood of Bayside, Queens, in New York City. She was also a Marian seer who relayed hundreds of prophetic messages from Mary, Jesus, the saints, and other heavenly personages between the beginning of her mystical experiences in 1968 and her death. T ­ oday she is remembered by her followers, who call themselves “Baysiders,” as a saint awaiting beatification, and by residents of the Queens neighborhood of Bayside Hills as a fraud and heretic who presented an existential threat to their neighborhood. T ­ hese starkly divided views of Lueken had relatively ­little to do with the content of her visions and far more to do with the practical issues that arise when a large apparitional movement occurs in an urban area. Between 1970 and 1974, the controversy surrounding Veronica Lueken resulted in an episode known as “The B ­ attle of Bayside,” a conflict between Marian pilgrims and Bayside Hills residents, in which the New York Police Department, state politicians, and the Diocese of Brooklyn became entangled. In 1974, an injunction by the Supreme Court of New York (as well as a vision from Mary herself) persuaded Lueken to move the vigils to Flushing Meadows Park. But the conflict profoundly ­shaped the Baysider movement and is remembered in Bayside Hills to this day. Marian apparitions are uniquely tied to the physical space where the apparition was said to occur.1 Apparitional movements frequently regard sacralizing and securing access to physical spaces as a key objective. At Lourdes, the government declared the grotto where the apparition occurred “off limits” and even erected barricades to keep pilgrims out; pilgrims simply destroyed the barricades.2 Cityscapes are already engaged in a perpetual strug­gle over what Robert Orsi calls “religious topographies,” or maps of significance specific to dif­fer­ent urban cultures and polities. He writes:

con testing r eligious topogr a phies  93

­ eople must contend with intrusions upon their religious topographies, P with the efforts of o­ thers to control, r­ eorient, redistrict, or even obliterate their distinct experience of the city, and with conflicts and disjunctures of their own mappings. But the social and religious life of American cities is constituted by overlapping cultural cartographies—­variant mappings reflecting complex histories, ideologies, spiritualities, and personal experiences and needs.3

In Orsi’s view, working-­class Catholics like Veronica Lueken are the underdogs in t­hese strug­gles over space and significance; the very geometry of large American cities is meant to privilege white, Protestant sensibilities while e­ ither concealing or assimilating the cultures of immigrants, minority religions, and minority p­ eople. But a Marian apparition amounts to something like a “secret weapon” in ­these strug­gles over religious topographies. Church authorities have traditionally been suspicious of Marian apparitions precisely b­ ecause they do have the power to reorder every­thing, changing devotional practices, doctrines, and p­ olitical loyalties. But above all, apparitions can sacralize physical space, creating pilgrimage sites out of previously insignificant grottos, fields, and mountains. This chapter applies Orsi’s hermeneutic of cityscapes as a realm of competing religious topographies to interpret the ­Battle of Bayside and its historic significance. Residents of Bayside Hills (most of whom w ­ ere also Catholic) complained that crowds of Marian pilgrims w ­ ere contributing to traffic and pollution and relieving themselves on their well-­maintained lawns—­all of which was true. But ­these grievances alone do not explain the vilification of a ­woman who was nominally a co-­religionist or claims that what Lueken was ­doing was not, in fact, religion. As the situation deteriorated, residents increasingly a­ dopted a language of patriotism, framing themselves as Americans united by their shared m ­ onotheism, defending their rights against invading prac­ti­tion­ers of a pseudo-­religion. Perhaps the most significant m ­ easure of the B ­ attle of Bayside’s ongoing significance is an article that appeared in The Queens Tribune in 1999 entitled “Dirty Thirty: The Borough’s Most Notorious.” Lueken was number seventeen on a list of the worst p­ eople ever to have lived in Queens, between a man who shot and killed two police officers and an individual dubbed “The ATM Rapist.” Lueken was controversial, but nothing like a murderer or a rapist. Lueken’s appearance on this list may be explained if the ­Battle of Bayside is understood as a strug­gle over the same categories

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urban dwellers use to understand themselves: insider/outsider, Catholic/ not Catholic, religion/madness. Bayside Hills was not just where ­people lived and prayed but part of a cartography that rendered t­ hese categories meaningful. Lueken and the pilgrims who ­were drawn to her posed a unique threat to ­these categories, largely by dint of where they engaged in Marian piety. Viewed in this way, the ­Battle of Bayside also provides a unique insight into the nature of Marian apparitions: They are “radical” events, not just ­because of new prophecies or devotional practices they may introduce but ­because they mobilize ­people in ways that disrupt unstated rules, uncover social fault lines, and open the social order up to reassessment and renegotiation.

The Church in the Garden City For Orsi, cities are carefully designed to curate what kinds of p­ eople, cultures, and experiences can occur, excluding the wrong kind of ­people or—­better yet—­assimilating them. He writes that the cities i­ magined by urbanists ­were never intended “to be the habitations of immigrants and mi­grants or places where t­ hese foreign ­people of strange customs could make lives for (or public spectacles of) themselves; for t­ hese populations, the environment at best could function as an agent of assimilation and acculturation.” Instead, “[t]hrough geometry, monumentality and exposure to carefully cultivated nature in the city could bring order out of chaos, unity out of diversity, whiteness out of color.” 4 He associated this attitude with “The Garden City” movement, founded in E ­ ngland at the end of the nineteenth c­ entury by urban planner Ebenezer Howard. The Garden City model emphasized order and the strategic deployment of nature to render cities “bearable.”5 An enclave of relative quiet within Queens, Bayside Hills conformed to the Garden City ideals. Bayside Hills was once a 117-­acre farm, and then it was a country club ­until the Gross Morton com­pany developed it into a subdivision in 1935.6 Nine hundred and fifty new homes ­were constructed and sold for an average of $5,000. Homeowners founded the Bayside Hills Civic Association (BHCA) in 1936. One of the distinctive features of the neighborhood is that main streets contain grassy traffic islands or “malls.” The malls serve no objective purpose, but they have been a source of pride to the community and a classic example of Garden City–­style urbanism. Access

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figure 14. St. Robert Bellarmine Roman Catholic Church’s location in Bayside, New York. (Image created by Joseph P. Laycock with Google Map.)

to the malls also became the primary arena of conflict during the B ­ attle of Bayside. St. Robert Bellarmine Roman Catholic Church was constructed in 1939. It represented the first intrusion of Catholic religiosity into this carefully planned community. It had not been part of the Gross Morton com­ pany’s plan and originally consisted of a converted h ­ ouse. Even t­ oday, it is surrounded by well-­maintained private homes. Its first Mass drew 225 worshippers, and the police deemed a crowd of this size hazardous in a residential area. By the 1960s, the parish had grown to 8,800 Catholics, and St. Robert Bellarmine’s expanded to fill an entire block and added a school.7 Many of the residents of Bayside Hills ­were Catholics and the descendants of immigrants who had achieved middle-­class status. The prosperity of the neighborhood, as well as its property values, w ­ ere a symbol of how far they had come. In 1970, Al Falloni was president of the BHCA during the ­Battle of Bayside (and had been for eight terms). He had been a man­ag­er for Italian-­A merican heavyweight boxing champion Rocky Marciano before g­ oing into real estate.8 When the New York Department of Parks ­stopped mowing Bayside Hills malls in the 1960s, Falloni rented

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a small herd of goats that he tethered to the malls. Then he invited the press to photo­graph his goats in an effort to shame the Department of Parks. ­After that, the BHCA purchased two mowers and took turns volunteering to mow the lawns. Fi­nally, they pooled their resources and hired a landscaper. Falloni’s efforts to keep the malls maintained ­were recorded by resident Adrian K. Cornell in an unpublished memoir, suggesting that this ele­ment of the Garden City ideal was impor­tant not only for the neighborhood but also for the stories that neighbors told about themselves.9

The B ­ attle of Bayside Lueken’s mystical experiences began a­ fter the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. In April 1970, Mary appeared to Lueken in a vision in her apartment and said she would appear next at St. Robert Bellarmine’s, only about a mile away. Lueken was part of the parish but was not a resident of Bayside Hills. Instead, she and her f­amily lived in a cramped working-­class apartment that sometimes h ­ oused as many as nine relatives. Lueken began kneeling e­ very day before a statue of Mary in the church courtyard, awaiting an apparition. On June 18, Mary appeared to Lueken and announced that she would appear t­here on e­ very Catholic feast day and that it would become a national shrine. According to Kevin J. Farrelly, who lived in Bayside Hills at the time, Lueken was at first perceived as “the neighborhood kook.” The priests at St. Robert Bellarmine’s never encouraged her visions or endorsed her “messages from heaven,” but they also never ­stopped her prayer vigils in the church courtyard or allowed teenage hecklers to bother her. This situation changed in 1973 when Lueken attracted the attention of a traditionalist Catholic movement from Quebec called The Pilgrims of Saint Michael. Also known as “The White Berets” for their distinctive hats, The Pilgrims felt betrayed by the recent reforms of Vatican II and had been seeking a Marian seer. They endorsed Lueken as “the seer of the age,” printed her messages from heaven in their newsletter, and ­organized large tour buses of pilgrims that traveled from Canada to Bayside Hills. Soon groups of up to two thousand pilgrims w ­ ere arriving from all over Canada and the United States to pray the Rosary and see Lueken receive messages from Mary. Bayside Hills residents presented an ever-­growing list of grievances against the vigils. They objected to the crowds, pilgrims taking all the

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parking spots, the sound of vigils that went on u ­ ntil midnight, and pollution from their tour buses. The crowds also attracted curious onlookers. Farrelly recalled inviting friends to spend a Saturday night observing the spectacle of the vigils.10 Growing crowds attracted vendors selling ice cream, hot dogs, and religious paraphernalia, as well as hecklers. An editorial by BHCA board member William Caulfield explained: Bayside Hills has been invaded. The issue is as s­ imple as that. Some of our neighbors have had the use of their property, and the right to its peaceful enjoyment, snatched away from them by a nomadic band. Garbage is strewn on their lawns and about the streets before and ­after ­every vigil. Urination and defecation on shrubs and lawns are common occurrences.11

While this editorial objects to the activities of the pilgrims, it also conveys that t­ hese are the wrong kind of p­ eople: invaders and nomads. A letter to the editor of The Bayside Hills Beacon is also telling: “Our neighborhood is fast becoming a ‘ghetto’ and p­ eople are threatening to sell at their first offer.”12 This conveys a fear about property values, but it is also about categories: Whose neighborhood is respectable and whose is a ghetto? Orsi describes how city religion intersects with fantasies about slums in which working-­class neighborhoods are i­ magined as nightmarish but also as exciting destinations for middle-­class adventurers, artists in search of “authenticity,” and ­others with romantic notions about how other p­ eople live. The phrase “hunting the elephant” referred to visiting slums in search of excitement.13 If Bayside Hills understood itself in contradistinction to the sites of t­hese urban fantasies, it must have been especially stinging to home-­owners that the place where they lived had now become the sort of neighborhood where bored ­people went to see something unusual or dangerous. Francis Mugavero was a progressive bishop and seemed uninterested in investigating a Marian apparition. But u ­ nder pressure to resolve the situation, he tapped James P. King, one of the diocese’s chancellors, to investigate. On June 29, 1973, King convened a small committee in the rectory of St. Robert Bellarmine’s to review transcripts of Lueken’s messages. L ­ ater that day, a two-­page report was sent to the bishop. King reported, “Every­one read much of the material that we have on file from this lady and all agree that it seems to be a rather rambling mish-­mash of

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material gleaned from books about apparitions of Our Lady, especially at Fatima.” The committee recommended that Mugavero approve a letter to Lueken explaining that a committee appointed by the bishop had found “nothing miraculous about the messages she was receiving” and requesting that she no longer invite p­ eople to attend her vigils. Furthermore, the committee recommended contacting the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) to request its help in discouraging Catholics around the country from attending vigils at Bayside.14 Meanwhile, residents became increasingly aggressive ­toward the pilgrims. Some became regular hecklers during vigils. In June 1973, Lueken’s husband, Arthur, sought a bullhorn permit from local police—­presumably so that vigil o­ rganizers could be heard over the noise of the hecklers. Monsignor Emmet McDonald, the pastor at St. Robert Bellarmine’s, convinced the police not to grant the permit.15 In September, the pilgrims ­organized a letter-­writing campaign requesting the use of the church itself. At the Archives of the Diocese of Brooklyn, I found a dozen copies of a form letter to Chancellor King signed by Lueken’s supporters. The letter reads: We have been and presently are being subjected to derision, profanity as well as complaints from families in the area, during ­these devotions and prayers. . . . ​In view of the circumstances related I ask you please to consider granting permission for the use of St. Robert Bellarmine Church which is unused and directly b­ ehind our Blessed M ­ other’s Shrine. We are willing to rent the church or ­whatever it takes, in order to be able to make use of it as a sanctuary.16

But the parish shared the homeowners’ view that the pilgrims w ­ ere outsiders. Many of the influential members of the BHCA ­were also on St. Robert Bellarmine’s parish council. On September 9, the council met to discuss the vigils. In a letter to Monsignor McDonald, parish council president ­Joseph E. Geoghan recommended that the diocese conduct a more definitive investigation and that the vigils be dealt with through a combination of civil remedies and criminal complaints.17 The day ­after receiving the Council’s letter, McDonald sent a strongly worded letter to Bishop Francis J. Mugavero calling for stronger m ­ easures to control the situation. He wrote: I believe that Veronica Lueken is a charlatan and playing on the religious feelings and beliefs of our Catholic p­ eople, some of whom do not appear to be entirely stable. I suspect that she herself is emotionally

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disturbed, but I do not have any medical proof of this assertion. I think that she is realizing a substantial financial return from ­these activities. She has not heeded in the slightest Monsignor King’s admonition to cease inviting p­ eople to this Parish and has not accepted the advice of her Parish priests.

He concluded his letter by suggesting that the diocese adopt a more direct strategy and take any steps necessary to “terminate Mrs. Lueken’s activities.” He writes, “At first we had hoped that this activity would die a natu­ral death, then we refrained from taking certain steps ­because of the notoriety and enhancement that it might give to Veronica’s activities, but at this par­tic­u­lar time in the situation I think positive and vigorous action is called for.”18 ­A fter McDonald and the parish council called for stronger action, Chancellor King wrote another letter to Lueken explaining that her vigils had become “a serious irritation to the ­people of the community.” This letter also came with an ultimatum: If the disruptions to the community did not cease, the diocese would remove that statue of Mary where Lueken held her vigils and build a fence around the church property to keep out trespassers.19 By November, the crowds of pilgrims had only continued to grow. So far, King had attempted to dissuade pilgrims from coming to Bayside; now, he was openly authoritarian. Monsignor Powell arrived at one of the vigils and began reading a letter from Chancellor King, “declaring once again that the church property is out of bounds for devotional use . . . ​devotions to Our Lady ­will be conducted only in the parish church by priests authorized to do so by the pastor . . . ​the meetings are contrary to diocesan authority and p­ eople should especially be discouraged from making any offerings of money or cooperating in money-­gathering procedures.”20 This tactic was unusual coming from a diocese with generally progressive leadership. King and Powell w ­ ere likely unprepared for what the pilgrims did next: They simply ignored the vicar, saying the Rosary louder to drown out his voice. The agent of the diocese was regarded as just another heckler. Powell returned at the next vigil and read the letter again, this time through a bullhorn. The pilgrims remained defiant. Faced with what he saw as a “complete lack of cooperation,” Chancellor King de­cided to carry out on his ultimatum and remove the statue of Mary

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from the grounds of St. Robert Bellarmine’s—­a move that the parish council supported in a vote of 21 to 1. King explained this decision in a letter: We have come to the very sorrowful conclusion that the only means left at our disposal is to direct that the statue of Our Lady be removed from church grounds at least u ­ ntil t­ hese p­ eople can be convinced that they must not assem­ble h ­ ere. . . . ​They [the parishioners of St. Robert Bellarmine’s] should not be deprived of their shrine and the use of their property in such a beautiful neighborhood b­ ecause p­ eople from afar w ­ ill not obey Church authority and w ­ ill not accept the obvious that prayer to Our Lady is best offered in Church in the sacramental presence of her Divine Son.21

On November 27, 1973, the parish moved its statue of Mary to an undisclosed location. Following the removal of the statue, one Baysider remarked, “This is the place the Blessed M ­ other chose to bring her p­ eople. She asked Veron22 ica to do this.” Pilgrims began to collect “holy dirt” from where the statue had stood. On December 2, Lueken arrived for the scheduled vigil, bringing her own statue made of fiberglass, which she set on a card t­ able.23 Carrying this statue to St. Robert Bellarmine’s became a ritual that only added to the pageantry of the vigils. Farrelly recalls that pilgrims would arrive in buses that parked at Queensborough Community College, half a mile east of St. Robert Bellarmine Church. They would then carry the fiberglass statue, now adorned with a blue cape and gold crown, in a pro­cession to the church.24 Farrelly conceded that the pro­cession was an impressive sight, even for nonbelievers. As the conflict wore on into 1974, pressure to drive the vigils out only caused the pilgrims to attach greater significance to their sacred space. Lueken’s messages from this period emphasize both the significance of St. Robert Bellarmine’s as a sacred site and the inability of ­human agencies to defy the pilgrims’ divine mandate. On February 1, 1974, Lueken delivered the following message: Know well, man, that you cannot defy the F ­ ather, for it is in the ­will of the F ­ ather that this land be claimed for the salvation of souls. All who come to t­ hese hallowed grounds, My child, w ­ ill receive graces in abundance, graces of cure and conversion. The crippled ­shall walk, the blind ­shall see. ­Those in darkness ­shall come forward into the light.25

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Homeowners became more obstinate as well. The summer months drew larger crowds, which, in turn, drew more vendors. In June 1974, Al Falloni wrote Bishop Mugavero describing the state of the vigils: The vigils held on Sunday after­noons and on the eve of holy days, has [sic] taken on a carnivale [sic] atmosphere in our residential area. We do not believe this is the type of devotion sanctioned by the Church ­toward the Virgin Mary. The residents of our community are suffering the brunt of ­these repeated vigils. The police have been notified of the civil infractions namely, pollution of the air from numerous buses which arrive each time from other states, empty food containers, candy wrappers, and empty beer and soda cans which are left ­after the ­people leave. Due to lack of public facilities, ­people are seen voiding in the area, between cars, in the bushes on the adjacent properties and thereby esposing [sic] themselves indecently.26

Tensions between pilgrims and residents began to escalate into vio­ lence. On June 15, 1974, a seventeen-­year-­old was stabbed twice in the back following a verbal altercation with a pilgrim. A letter from King to James Rausch of the USCCB described this incident and claimed that the assailant had been one of the Pilgrims of Saint Michael who boarded a tour bus back to Montreal and escaped across the border to Canada.27 Three days a­ fter this incident, the fourth anniversary of the vigils brought two thousand pilgrims to Bayside, who w ­ ere met by 150 picketers from the BHCA.28 In July and August, the BHCA and parish authorities began meeting with police to discuss a solution to the situation in Bayside.29 Attorney Donald Kiley was hired to represent both the BHCA and the parish council. In September 1974, a meeting was held at St. Robert Bellarmine’s between Lueken’s followers, the BHCA, and the parish council to see if some agreement could be reached. Lueken did not attend, explaining that she had wanted to but that Our Lady had forbidden it.30 The pilgrims felt the disturbances could be minimized if only they w ­ ere allowed to use the church gymnasium. However, the parish council rejected this solution, as allowing Lueken and her followers to use church facilities was tantamount to giving formal approval to her movement. The meeting became another moment of alienation where church authorities and pilgrims realized that they saw the world in very dif­fer­ent ways. Monsignor McDonald

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reflected on the meetings: “Our response that the Parish and Diocese are ­legal corporations and have a right to determine the use of their properties had ­little effect.”31 Lueken eventually asked Chancellor King, “What do you mean that the church is private property? . . . ​Has the church become a business? We c­ an’t pray t­ here?”32 For Lueken and her followers, the church did not belong to associations and committees but to God, and a direct command from the Virgin Mary should trump concerns like property values. Furthermore, the pilgrims argued that their movement represented thousands of Catholics and, as such, should have a say in how Catholic resources ­were allocated. A ­little over a week a­ fter the meeting in September, Chancellor King issued the following statement: As a result of a complete and thorough investigation and hopeful of inspiring only true devotion to Our Lady, the ecclesiastical authority of the Diocese of Brooklyn hereby gives notice that all Catholics are directed to refrain from frequenting this site and any devotions not authorized by the priests of St. Robert Bellarmine Parish are unauthorized and forbidden.33

The statement was distributed in E ­ nglish and French so that pilgrims from Quebec could read it as well. For Chancellor King, invoking the authority of the diocese to tell Catholics how they could pray was a drastic step. If such a move had been made ­earlier, or if Bishop Mugavero had acted directly, the diocese might have been able to stop Lueken’s momentum.34 However, the Baysiders had now been gathering momentum for four years and reached a kind of critical mass. The situation only continued to escalate further. On October 6, 1974, Lueken delivered a message from Mary requesting a basilica at St. Robert Bellarmine’s. Socially speaking, the proposed basilica represented a way of permanently inscribing the movement’s spiritual topography onto the landscape. This message was typed and ­disseminated through the movement’s network, which now extended throughout the United States, Canada, and beyond. As a result, the diocese received numerous letters as late as 1979 demanding that a basilica be built at St. Robert Bellarmine’s. Most of t­ hese letters w ­ ere from p­ eople living in other states who had never seen St. Robert Bellarmine’s and had no idea how small the available space was. A few of the letters contained

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donations of five dollars, all of which the diocese returned along with a form letter dismissing the Bayside apparitions as inauthentic.35 In November, the parish council erected a 300-­foot-­long snow fence with a “No Trespassing” sign, effectively barring the pilgrims from accessing their sacred site.36 The pilgrims, however, would not be deterred by a fence. Instead of trespassing, the vigils w ­ ere moved to the grassy malls that adorned the m ­ iddle of 56th Ave­nue, which runs past the north side of the church grounds. The malls ­were each a block long but only about ten feet wide, with traffic on ­either side. To accommodate all the pilgrims, it was sometimes necessary to occupy five blocks’ worth of malls between 211th Street and Bell Boulevard. Loudspeakers and other devices allowed vigil leaders to communicate with pilgrims standing blocks away.37 ­These ­were the same malls that Al Falloni and the BHCA had previously waged a long and expensive campaign to keep manicured and pristine—­a collective symbol of the community and its identity. For pilgrims to occupy them was an example of one religious topography making an aggressive incursion onto another. In her first message from heaven given on the lawns, Lueken announced, “Know, My child, that I ­will be with you. I ­will be ­here at the sacred grounds up to the coming of My Son. No fence ­shall be high enough to shut out the light. No man can go above his God.”38 The pilgrims continued to hold vigils on the malls for months. The BHCA asked the police to intervene and claimed that holding religious rituals on public property v­ iolated the separation of church and state. However, police commissioner Michael J. Codd countered that the pilgrims had a right to the f­ ree exercise of religion. In response, Falloni told the New York Post that the BHCA was hoping to prove that the vigils w ­ ere 39 not an expression of religion. The BHCA repeatedly described the vigils as “quasi-­religious.” William Caulfield, who was both a BHCA board member and a member of the parish council, explained in an editorial: I know that many of our Catholic friends have opinion about the religious aspect of the vigils. That is within the scope of their religious beliefs, however, and is not a suitable subject for a civic association to deal with. But it is also true that, in innumerable ways, the activities which take place on the corner of 56th Ave­nue and 214th Street are not religious issues. They affect the ­whole society, and it is to this aspect of the issue that this editorial is addressed.40

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Caulfield’s argument invokes a common p­ opular assumption that religion is a private ­matter and that public expressions of faith are not r­ eally religious.41 This criteria of “real religion” made a ­convenient bookend to the claim that the vigils v­ iolated the establishment clause. The BHCA’s l­egal arguments tried to have it both ways: As far as religious liberties w ­ ere concerned, the vigils ­were not religious, but if holding religious ceremonies on public property was unconstitutional, then the vigils ­were definitely religious. Residents and church authorities became increasingly frustrated by police, who explained they could only intervene if the pilgrims ­were breaking the law. Eugene Biegel, captain of the Bayside police precinct, told the residents, “Give me a piece of paper signed by a judge, and you ­will see action.” 42 The BHCA felt that the rule of law had failed them. Some called for the National Guard.43 This attitude led to a period of increasingly aggressive tactics from residents, including picketing in front of the homes of Lueken and her supporters. Residents also began ­organizing counter-­ vigils, which w ­ ere held on the malls at the same time as the vigils. The counter-­demonstrations took the competing topographies to their logical conclusion: The malls near St. Robert Bellarmine’s became a battlefield where residents and pilgrims competed for physical space and symbolic dominance. While the pilgrims said the Rosary, homeowners would run their lawnmowers to drown out their voices. They handed out copies of King’s statement condemning the vigils and held up signs reading, “Your bishop forbids you to be h ­ ere.” 44 Bayside Hills residents increasingly began to use the rhe­toric of patriotism, framing the conflict in mythic terms of freedom-­loving Americans protecting themselves from a group that not only represented bad religion, but also bad Americans. Several counter-­vigils ­were described as “bicentennial cele­brations” even though they w ­ ere held in 1975. ­These cele­brations involved residents walking past the vigils while loudly singing “The ­Battle Hymn of the Republic,” “God Bless Amer­i­ca,” and “The National Anthem.” William Caulfield told the Long Island Press, “What w ­ e’re ­doing ­here is the best bicentennial lesson ­we’ll ever get or give to our kids. Just like 200 years ago, w ­ e’re protecting our rights.” 45 An increasingly larger police presence was needed to maintain public order, and wooden police barriers ­were set up along the malls. At a counter-­ vigil on March 22, 1975, William Caulfield was arrested for disorderly

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conduct following a confrontation with a police officer. He told reporters, “Apparently shouting your prayers out loud, chanting at night, lighting hundreds of candles in a quasi-­religious ceremony, spraying ­people with holy ­water, and shoving a camera in somebody’s face ­isn’t disorderly conduct.” 46 That night a crowd of Bayside Hills residents went to the police precinct and signed civilian complaints regarding his arrest.47 On April 5, 1975, the BHCA planned a “bicentennial concert” to be held on the same mall in front of the church where the pilgrims ­were planning to hold their vigil. The Bayside Times reported, “It’s simply a case of who gets ­there first, the worshippers or the concertgoers. Each ­will only be exercising their right to freedom of assembly.” 48 This being the case, Caulfield and a few ­others volunteered to spend the night in a tent with traffic driving on e­ ither side to give the pilgrims no chance of staking a claim on their mall.49 The night of April 5 was unusually cold. The date fell on a Saturday, leaving more p­ eople f­ ree to attend e­ ither the vigil or the BHCA’s “concert.” One hundred police officers w ­ ere pre­sent to keep the peace. Two hundred fifty pilgrims arrived, only to find their mall was already occupied. They still set up their card t­ able and fiberglass Mary statue and began to pray. Police took the position that the contested mall had already been claimed by another party and asked the pilgrims to break up their vigil and move elsewhere. While the police w ­ ere speaking with the pilgrims, an altercation broke out between forty-­year-­old James O’Connor, a Bayside Hills homeowner, and Lieutenant John Karcich, a tactical patrol force officer. O’Connor received a baton strike to the head that required eight stitches. ­A fter this incident, BHCA members filed fifty complaints against Karchich. Queens district attorney Nicholas Ferraro asked to impanel a special ­grand jury to investigate charges that the police overreacted. Meanwhile, vigil organizers filed thirty-­five complaints against the BHCA for harassment, criminal mischief, and abuse.50 Following this incident, police declared that no one could occupy the mall directly in front of the church between 213th and 214th street.51 This was to be a sort of “no-­man’s-­land” separating pilgrims and residents. By now, the conflict had become national news. Newsweek opined, “The real miracle of Bayside Hills may be that no one has been killed.”52 Following the chaos of April 5, the BHCA a­ dopted a new tactic and attempted to take the moral high ground. On April 13, an event was

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o­ rganized called “Cool Sunday.” The event emphasized removing Lueken through l­ egal means rather than open aggression. Several state politicians had become involved in the conflict at Bayside and gave speeches, including State Senator Frank Padavan (R-­Jamaica), City Council Member Matt Troy (D-­Queens Village), and Assembly Member Vincent Nicholosi ­(D-­Bayside). Seventy-­five police officers ­were pre­sent, and Queens police commissioner Joseph Veyvoda had closed the malls and streets to all parties. However, the parish council allowed the BHCA to hold their event on the church lawn. When Lueken and 150 of her followers arrived for their Sunday holy hour, they found ­there was nowhere to go, so they filed into St. Robert Bellarmine’s for Sunday Mass.53 ­After the ­service, Lueken went into an ecstatic trance and her followers began to chant the Rosary. Monsignor McDonald had several baptisms to perform that after­noon and asked the pilgrims to be ­silent, exclaiming, “You are profaning the Church.” King, who was also pre­sent, told the pilgrims, “The Blessed M ­ other Mary is not pleased with what you are d­ oing. Pray in silence. We are about to baptize ­children.”54 The pilgrims ignored his pleas for quiet, and the baptisms had to be rescheduled. Monsignor McDonald filed a detailed report with police commissioner Codd.55 Lueken ­later claimed that, while in prayer, she tunes out the world and is essentially deaf. As a result, she simply failed to notice McDonald waving his arms and yelling at her to cease.56 Following this incident, Senator Padavan asked the state attorney general to begin a full-­scale investigation into the legality of the vigils.57 St. Robert Bellarmine’s fi­nally took l­egal action against Lueken, and one judge Hymann signed an order requiring Lueken to show cause for her public demonstrations. He also issued a preliminary injunction barring Lueken from the vigil site. The vigil ­organizers filed their own ­legal action against the BHCA. That May, Lueken and her allies w ­ ere asked to appear in court on five separate occasions. During t­ hese proceedings, the police, who seem to have had a better rapport with Lueken than anyone ­else outside of her movement, suggested she relocate her vigils to nearby Cunningham Park. Lueken initially resisted this suggestion. The last vigil in Bayside occurred on Pentecost, May 17, 1975, in defiance of Judge Hymann’s injunction. Two thousand pilgrims arrived from as far away as Nebraska.58 Residents offered heavy ­resistance, attempting to drown out Lueken’s messages with lawnmowers. ­Others bore placards proclaiming, “Veronica is a hoax.”59

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The following ­evening, Mary and Jesus reportedly appeared in Lueken’s apartment. They ­were vis­i­ble not only to Veronica but also her husband, Arthur, and a third individual named only as, “Mr. N. S.” The apparitions gave a message, which Mr. N. S. wrote down and Lueken l­ ater read to her followers: My child, you have passed the test and have given complete obedience to the Eternal ­Father. Now is the time for a small change. The numbers of the faithful are reaching too and far in excess of what can be accommodated. Therefore, you ­will tell the Bishop: “You w ­ ill be given a sign by the Eternal F ­ ather.” He (the Bishop) w ­ ill find this sign unquestionable. You ­will, My child, receive the message from Me on the eve of all feast days as in the past. The ­peoples of the world ­will continue to go to the Shrine in g­ reat numbers—­that ­will not consist of crowds—­until the basilica is opened by the sign given to your Bishop. The p­ eoples must continue to pray. Accept the offer of the Department of Police, and I w ­ ill do the rest. ­There is a time for every­thing, My child, even for change.60

With this message, the Baysiders ­were able to yield control over their ­sacred site without admitting defeat. The message also lent some stability to the Baysiders’ deteriorating relationship with church authorities. A super­natural sign would one day vindicate the Baysiders, at which point church authorities would admit they had been wrong. On May 20, a ­lawyer representing the pilgrims expressed that they would accept an offer from the Department of Parks to find a new location for the vigils.61 On May 22, Lueken met for three hours with representatives from the BHCA in the office of Justice Joseph Kuzeman of the New York Supreme Court. Kuzeman worked out a settlement in which Lueken would cease holding her vigils at St. Robert Bellarmine’s. Instead, the pilgrims would move to an appropriate public space and obtain proper permits. If any pilgrims did continue to gather in Bayside Hills, police ­were authorized to disperse them. In return, the BHCA agreed not to harass Lueken if she visited St. Robert Bellarmine’s alone. On reaching the agreement, Kuzeman declared, “­Here nobody lost and both sides won ­because they both approached the prob­lem sincerely. I hope they all go back to the community and realize that what has been done t­ oday has been done in the best interests of all. Both sides deserve to be commended.” 62 Lueken emerged on the steps of the court­house, where many of her followers

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and reporters stood waiting. She announced, “The way of the cross ­w ill persist. The Lord works in mysterious ways, but we w ­ ill prevail. His ­w ill be done.”  63 So ended the B ­ attle of Bayside. On May 26, 1975, the vigils w ­ ere held for the first time in Flushing Meadows Park at a monument commemorating the spot where the Vatican pavilion had stood during the 1964 World’s Fair. Baysiders (who splintered into multiple groups following Lueken’s death in 1995) still gather weekly on this spot, and annual gatherings to commemorate Mary’s first appearance at Robert Bellarmine’s still draw hundreds of pilgrims from around the world.

Discussion The ­Battle of Bayside unearthed deep fault lines in the city’s Catholic community. In 1973, Bayside Hills was about 60 ­percent Catholic, with significant populations of Protestants and Jews.64 The mostly working-­class Catholics who attended the vigils now felt alienated from the middle-­class Catholic homeowners and the authorities of the parish and diocese. If physical space is critical to how individuals, neighborhoods, and movements understand themselves, it is not surprising that both the Baysiders and the residents of Bayside Hills ­were changed following this clash of sacred topographies. On June 14, 1975, the BHCA o­ rganized a neighborhood “Jubilation Day,” celebrating their victory over the pilgrims. A thanksgiving mass and an interfaith ­service ­were held at St. Robert Bellarmine’s, followed by slide shows and home movies of the vigil ­battle. At 1 p.m., celebrants ­were invited to “report in work clothes to the mall at 56th Ave­nue and 214th Street to mow, clean, rake, and spruce up the mall in a gesture of thanksgiving and dedication.” Watermelon, balloons, and lemonade ­were available for ­children in the church parking lot. The St. Robert Bellarmine parish band paraded on the malls, playing patriotic songs. An ­evening dance for adults featured more m ­ usic and included soda, beer, and cocktails at the price of admission.65 This act of ritual “dedication” to the malls is perhaps the greatest evidence that ­these spaces ­were—in the Durkheimian sense—­sacred to the community.66 David Chidester and Edward Linenthal suggest that one way space is sacralized is through the “politics of exclusion.” That is, space is marked as sacred, in part, by who is kept out.67 The Jubilation Day festivities served the social function of reclaiming the space for residents and reestablishing their authority over it.

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In 1995, Kevin J. Farrelly—­who had become BHCA president—­organized an event to commemorate the ­Battle of Bayside. Farrelly showed a ­silent film of the vigils that had been created by David Oats, an editor for the Queens Tribune. Farrelly explained that this was not an expression of enmity t­ oward Lueken but a commemoration of an impor­tant moment in the community’s history.68 However, not every­one remembered the ­Battle of Bayside in purely historical terms. The commemorative event was covered in a New York Times article titled “A Cherished Memory: Banishing Veronica,” which was printed only two months before Lueken’s death.69 For the Baysiders, the ­battle for the grounds of St. Robert Bellarmine’s became something like a founding myth. Baysiders feel that they w ­ ere harassed, slandered, and assaulted simply for saying the Rosary on the grounds of a Catholic church. The fact that church authorities sided with the BHCA and state politicians engendered further feelings of persecution and betrayal. ­These feelings almost certainly contributed to a theme of conspiracy and a subversion narrative that runs throughout Lueken’s prophecies. Many Baysiders believe that the BHCA discussed hiring a hit man to assassinate Lueken and have even told stories of failed assassination attempts witnessed in Bayside Hills. In 1975, Lueken announced a message from Mary that Pope Paul VI had been replaced by a KGB agent to bring down the Catholic Church from within. For Baysiders, this claim seemed plausible partly b­ ecause it explained why church authorities had rejected them. The ­Battle of Bayside had also forced the hand of Bishop Mugavero to hold an extremely expedited investigation into Lueken’s visions. As the conflict wore on, church authorities began to assert that Lueken had been debunked by a “complete and thorough” investigation. This was not true, as Lueken and her followers had never been interviewed by the investigating committee. To this day, this omission has caused Baysider leaders to argue that they are not obligated to obey church ­orders regarding Lueken. At the time of this writing, Saint Michael’s World Apostolate, the most prominent Baysider group, continued to lobby for a new investigation. In 2019, church authorities ordered materials related to Veronica Lueken contained in the Archives of the Diocese of Brooklyn sealed. To understand how the urban setting affected the apparitions of Bayside and the development of the Baysider movement, it is helpful to compare the Bayside apparitions with that of Nancy Fowler of Conyers, Georgia. Fowler began experiencing visions in 1987 and became the next major

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American seer a­ fter Lueken. In the 1990s, her visions drew crowds of up to one hundred thousand ­people. Conyers is a rural community about thirty miles east of Atlanta. The bishop of Atlanta consistently opposed the apparitions; however, the situation never became nearly as divisive as at Bayside, and t­here was never a formal investigation into Fowler’s visions. This is almost certainly ­because Fowler’s followers could easily purchase a thirty-­acre farm where their vigils could be held, and the throngs of pilgrims ­were an economic boon to Conyers. This meant that church authorities w ­ ere ­under much less pressure to control Fowler, and Fowler’s followers, in turn, a­ dopted a less combative attitude. However, it should not be concluded that the apparitions of Bayside ­were contentious solely ­because of the urban dynamics of space and power described by Orsi. Marian apparitions are, by nature, radical events in which ordinary ­people feel an extraordinary access to sacred presence, and the order of the world becomes open to reassessment.70 Rather, the conditions of city religion threw into relief the dynamics of space, authority, and symbolic capital that are always at stake in Marian apparitions. Both the pilgrims and residents seemed intuitively to understand how the control of space contributed to the control of other dimensions of social life, and they rapidly developed strategies for asserting control of space, such as civic rituals, holy pro­cessions, or simply saying the Rosary repeatedly. Like the unstated rules that govern who belongs in a neighborhood and who does not, apparitional events operate within unstated strategies of authority that involve the careful deployment of ­people and symbols. The fact that ­these strategies are rarely articulated explic­itly does not mean any of the stakeholders in an apparitional event are unaware of their existence. Notes 1. David G. Bromley and Rachel S. Bobbitt, “Visions of the Virgin Mary: The ­Organizational Development of Marian Apparitional Movements,” Nova Religio 14, no. 3 (2011): 15. 2. Sandra Zimdars-­Swartz, Encountering Mary: Visions of Mary from La Salette to Medjugorje (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1991), 59. 3. Robert Orsi, “Introduction: Crossing the Line,” in Gods of the City: Religion and the American Urban Landscape, ed. Robert Orsi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 52. 4. Orsi, “Crossing the Line,” 40.

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5. Orsi, 37. 6. Alison McKay, Bayside (Portsmouth, NH: Arcadia Publishing, 2008), 51. 7. St. Robert Bellarmine Roman Catholic Church, “The Parish of St. Robert Bellarmine at Bayside,” Available online at http://­w ww​.­stroberts​.­org​/­. 8. Associated Press, “Veronica Disrupts Baptisms,” Morning Rec­ord, April 14, 1975, 12. 9. Adrian K. Cornell, What?? Who?? King Cornell?!?! Who’s He???? (Self-­ published memoir), 152. 10. Kevin J. Farrelly, in interview with the author, June 14, 2012. 11. William Caulfield, “The Vigils,” Bayside Hills Beacon, September 1974, 3. Both of the Bayside residents I interviewed mentioned the prob­lem of public urination. As Farrelly explained it, the area around St. Robert Bellarmine’s was a residential neighborhood with no public facilities whatsoever. The pilgrims truly did have no alternative. 12. Bayside Hills Beacon, October 1974, 8. 13. Orsi, “Crossing the Line,” 10. 14. Chancellor King to Bishop Mugavero, “Memorandum,” June 29, 1973, Archives of the Diocese of Brooklyn. 15. Chancellor James P. King to Bishop Francis J. Mugavero (June 29, 1973). Archive of the Diocese of Brooklyn. 16. Form letter to Chancellor King, September 28, 1973, Archives of the Diocese of Brooklyn. 17. Joseph E. Geoghan to Monsignor McDonald, September 13, 1973, Archives of the Diocese of Brooklyn. 18. Monsignor McDonald to Bishop Mugavero, September 14, 1973, Archives of the Diocese of Brooklyn. 19. Chancellor James P. King to Veronica Lueken, September 20, 1973, Archives of the Diocese of Brooklyn. 20. Jim Greene, “Bayside Church Statue Removed to Curb Spurious Marian Rites,” Tablet 66, no. 45 (December 6, 1973), 1. 21. Greene, “Bayside Church Statue Removed,” 1. 22. Jo-­Anne Price, “Church Removes Statue in Dispute Over Visions,” New York Times, December 2, 1973, 158. 23. Jay Itkowitz, “Removal of Statue Fails to Dissuade Vigil Keepers,” Long Island Press, December 3, 1973, 1. 24. Farrelly, interview. 25. Veronica Lueken, Virgin Mary’s Bayside Prophecies: A Gift of Love, vol. 2 (Lowell, MI: T ­ hese Last Days Ministries, 1998), 128. 26. Bayside Hills Civic Association to Bishop Francis J. Mugavero, June 19, 1974, Archive of the Diocese of Brooklyn.

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27. Chancellor James P. King to Bishop James S. Rausch, June 19, 1974, Archive of the Diocese of Brooklyn. 28. “Homeowners Seek Court Ban on Vigils,” Bayside Times 30, no. 46 (June 20, 1974): 1. 29. Kevin Farrelly, “Chronology of Bayside,” n.d. 30. Veronica Lueken, “ ‘The Truth about the So-­Called Investigation’ in Veronica Lueken’s Own Words,” available online at http://­w ww​.­tldm​.­org​/­no​ -­invest​/­Veronica​.­htm. 31. Chancellor James P. King, “Memorandum,” September 8, 1974, Archive of the Diocese of Brooklyn. 32. Lueken, “The Truth about the So-­Called Investigation.” 33. Chancellor James P. King, “Memorandum,” September 17, 1974, Archives of the Diocese of Brooklyn. 34. During the height of the apparitions in Necedah, Wisconsin, in 1950, Samuel Cardinal Stritch, archbishop of Chicago, ordered Catholics not to attend. As a result, charter buses from Chicago w ­ ere canceled, and the crowd shrank considerably. Marlene Maloney, “Necedah Revisited: Anatomy of a Phony Apparition,” Fidelity (February 1989), 23. 35. Archives of the Diocese of Brooklyn. 36. Chancellor King to Bishop Mugavero, November 22, 1974, Archives of the Diocese of Brooklyn. 37. Adrian K. Cornell, in interview with author, July 5, 2012. 38. Lueken, Virgin Mary’s Bayside Prophecies, vol. 2, 549. 39. Peter Freiburg, “Queens Simmers ­After ‘Vigils,’ ” New York Post, April 7, 1975. 40. William Caulfield, “Editorial: The ‘Vigils,’ ” Archives of the Diocese of Greater Brooklyn. 41. For an analy­sis of the history of this assumption in American law and politics, see Stephen L. Car­ter, The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion (New York: BasicBooks, 1993). 42. “Vigils: Tensions Continue to Mount,” Bayside Times 34, no. 34 (March 27, 1975): 1. 43. Susan Cheever Cowley, “Our Lady of Bayside Hills,” Newsweek, June 2, 1975, 46. 4 4. Robert Kalfus, Long Island Press, April 14, 1975. 45. Quoted in Jane Yager, “The Rosary and the Lawnmower: The Making of Public Religion in the Con­temporary American City” (thesis, Macalester College, 2001), 94. 46. “Vigils: Tensions Continue to Mount,” 10. 47. A document titled “Vigil Chronology” describes the number of residents who visited the precinct as over five hundred. However, Kevin Farrelly currently believes this number may be exaggerated. See Farrelly, “Vigil Chronology” (May 1995).

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48. “Uneasy Truce Over Vigils ­Faces Its Toughest Test,” Bayside Times 34, no. 35 (April 3, 1975): 14. 49. Farrelly, in interview with the author, June 16, 2012. 50. “Arrests Cap Demonstration at Vigil Site, College Gate,” Bayside Times 34, no. 36 (April 10, 1975): 1–2. 51. Farrelly, interview, June 16, 2012. 52. Susan Cheever Cowley, “Our Lady of Bayside Hills,” Newsweek (June 2, 1975), 46. 53. “5 years of Vigils Rile Some in Bayside,” New York Times, April 14, 1975, 35. 54. “ ‘Vigils’ Averting Major Confrontation,” Bayside Times 34, no. 37 (April 17, 1975): 1. 55. Monsignor James P. King to Commissioner Michael J. Codd, April 15, 1975, Archives of the Diocese of Brooklyn. 56. Lueken, “The Truth about the So-­Called Investigation.” 57. “Padavan Bids Lefkowitz Probe Vigils,” Bayside Times 34, no. 38 (April 24, 1975): 1. 58. Robert McG Thomas Jr., “­Woman Agrees to Change Site of Virgin Mary Vigils,” New York Times, May 23, 1975, 41. 59. Susan Cheever Cowley, “Our Lady of Bayside Hills,” Newsweek, June 2, 1975, 46. 60. Lueken, Virgin Mary’s Bayside Prophecies: A Gift of Love, vol. 3 (Lowell, MI: T ­ hese Last Days Ministries, 1998), 106–107. 61. Ann Ferguson, “My Memories of Veronica Lueken,” accessed September  10, 2012, http://­w ww​.­tldm​.­org​/­news4​/­MemoriesOfVeronica​.­htm. 62. Arthur Everett, “Religious Street Vigils in N.Y. Ended,” St. Petersburg Times, May 24, 1975, 4-­A. 63. “Peace Returns to Bayside Hills,” Bayside Times 34, no. 43 (May 29, 1975): 1–12. 64. Peter Freiburg, “Queens Simmers A ­ fter ‘Vigil,’ ” New York Post, April 7, 1975. 65. Jubilation Day Program, 1975, Archives of the Diocese of Brooklyn. 66. For a discussion of the ­Battle of Bayside in terms of civil religion, see Yager, “Rosary and the Lawnmower.” 67. David Chidester and Edward Tabor Linenthal, American Sacred Space (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 8. 68. Farrelly, interview, June 14, 2012. 69. Jane H. Lii, “Neighborhood Report: Bayside Hills; A Cherished Memory: Banishing Veronica,” New York Times, June 4, 1995, 9. 70. Robert A. Orsi, History and Presence (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2016), 67.

Part II: Shifting Marian Meanings



Fatima ­Family Shrine Reinterpreting Mary on the South Dakota Prairie k atherine duga n

Like Fatima—­which was a small rural parish and town where the M ­ other of God appeared in the Cova da Iria in Portugal—­Alexandria, South Dakota, is a small town in rural Amer­i­ca. —­Mary in Mid-­America: Fatima F­ amily Shrine

By 1974, Robert J. Fox had been a diocesan priest in eastern South Dakota for almost twenty years. That summer, Fox went on what would become the first of many pilgrimages to Fatima, Portugal, with the Blue Army of Fatima, the long-­time international promoters of devotion to Our Lady of Fatima.1 Fox walked around the site where, sixty years prior, three shepherd c­ hildren had experienced an “ ‘explosion of the super­natural’ into the modern world.”2 In the hills outside Fatima, in Cova da Iria, Portugal, Fox touched the spot where Mary appeared six times over the summer and into the fall of 1917. ­There, Our Lady of Fatima had shown Lucia and her cousins, Jacinta and Francisco, a vision of hell, called for a devotion to her Immaculate Heart for the conversion of Rus­sia, and predicted the suffering of popes.3 Fox prayed ­there, asking Mary the same question Lucia asked her: “What do you want of me?” ­There was no apparition or voice from the heavens for Fox. Rather, in a slow dawning during the two-­ week pilgrimage, he remembered feeling an “unmistakable conviction in [his] heart” 4 that Mary wanted him “to teach the fullness of the Catholic Faith to youth everywhere I could.” Ten years ­after this first pilgrimage, he described its long-­term impact: It was the beginning of my work for more than a quarter of a c­ entury in writing catechisms, leading intensive pilgrimage retreats, teaching through audiocassettes and ­television programs, writing for Catholic publications and fi­nally developing the Fatima ­Family Apostolate for the sanctification of the f­ amily.5

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Fox was clear that “[t]hat pilgrimage to Fatima . . . ​was a turning point in my priesthood. Ever ­after, my priesthood was to be colored with Fatima.” 6 And that Fatima-­colored priesthood eventually became manifest in the Fatima F ­ amily Shrine in Alexandria, South Dakota. Fox was born on Christmas Eve, 1927, into a large farming ­family near Watertown, South Dakota. He grew up as the youn­gest of eight c­ hildren with a widowed m ­ other, Susie Fox, who took her ­family to Mass e­ very Sunday. As his ­brothers ­were returning from World War II, this self-­described “farm boy” enrolled in the seminary. In 1955, Fox was ordained a priest in the Diocese of Sioux Falls. ­After almost three ­decades of assignments across the diocese, Fox was appointed pastor of St. Mary’s Parish in Alexandria in 1985. Alexandria is located east of the Missouri River that cuts South Dakota in half between “East River” and “West River.” Roughly six hundred p­ eople live in and around this small town, many on farms that have raised corn, soybeans, and alfalfa for several generations.7 Cross-­country travelers on Interstate 90, between Boston and Seattle, may have s­ topped h ­ ere for gas, several miles east of the world’s only Corn Palace. Amid the interstate billboards advertising ­free ­water in Wall Drug and mileposts that indicate where to turn off to visit the home of Laura Ingalls Wilder in nearby in DeSmet, a billboard welcomes visitors to Alexandria’s “Fatima F ­ amily Shrine.” Fox began fund­rais­ing for and then building the Fatima ­Family Shrine almost immediately upon his arrival in Alexandria. The shrine was dedicated in 1987. A series of additional shrines ­were added to the complex over the next several years: the Holy F ­ amily Chapel was finished in 1989, the same year as a pro-­life Guadalupe shrine and a statue of Our Lady of Fatima w ­ ere added. A Crucifixion Scene was blessed in 1991, and a ­Divine Mercy Shine was also installed that year. An Angel of the F ­ amily shrine joined the complex in June 1993. Mary has never appeared in Alexandria, South Dakota; instead, on the stark South Dakota prairie, this sprawling shrine complex both commemorates and interprets the apparition of Mary as Our Lady of Fatima in rural Portugal in 1917. Shrines often mediate apparitions. Across this collection are examples of how apparitions of Mary are reworked by the shrine-­builder’s design choices, their interpretations (and reinterpretations) of the apparition’s meaning, pilgrims’ experiences at shrines, as well as the par­tic­u­lar local contexts and historical moments of the shrine. This chapter examines how

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figure  15. This postcard from the 1990s depicts the complex of the Fatima F ­ amily Shrine. (From Katherine Dugan’s personal collection.)

Fatima F ­ amily Shrine mediates the apparitions of Our Lady of Fatima in—­ and for—­the milieu of late twentieth-­century South Dakota. I begin with a close look at the kinds of interpretative moves Fox makes within this shrine by examining the early shrine construction choices and the annual Marian Congresses held at the shrine in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s. I then turn to the addition of the Guadalupe shrine. By weaving together ­these two apparitions of Mary, Fatima ­Family Shrine marks out a version of Mary in South Dakota that is embedded with fears about the local ramifications of legalized abortion and infused with national pro-­ life politics. Fi­nally, I examine the shrine’s “Holy ­Family Chapel and Penitential Path” with attention to how ­these reinterpretations of the Fatima apparition and message allow Catholics to claim moral authority of “­family values” in the late twentieth and early twenty-­first centuries. Where a historical emphasis on Fatima’s messages urge the devout to pray the Rosary as a guard against the threats of communism, Fox’s shrine emphasizes Fatima’s message as a protector of pro-­life, nuclear, heterosexual ­family norms. This shrine sets an agenda for how to be Catholic in the late twentieth ­century. Fatima ­Family Shrine in rural South Dakota mediates a Marian apparition in light of con­temporary cultural anx­i­eties.

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Building Portugal’s Fatima in South Dakota The Fatima F­ amily Shrine in Mid-­America is designed as a monument of faith—to call all back to Jesus of the Gospels ever pre­sent in His Church. —­Mary in Mid-­America Shrine

Throughout September 1987, the Alexandria Herald ran several stories about Alexandria’s first “National Fatima ­Family Congress.” Fox and the parishioners at St. Mary’s ­organized four outdoor Masses at the newly completed Fatima ­Family and Eucharistic Shrine. They received the city’s permission for a Marian pro­cession five blocks through town and coordinated a series of speakers over the weekend to dedicate the new shrine. The three-­day event was ­organized around the theme: “Peace in the World, Peace in the Church, Peace in Our Families.” By the ­middle of September, the local newspaper was reporting that twelve hundred ­people from forty states and six countries had registered. In the days leading up to the congress, ­organizers worried about weather forecasts of rain, but clouds gave way to the sun for most of the long weekend. They listened to the local bishop, Paul Dudley, talk about the centrality of Marian devotion in Catholic life, “ ‘Mary, M ­ other of the Church’ and her role as teacher,” and Fox’s talk gave a preview of his argument that Fatima could have meaning in a post-­communist-­fear world, titled, “The Hour of Fatima is Now.” The Alexandria Herald’s full-­page spread of pictures shows the bishop of Fatima, Portugal, attending in full regalia. A class of ­children received their First Communion, and thousands of ­people participated in the candlelight pro­cession b­ ehind a statue of Our Lady of Fatima.8 The final estimates w ­ ere that somewhere between six and ten thousand ­people traveled—­some described it in their letters of gratitude to the newspaper’s editor as a “pilgrimage”—to attend this Marian Congress in a town where the closest ­hotel is twelve miles away. The newly completed Fatima ­Family and Eucharistic Shrine was (and is) composed of four statues. Moving from left to right, the statues are: an angel kneeling before a depiction of a tabernacle, Joseph holding Jesus, Our Lady of Fatima, and a depiction of Jesus as the Sacred Heart. In front of ­these large statues, a ­simple granite altar stands ready for a priest to say Mass—­a nd at the dedication of the shrine, during the congress in 1987, the bishops of Sioux Falls and Fatima, Portugal, co-­

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figure 16. The largest newspaper in the state, The Argus Leader, covered the dedication of the Fatima ­Family & Eucharistic Shrine in 1987. (From Katherine Dugan’s personal collection.)

celebrated Mass ­there. The altar is flanked by statues of the three child visionaries of Fatima kneeling in front of the shrine. Above the two structures that hold the statues of the members of the Holy ­Family, a huge swirling stained glass image depicts the apparition’s “miracle of the sun.”

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The Fatima F ­ amily and Eucharistic Shrine traffics between local and international locations, between cultural contexts, and between interpretive lenses. One way this happens is in the materiality of this shrine, which reflects Fox’s efforts to weave together the life of the Fatima apparition and Catholic life in Alexandria. Significantly, this shrine is made from granite from a local quarry, and each of the four statues is made from marble shipped to South Dakota from Portugal. Fox’s careful shrine design intentionally imitates the shrine at Fatima: the style of pilgrimage imitates that of Fatima, the images of Mary are mirrors of the Portuguese version, and the style of rock is similar in both places, as are the depictions of the child-­seers.9 Fox did not simply transplant a Portuguese apparition site in his home state; he rooted this shrine in South Dakota, using local materials, labeling the place “Fatima in South Dakota” and “Mary in Mid-­America.” Fox also seemed aware that most pilgrims to Alexandria—­especially in the 1980s and 1990s when international air travel was an even more substantial undertaking than it is t­ oday—­would not also travel to Portugal. This granite from South Dakota and marble from Portugal made it pos­si­ble for Catholics on the G ­ reat Plains to experience Fatima while also seeing their own locale reflected in the construction and design of the shrine. ­These material choices make this shrine translocal—­meaning it is rooted in both rural South Dakota and Fatima.10 Thomas Tweed has developed this language of the “translocal” in religious norms, arguing that both “dwelling” and movement are descriptive of how religions and religious p­ eople exist in the world. He posits that religions “employ tropes, artifacts, rituals, codes, and institutions to mark bound­aries, and they prescribe and proscribe dif­fer­ent kinds of movements across t­ hose bound­ aries.”11 As ­these meanings are enacted, prayed at, and reinterpreted, Fatima F ­ amily Shrine and the Marian Congresses become examples of what Tweed and James Clifford describe as a “translocal culture,” which describes how movement and dwelling overlap.12 In the case of Fatima ­Family Shrine, the translocal is between South Dakota and Portugal, but also between the cultural milieu of 1917 and the 1990s. This shrine remembers an apparition of Mary that occurred in a dif­ fer­ent location, a dif­fer­ent historical moment, and with a dif­fer­ent tone. This is, of course, not the first time that this specific apparition has been reworked to cross contexts. Anthropologist Jeffrey Bennett’s work on

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the Fatima apparitions describes how often—­a nd with much vigor—­ communities have created what he calls a “translocalization” of the Fatima event. Within the logic of Fatima devout, pilgrims have long seen the apparitions as the “validation of an entire religious outlook that had been bitterly contested at larger social and ­political levels but that remained central to the cause of structuring truth and value in the lives of interested individuals.”13 Since its origins, Bennett argues, Fatima has allowed its devout to situate themselves as truth-­bearers to a skeptical culture. The way that the Fatima messages have often sat somewhat askew of their cultural context, Bennet posits, allows for mimetic efforts wherever Fatima devout reside.14 The translocalization at work in the Fatima ­Family Shrine affirms a sense of a better, more ­righteous Catholic life on the prairie. Most of what con­temporary Catholics know of the apparitions and messages of Our Lady at Fatima come from the memoirs of the oldest seer, Lucia, which ­were first published in 1936. She reported that Mary had “asked for the consecration of Rus­sia to her Immaculate Heart, and for Catholics to receive Communion on the first Saturday of five consecutive months. The stakes of ­these practices ­were high: Fulfilling ­these requests would lead to the conversion of Rus­sia and world peace, while ignoring them would result in war, hunger, and the persecution of the Church.”15 ­After Pope Pius XII gave a homily on the twenty-­fifth anniversary of the apparitions and Lucia’s memoirs ­were published in ­English, Fatima became a more internationally known apparition.16 During the Cold War in the U.S., the slogan, “ ‘Fatimize or be atomized’ ” signaled that devotion to Mary at Fatima (especially through praying the Rosary) was a way to stave off global nuclear destruction.17 According to this mid-­century “Fatima worldview,” the world is ordered by an offended God who is angry with h ­ uman “sin and evil” ­because they represent a “violation of . . . ​a sacred order.” In the face of t­hese dangers, it is Mary who can intercede on behalf of ­humans, if only they repent and convert. The faithful must, “ ‘Pray! Pray a ­great deal!’  ”18 ­Popular American Catholic figures like Bishop Fulton Sheen visited Fatima and frequently mentioned Fatima’s call to pray the Rosary to resist communism.19 Notably, this distinctive mid-­century Fatima tenor of nuclear destruction and fear of communism is absent in Fox’s Fatima ­Family Shrine. The design choices that Fox made in the Fatima ­Family and Eucharist Shrine reflect his work to make the messages of Fatima relevant in the 1980s and

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1990s. This is perhaps most clear in the details of the swirling stained glass. The eye-­catching stained-­glass work in this shrine is an artistic rendering of Fatima’s “miracle of the sun.” This event marked the end of the apparitions at Fatima. As historian Sandra Zimdars-­Swartz summarizes several accounts of the apparition, it had been pouring rain throughout the night before and into the late morning of October 13, 1917, in Cova da Iria, and “a majority of t­ hose pre­sent said that they had seen the sun ­t remble and dance, and spoke of a variety of colors issuing from the sun and illuminating the crowd.” ­Others reported that they had also “seen the face of the Virgin, and some that the sun whirled like ‘a ­giant Catherine wheel,’ falling ­toward the earth.” Lasting roughly ten minutes, according to most accounts, many also describe a ­great heat from the sun, which dried them all from the rain.20 Fox loved this part of the apparition and leaned heavi­ly on this miracle in his interpretations of Fatima. In his hagiographic telling, the sun danced and looked like a “­giant Catherine wheel giving off all kinds of colors . . . ​[t]he sun descended and ascended three times before resuming its normal course.”21 He emphasized that Our Lady of Fatima performed the miracle “so that all may believe” and how Lucia instructed the many gathered to close their umbrellas and pray the Rosary.22 Fox designed the Fatima F ­ amily and Eucharistic Shrine’s stained glass as a pedagogical commemoration of this miracle but also encoded instructions on how to pray the Rosary. The guide he produced for pilgrims praying at the shrine explains that t­ here are fifteen golden stars in the glass, each representing the fifteen Mysteries of the Rosary. Fox reminds pilgrims that “[d]uring each of her apparitions at Fatima, our Lady asked that we pray the Rosary daily. She also asked that we pray the Rosary properly—­which means meditating on the Mysteries of the Rosary.”23 The emphasis on praying the Rosary is a long-­held message of Fatima, but the way Fox teaches pilgrims how to pray it and promotes it as an act of saving Catholic families layers new interpretations onto this apparition. This shrine teaches visitors and pilgrims alike how to be a par­tic­u­lar kind of Catholic, one devoted to the Rosary and to heteronormative Catholic ­family values. The shrine-­based Marian congresses doubled down on the interpretation of Fatima as focused on ­family values. This Fox-­infused version of Fatima provides guidance on how to be a good Catholic, in what Fox feared was an increasingly secularized context, and how to embody ideals of

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Catholic ­family life. The messages of Fatima are reinterpreted in a changed cultural context: Prayer and devotion to Catholic practice are needed in the face of secularism, a presumed loss of Catholic identity among young ­people, and perceived threats to the nuclear f­ amily. Not coincidentally, subsequent congresses w ­ ere moved to June, over F ­ ather’s Day weekend, to emphasize the importance of heterosexual, nuclear families led by ­fathers. The shrine-­based congresses touted themes that emphasized this focus on heterosexual ­family norms: “Call to Holiness: Fatima ­Family Congress” and other times, “Fatima in Amer­i­ca Congresses,”24 the theme was always a variation on holy ­family life and ­family values, such as 1989’s “Saving the ­Family for Jesus Christ in the Fullness of Truth Faith” or 1997’s “Families: Called to Holiness in Christ.”25 Fatima in Portugal is resisting communism, and Fatima in South Dakota is about protecting Catholic families. This mutability in meaning is indicative of the translocal, but also transtemporal, interpretations that took place at this shrine. Fox was an idiosyncratic personality, but he is certainly not alone in his efforts to reinterpret apparitions in changed cultural and historical contexts. This shrine is a replication of a Marian apparition in rural Portugal, but also a reinterpretation of the messages of Our Lady of Fatima. This shrine, with its accompanying congresses, piles on reinterpretations of the Fatima apparition from the prairies of South Dakota. The Congress of 1987 and the dedication of the Fatima F ­ amily and Eucharistic Shrine w ­ ere just the beginning of this interpretive Fatima movement on the prairie.26 As Fox built onto Alexandria’s Catholic shrine, the shrine’s interpretive work drew other Marian apparitions into this worldview.

Fatima’s Guadalupe in South Dakota: Pro-­Life Politics and Fatima We see in both Fatima and Guadalupe the call to faith and to re­spect the indissolubility of the marriage bond, the sanctity of the ­family and the right of the unborn to ­human life. —­Fr. Robert Fox, 199727

On Christmas Day, 1988, Fox said the holiday Mass in Alexandria and then spent most of the day traveling to the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe

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in Mexico City. Detailing the trip in his memoir years l­ater, he remembers planning the trip to “pray for guidance in adding a pro-­life shrine to the expanding Fatima F ­ amily Shrine.” His host was a young man he had met on one of his many pilgrimages to Cova da Iria. Fox said Mass at the Basilica in Mexico the day ­after Christmas, during which he told ­those gathered why he had come and, Fox reported, t­ hose at Mass “broke forth in applause.”28 For Fox, Guadalupe and Fatima w ­ ere interpretively linked within a pro-­life framework. Fox’s pilgrimage to the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City took place against the backdrop of a surge in interest in Guadalupe as a pro-­life figure. The ­Human Life International ­organization, then ­under the leadership of Fr. Paul Marx, began using Guadalupe as a Marian proclamation against abortion in the 1980s.29 The U.S. Bishops have long-­endorsed this interpretation of Guadalupe. Impor­tant for this Guadalupe statue is that Fox saw a line of continuity between his interpretations of Fatima devotion as about ­family values and Guadalupe’s opposition to abortion. By the 1990s, Guadalupe had become an icon of the pro-­life movement for some white Catholics, including many in Alexandria. Guadalupe, within the Fatima ­Family Shrine, is a six-­foot statue of Mary atop a large cement block with a plaque that explains who she is and that this is a pro-­life shrine—­“Patroness of the Unborn, Protectress of ­Children, ­Mother of the Amer­i­cas.” It is relatively modest in size, especially compared to the grandness of the central Fatima ­Family and Eucharist Shrine described e­ arlier. Located off to the side of the complex, the bronze of the statue contrasts with the marble and concrete of the other structures, which creates an arresting aesthetic. The most eye-­catching part of the image is the rays around her back. The Mexican artist who designed this statue had previously designed a large bronze statue of Pope John Paul II at the Shrine of Guadalupe in Mexico City. Fox met and invited that artist to use a similar style in Alexandria. Further building the transnational nature of the Fatima ­Family Shrine complex, the bishop of Mexico City traveled to ­A lexandria in 1989 for the formal dedication and cele­bration of this addition to the Fatima F ­ amily Shrine. Of course, Pope John Paul II is also intimately connected ­here—he claimed that Our Lady of Fatima saved his life during

figure 17. The Guadalupe Shrine within the Fatima F ­ amily Shrine. (From Katherine Dugan’s personal collection.)

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the assassination attempt of May 13, 1981, which happened on the feast day of Our Lady of Fatima and the anniversary of her first apparition in 1917.30 This addition of pro-­life politics at the Fatima ­Family Shrine was a way for Fox to connect his proj­ect to a growing sense of Catholic identity defined by John Paul II’s interest in a distinctive Catholic identity. ­These ties between Fatima, Alexandria, John Paul II, and Guadalupe are part of how Fox stitched together a version of Fatima that is worried about secularism, focused on Catholic f­amily life, and on a version of Guadalupe concerned about pro-­life politics. Fox is clear about this larger matrix of Marian meanings: “The Guadalupe message is not just for Mexico. . . . ​Like Fatima, it too, is for the ­family, the world . . . ​a message ever relevant.”31 Fox argues that the two visions are linked through their shared messages of “life, of grace and of mercy.” B ­ ecause the Fatima ­Family Shrine is dedicated to “holiness of the ­family” and “must speak for the sanctity of ­human life,” then “[t]he logical conclusion of what image of Mary would best pre­sent that truth is found in Our Lady of Guadalupe.”32 Drawing on by-­then familiar tropes by pro-­life groups that had begun to depict Guadalupe as having ­stopped the “­human sacrifices [of] ­children and, for the most part, infants,”33 Fatima ­Family Shrine echoes and develops reinterpretations of Fatima, as invested in anti-­ abortion, pro-­life politics. Illustrating this interpretive link, during the 1989 Marian Congress, Fox invited Edouard Cardinal Gagnon, of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for the F ­ amily, to perform the dedication of the newly constructed Guadalupe shrine. Further linking this interpretation of the Fatima apparitions to Guadalupe and pro-­life politics, the Cardinal also blessed a handful of pregnant ­women and baptized an ­adopted child. This child’s birth ­mother was a teenager who, as Fox summarized the event, “could have had this child aborted. She chose not to.”34 Impor­tant h ­ ere is the par­tic­u­lar social context of this South Dakota–­ based pro-­life Guadalupe devotion. In the early 1990s, Catholic parishioners in Alexandria raised money for a shrine to Our Lady of Guadalupe—not of Mexico and Mexican-­A merican Catholic identity, but of the unborn and as a statement of pro-­life Catholic politics. While abortion was, of course, l­egal across the country by 1989, abortion has never been easy to access in South Dakota. Governors and state legislators have consistently been elected on the promise of restricting abor-

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tion access and the state still has some of the most restrictive laws in the country. In 1989, t­here was one doctor in the entire state who would perform an abortion—­a nd he was located in Sioux Falls, about ninety miles east of Alexandria.35 In her ethnographic study of how abortion debates have unfolded on the ­Great Plains, Faye Ginsberg examines the high stakes of abortion for Catholic familyhood. Yes, the abortion debate is about resisting a surgical procedure understood by some as killing a baby; but it is almost more significantly about an entire pro-­life worldview, where “abortion destroys the bases of gender differences critical to biological, cultural, and social reproduction. It subverts the fertile u ­ nion of men and w ­ omen. . . . ​This prospect threatens the ­union of opposites on which continuity of the social ­whole is presumed to rest.”36 This means that, amid the cornfields and soybeans, Catholics in rural Amer­i­ca set themselves to the task of praying for the soul of the country through the intercession of Guadalupe at the Fatima F ­ amily Shrine complex. Not unlike their p­ redecessors who prayed the Rosary at Fatima’s insistence to protect the world from communism, Guadalupe at this shrine instructs Catholics on how to be the moral voice of a nation. ­There is a ­political morality invested in this Fatima-­ infused Guadalupe.

Fatima’s F ­ amily Values in Mid-­America The Holy ­Family Chapel is a place for special prayers and consecrations ­concerning the sanctification of ­family life. —­Pilgrimage to Fatima F­ amily Shrine

In his guidebook, Pilgrimage to the Fatima ­Family Shrine, Fox instructs visitors on how to approach a part of the shrine’s complex called the Holy F ­ amily Chapel. Pilgrims to this shrine are instructed to pray the penitential path “on your knees from the [main] Shrine area to the chapel.” This shrine was added to the Fatima ­Family Shrine in 1989, was designed to be a replica of what is known as the “­little chapel” at the apparition site in Fatima, Portugal. The devout are expected to pray the Rosary while moving along the granite path. They are instructed to “consecrate” their ­family to Mary at Fatima, asking for special blessings upon f­ amily life.37

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This chapel’s stained glass mirrors the “miracle of the sun” glass in the main Fatima F ­ amily and Eucharistic Shrine, but the emphasis on rosary instructions has been replaced by an emphasis on the Holy F ­ amily. Each panel of the chapel has intricate designs in blues and reds and yellows, making swirling images of angels. Two large statues of angels, just inside the entrance, make clear that the message at Fatima is about ­family life: One is an “Angel of the F ­ amily and Youth” and the other an “Angel of the Eucharist and the of the Tabernacle.” As the shrine’s promotional materials describe it, this shrine is meant to be a “place for special prayers and consecrations concerning the sanctification of f­ amily life.”38 The physical, translocal presences of this shrine are intentional—­a Portuguese ­woman sculpted the Holy F ­ amily image, and her visuals ­were assisted by Sr. Lucia, the one Fatima seer still alive during the shrine’s development in the late 1980s. This emphasis on ­family life reflects a par­tic­u­lar focus by Fox on a part of the Fatima apparitions. Fox regularly wrote about and gave homilies about the moments just before the “miracle of the sun.” Quoting liberally from Lucia’s reports, Fox highlights that the three shepherd ­children looked in the sky and “ ‘ beside the sun we saw Saint Joseph with Child ­Jesus, and Our Lady robed in white with a blue mantle.’ ”39 This part of the vision became a central interpretive key for Fox’s meaning-­making of Fatima in the 1980s. As Fox developed his grammar of Fatima-­infused f­ amily values, he used “sanctification of f­ amily life” to mean a commitment to Catholic marriage and raising Catholic c­ hildren. Of course, Catholics moralizing about heterosexual ­family norms is not new; neither is the use of the Holy ­Family as the model of ideal familyhood. But this link between the appearance of the Holy F ­ amily in Fatima’s miracle of the sun is unique. Fox makes the connection like this: At Fatima, Mary’s “call for the sanctification of ­family life . . . ​Heaven was calling the ­family to holiness.” 40 The shrine’s guide explains that this intention was inspired by the vision of the “Holy ­Family seen by the three shepherd ­children at Fatima during the miracle of the spinning sun.” This, as Fox interprets the vision, means that the Holy F ­ amily is meant to be the model of a Catholic f­ amily. Notably, this chapel was added to the shrine in late 1989, amid the rise of the Christian Right and the ideology of “­family values” on the national and statewide p­ olitical landscape.41 One way that Catholics interpreted ­political and social conservativism was in terms of the “threat to the

figure  18. The Pilgrimage to Fatima F­ amily Shrine guides visitors through the shrine and advises how to pray at the shrine. (From Katherine Dugan’s personal collection.)

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f­ amily.” What had once been fear of “godless communism” became, as the shrine materials put it, a sense that “the ­family is ­under attack” and families risk “sink[ing] into the sea of secularism.” 42 The design of this shrine consistently proclaims that message. One of the angels at the entrance to this Holy F ­ amily Chapel has a crown on its head—­that crown is a “crown for purity” ­because, the Shrine’s guidebook explains, “Satan has been effective in his effort to destroy the ­family, to destroy the beauty of love between man and ­woman.” 43 This articulates the gendered norms at work ­here: “The crisis of the f­amily and faith in the world is stemming largely from the failures of men as husbands and ­fathers.” 44 Fox blames the feminism of the w ­ omen’s liberation movement, which, he argues, has made “wimps of many young men” ­because it encourages “the wife [to] usurp her husband’s role” in families.45 Fox is writing of his perception of a national trend, though undoubtedly informed by his local experiences. As South Dakota feminist Ruth Ann Alexander remembers it, the w ­ omen’s movement arrived late in South Dakota; its light “eventually penetrate[d] South Dakota to change the lives of ­women ­here.”  46 In the 1970s, ­women in South Dakota began serving on school boards and gaining state-­level appointments. By 1988, ­women made up more than half of the student population at South Dakota colleges and more and more ­women ­were entering the workforce. Particularly galling to Fox must have been that a Catholic s­ ister was part of the South Dakota’s feminist del­e­ga­tion to the 1977 International ­Women’s Year Conference in Houston.47 Fox refused to allow girl altar servers in his parish, even when the local bishop began allowing it in the 1980s.48 For Fox, the ­women’s movement spelled disaster for families and the Church, which relied on families to be rightly ordered mini-­churches. Scholars of religion in the U.S. have often argued that anti-­communist devotion to Fatima in the 1950s aided a Catholic assimilation into American politics—­among them, Roger Ellswood aptly described Fatima as a way for Catholics to embody “a counter-­cultural way to be directly in the cultural mainstream.” 49 During the Cold War, Catholics relied on Fatima to assert their capacity to be both Catholic and American. Marian devotion became a sort of “triumphalist Americanism” that situated Marian devotion.50 Forty years ­later, with a dif­fer­ent intention, a similar assertion about American Catholicism as being able to uphold cultural values is at work in this Holy F ­ amily Shrine.

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Fox built the shrine in South Dakota as a ­righteous claim of how to be a good Catholic and how to raise a Catholic ­family in the late twentieth ­century. This shrine embeds a vision of how to do Catholic familyhood amid Fox’s perception of changing norms of ­family life in the U.S. The fervor of anti-­communist Fatima devotion was dispersing into fears about ­family values, rising divorce rates, and concerns about how ­women’s rights ­were reshaping traditional ­family norms. It is notable, however, that this kind of moral-­political framework is being made through the apparition of Mary at Fatima and at a chapel devoted to a par­tic­u­lar vision of Fatima’s “miracle of the sun.” The per­ sis­tent and interpretive presence of the Fatima ­Family Shrine on the prairie of South Dakota is part of what Paula Kane has described as a surge in “the conservative revival of the mid-1980s.”51 Fox and the Fatima F ­ amily Shrine are part of this 1980s resurgence of Marian devotion. Most interpretations (and other replica shrines of Fatima) focus on Mary’s message to Catholics to be more devout, to pray the Rosary, and fight communism. That message is creatively reworked on the prairie. The role of Mary, Joseph, and Jesus as the idyllic ­family becomes central to the message of the shrine. While the message of Fatima has been traditionally understood as a reactionary shrine that focuses on fear and opposition, the Holy ­Family Shrine within the Fatima F ­ amily Shrine turns the message forward-­facing. Rather than fear or rejection of something, this shrine tries to articulate a forward-­ looking vision of how to embody Catholic life. This is about how to be a good Catholic. The specifics of anti-­communist Fatima faded as ­pro-­family-­values Fatima emerged h ­ ere. Fatima F ­ amily Shrine works on American Catholic identity, prescribing expectations for Catholic families.

Conclusion Sometimes we look upon the shrine simply as a memorial and fail to make it an occasion for prayer. . . . ​Let us never pass by without prayer. —­Mid-­America’s Fatima F­ amily Shrine Prayer Book

In June 2012, I arrived in Alexandria for a one-­time anniversary revival of the congresses, called “Marian Congress Celebrating the Mid-­America’s

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Fatima F ­ amily Shrine.” Two teen­agers directed me to the overflow parking lot at the nearby high school. Fox had retired from active diocesan life in 2003 and died in 2009. It had been several years since the parishioners of St. Mary’s had hosted the Marian Congress. As a commemoration of the twenty-­fifth anniversary of the shrine, the parish’s current pastor de­cided to host a three-­day conference. The topics ­were updated from the 1990s, but the themes w ­ ere familiar: An anti-­abortion activist made a strong plea for overturning Roe v. Wade, a married layman gave a speech on how to “live the Fatima message” through traditional ­family values, attendees prayed the Rosary together, and Mass was held at the shrine. Fatima F ­ amily Shrine—­and its reinterpretations and reworkings of the apparitions of Our Lady of Fatima—­contains and enacts wide-­ranging interpretations of ­family life and pro-­life politics in this translocal context of rural South Dakota. Studying this shrine sheds light on three impor­tant themes in U.S. Catholicism. The Fatima F ­ amily Shrine draws visitors into an experience of the Fatima apparitions and Mary’s messages in rural Portugal. From small-­town South Dakota, pilgrims are invited to experience a kind of Catholic practice that is both firmly rooted in Alexandria and draws them into an international Catholic world. Throughout the complex, Portuguese marble and artists from Portugal and Mexico interact with stone from the G ­ reat Plains. T ­ hese physical markers draw the pilgrim not only into Catholic life on the prairie, but also into the transnational experience of Fatima devotion. The life of this shrine is inseparable from the priesthood of Robert Fox. His detailed reinterpretations of Fatima’s “miracle of the sun” as a message about ­family values add layers of con­temporary meaning to an apparition traditionally focused on international politics. It is impossible to examine Fatima F ­ amily Shrine without also delving into the life of its ­founder. This r­ ipples through Catholic life: Individuals within and beyond the hierarchy regularly manage to imprint their ideas into Catholic life. This means that shrines give us a glimpse not only of the devotional life of pilgrims and the expectations of shrine-­builders, but also a way of seeing how individuals can impact Catholic practices. Fi­nally, the Fatima ­Family Shrine reflects ongoing efforts to have Mary, especially Our Lady of Fatima, speak to the con­temporary milieu. Fatima’s message of anti-­communism played a critical role in making American Catholics legible to a broader U.S. audience in the 1950s. That read of Fatima

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had become stale by the 1970s and 1980s, but Fatima is a power­ful and malleable figure. By updating the ­enemy—­from communism to secularism, from nuclear destruction to destruction of the nuclear ­family—­Fox joined a growing set of religious conservatives (inspired by Pope John Paul II) in carving out a new way to be Catholic. The shrine’s emphasis on f­amily values is an effort to speak—in terms of both heterosexual nuclear families and opposition to abortion—to the late twentieth and early twenty-­first ­century in terms that resonated more pressingly than communism. Shrines are never simply empty containers of ideas. They have an agency that shapes the landscape around the devout and encourages par­ tic­u­lar reads of the con­temporary moment. By importing a pro-­life, pro-­ family version of Fatima, the Fatima ­Family Shrine prescribes how to be Catholic. In this view, Fatima has never been just about what happened in Cova da Iria. Instead, it is about how Marian apparitions have been viewed and interpreted for over a ­century. Fatima ­Family Shrine is another chapter in that still-­unfolding story of Marian shrines. While the Fatima ­Family Shrines’ emphasis on ­family values is notable among the crowd, it is certainly not the only shrine that intervenes in the story of Fatima. This renegotiation, reinterpretation, and reworking is the work that Marian shrines do across the U.S. Notes 1. The Vatican formally acknowledged Mary’s apparition at Fatima in 1930. In 1947, a priest in Newark founded the Blue Army of Our Lady of Fatima Apostolate, “dedicated to the daily rosary and voluntary acts of penance offered to God for peace in the world and the conversion of Rus­sia” (Frederick L. Miller, “The Significance of Fatima: A Seventy-­Five-­Year Perspective,” Marian Studies 44, Article 9 (1993): 71–72, available at https://­ecommons​.­udayton​.­edu​/­marian​ _­studies​/­vol44​/­iss1​/­9). 2. Robert J. Fox, “Fatima and the F ­ amily,” Fatima F­ amily Messenger, October–­December 1992, 4. 3. Sandra L. Zimdars-­Swartz, Encountering Mary: Visions of Mary from La Salette to Medjugorje (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1991), 199, 201. 4. Mike ­Sullivan, “Youth for Fatima: An Interview with Fr. Robert J. Fox,” Lay Witness Magazine, July–­August, 2005, https://­laywitness​.­org​/­Laywitness​ /­Online​_­view​.­asp​?­lwID​=­226. 5. Fr. Robert J. Fox, Fatima T ­ oday: The Third Millennium (Redfield, SD: Fatima F ­ amily Apostolate, 1983, 2001), 156.

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6. Fr. Robert J. Fox, A Priest Is a Priest Forever (Hanceville, AL: Fatima ­Family Apostolate, 2005), 235. 7. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the population of Alexandria was 588  in 1990 and at 615  in 2010, https://­data​.­census​.­gov​/­cedsci​/­table​?­q​=­Alexandria. Hanson County, from which the population of Catholics at St. Mary’s comes, was at 3,330  in 2010, https://­data​.­census​.­gov​/­cedsci​/­table​?­q​=­Hanson 8. “Fatima ­Family Shrine to Be Dedicated, Blessed Saturday Night,” Alexandria Herald, September 24, 1987; “1200 Expected to Attend Marian Congress,” Alexandria Herald, September 24, 1987; “Thousands Attend Marian Congress Event,” Alexandria Herald, October 1, 1987; “Bishop Amaral Dedicates Fatima Shrine,” Alexandria Herald, October 1, 1987; “Marian Congress Set for June 24–26,” Alexandria Herald, April 28, 1988; “600 Attend Second Marian Congress,” Alexandria Herald, June 30, 1989. 9. Fox’s bibliography is expansive. A small sampling of frequent sellers include: Marian Manual, Fatima T ­ oday, Heroic Catholic Families, Catholic Truth for Youth, The Day the Sun Danced, and Saints and Heroes Speak (4 vols.). He also wrote most of his quarterly magazine, Fatima F­ amily Messenger for more than ­decade and was an occasional columnist for the National Catholic Register and Soul Magazine (the quarterly magazine for the World Apostolate of Fatima-­USA). 10. Thomas Tweed, Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 58. 11. Tweed, Crossing and Dwelling, 123. 12. James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth ­Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 7. 13. Jeffrey S. Bennett, When the Sun Danced: Myth, Miracles, and Modernity in Early Twentieth-­Century Portugal (Charlottesville, VA: University of ­Virginia Press, 2012), 145. 14. Bennett, When the Sun Danced, 145–150. 15. Thomas A. Kselman and Steven Avella, “Marian Piety and the Cold War in the United States,” Catholic Historical Review 72, no. 3 (July 1986): 403–424, esp. 409. 16. Una Cadagen has argued that t­ hese apparitions at Fatima w ­ ere l­ ittle known outside of Portugal u ­ ntil the 1940s; Cadegan, “The Queen of Peace in the Shadow of War: Fatima and U.S. Catholic Anticommunism,” U.S. Catholic Historian 22, no. 4 (Fall 2004): 1–5. 17. Paula Kane, “Marian Devotion Since 1940: Continuity or Casualty?,” in Habits of Devotion: Catholic Religious Practice in Twentieth C ­ entury Amer­i­ca, ed. James O’Toole (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 101. 18. Zimdars-­Swartz, Encountering Mary, 246–249; Quotes on page 247. 19. Kselman and Avella, “Marian Piety,” 411–412.

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20. Zimdars-­Swartz, Encountering Mary, 82–83. In her description, Zimdars-­Swartz cites the work of J. De Marchi, Fatima: The Facts, trans. I. M. Kingsbury (Cork: Mercier Press, 1950). 21. Marchi, Fatima: The Facts, 9. 22. Fox, Fatima ­Today, 29–32. 23. Mary in Mid-­America: Fatima F­ amily Shrine, Alexandria, South Dakota, 33. 24. Mary in Mid-­America, 27. 25. “­Family Values Stressed at Marian Congress,” Alexandria Herald, June 27, 1991; “The ­Family is Focus of Marian Congress,” Alexandria Herald, June 29, 1989; Robert J. Fox, “Theme: ‘Families: Called to Holiness in Christ,’ ” Immaculate Heart Messenger, April-­May-­June 1997, 38. 26. Miller, “The Significance of Fatima.” 27. Fr. Robert J. Fox, “Editorial: FFA Inspired by Fatima and Guadalupe,” Immaculate Heart Messenger, April-­May-­June 1997, inside cover. 28. Fox, Priest Forever, 296. 29. Fr. Paul Marx, “Our Patroness: Our Lady of Guadalupe,” H ­ uman Life International, https://­w ww​.­hli​.­org​/­about​-­us​/­our​-­mission​/­our​-­lady​-­of​-­guadalupe​ -­patroness​-­of​-­the​-­unborn​/­. 30. George Weigel, Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), 440. 31. Fox, “Editorial,” inside cover. 32. Fr. Robert J. Fox, “­Mother of Mercy / ­Mother of Life,” in Immaculate Heart Messenger, April-­May-­June, 1997, p 18. 33. Fox, “Editorial.” This echoes common tropes among conservative, pro-­life Catholic groups who have adapted Our Lady of Guadalupe as a symbol of the cause. As Karen Park has pointed out: “Groups such as ‘Priests for Life’ and ‘­Human Life International’ use her as their patroness. They also make explicit claims linking the pre-­Christian Aztec practice of h ­ uman sacrifice to the ‘bloodthirsty h ­ uman sacrifice’ of abortion.” Karen Park, “ ‘Citadel of Orthodoxy’: Meaning, Message, and Pilgrimage at Our Lady of Guadalupe Shrine in La Crosse, Wisconsin,” American Catholic Studies 128, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 1–16, esp. 4. 34. “Cardinal Gagnon Praises FFA Congress,” Fatima F­ amily Messenger, July-­August-­September, 1989, 17. 35. Guttmacher Institute Fact Sheets, https://­w ww​.­guttmacher​.­org​/­fact​ -­sheet​/­state​-­facts​-­about​-­abortion​-­south​-­dakota, and https://­w ww​.­guttmacher​ .­org​/­state​-­policy​/­explore​/­choose​-­life​-­license​-­plates. 36. Faye D. Ginsburg, Contested Lives: The Abortion Debate in an American Community (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 216. Ginsburg study is based in Fargo, North Dakota, about 250 miles northeast of Alexandria.

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37. Pilgrimage to Fatima F­ amily Shrine (Hanceville, AL: Fatima ­Family Apostolate, 2005), 5–7. 38. Pilgrimage to Fatima F­ amily Shrine, 5. 39. Fr. Robert J. Fox, The Charter of the Fatima F­ amily Apostolate, 7; Fox’s writings are short on clear citation. But this reference comes from S­ ister Lucia, Fatima in Lucia’s Own Words, ed. by Fr. Louis Kondor (Fort Worth, Texas: Stella Maris Books, 1976). 40. Fox, Charter of the Fatima F­ amily Apostolate, 8. 41. I find Seth Dowland’s F­ amily Values and the Rise of the Christian Right (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) particularly helpful for interpreting the place of Catholics in that ­political landscape. Joan Wallach Scott’s Sex and Secularism (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2018) includes a helpful overview of the normative power of the nuclear ­family. 42. Mary in Mid-­America, 37. 43. Pilgrimage to Fatima F­ amily Shrine, 9. 4 4. Fox, “Fatima and the ­Family,” 38. 45. Fox, Priest Forever, 306. Despite Fox’s fevered pitch, marriage rates in the 1980s and 1990s ­were higher in South Dakota than in the rest of the country, and divorce rates w ­ ere lower; 4.1 of ­every 1,000 South Dakotans got divorced in 1980 (“Marriage and Divorce,” South Dakota Department of Health, doh​.­sd​.­gov​/­statistics​/­2009Vital​/­MarriageDivorce​.­pdf). 46. Ruth Ann Alexander, “A Feminist Memoir, 1964–1989,” South Dakota History 19, no. 4 (Winter 1989): 539–555, esp. 539. 47. Interview with Ruth Ann Alexander, 1977; from “1977 International ­Women’s Year (IWY) Oral History Collection,” https://­digital​.­library​.­sc​.­edu​ /­exhibits​/­iwy​/­national​-­interviews​/­ruth​-­ann​-­alexander​/­. 48. Fox, Priest Forever, 245. 49. Quoted in Kane, “Marian Devotion Since 1940,” 102. 50. Thomas Tweed, Amer­i­ca’s Church: The National Shrine and Catholic Presence in the Nation’s Capital (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 24–27. 51. Kane, “Marian Devotion since 1940,” 121. Kane mentions Fox and his Fatima F ­ amily Apostolate as an example. This also reflects Fox’s commitment to Catholic identity as articulated by John Paul II during his long papacy. Pope John Paul II’s devotion to Our Lady of Fatima as a figure of anti-­communism, personal protector, and Catholic practice is well-­documented, but summarized nicely by Miller, “The Significance of Fatima,” 56–87.



Consolation’s Many ­Faces Ethnic Intersections at the National Shrine of Our Lady of Consolation in Carey, Ohio dav id j. endres

Introduction: “One Vast Hail Mary” If I could paint, I could find no subject more replete in h ­ uman interest than this marvelous spectacle. . . . ​The rich and the poor, the young and the old, foreigners, wearing in their ­faces the stamp of their ­nationality . . . ​trusting in the listening ear of a Divine Intercessor, while thousands of lips move together in one vast “Hail Mary!”1 —­Participant in the Annual Assumption Novena, August 1910

Since 1875, hundreds of thousands of pilgrims have journeyed to the Basilica and National Shrine of Our Lady of Consolation in rural Northwest Ohio to join their prayers in “one vast ‘Hail Mary.’ ” Small towns and farmland dot the region surrounding the shrine, an area settled by ­European American immigrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Indeed, vari­ous immigrant groups have long been attracted to the shrine. Over the years, shrine pilgrims have spoken more than a dozen tongues, representing a veritable United Nations of immigrants and their descendants.2 The pilgrims who come to Carey, Ohio, take part in an ancient tradition of asking the M ­ other of God’s intercession u ­ nder the title “Our Lady of Consolation,” acknowledging the Virgin Mary as a loving ­mother who cares for her sons and ­daughters, especially in times of illness, suffering, and persecution. In seeking spiritual benefits and sometimes physical, ­mental, or emotional healing, pilgrims leave their work and home lives ­behind. In par­tic­u­lar, immigrants who often encounter their new environment as unfamiliar and disorienting come to Carey seeking super­ natural graces while cultivating spheres of faith and kinship that remind them of home.

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Over many ­decades, the pilgrims’ ethnic identities intersected at Carey as newer arrivals w ­ ere added to e­ arlier immigrant populations (and their descendants). Western E ­ uropeans w ­ ere the first wave, followed by Eastern and Southern ­Europeans in the first half of the twentieth ­century. Over the past fifty years, Latino, Asian, and M ­ iddle Eastern immigrants have become the most numerous. In each case, one or more ethnic groups became dominant without replacing former groups. The ­earlier groups remained in smaller numbers while intersecting with newer immigrants. The devotions exhibited at Carey witness to immigration as a “theologizing experience” that can heighten religious practice and introspection.3 Immigrants’ faith, ­because it does not demand divided loyalties between home and host nations, helps to incorporate waves of newcomers. As the history of the shrine indicates, religious fervor is not always sustained in the second and third generations a­ fter immigration. Still, expressions of faith help forge an ethnic identity and convey it to the next generation. As ethnic groups intersect and interact, their shared faith and devotion do not destroy cultural variation. The devotions at Carey show that the interplay between assimilation and ethnic distinctiveness is a false dichotomy; incorporation into a new society can occur while maintaining or even strengthening ethnoreligious identity. This chapter on the devotions practiced at the Basilica and National Shrine of Our Lady of Consolation serves as a case study of immigrant piety. By highlighting the role of vari­ous ethnic groups, especially the most recent immigrant group, Chaldean Catholics from Iraq, it argues for the adaptability of the devotion and the force of ethnic identity as immigrant groups navigate the pro­cession of “becoming American.”

Chaldean Catholics and Con­temporary Marian Devotion Pilgrimage to the shrine has taken on vari­ous forms throughout its history. The first pilgrims came by foot or cart, then by train, automobile, or chartered bus. In 2020, the in-­person pilgrimage was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but “virtual pilgrims” w ­ ere invited to access preaching and prayers digitally—in six languages. Two annual commemorations attracted large numbers: the feast of Our Lady of Consolation on the fourth Sunday ­after Easter (which declined in importance over the years) and the solemnity of Mary’s Assumption each August 15. At the Assumption

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feast, crowds ­were reportedly as high as fifty thousand pilgrims. In recent years, up to ten thousand take part if the solemnity occurs near a weekend.4 The shrine’s pilgrims include a significant number of Chaldean Catholics—­Iraqis who fled vio­lence and persecution to make a new home, often in Southeast Michigan.5 Only a two-­hour drive by car from Detroit, Carey is accessible to the Chaldean community. Beginning in the 1970s, Chaldean clergy promoted the shrine to their ­people, and interest spread. In recent ­decades, Chaldeans have predominated at the annual Assumption novena, numbering in the thousands. The gathering serves as an opportunity for diasporic Chaldeans to forge or reaffirm religious, ethnic, and familial bonds. The Assumption novena begins each year on August 6, culminating with a candlelight pro­cession and Mass presided over by the bishop of Toledo on August 14, the vigil of the solemnity. Devotions each ­evening include a rosary pro­cession, recitation of the novena prayer, proclaiming of Scripture, and a homily from a guest preacher, often a member of the Conventual Franciscans, the religious community that staffs the shrine. Before the ­services, confessions are heard in the shrine or, on the novena’s final day, on the lawn nearby. In the early to mid-­twentieth c­ entury, confessions ­were heard in up to ­eighteen languages. More recently, foreign-­ language confessions are less frequent (according to the availability of priests), but penitents sometimes offer their act of contrition in their native tongue before receiving absolution. Ethnic intersections are evident during the “feast week.” Numerous ethnic groups, including many Indians and Albanians, join the Iraqis and the Euro-­American descendants of the shrine’s first devotees. At alternating times, liturgy is celebrated in the shrine for vari­ous language groups. For Eastern Catholics, liturgies are celebrated in Syriac according to the Chaldean rite and in Ma­la­ya­lam according to the Syro-­Malabar rite (based in India). Prayers are also offered in ­English, Spanish, and Albanian. Historically, liturgies ­were also celebrated in Italian and Eastern ­European languages. Attendees join the nightly rosary pro­cession b­ ehind banners depicting their regional and local Marian devotions. Beyond the liturgical, participants socialize with food and drink according to their customs, further enforcing bonds of kinship. The mixing of ethnic groups at the shrine is vis­i­ble through the items they leave b­ ehind. Pilgrims from vari­ous groups deposit ex-­votos (literally,

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“from the vow”), objects that acknowledge a prayer offered or answered. By the early twentieth c­ entury, as healings through the intercession of Our Lady of Consolation ­were reported, visitors left dozens of crutches and canes. They w ­ ere neatly hung on the shrine’s walls and l­ater placed with other ex-­votos in the shrine’s crypt. ­Today, a ­great diversity of ex-­votos, including casts, braces, and ­children’s booties, are found among the hundreds of items displayed within (and increasingly on top of) a series of glass cases. Recently left items include photos of ill persons, dog tags of returned military personnel, and pregnancy sonograms. Photos, prayers of intercession, and handwritten explanations, often in E ­ nglish or Arabic, sometimes accompany the items as further evidence of the ethnic groups who pray at the shrine. During the nine days of the Assumption novena, the number of pilgrims, mostly Chaldeans, builds from hundreds to thousands. The town’s resources are stretched to provide food, lodging, and security. Some visitors stay off-­site, but many camp on the shrine property, where a temporary city of tents and RVs forms. A few pilgrim families rent homes in Carey, with at least one Chaldean-­owned residence used exclusively during the novena week. Shrine officials attempt to ­organize the tent city’s chaos, marking camp areas with yellow tape, providing trashcans, and directing pilgrims not to camp on the church lawn. In recent ­decades, Chaldeans have become the most prominent group attending the novena. M ­ iddle Eastern Catholics’ presence in Carey goes back a c­ entury. In 1917, several hundred Maronite Catholics, chiefly immigrants from Lebanon, came to the shrine, holding an all-­night vigil in the church.6 Reports from the early 1920s indicated that “many Syrians” from Cleveland and Detroit ­were pre­sent. During the novenas in the 1920s, the liturgies w ­ ere celebrated not just in Latin, familiar to Euro-­American Catholics, but also in the Maronite, Melchite, and Syriac rites.7 Chaldeans’ interest in the shrine grew organically, communicated mainly by word of mouth. As one pilgrim reported, “Families found comfort in Carey b­ ecause the church . . . ​catered to them and spoke their own language—­Chaldean. When ­people heard that, they started bringing their friends, and their friends, and their friends.” 8 Chaldean clergy helped promote the devotion. F ­ ather Jacob Yasso, the pastor of a Detroit Chaldean church, brought hundreds to the shrine by 1970. ­Because of Maronite Catholics’ presence, confessions w ­ ere heard in Arabic during

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the mid-1960s; the Chaldean liturgy was first celebrated during the novena in 1971. Soon the pilgrimage attracted the attention of Chaldean clergy from Baghdad and Kirkuk, who visited the shrine during tours of the United States.9 ­Because of anti-­Christian prejudice and vio­lence, many Chaldeans fled Iraq to the United States in the 1970s through the 1990s. ­After the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, thousands of additional mi­grants sought greater freedoms, including economic opportunity and religious liberty in the United States. Chaldeans in Southeast Michigan—­now numbering around one hundred thousand—­compose the largest concentration outside the ­Middle East. Most come from the same cities in northern Iraq; many are related by blood or marriage. They sustain nearly a dozen Chaldean churches in the Detroit area.10 For Chaldeans, Marian devotion is closely linked to the memory and experiences of their homeland. Raad Eshoo, OFM Conv., an Iraqi-­born friar, explained that the novena at Carey provides an opportunity to give thanks to the Virgin Mary: “Mary was our protector during the war in Iraq. We had been through a difficult time in Iraq, and Mary saved us.” He recalled an experience in 2004 when U.S. soldiers ­were searching homes: “I opened the door and saw five American soldiers carry­ing guns, and they w ­ ere very aggressive. T ­ here was an Iraqi translator with them, translating from Arabic to ­English. The soldiers ­were mad and upset; [however], when they entered my ­house, they saw a statue of Mary. Immediately, they lowered the guns and recognized that we w ­ ere Christians. They apologized and left our h ­ ouse without even searching it.”11 The hardships of life form a significant aspect of the Chaldean identity with Mary viewed as a transnational intercessor and protector. Due to experiences of persecution, Chaldeans in the United States continue to be ­shaped by threats to their freedoms. In 2005, about twenty members of the Street Preachers’ Fellowship, a Biblical fundamentalist group, came to the shrine on the eve of the Assumption, preaching against Marian devotion as practiced by Catholics, including Chaldeans. ­After one street preacher allegedly called the Virgin Mary a “whore,” over two hundred Chaldeans attempted to force the preachers to leave. Franciscan ­Father John Raphael Hadnagy, then serving at the shrine, explained the Chaldeans’ reaction: “They come h ­ ere [to the United States] expecting religious freedom, and they encounter this, and they take it as religious

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oppression.” Several minor injuries resulted, along with the arrest of eight pilgrims.12 Chaldeans in the United States cultivate a tight-­knit intergenerational ­family network. According to their understanding, all Chaldeans are nashwatha (cousins), literally or figuratively. They closely identify with their Christian faith and have high rates of religious participation. Though devotion to Mary ­under the title “Our Lady of Consolation” is not found in Iraq, the marking of Marian feast days with prayer, food, and cele­bration is a strong tradition, prompting Chaldeans to adopt Carey as a place of devotion and cele­bration.13 The presence of Chaldean pilgrims fosters a festival-­like atmosphere during the novena. The smell of food prepared in camp fills the air; traditional foods such as dolma (stuffed grape leaves) are apportioned among ­family members.14 Plates are brought to the friary to be shared by the priests assisting at the novena. The festivities increase in tempo ­after dark. One Chaldean pilgrim related, “We come ­here to gather together, to pray, to dance.”15 For t­ hese devotees, dancing and singing are not opposed to participation in the pilgrimage’s more solemn ele­ments.16 Franciscan Raad Eshoo explained the novena’s complementarity with his homeland’s traditions: “We have a lot of feasts; we call them ‘shera,’ [with] a lot of ­people camping, ­music, dancing, food, and we end it with Mass and pro­cession. When I’m h ­ ere, I feel like [I’m] home.”17 To non-­Chaldean observers, their enthusiasm is impressive. A friar remarked, “They have a wonderful way of combining a love of life with their strong faith in God.”18 On the eve of the Assumption, as dusk approaches, the statue of Our Lady of Consolation emerges from the church carried by Franciscan friars. Assembled outside, thousands of pilgrims holding candles line the path between the church and shrine park to accompany the statue. At first sight of Our Lady, the crowd responds, with Chaldeans joyfully greeting her with ululation. As pilgrims sing Marian hymns, several friars carefully lift the statue onto a platform in a flatbed truck. Toledo’s bishop climbs onto the truck bed, kneeling before the image and leading the faithful in the rosary. The truck inches along, traversing the half-­mile path to the park as thousands follow. Nearing the park, some followers continue forward, taking their places for Mass; ­others, including many Chaldeans, return to the camp instead (some having attended an e­ arlier Chaldean liturgy). The Toledo bishop, accompanying clergy, and the choir assem­ble

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figure 19. The statue of Our Lady of Consolation emerges from the shrine at nightfall on August 14, 2018, carried by Franciscan friars Tony Vattaparambil, Maximilian Avila Pacheco, and Paul Schneider. The friars, like the pilgrims, are representative of diverse ethnic heritages. (Courtesy of Communications Office of the Province of Our Lady of Consolation, Mount St. Francis, Indiana.)

at the outdoor altar—­a permanent but seldom used fixture at the shrine park. Mass in E ­ nglish begins, aided by a temporary sound system and lighting for the thousands of worshippers. The novena preacher concludes the nine days of prayer, offering a final homily reflecting on an aspect of the Virgin Mary or the solemnity. Upon conclusion of the liturgy, the festivities continue well into the night. The shrine’s popularity for Chaldeans and other ethnic groups is rooted in spiritual and relational connectivity. Spiritually, they give thanksgiving for Mary’s ongoing protection. Communally, they connect with an extended kinship network—­the advantage of a pilgrimage destination within close reach of their homes in southeast Michigan. At Carey, the young and old, established families and recent arrivals, Iraqi-­and American-­ born, Chaldean, and non-­Chaldean intersect. Carey functions as a place of familiarity for members of a diaspora community forged through hardship, connecting their homeland and host country.

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Waves of Immigration From the shrine’s founding, the presence of immigrants has been central to its identity.19 The small Catholic parish from which the shrine took shape was initially formed in 1867 and named St. Edward. At its start, the congregation of about ten families was a mix of Western ­Europeans, including Germans, Belgians, French, Irish, and Luxembourgers.20 In 1872, St. Edward’s structure was still unfinished when its new pastor, F ­ ather Joseph Gloden, arrived. A native of Luxembourg, F ­ ather Gloden knew of Our Lady of Consolation (also known as Our Lady of Luxembourg), a devotion dating back to the seventeenth ­century when Mary’s prayers ­under that title w ­ ere believed to have eased the ravages of a plague. Acknowledging Our Lady of Consolation as a source of special graces, he promised to rename the church and enthrone a statue of the parish’s new patron.21 Gloden obtained a thirty-­six-­inch-­tall wooden replica containing a tiny sliver of the seventeenth-­century statue Luxembourgers associated with the miraculous. On May 24, 1875, parish members pro­cessed the image seven miles from the neighboring St. Nicholas Church in Frenchtown to its new home in Carey.22 During the pro­cession, a fierce thunderstorm threatened the participants, but though dark clouds and lightning enveloped them, not a drop of rain fell ­until the statue safely reached the church. The first physical healing attributed to Our Lady of Consolation in Carey was also reported that day. The shrine, in imitation of Old-­World devotions known to many of the area’s Catholics, developed slowly and organically. Its first devotees w ­ ere local farmers who made pilgrimages to the site during times of difficulty, danger, or sickness. As miracles w ­ ere publicized by word of mouth and ­later through the local press, its notoriety increased so that by 1890 a day was set aside for pilgrims to visit from nearby towns—­the so-­called strangers’ day (­later called “pilgrims’ day”). Pilgrims began arriving by train from Midwestern cities, at first thousands of visitors and, ­later, tens of thousands. Hundreds reported physical cures, but many more came not to heal the body but to soothe the mind and soul.23 Visitors flocked to Carey during the annual spring pilgrimage (commemorating the feast of Our Lady of Consolation) and the summer pilgrimage (leading to the cele­bration of Mary’s Assumption). Both followed a daily schedule of devotional opportunities. Early in the day, Masses ­were

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figure  20. Interior of the original Our Lady of Consolation shrine church in Carey, Ohio, including crutches of ­those who claimed to have received physical healings. (Courtesy of Our Lady of Consolation Archives.)

said. During the day, pilgrims had opportunities for confession, the rosary, litanies, Stations of the Cross, and benediction of the Blessed Sacrament. Vespers, usually including a sermon in E ­ nglish or German, was celebrated in the ­evening. In imitation of the Octave cele­bration held annually in Luxembourg City, participants carried the statue of Our Lady of

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Consolation (sometimes by candlelight) through the streets, praying the rosary and singing hymns.24 Though the devotion originated in Luxembourg, the shrine soon gained a diverse ethnic appeal. Immigrants from Luxembourg and Belgium, who knew of the devotion to Our Lady of Consolation, w ­ ere joined by other ­Europeans. German and Irish Americans connected the shrine to their own regional Marian devotions and pilgrimages.25 Within a few ­decades, Italian, Polish, Slovak, and Hungarian Americans joined the Western ­Europeans. More recent immigrant waves include Latino, Indian, and Albanian pilgrims, in addition to the large number of Chaldeans discussed ­earlier. ­Whatever the nationality of the pilgrims, a shared faith transcended ethnic differences. Devotees traveled on the same trains and buses, jostled for space to pray near the image of Our Lady, and lodged near one another in area ­hotels, the shrine’s pilgrim ­house, or its campground. Significantly, they ­were united by the hope for heavenly consolation—­ whether relief from sickness, addiction, ­family strife, or war in one’s homeland. Latin, the primary language used in the Church’s formal worship, allowed for shared prayer despite differences. Participation in a common devotion amid cultural and linguistic distinctiveness diminished separateness. The praying and singing of thousands of ­people, even when not in the same language, created a sense of unity amidst diversity. Si­mul­ta­neously, the devotion engaged their ethnic identities with allowance for one’s traditions, including expressions through m ­ usic, customs, and food. Vocal prayer bonded co-­ethnics and highlighted their identities. The variety seems to have been mostly harmonious. As one participant recorded, “Hymns and prayers ­rose to heaven sung and prayed in many dif­fer­ent languages and tongues. To one that ­didn’t understand the purpose of the pilgrimage, the mingling of dif­fer­ent languages may have sounded like a Babel, but it must have been as sweet ­music to God b­ ecause each person was honoring Mary as best he knew how.”26 ­After the Second Vatican Council, when the liturgy was no longer celebrated in Latin but in the vernacular, diverse liturgies ­were offered during the pilgrimages. Visiting priests—­often the group leaders—­celebrated the Mass according to their language (and, in the case of Byzantine, Maronite, and Chaldean Catholics, in separate liturgical rites). Confessions ­were heard in almost as many languages as t­ here w ­ ere pilgrim groups.

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The Conventual Franciscan priests, the shrine’s spiritual leaders, recruited fellow friars with foreign language fluency to hear confessions and provide counsel. Signs hung above confessionals noting which languages ­were known to a given priest. Pilgrims brought their national-­specific Marian devotions to the shrine, merging with or supplanting Our Lady of Consolation with their own Madonnas. B ­ ecause of reported physical healings, the shrine became linked to the Marian apparitions at Lourdes, France, causing Carey to be called “Lourdes in Amer­i­ca.”27 The shrine’s advertising highlighted connections to E ­ uropean devotional observances: “Sights nowhere to be encountered in the United States except in the ­little city of Carey give one a glimpse of old-­world religious customs and observances.”28 In the 1950s and 1960s, when pilgrims w ­ ere less likely to be of Western E ­ uropean ancestry, Carey was linked to devotions p­ opular elsewhere, including Our Lady of Mount Carmel (Italian), Our Lady of Czestochowa (Polish), and Our Lady of El Pueblito (Mexican).29 Visitors employed prayers, hymns, and banners highlighting their ethnic Marian traditions, calling attention to their identities and piety, which w ­ ere viewed as complementary to other devotions occurring at the shrine. The mixing of ethnicities was promoted in t­ hese early years of the shrine as uniquely Catholic (a testimony to the Church’s universality) and uniquely American (a sign of what made the United States a ­great nation): “Differing as to tribe and nation and speech, yet they ­were as one with their faith and devotion. Natives of many and diverse lands, foreigners by birth many of them ­were, they marched side by side, not as aliens, but as citizens of one g­ reat republic.”30 A 1924 newspaper article boasted of the Church’s “­great work of amalgamation” by which pilgrims of “at least nine dif­fer­ent national extractions” pro­cessed ­behind the flag and the cross.31 Pilgrims’ shared experiences as members of an ethnic group provide a win­dow into the shrine’s adaptability and flexibility. But such amalgamation was not seamless, as devotional expressions could foster intra-­ethnic identification more than inter-­ethnic cooperation. The force of cultural identity is partly seen by the shrine’s reliance on new waves of immigration. As participation from an ethnic group or groups waned, devotees ­were succeeded by more recent arrivals, who, in turn, ­shaped the shrine through distinctive traditions.

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Western ­European Luxembourgian immigrants first transported devotion to Our Lady of Consolation to the United States. Prayers to Mary u ­ nder that title predominated in Luxembourg and the surrounding areas of Belgium, France, and Germany.32 The pastor, ­Father Gloden, along with ­those devoted to Our Lady of Consolation, desired a replica for their church: “Since we cannot go to our dear M ­ other in Luxembourg anymore, allow us at least to go to her in Carey. She w ­ ill hear us t­ here just as well.”33 On the day of the image’s enthronement in the church, the Luxembourg-­born Benoit Biloque participated in the pro­cession with his c­ hildren. Absent that day was his ill ­daughter, Eugenia (also called Jane), who had been unable to eat for weeks. When the f­ amily returned home, they found her well.34 At the time of the parish’s founding, Carey was not a primarily Catholic area and was not a likely pilgrimage site. In its early years, partly b­ ecause of the difficulty of travel, the shrine’s fame was l­imited to the neighboring farm communities. Most did not come from a radius of more than a few dozen miles. Based on the surnames of ­those who claimed spiritual ­favors a­ fter visiting the shrine, the earliest devotees w ­ ere most often German, Belgian, and Luxembourgian, roughly matching the ethnic identities of Carey’s surroundings. Many w ­ ere immigrants or the c­ hildren of immigrants. As the shrine’s fame grew in the early twentieth c­ entury, Carey increasingly became a destination for Catholics living in nearby cities such as Cleveland, Toledo, Detroit, and Cincinnati. Rail travel made it pos­si­ble to reach the shrine in just a few hours, and train operators charged special rates (as l­ittle as two or three dollars per round trip) from vari­ous points in Ohio and Michigan. Second-­and third-­generation Irish-­and German-­ Americans predominated, though some ­were immigrants themselves. The presence of German speakers is evident from the inclusion of a German-­ language sermon among the activities scheduled for the spring and summer pilgrimages through the early 1900s.35 Most pilgrims’ identities have faded into obscurity except ­those who reported cures. Matilda Antweiler, a German-­born ­mother of three from Cleveland, visited the shrine in June 1908. An invalid for some two ­decades, she placed her hand upon the statue of Our Lady of Consolation, remaining ­there for some moments “weeping and praying.” According to

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figure  21. Pro­cession in front of the original shrine church, circa 1910. (Courtesy of Our Lady of Consolation Archives.)

a newspaper report, “At last she ­rose, her face shining, and declared that her suffering had ceased.”36 An unsympathetic investigator deemed her a ­woman of “­simple” faith, quick to believe in a cure. However, he noted that five years ­after the apparent healing, she had complained of no lingering maladies.37

Eastern ­European ­ hose who reported healing in the shrine’s first d­ ecades included German T names like Donnersbach, Reinstatler, and Fishbaugh, along with numerous Irish names, including McGinty, Donnelly, and Fitzgerald.38 As the number of pilgrims grew and the geographic draw widened, the visitors’ ethnic composition diversified. Rural Northwest Ohio remained generally homogeneous, while Eastern ­Europeans settling in the ­Great Lakes region impacted the shrine. During the 1916 summer pilgrimage, a group of 150 “Slavs” from Northeast Ohio came to the shrine, who “by their unusual dress and general appearance created much interest.” None of the priests spoke their language, but the pilgrims conducted prayers in their native

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tongue.39 By 1922, it was “easy to disregard” the voices singing and praying in ­English or German b­ ecause they w ­ ere eclipsed by the number of Polish, Hungarian, Slovenian, and Slovak pilgrims, each using their language.40 The shrine embraced the diversity of language groups. By the 1920s, the monthly Bulletin of the Shrine of Our Lady of Consolation (­later, The Apostolate of Our Lady) included sections printed in Polish, Hungarian, Slovak, and Slovenian—­usually fund­rais­ing appeals or information on upcoming pilgrimages. The devotions’ multiethnic character was evident. A description of the annual August pilgrimage read: “The nationalities represented among the pilgrims w ­ ere varied, and for the benefit of non-­English speaking ­people, sermons ­were preached and confessions heard in Polish, Slovenian, Slovak, and Hungarian languages.” 41 Eastern ­Europeans brought a festive quality to the shrine’s devotions, including singing and playing musical instruments.42 The August 1920 pilgrimage brought so many devout Poles that, hoping to be first in the candlelight pro­cession, they “fairly overwhelmed” the candle sellers.43

figure  22. Hungarian pilgrims waiting to begin the pro­cession. (Courtesy of Our Lady of Consolation Archives.)

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During the World War II—­and Cold War–­eras, less publicity accompanied Eastern ­European ethnics, many of whom ­were from countries that became part of the Communist Eastern Bloc. Instead, the shrine’s lit­er­a­ ture showed concern for American patriotism and, while war raged in ­Europe and Asia, offered prayers for and on behalf of soldiers serving overseas. However, the number of Eastern ­Europeans at the shrine did not lessen. Without mentioning which ethnic groups ­were pre­sent, most of the pilgrimage lit­er­a­ture during this period related only that confessions and sermons w ­ ere offered in “vari­ous foreign languages,” up to fifteen languages during the annual novena.44

Southern ­European Southern ­Europeans from Italy (and ­later, Albania and Malta) began to make the journey to the shrine in the early twentieth ­century. Italians came to Carey from the cities of the G ­ reat Lakes region: Detroit, Cleveland, Youngstown, Canton, and Buffalo. By 1921, in addition to other ­European languages, confessions w ­ ere routinely heard in Italian.45 Many of the Italians’ visits w ­ ere o­ rganized not by priests or parishes but by the laity. By mid-­century, Italian Americans comprised perhaps three-­quarters of the pilgrimage groups. Like other groups, they made the shrine their own, bringing their own spiritual and cultural identities. Attempting to re­create aspects of their festas to honor their patron saints, the Italians played accordions and pro­cessed ­under banners noting their ethnic and religious socie­ties. According to their custom, they pinned dollar bills to their banners in thanksgiving or petition, offering the money to Our Lady and the shrine.46 During the Second World War, fighter p­ ilot Dominic “Don” Gentile of Piqua, Ohio, the son of Italian immigrants, completed 182 missions and flew 350 combat hours. Devoted to Our Lady of Consolation throughout his life, he traveled annually to Carey. As a child, Gentile had been overcome with carbon monoxide and was not expected to live, but his ­mother, Josephine, prayed to Our Lady of Consolation, and he recovered. He believed that Our Lady had also protected him during the war, and thus when Gentile first returned home, although many well-­wishers came to meet him at the train station, he slipped away, desiring to go first to the shrine.47 The Italians’ distinct sense of spiritual reciprocity, kinship, and

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familiarity with Our Lady impacted o­ thers’ experience of the devotions. The combination of the festive and emotive became a dominant trait. Carey’s popularity among Italian-­Americans continued for d­ ecades, remaining a significant proportion into the 1970s and 1980s.

Latin American In 1941, the first mention of Latino pilgrims at Carey recorded two hundred Mexicans from Toledo’s “Mexican colony” visiting the shrine.48 Spanish speakers’ attachment to the shrine grew during succeeding d­ ecades. In the 1950s and 1960s, mi­grant farmworkers in the region overshadowed the ­earlier Latino mi­grants who had pursued manufacturing jobs. By the late 1960s, over twenty-­five thousand Latino mi­grants came to Michigan and Ohio each summer, picking cherries in Michigan each July and arriving in Northwest Ohio in August to harvest tomatoes. Though proximate to the shrine in late summer, they w ­ ere not a significant presence at the novena ­until the 1970s.

figure  23. Pilgrims, including Italian-­and Latino-­Americans, with banners representing vari­ous Marian devotions, including Our Lady of Perpetual Help and Our Lady of Guadalupe, circa 1976. (Courtesy of David J. Endres.)

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Mexican immigrants who participated in the novena often pro­cessed with banners honoring Our Lady of Guadalupe, the Amer­i­cas’ patroness and a figure of unparalleled importance for Mexican Catholics. Mexican Americans venerated their own Madonna even in the shadow of a shrine dedicated to the Luxembourg-­inspired Our Lady of Consolation. The devotees emphasized that Our Lady of Guadalupe was not well known in Ohio: “We know her like our ­mother,” said one pilgrim, “and we feel ­others need to know her like this, too.” 49 Lacking a local shrine to call their own, Mexican Americans brought their Madonna, La Virgen Morena (the brown virgin), to Carey. The presence of Guadalupe’s devotees indicates the flexibility of the shrine and the potential overlapping of identity and meaning among pilgrims of varying ethnicities.50

Conclusion The ethnically diverse and lively Catholic devotion at Carey has attracted successive waves of immigrants during its history. The presence of t­ hese groups—­whose numbers ebb and flow over time and are eventually succeeded by newer arrivals—­indicates the role that immigration continues to have within the Catholic Church. The spiritual and relational bonds formed and sustained ­there through Marian devotion evidence the enduring importance of ethnicity, challenging an understanding of the American Church as primarily influenced by nineteenth-­century immigration. Long ­after the first significant wave of E ­ uropeans, new arrivals make the shrine home as they navigate ethnic identity and religious faith in their ­adopted country. Ethnic intersection occurs concurrently with maintaining or even strengthening ethno-­religious identity. The experience of pilgrims to the Basilica and National Shrine of Our Lady of Consolation highlights the resiliency of Marian devotion and suggests that ethnic intersection can assist immigrants in forging Catholic and American identities. Notes 1. “Pilgrims H ­ ere,” Carey [OH] Times, August 18, 1910. 2. For one pilgrim’s experience of the shrine as a “United Nations,” see an article in the Shrine of Our Lady of Consolation’s periodical, Apostolate of Our Lady (previously called the Bulletin of the Shrine of Our Lady of Consolation): Rosemary Schlachter, “My M ­ other and Yours,” Apostolate of Our Lady 46, no. 4 (April 1965): 18.

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3. For the role of immigration in enhancing religious identity and participation, see Michael W. Foley and Dean R. Hoge, Religion and the New Immigrants: How Faith Communities Form Our Newest Citizens (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 64–65. 4. This count is based primarily on the author’s observations while serving as preacher for the shrine’s annual Assumption novena, August 6–14, 2018. 5. Chaldeans are Eastern Catholics in communion with Rome. They have their own traditions and liturgical practices. See Kristian Girling, The Chaldean Catholic Church: Modern History, Ecclesiology and Church-­State Relations (New York: Routledge, 2018); Ronald Roberson, The Eastern Christian Churches: A Brief Survey (Rome: Pontificio Instituto Orientale, 1999), 146–148. 6. “Largest Pilgrimage Ever H ­ ere,” Carey [OH] Times, August 16, 1917. 7. “August Pilgrimage,” Bulletin of the Shrine of Our Lady of Consolation 2, nos. 11–12 (October 1921); “Afterthoughts,” Bulletin of the Shrine of Our Lady of Consolation 4, nos. 11–12 (September 1923); “The August Pilgrimage at the Shrine,” Carey [OH] Times, August 23, 1928. 8. Dan Reinhart, “For Many Pilgrims, the Road to Carey Has Been a Long One,” [Carey, OH] Progressor-­Times, August 8, 2012. 9. Schlachter, “My M ­ other and Yours,” 17; Reinhart, “For Many Pilgrims”; “Around the Shrine in Pictures,” Apostolate of Our Lady 51, no. 10 (October 1970). 10. Joseph Sassoon, The Iraqi Refugees: The New Crisis in the ­Middle East (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2009), 5, 25, 110–112; Aaron Terrazas, “Iraqi Immigrants in the United States in 2007,” March 5, 2009, https://­www​.­migrationpolicy​.­org​/­article​ /­iraqi​-­immigrants​-­united​-­states​-­2007; Mary  C. Sengstock, Chaldean Americans: Changing Conceptions of Ethnic Identity (New York: Center for Migration Studies, 1999), 28–32, 65–67; Yasmeen S. Hanoosh, The Chaldeans: Politics and Identity in Iraq and the American Diaspora (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2019), 13–15, 113–117, 161–163. 11. Raad Eshoo, OFM Conv., email communication with the author, December 27, 2019. 12. Judy Roberts, “Iraqi Catholics Tangle with Protesters,” National Catholic Register, September  4, 2005, http://­w ww​.­ncregister​.­com​/­site​/­article​/­iraqi​ _­catholics​_­tangle​_­with​_­protesters. 13. On the Chaldeans’ strong faith-­and family-­based ethnic networks, see Sengstock, Chaldean Americans, 36–47, 125–129; Hanoosh, The Chaldeans, 123–127. 14. This tradition is not new. An early reference to so-­called Syrian pilgrims (likely Lebanese) preparing and sharing a roasted lamb outside of the shrine is found in “20,000 Attend Pilgrimage,” Carey [OH] Times, August 20, 1925. 15. Reinhart, “For Many Pilgrims.” 16. “Pilgrims Gather at Church in Carey,” [Fremont, OH] News-­Messenger, August 20, 1974. 17. Raad Eshoo, OFM Conv., quoted in, Katie Rutter, “Chaldean Catholics Celebrate Mary, Culture, ­Family at Ohio National Shrine,” Catholic News ­Service,

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August  20, 2019, https://­www​.­catholicnews​.­com​/­services​/­englishnews​/­2019​ /­chaldean​-­catholics​-­celebrate​-­mary​-­culture​-­family​-­at​-­ohio​-­national​-­shrine​.­cfm. 18. “Pilgrims Gather at Church in Carey,” [Fremont, OH] News-­Messenger, August 20, 1974. 19. The significance of ethnic groups to the growth of shrines and pilgrimage sites is reviewed in Gisbert Rinschede, “Catholic Pilgrimage Places in the United States,” in Pilgrimage in the United States, Geographia Religionum 5, ed. by Gisbert Rinschede and Surinder M. Bhardwaj (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 1990), 91–95. Rinschede estimates that one in ten pilgrimage sites in the U.S. are “visited exclusively by one specific ethnic group” (91). 20. The parish’s baptismal register rec­ords the parents’ birthplaces: “Baptisms, 1873–1886,” Our Lady of Consolation, Carey, Diocese of Toledo, at Bowling Green State University and Center for Archival Collections, Bowling Green, Ohio. 21. For a survey of the shrine’s early history, see David J. Endres, “Mary’s Choice: The Shrine of Our Lady of Consolation, Carey, Ohio, 1912–29,” in Many Tongues, One Faith: A History of Franciscan Parish Life in the United States (Ocean­side, CA: Acad­emy of American Franciscan History, 2018), 78–91. 22. Many sources list the date of the first pro­cession as May 24, 1875, but ­Father Gloden believed the event occurred the following year. See “Correct Date Ascertained,” Carey [OH] Times, June 29, 1911. 23. For a study of the healings, see David J. Endres, “What Medicine Could Not Cure: Faith Healings at the Shrine of Our Lady of Consolation, Carey, Ohio,” U.S. Catholic Historian 34, no. 3 (Summer 2016): 25–49. 24. See, for example, “The Pilgrimage,” Carey [OH] Times, May 17, 1900; “Largest Pilgrimage Ever H ­ ere,” Carey [OH] Times, August 16, 1917. 25. On the transplanting and re-­creating of sacred places, see Carolyn V. Prorok, “Transplanting Pilgrimage Traditions in the Amer­i­cas,” Geo­g raph­i­cal Review 93, no. 3 (July 2003): 291–292. 26. Urban Wagner, OFM Conv., “My First Pilgrimage,” Apostolate of Our Lady 26, no. 8 (August 1945): 9–10. 27. For the linking of the two shrines, see “The Apparition of the Immaculate Virgin Mary at Lourdes,” Apostolate of Our Lady 19, no. 2 (February 1938); “Feast of Our Lady of Lourdes, Feb. 11,” Apostolate of Our Lady 21, no. 2 (February 1940). Also, Donna M. Davis, “Carey shrine known as the ‘Lourdes of Amer­i­ca,’ ” [Upper Sandusky, OH] Chief-­Union, August 11, 1964. 28. Undated newspaper clipping, “Advertisements” file, many ca. 1927–1929, Shrine of Our Lady of Consolation Archives, Carey, Ohio (hereafter SOLCA); also quoted in “Pilgrimage Starts Next Saturday,” Carey [OH] Times, August 8, 1929. 29. See, for instance, devotion to Our Lady of El Pueblito in Apostolate of Our Lady 41, no. 10 (October 1960): 7–8. 30. “Reminiscence of the August Pilgrimage,” Carey [OH] Times, August 24, 1922.

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31. “Largest Crowd on Rec­ord,” Carey [OH] Times, August 21, 1924. 32. David J. Endres, “Notre-­Dame de Luxembourg in the United States: The Beginnings of a Euro-­American Devotion,” in Notre-­Dame de Luxembourg: Dévotion et Patrimoine (Bastogne, Belgium: Musée en Piconrue, 2016), 63–64. 33. “1875–1925,” Bulletin of the Shrine of Our Lady of Consolation 6, nos. 5–6 (April 1925): 3. 34. “Shrine in Buckeye State,” Cincinnati Enquirer, May 9, 1909. 35. For example, see “The Pilgrimage,” Carey [OH] Times, May 20, 1909. 36. “Village Church Is Pilgrim Shrine,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, May 9, 1909. 37. Dr. A. J. Prudhomme, “Impressions Gained in a Personal Interview with Mrs. Matilda Antweiler” [September 10, 1913],” SOLCA. 38. Endres, “What Medicine Could Not Cure,” 47–49. 39. “Thousands of Pilgrims,” Carey [OH] Times, August 17, 1916. 40. “Reminiscence of the August Pilgrimage,” Carey [OH] Times, August 24, 1922. 41. “August Pilgrimage,” Bulletin of the Shrine of Our Lady of Consolation 2, nos. 11–12 (October 1921); “Afterthoughts,” Bulletin of the Shrine of Our Lady of Consolation 4, nos. 11–12 (September 1923). 42. “Ten Thousand ­Here,” August 18, 1921, Carey [OH] Times. 43. “Mammoth Crowd ­Here,” Carey [OH] Times, August 19, 1920. 4 4. “40,000 Pay Tribute to Mary,” Apostolate of Our Lady 21, no. 9 (September 1940). 45. “Pilgrimage,” Carey [OH] Times, April 7, 1921. 46. See, for example, “Pilgrimages Coming in the Near F ­ uture,” Apostolate of Our Lady 41, no. 8 (August 1960). 47. “Gentile and Kin at Shrine Renew Vow Made on Sparing of His Life 22 Years Ago,” New York Times, May 22, 1944. 48. Shrine of Our Lady of Consolation, “Church Chronicles,” entry for August 3, 1941, pg. 68, SOLCA. For the context of the Mexican migration to Northwest Ohio, see Dionicio Nodín Valdés, Barrios Norteños: St. Paul and Midwestern Mexican Communities in the Twentieth C ­ entury (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000), 139–140. 49. “They Come for Varied Reasons,” [Carey, OH] Progressor-­Times, August 12, 1981. 50. For an example of Marian devotional substitution and the wide appeal of Marian shrines irrespective of nationality, see Thomas A. Tweed, Our Lady of the Exile: Diasporic Religion at a Cuban Catholic Shrine in Miami (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 58–59. For the expansive nature of the Guadalupe devotion, see Timothy Matovina, Theologies of Guadalupe: From the Era of Conquest to Pope Francis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 158–165.



American Czestochowa Polish Piety and Haitian Hybridities of Marian Meaning in Pennsylvania ter ry rey

The Virgin on the Hill Perched atop the highest hill in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, the National Shrine of Our Lady of Czestochowa—­with its cavernous sanctuary, surrounding chapels, grotto, cemetery, monastery, rosary garden, religious goods store, museum, retreat center, monuments, and cafeteria—­teems with evocative symbols, saints, and spirits that call the faithful to its space. First established in 1953 for Pennsylvania’s Polish immigrants devoted to Our Lady of Czestochowa, the Pauline ­Fathers envisioned a shrine that would be an impor­tant pilgrimage site for the devout.1 Drawing upon historiographic and ethnographic research, this chapter analyzes the ethnic contours of pilgrimage culture at the shrine for “The Queen of Poland,” often affectionately referred to in the United States as the “American Czestochowa.” While the Doylestown shrine initially appealed to local Polish and Polish American devotees, ten years ­after its founding Haitian and Haitian American Catholics also became frequent visitors. It is doubtful that the Polish monks who then maintained the shrine realized that their own Polish ancestors had brought Our Lady of Czestochowa to the C ­ aribbean during the Haitian Revolution in 1803. Most early Haitian pilgrims in Doylestown w ­ ere p­ olitical exiles from New York and Montreal, beginning in the late 1960s. Like the generations of Haitian devout who make pilgrimages to Doylestown, the ­founder of the National Shrine of Our Lady of Czestochowa was a refugee. ­Father Michael Zembrzuski had been deported from Hungary by a brutal Stalinist dictatorship early during the Cold War. Both the Haitian pilgrims and ­Father Michael shared an unwavering devotion to Czestochowa, a manifestation of the ­Mother of God who had liberated the Polish and the Haitian ­people from oppression and protected them from violent invaders.

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figure 24. National Shrine of Our Lady of Czestochowa, Doylestown, Pennsylvania. (Image from Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia​.­org/wiki/File:Main​_ Church_Out_1.jpg.)

This chapter compares Polish and Haitian Marianisms at the shrine, with an emphasis on the evocative and unifying power of this par­tic­u­lar Marian icon for two groups of p­ eople with dif­fer­ent histories and ethnic and racial identities. The shrine thus offers a unique reflection of the changing religious landscape in the United States and of the American Catholic Church, especially insofar as ­there are virtually no Haitians living in Doylestown or the surrounding suburban towns. Unlike Haitian Catholics at Italian churches in New York like Our Lady of Mount Carmel or Notre Dame d’Haiti in Miami, who are there because ­there are large communities of Haitians in t­ hose cities. One recent trend in Chris­tian­ity across denominations in the United States is “nesting churches,” or congregations of immigrants h ­ oused in longer-­standing mainstream churches.2 But Haitians in Doylestown do not nest ­there. The Doylestown Haitian experience is, generally to the contrary, entirely about pilgrimage and not about belonging, and about an occasional and somewhat segregated ethnic blending at the shrine between Haitians and Poles.

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Racial and Devotional Diversity at the Shrine Catholic life in Doylestown features very l­ittle intermingling of Haitians and Poles or Haitian Americans and Polish Americans at the shrine. Furthermore, judging by the total lack of Polish restaurants or delis in the city, it would appear that few who live in or near Doylestown are Polish or Polish American, even though Doylestown is 93 ­percent white. Racial segregation at the shrine is complicated by language barriers between Polish monks and Haitian devout. Despite the challenges, both communities continue to participate in the life of the shrine. I have attended the Czestochowa feast several times and observed marked differences in how t­ hese two groups worship and congregate. Haitians gather for Creole Mass in the rather squat, dark lower sanctuary, while the Polish Mass takes place in the massive, cavernous, bright upper sanctuary. At the Creole Mass, ­there is more singing and more vis­i­ble ecstasy, which evinces the influence of the Charismatic Renewal in Haitian Catholicism. Elsewhere about the sprawling shrine grounds, Haitians frequent the Rosary Garden, the Chapel of St. Anne, and the grotto of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, but they do so on their own, effectively taking over the grotto on the feast day. Not far from the large cafeteria that serves Polish meals, the Haitian pilgrims enjoy their rice, beans, chicken, and plantains on their buses, rarely dining with Poles inside. The most notable exception to this racial segregation at the shrine is seen in the Candle Chapel. The Candle Chapel is a small, cube-­shaped sanctuary with glass walls and literally hundreds of short and tall devotional candles in plastic placed on narrow iron shelves found along three of the walls from floor to ceiling. Upon entry, one can purchase t­ hese candles, usually white, blue, or red (they cost five dollars each and are said to last for six days), light them, and find a space on the shelves to place them amid the ­others. It is a solemn sanctuary, thus splendorous, illuminated, and flickering. On the summer feast day, the heat of hundreds of small flames blends with the sun rays beaming through the glass walls to make the space uncomfortably warm (­there is no air conditioning), especially when it is crowded with believers. It cannot be larger than 200 square feet, though the ceiling is high. ­There is no place to sit, but ­there are kneelers and an altar rail in front of the large icon of Our Lady of Czestochowa. It is ­there, on the kneelers, where Haitians, Haitian Americans, Poles, and

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Polish Americans find themselves shoulder to shoulder, praying in four dif­fer­ent tongues (French, Haitian Creole, E ­ nglish, and Polish). B ­ ecause of the heat, most who enter the chapel in August do not remain for long. Devotional styles ­here vary notably. Haitians in the chapel, mostly ­women, frequent the kneelers and pray ­there imploringly, usually aloud, while ­those who stand usually have their arms outstretched, plastic rosaries dangling from their fin­gers or wrists. Polish devotions in the chapel are usually more reserved, with the faithful generally standing or kneeling and praying silently. Though Our Lady of Czestochowa is the namesake of the hilltop shrine and its cultic focus and raison-­d’être, one notes a broader “system of symbols” ­there that is richly meaningful for both Poles and Haitians, though in dif­fer­ent ways.3 Take, for example, the 25-­foot statue of Pope Saint John Paul II standing atop a high plinth with outreached arms, a pontiff dear to both communities and whose two visits to the shrine infuse it with abundant “religious capital.” 4 ­Behind the saint, the cross atop the shrine’s steeple reaches 250 feet into the sky. For Poles, the stature of Pope Saint John Paul II is beyond compare as Brian Porter explains: When Karol Wojtyla became Pope John Paul II in 1978, he proclaimed that the slogan for his papacy would be “Totus Tuuo” (totally yours). The “you” to whom he was addressing this commitment was the Virgin Mary, Blessed ­Mother, Queen of Heaven, Handmaiden of the Lord, Mater Dolorosa, ­Woman of Valour, Paragon of Chastity, Supreme Mediatrix, and (certainly not least) Queen of Poland.5

Porter helpfully underscores how “culturally distinctive ­metaphors and local shifts in emphasis . . . ​allow Mary to assume a variety of forms,” and this is very much the case at the shrine each August, for Mary is not only Queen but Hetmanka: “In pre-­partition Poland the Hetman was the commander-­in-­chief of the armed forces, the one who actually led the troops into ­battle.” 6 To pray at the shrine is to pray to a Virgin ­Mother who is also a military commander, all the while surrounded by the hundreds of Polish and Polish American war dead who are buried ­there. Meanwhile, many Haitian Catholics credit Pope John Paul II and the Virgin Mary with having liberated them from ­decades of brutal dictatorial rule ­under the dynastic Duvalier regime (1959–1986) ­because of the

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figure 25. Pope Saint John Paul II statue at the National Shrine of Our Lady of C ­ zestochowa, Doylestown, Pennsylvania. (Image from Public Domain, https:// commons​­ .wikimedia​ .­o rg/wiki/File:John_Paul_II_ (Doylestown,_PA).jpg.)

pontiff’s epochal visit to Haiti in 1983 during a Marian conference of the Haitian Catholic bishops. This occurred at the very time when the Polish ­people ­were rising up against communism, a strug­gle in which, too, “the image [of Our Lady of Czestochowa] served as one of the most ­popular symbols of r­ esistance—­combining religious and national dimensions,” as Anna Niedźwiedź explains.7 Resonant with deeply historical Polish understandings of the Virgin M ­ other as a warrior, the pope’s steadfast Marian devotion has made him heroically saintly among Haitian Catholics. Though most Haitians are surely unfamiliar with the word Hetmanka, the Queen of Poland was also a commander in their ancestors’ revolution, the Haitian Revolution. And when the Polish pope arrived in Port-­au-­Prince,

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their ­Caribbean nation’s capital, in 1983 to inspire the overthrow of a brutal despot, the pontiff himself was not on a battlefield but on an airport tarmac, declaring that “Something must change ­here.” 8 Thus, the shrine is infused with a good m ­ easure of “­political capital” for Haitians and Haitian Americans, as it is for Poles and Polish Americans, though in markedly dif­fer­ent ethno-­national ways.9 This plays out in myriad forms of “visual piety” at the shrine and during the pilgrimage experience.10

Our Lady of Czestochowa: A Black Madonna Become Polish The origins of Our Lady of Czestochowa in Poland are steeped in legend. It is thus “impor­tant to consider the historical context of the Czestochowa image,” as writes Niedźwiedź: The “new Marian cult” first gained prominence in the eleventh ­century Latin ­Europe and reached its culmination in the ­fourteenth c­ entury. It was in the f­ourteenth ­century that the image of Our Lady of Czestochowa arrived at the Jasna Góra monastery. . . . ​The complex and varied influences are evident in the oldest legends. . . . ​In ­these narratives we find the intertwining of threads typical of the religious culture of the Orthodox East and the Latin West.11

Hybridization, as such, has always been part of Czestochowa’s cult, and it remains vibrant in newer forms in Doylestown to this day. One of the most beloved legends is that the original (Byzantine-­style) painting of the Blessed M ­ other was the work of Saint Luke. This myth was widely believed among Polish Catholics during the miraculous events that would mark Czestochowa as Queen of Poland. How her first icon went from St. Luke’s rooftop in Jerusalem, where he is purported to have painted it on a cedar t­ able on which the Virgin Mary once took her meals, to Doylestown is an intriguing story that is too long to tell h ­ ere. This was not just any t­ able, mind you, but one that was built by St. Joseph and, miraculously, according to legends in Poland, by baby Jesus ­after the Holy ­Family’s return from exile in Egypt. What’s more, this was the ­table used during the Last Supper and was in the Upper Room at Pentecost.12 The icon then made its way to Constantinople and onward to Rus­sia, all along the way gaining a reputation for working miracles wherever it landed.

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­ hese wanderings also mark her as a pilgrim herself, presaging the T extraordinary pilgrimage culture that Czestochowa would inspire once she fi­nally settled in the monastery at Jasna Góra in 1384. The year she received the title “Queen of Poland,” in 1655, Our Lady of Czestochowa was credited with having ensured the defense of the monastery at Jasna Góra against a menacing and numerically superior invading military force. “In an era when grandiloquent expressions of devotion to the Virgin Mary w ­ ere commonplace,” as Robert Alvis explains, “this one stood out”: It emerged in the midst of a full-­scale military catastrophe, in which Cossack, Muscovite, and Swedish armies ravaged the countryside and forced the king to seek refuge abroad. . . . ​That the Lutheran Swedes would dare to attack the home of the Black Madonna stirred ­righteous indignation, and their failure gave rise to the conviction that higher powers ­were now engaging in the country’s cause.13

­ hose higher powers w T ­ ere concentrated in the hands and grace of Our Lady of Czestochowa. ­Those hands and grace have always held and defended the Polish p­ eople and their beloved shrine. It survived a horrific fire in 1690, thanks to the Queen of Poland, and another military invasion in 1770, while Poles ­later survived World War II and Soviet-­backed communism, also thanks to her grace and hands. In 1930, a ten-­year-­old boy named Karol Wojtyla was a pilgrim at the shrine. L ­ ittle could he have known then that he would one day become pope, help liberate Haiti from a brutal dictatorship, and twice visit his Blessed ­Mother’s shrine atop the highest hill in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.14 For both of them. This pope and his Blessed ­Mother would also join forces with a dockworker named Lech Walesa in the 1990s to help defeat communism in their homeland. The history of that remarkable tale is longer, of course, dating back to the pontiff’s historic pilgrimage to Poland in 1979 and to a pathway forged that would save his beloved religion from being “threatened” by Soviet communism to becoming once again his ­people’s very identity and perseverance.15 He first visited the shrine in Doylestown ten years prior, not yet as pope but then as Archbishop of Krakow and a cardinal.16 Czestochowa is the heart of this. For, “John Paul believed that through a recommitment to the heart of Polish identity, vibrant Catholicism, and a devotion to prayer and Our Lady

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of Czestochowa. Poles could begin the ­process of defeating communism.”17 In ­doing so, the pope ended his address at her shrine in Poland by stating: “Allow me to entrust every­thing ­here, all of this, to Mary. Allow me to entrust every­thing in a new way! I am a man of ­great trust, I learned to be so ­here. Amen!”18 Four years ­later he was in Haiti declaring that “Something must change h ­ ere.” And change indeed ensued. All ­under the grace and in the hands of a black Madonna become Polish.

Polish Catholics in Amer­i­ca ­ here w T ­ ere six Polish men in Amer­i­ca at Jamestown in 1608, artisans brought by John Smith to help establish his settlement in ­Virginia, some twelve years before the E ­ nglish “Puritan” pilgrims landed in Mas­sa­chu­ setts (they had meant to reach the mouth of the Hudson River but got blown off course at sea). Although ­little is known of the Poles in Jamestown (they may, in fact, have been Protestants), o­ thers of their countryfolk about whom we do know much would arrive the following ­century. Notable among them in the historical rec­ord are the “­Father of the American Cavalry,” Casimir Pulaski (1745–1779), and Thaddeus Kosciusko, who would distinguish themselves during the American Revolution and in the first half of the nineteenth c­ entury. But it was only a­ fter the Civil War that large waves of Polish immigrants would crash upon American shores.19 By the dawn of the twentieth ­century, t­ here w ­ ere nearly four hundred thousand Poles in the U.S., more than half of whom had arrived between 1890 and 1900. Over the subsequent thirteen years, nearly six hundred thousand more Poles from the ­Russian empire doubled the size of Amer­i­ca’s Polish immigrant population. ­There ­were, of course, economic and ­political forces ­behind their emigration to the U.S., but also religious ones, as historians have demonstrated. Per ­Sister Lucille, for instance, “as late as 1870, religious oppression was one of the expulsive forces responsible for the migration of thousands of southern Slovaks, among whom Poles ­were found, into Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois.”20 Many Polish immigrants also made their way to the coal mines of Pennsylvania and ­others to Philadelphia, some of them soon to become the first Marian devotees at the Doylestown shrine. By 1912, meanwhile, “six years before a revision in Canon Law froze the number of ethnic parishes in the United States,” t­here w ­ ere more Polish ethnic parishes

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than Italian ones, over five hundred in all, and most of them w ­ ere pas21 tored by immigrant Polish priests. Priests, monks, and nuns have always been centerpieces of Polish Catholic communal existence and identity, and this continued to be true in the emergent “American Polonia.” The earliest Polish Catholic congregations in the United States w ­ ere founded in Texas, Wisconsin, and New York in the second half of the nineteenth ­century.22 Initially, diocesan priests fostered Polish Catholicism in the U.S. However, religious ­orders, like the Congregation of the Resurrection in Chicago and the Felician ­Sisters, who first arrived in 1874, soon ministered widely in Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.23 As William Galush observes, “The presence of Polish regulars was an impor­tant source not only of clergy but of ties to the homeland, as they retained connections with their foundations in the homeland.”24 Such a trajectory is reflected in the national shrine in Doylestown, which was founded by a single Polish cleric, but was sustained and flourished ­because of the ministry of the Pauline ­Fathers and their deep connection to Jasna Góra. Of course, Polish laypersons have also been of g­ reat importance to the establishment and development of Catholic Polonia in Amer­i­ca. The shrine in Doylestown was initially funded largely by Philadelphia’s Polish Catholics. And through it all, and stretching back to Poland and expanding “during the Counter-­Reformation,” as John Bukowyczk explains: Marian mysticism developed as an especially pervasive feature of Polish belief and would remain so into the modern period. Marian influences ­were thus commonplace in Poland’s Roman Catholic church and in immigrant districts of Amer­i­ca where Poles often encountered Resurrectionist ­Fathers and other priests who ­were steeped in Marian piety.25

Our Lady of Czestochowa, perched atop a hill in Pennsylvania, is the center of this piety. The coal-­mining regions of Central and Northeastern Pennsylvania ­attracted more Polish immigrants than anywhere ­else in the state, with Scranton serving them as an impor­tant urban and religious center. Some w ­ ere also drawn to Philadelphia, just twenty-­five miles south of Doylestown. Polish immigration to Philadelphia surged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth c­ entury, concentrated mostly on the farms in

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Port Richmond and what would become Bridesburg, regions that ­were then rapidly transforming from rural to urban; even ­today, it is not uncommon to hear Polish spoken in ­these neighborhoods’ delis, restaurants, and bars. By 1903, Poles had built a religious hub in the form of St. Adalbert Catholic Church, in Port Richmond, while eleven years prior they had established the city’s oldest Polish church, just to the south in the Fishtown neighborhood, St. Laurentius, founded in 1882, and in Bridesburg, St. John Cantius, in 1892. The laity at ­these three churches would be vital to the establishment of the shrine of Our Lady of Czestochowa in Doylestown, the crown jewel among the more than eight hundred ethnic parishes and five hundred parochial schools that Polish and Polish American Catholics have contributed to American Catholicism.26

The Making of a Polish Shrine in the “Holy Experiment” ­ ather Michael Zembrzuski arrived in Amer­i­ca in 1949 and turned to the F faithful congregants at St. Laurentius, St. Adalbert, and St. John Cantius in Philadelphia to make the shrine a real­ity. Carting in 1951 “a faithful copy” of the revered Polish Madonna from her home shrine in Czestochowa, Poland, Zembrzuski soon gained the blessing of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Philadelphia to establish the shrine in a commonwealth that its ­founder, William Penn, initially launched in 1682 as a “holy experiment.” Zembrzuski, a Pauline ­Father, had previously served as a missionary in Hungary. He emigrated to the U.S. “with less than $56 to his name” when his order was expelled by the communist regime t­ here.27 Within a few years, thanks to Philadelphia’s Polish Catholics, the cleric realized his dream of establishing a shrine for the Queen of Poland in Pennsylvania. Having raised adequate funds, “­Father Michael purchased a forty-­acre property on December 13, which included living quarters and a barn, for $49,000.”28 The dedication ceremony took place in June of 1953 at the shrine’s original site: a h ­ umble white barn on a hillside (it has since been painted red and moved over the hill and downslope). Several Polish Pauline monks soon joined Zembrzuski and subsequently purchased more land. The throngs of lay Catholics coming to the barn to venerate Czestochowa grew so rapidly that a larger sanctuary had to be constructed, which required the financial support of the faithful.29 Ground for the new shrine was broken in 1964, on the feast day of Our Lady of

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Czestochowa. Two years l­ater, on October 16, 1966, Philadelphia’s Archbishop John Krol, a Polish American himself, dedicated the shrine before 135,000 p­ eople, including President Lyndon B. Johnson and his f­ amily, an event honored by a plaque affixed to the main door of the upper sanctuary.30 The occasion also commemorated the one-­thousandth anniversary of the Christianization of Poland.31 Constructing the shine cost $3 million, a huge sum at the time. The artistic vision for the massive, modern sanctuary was that of acclaimed Polish architect J. George Szeptycki. Szeptycki had immigrated to the United States a­ fter having restored historic churches in his homeland, and also having served in the Polish under­ ground ­resistance movement during World War II, which nearly cost him his life in a Nazi concentration camp.32 Over time, the Pauline monastery at the shrine expanded. A large part of the shrine’s land is now a cemetery, holding the remains of more than five thousand ­people, with most of the headstones bearing Polish surnames. The burial ground is also home to a 45-­foot metal cross commemorating the victims of 9/11 and an equally large sculpture of a winged hussar knight, who is kneeling over the war dead buried t­ here, his sword clenched firmly, its tip brought down in homage to its plinth. On the grounds also stand monuments to Ignacy Paderewski, the legendary composer, and then-­newly ­independent Poland’s first prime minister as of 1919. Another stands for victims of the 1940 Katyn Massacre, and ­here, too, are commemorated Polish and Polish American veterans of war. Up the hill is the Rosary Garden, featuring a wide pathway that leads the prayerful past numerous large statues of Jesus and vari­ous Catholic saints. The red barn, the site of the original shrine, is also ­there, just down the hill at the edge of the cemetery. It is all bucolic, its surroundings verdant and blanketed by wide-­open skies, shouldered by rolling hills, forests, fields, and farms off in the distance. The shrine’s history “reveals the religious aspirations of the Polish-­ American community and the strength of their devotionalism, as well as the ways that the shrine has maintained its relevance by recognizing and adapting to their changing spiritual and cultural needs,” as Thomas Rzeznik observes.33 Among the many ways this space has shifted over its ­decades in Doylestown are the demographics of Catholics who find meaning in this pilgrimage site, including significant numbers of Haitians and Haitian Americans. But, elsewhere among Polish Catholics abroad, pri-

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vate prayer has taken ­precedence for some over communal devotions and sacraments, as Kerry Gallagher and Marta Trzebiatowska have found among Poles in Ireland.34 However, at this shrine, congregationalism, communal ritual, and togetherness remain altogether power­ful, even on other­wise quiet winter Monday nights when a Charismatic group meets for devotion and study in a chapel in the shrine’s visitor center. They sway, sing, clap, pray, and study ministry, mostly in E ­ nglish.

Creolizing Mary in Pennsylvania Our Lady of Czestochowa has been of central importance to Haitian Marianism since the era of the Haitian Revolution, as of 1803.35 While Our Lady of Perpetual Help is Haiti’s patron saint and is conflated in Haitian Vodou with the originally African spirit (lwa) Èzili, Czestochowa’s cult is also quite ­popular in Haiti. She, too, is conflated in Vodou with Èzili, particularly in her Petwo manifestation as Èzili Dantò, a fiery spirit of Kongolese inspiration. As Karen McCarthy Brown explains, “Petwo spirits are . . . ​hot-­tempered and volatile. . . . ​The power of Petwo spirits resides in their effectivity, their ability to make ­things happen.”36 Dantò also likes to smoke and carry sharp knives. Though rarely together, Haitian and Polish Catholics share a deep devotion to Our Lady of Czestochowa, which is made manifest in respectively robust pilgrimage cultures.37 In the United States, ­these traditions are resplendently displayed at the shrine in Doylestown each summer. Polish pilgrimage to the monastery of Jasna Góra dates to the 1420s. Stories of miracles performed by Czestochowa began circulating early during her cult’s emergence in Poland and, thus, as Robert Maniura puts it, for Polish Catholics, “the perception of the miraculous is at the center of pilgrimage.”38 In Haiti, the oldest pilgrimage on rec­ord is to the Church of Saint Anne, located in the northern hamlet of Limonade, where pilgrims began arriving at her shrine in 1707.39 The miraculous is also at the heart of Haitian Catholic and Vodouist pilgrimage. Czestochowa first appeared in Haiti about one hundred years ­a fter St. Anne’s shrine was founded, a sanctuary of devotion to the Blessed ­Mother’s own ­mother. She initially arrived on banners and medallions ­carried by Polish legionnaires whom Napoleon had dispatched to Saint-­ Domingue as part of a last-­ditch effort by France to conquer the enslaved

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Africans and Creoles who w ­ ere revolting. Several hundred Polish legionnaires defected, some fighting against the French shoulder to shoulder with African and Creole insurgents. This cemented them in honor and glory as victors in world history’s only successful national slave revolt. Czestochowa was wounded during the fighting; hence, many Haitians describe the scars on this Black Madonna’s face as a result of this revolt. In 1805, Poles w ­ ere granted Haitian citizenship and declared by the new nation’s first constitution to be black.40 Centuries e­ arlier, their Black Madonna also received t­ hose very scars on a battlefield while defending Poles from an assault by Hussites in 1430.41 For both Haitians and Poles, the Madonna persevered, liberated their ­peoples, and continues to strengthen and bless them to this day. And for both ­peoples, her scars remind them of this, and that strug­gle is endemic to life but that, through faith, one perseveres. Czestochowa’s explosive debut in Haiti makes it unsurprising that she would be assimilated with the most explosive of the female Vodou spirits, Èzili Dantò. Given her scars, Czestochowa is often called twa màk (three scars).42 ­Because of her scars, dark skin tone, maternity, and her role in the Haitian Revolution, Our Lady of Czestochowa is the main iconic repre­ sen­ta­tion of Dantò in Vodou ­temples throughout Haiti. Though her icon is thus pervasive in Haiti, few p­ eople t­ here know her Polish name to be Czestochowa, usually just referring to her as Dantò, or lavyèj poloné (the Polish Virgin). Among fran katolik (lit: “frank Catholics,” i.e., Catholics who do not also practice Vodou), she is usually simply called “lavyèj” or “Manman Mari” (­Mother Mary). Despite this popularity, t­ here are no Catholic shrines to Czestochowa in Haiti. Nor have I ever seen her icon in any Catholic church t­ here, which leaves her out of the nation’s pilgrimage cir­cuit. This makes Doylestown even more significant for Haitians in the diaspora, and I have met pilgrims ­there who made the journey from Haiti for her feast day. But while some Marian devotees in Haiti who can afford such trips do travel abroad for pilgrimage—­and ­there are travel agencies who post ads in Haitian newspapers for such—­most Haitian pilgrims in Doylestown each August are dyaspora (diasporic Haitians). They almost all arrive via charter bus from cities in the United States and Canada. The religious identity of Haitians in the U.S. has historically been a creative mix of Vodou practices and Catholic devotions. This is part of a growing trend in American Catholicism of immigrants from the global

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south, especially Latin Amer­i­ca and the C ­ aribbean, infusing local churches and shrines with their indigenous religious rituals, worldviews, and offerings. Haitian pilgrims have reported to me that the sanctuary in Doylestown was once deeply infused with the spirit and power of Èzili Dantò. At around the time that the massive new shrine was dedicated, in 1966, and the icon was moved out of the barn and into its lower sanctuary, Haitian pilgrims began arriving from New York and Montreal. The barn continued to serve as a chapel, open to anyone who might be inspired to drift in and worship, as one observer noted in September 1982: We could hear a lot of noise—­I ­don’t remember if it was singing or chanting—as we approached the chapel. When we opened the doors, the place was jam-­packed with ­people wearing all white gowns and headwraps and having what appeared to be a pretty good time, dancing, smiling, celebrating. The one ­thing I do clearly remember was a huge portrait of “Our Lady” with jewels all over which ­really stood out ­because the building was austere (I ­don’t even remember seeing chairs or benches).

Diane Pilon was twelve years old at the time and recalls that she “just stood ­there, shocked at the ­whole ­thing. It’s not e­ very day a 12-­year-­old Philly kid sees something like that. The group was welcoming and seemed happy to have us ­there.” 43 This par­tic­u­lar gathering of Haitian Vodouists in the barn took place during the annual Polish Festival held at the shrine, complete with carnival r­ ides, beer gardens, a pop-up food court, polka musical performances, dancing, and tens of thousands of revelers taking it all in and gorging themselves on kielbasa sandwiches, pierogies, and potato placki.44 The priests at the shrine w ­ ere aware of what was g­ oing on among Haitians in the barn and were concerned. It is not clear w ­ hether they w ­ ere alarmed by a dif­fer­ent religion than theirs being practiced in the sanctuary or by the dangerous combination of candles burning in an old wooden structure, but the gathering of dozens of black ­people dressed in white and playing their drums came to a halt in the summer of 1993. Subsequently, Haitian pilgrims in Doylestown have had to “keep their multiple religious allegiances hidden.” 45 Signs of Vodou are still pre­sent at the shrine, and surely many of the offerings left at vari­ous locations are for Èzili Dantò.

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But t­ here are no longer communal rituals of the kind described by Pilon above. And nowadays, t­ here are signs in the barn in E ­ nglish, Creole, and Polish that burning candles in this sanctuary is strictly forbidden. ­Today, most dyaspora who journey to the shrine are fran katolik. The Creole Mass often features denunciations of Vodou from the pulpit, which usually garner responses of “Amen!” or “Hallelujah!” from the faithful in the pews. Furthermore, the Catholic Charismatic Renewal has recently changed the face of Haitian Catholicism, both in Haiti and in the U.S., and Marianism has been a fulcrum for this.46 Characterized by engaging the faithful in an absorbing call-­and-­response, Charismatic ritual practices provoke emotional shouts of joy and spontaneous beloved hymns in French and Haitian Creole.47 In 2017, I joined approximately five hundred worshippers at the shrine for the Haitian Mass, most of them w ­ omen wearing hats or veils. Throughout the ­service, they swayed and danced, hands reaching to the heavens and to the Blessed ­Mother, some with tears of joy streaming down their cheeks. The few pews between the altar and the iron bars w ­ ere crammed with the faithful, most of whom arrived early in order to secure a spot in the sanctuary’s most hallowed space. About a half-­hour into the ­service, ­things r­ eally began to “heat up” (chofe), as Haitians often say about ecstatic communal religious ­services, ­whether Catholic, Protestant, or Vodouist. Vodouist devotions often occur at and around the shrine, and t­ here are times when t­ hings heat up and unmistakably evoke Vodou practice. But, judging from the recollections of observers who have been

figure  26. Our Lady of the Assumption, Haiti’s national cathedral in the capital city of Port-­au-­Prince and the epicenter of Marian devotion in the ­Caribbean nation, as it stood in 1924. The cathedral collapsed during the tragic earthquake of January 12, 2010.

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g­ oing to the shrine for ­decades, this practice has been on the decline since the 1990s.48

The Feast of Our Lady of Czestochowa The highlight of the liturgical calendar and the time of the most ebullient “collective effervescence” at the shrine is the feast day of Our Lady of Czestochowa, which takes place annually on the Sunday closest to August 23.49 The 200-­acre shrine campus features multiple attractions for pilgrims, with the Candle Chapel and the grotto of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception especially appealing to the faithful. Many spend the entire day at the shrine, walking the grounds and praying, before and ­after Mass, and taking an early lunch. The icon that first took its place in the h ­ umble Pennsylvania barn has been blessed in Jasna Góra and “touched to the miraculous original.”50 It was also blessed by Pope Saint John Paul II in 1986. She now gazes on the faithful, hears their hymns and prayers, and blesses them from above the altar in the lower sanctuary, ­behind iron bars patterned ­after t­ hose that protect the original icon in Jasna Góra. The lower sanctuary is other­wise devoid of the resplendent Polish historical imagery that animates murals and mosaics in the upper church, especially the remarkable towering stained glass win­dows. The altar in the lower church dates to the seventeenth ­century and serves “translocative” and “transtemporal” functions for Poles and Polish Americans. Likewise, much of the entire upper shrine, especially the win­dows, is unabashedly ­political in nature and theme.51 The pilgrims come from all over, but many of their buses bear Illinois license plates. The feast day Masses are scheduled at noon. In 2017 I arrived early and counted twenty-­seven buses, the earliest arrived at 9:30. Seven carried Haitians and Haitian Americans from Montreal; Boston; New York; and Newark, New Jersey, and the rest brought Poles and Polish Americans. The Haitian buses w ­ ere stocked with cooking pots and food in the luggage racks below, including beans, rice, chicken, and plantains. The pilgrims on the Poles’ and Polish Americans’ buses came hungry to feast on the shrine’s large cafeteria’s Polish fare. T ­ hose Haitians arriving early ate meals outside on benches, picnic ­tables, or on their buses and then mulled about the grounds awaiting Mass, some in the Rosary Garden. ­Others, mostly w ­ omen, prayed at the grotto, in the Candle Chapel, or at

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figure 27. Our Lady of Czestochowa, Queen of Poland, Liberator of Haitians. (Image from Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia​.­org/w/index​ .php?search=nuestra+senora+de+czestochowa&t itle=Special:MediaSearch&go=Go&type=image.)

the chapel of St. Anne. Many early-­arriving Poles first visit the dead in the cemetery, which holds the remains of hundreds of Poles and Polish Americans who gave their lives on vari­ous battlefields—­mostly in Vietnam. Relatedly, the shrine’s large bookstore / museum features a few mannequins adorned in military uniforms, further deepening the Polish nationalist sentiment evoked at the site. The Feast Day Mass in the upper church is conducted in Polish, and ­people crowd into the large sanctuary as it is about to start. In the lower sanctuary, at the very same time, several hundred Haitians and Haitian Americans congregate for the simultaneous Mass in Haitian Creole, singing hymns and following Bible readings from the pulpit, mostly in French. Jubilant emotions flood both sanctuaries, especially the lower, one with white Catholics and the other with black Catholics. Their respective ­peoples’ histories are connected by oppression, vio­lence, Marian faith, and

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r­ esistance. Hymnic expressions, hand claps, and foot stomps filter up and down through the two sanctuaries and create a remarkable and unique convergence of Catholic practices in Haitian Creole, French, and Polish—­ but not E ­ nglish. This experience is quite a distinctive one not only in American Catholicism but globally, as I know of no other place where such a devotional ethnic confluence happens, ­whether rarely or each August in Pennsylvania. In terms of ethnicity, the Catholic Church in the United States has always been a church of immigrants—­although, as of 1965, this has been globally southernizing, with more immigrants since then arriving from the developing world, the Global South. One result of this is that ­today, more than half of Catholics in the U.S. have Spanish surnames, me included; however, the diversification of this diversification often goes unmentioned in American Catholic studies ­today, making the Doylestown experience each August an impor­tant reflection thereof. ­There and then are gathered ­people with surnames like Kowalski and Jean-­Baptiste. As already noted, for many Haitians, Our Lady of Czestochowa has been deeply infused with the feisty maternal Vodou spirit and power of Èzili Dantò. Despite denunciations of Vodou during the homily of this feast in the lower sanctuary, Dantò was undeterred in 2017 (she can be pushy and defiant): She descended in person, possessing a devotee, a middle-­ aged ­woman, in a pew nearest to the altar. The w ­ oman collapsed, yelped, and writhed on her back, on the pew, speaking in unmistakably Vodouist tongues: “dey-­dey-­dey-­dey.” As the s­ ervice wound down, the faithful sat, exhausted, and the possessed ­woman was helped outside. Then the Haitian Catholic priest announced that one of the shrine’s elder resident Polish monks was coming to address the faithful, and he offered the following words, which evoked thunderous applause: “God Bless you! Some fifty years ago, the first Haitian refugees came to this shrine. This is your home. Thank you for sharing in our love for the Blessed Virgin Mary.”52

Conclusion In Doylestown in 2019, Monsignor Thomas Wenski began his homily in ­English and Polish, and then the archbishop of Miami and the son of Polish immigrants, who has long served as the spiritual godfather to Haitian Catholics in South Florida, switched to Haitian Creole, saying, “Ayisyen yo, kote nou? Nou la? Mwen la tou” (“Haitians, where are you? Are you h ­ ere?

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I am h ­ ere too”), evoking screams of joy from the dozens of Haitians in attendance at the shrine, followed by a round of applause by the Polish monks and the throngs of faithful who filled the spacious sanctuary that day, the feast day of Our Lady of Czestochowa.53 Wenski then led them in singing one of the most beloved Haitian hymns to the Blessed M ­ other: 54 “Mari Manman Nou” (“Mary Our M ­ other”). The Blessed M ­ other is for all at the shrine a suprahuman force, as the faithful, w ­ hether Poles or Haitians, make homes and cross bound­aries, their devotion infused with the spirit of a maternal liberator and “defender” of two disparate p­ eoples confluently united in faith u ­ nder a warrior m ­ other, the Blessed Virgin Mary.55 The relationship between Polish and Haitian Marian devotees at this shrine is perhaps best described as a complicated, faithfully complicit confluence. This follows Thomas Tweed’s theory that “[r]eligions are confluences of organic-­cultural flows that intensify joy and confront suffering by drawing upon ­human and suprahuman forces to make homes and cross bound­ aries.”56 The National Shrine of Our Lady of Czestochowa contains and emits a multitude of meanings for the many pilgrims who visit this sacred site in Pennsylvania. Czestochowa has been a defender for over a thousand years, and t­ oday her shrine in the holy experiment sits atop a hill as a beacon in Pennsylvania to the descendants of t­ hose whom she has liberated: A Black Madonna as Holy ­Mother and Queen to Poles, and the descendants of the first p­ eople in history, mostly Africans, to ever pull off a national slave revolt—­the Queen of Poland become a wounded but combative Vodou spirit. As they gather as pilgrims each summer in Doylestown, Poles and Haitians, who may share very l­ ittle ­else in common, coalesce around their devotion to Czestochowa, flowing in a confluence of ­resistance, perseverance, and faith in the Blessed M ­ other, a black Madonna with scars on her cheek. Notes 1. Though statistics on this ­matter are unavailable, clearly hundreds of thousands of ­people visit the shrine each year. Hence millions have over the course of the shrine’s history. Poles and Polish Americans constitute the majority of pilgrims who visit the shrine regularly and / or for major feast day cele­brations, but especially for Czestochowa’s feast day each August. Other visitors have included two popes, three American presidents and one Polish president, countless Polish American motorcycle gang members, walking

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pilgrims from northern New Jersey, and many Haitian pilgrims. It has also been increasingly p­ opular of late among ­Vietnamese Catholics. 2. Philip Wingeier-­Rayo, “The ­Future of Mainline Churches: The Challenge of Race.” Insights: The Faculty Journal of Austin Seminary 133, no. 1 (2017): 3–11. See also, The Pluralism Proj­ect, “Church: Space and Spirit,” Harvard University, n.d., https://­pluralism​.­org​/­church​-­space​-­and​-­spirit; last accessed April 26, 2022. 3. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 90. 4. Pierre Bourdieu, “Genèse et structure du champ religieux,” Revue Française de Sociologie 12, no, 2 (1971): 295–334. 5. Brian Porter, “Hetmanka and M ­ other: Representing the Virgin Mary in Modern Poland.” Con­temporary ­European History 14, no. 2 (2005): 151–170, esp. 151. 6. Porter, “Hetmanka and M ­ other,” 155. 7. Anna Niedźwiedź, The Image and the Figure: Our Lady of Częstochowa in Polish Culture and P­ opular Religion, trans. Anna Niedźwiedź and Guy Torr (Krakow: Jagiellonian University Press, 2010 [2005]), 1. 8. For an abridged ­English translation of Pope Saint John Paul II’s epic homily in Port-­au-­Prince in 1983, see “Liberation Theology / Conférence Episcopal d’Haïti,” trans. and commentary by Terry Rey, in The Haiti Reader, ed. Laurent DuBois, Kaiama L. Glover, Nadève Ménard, Millery Polyné, and Chantalle Verna (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), 397–402. 9. Edward C. Banfield, ­Political Influence (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2017 [1961]); Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education ed. J. Richardson (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1986), 241–258. 10. David Morgan, Visual Piety: A History and Theory of ­Popular Religious Images (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 11. Niedźwiedź, The Image and the Figure, 10–11. 12. Niedźwiedź, 11. 13. Morgan, Visual Piety, 106. 14. Adam Bujak, The Shrine of Czestochowa Jasna Gora (Krakow: Bialy Kruk, 2008), 22. 15. Gracjan Kraszewski, “Catalyst for Revolution: Pope John Paul II’s Pilgrimage to Poland and Its Effects on Solidarity and the Fall of Communism,” The Polish Review 57, no. 4 (2012): 27–46, esp. 27. 16. For a glimpse and Pope Saint John Paul II’s visits to Doylestown, as well as the shrine’s grounds, see https://­czestochowa​.­us​/­john​-­paul​-­ii​/­. 17. Kraszewski, “Catalyst for Revolution,” 46. 18. Kraszewski, 46.

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19. On the “push” ­factors of Polish immigration to the United States, see Joseph John Parot, Polish Catholics in Chicago, 1850–1920 (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1981), 3–24. For a summary of influential Polish religious and artists in U.S. history, see Joseph Swastek, “The Contribution of the Catholic Church in Poland to the Catholic Church in USA,” Polish American Studies 24, no. 1 (1967): 15–26. 20. ­Sister Lucille, “The C ­ auses of Polish Immigration to the United States,” Polish American Studies 8, nos. 3–4 (1950): 85–91, esp. 85–86. 21. John W. Bukowczyk, “Mary the Messiah: Polish Immigrant Heresy and the Malleable Ideology of the Roman Catholic Church, 1880–1930,” Journal of American Ethnic History 4, no. 2 (1985): 5–32, esp. 6. 22. William J. Galush, “Polish Americans and Religion,” in Polish Americans and Their History: Community, Culture, and Politics, ed. John J. Bukowczyk (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996), 80–92, esp. 81. The earliest Polish settlement in the United States carries to this day a Polish name: Panna Maria, Texas. Led by a Franciscan friar named Leopold Moczygemba, it was established in 1854, in Karnes County. On this settlement and other early Polish immigrants in Amer­i­ca, see Anonymous, “The Significance of Panna Maria, Texas,” Samaritan Review 25, no. 1 (2005), n.p. 23. On the Felician s­ isters in the United States, and especially in Pennsylvania, see Mary Jane Kadyszewski, One of the F­ amily: History of the Felician ­Sisters of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart Province, Coraopolis, Pennsylvania, 1920–1922 (Pittsburgh: Wolfson, 1982). 24. Kadyszewski, One of the ­Family, 82. 25. John W. Bukowyczk, “Mary the Messiah: Polish Immigrant Heresy and the Malleable Ideology of the Roman Catholic Church, 1880–1930,” Journal of American Ethnic History 4, no. 2 (1985): 10. 26. Swastek, “Contribution of the Catholic Church,” 26. It should be noted, however, that the National Shrine of Our Lady of Czestochowa is not a parish. The Roman Catholic parish of Doylestown, located in the heart of the city, is Our Lady of Mount Carmel, which sends a medical team to Haiti each year and treats thousands of patients at a Catholic church in the capital city of Port-­au-­Prince. 27. Thomas Rzeznik, “The National Shrine of Our Lady of Czestochowa,” American Catholic Studies 127, no. 2 (2016): 97–106, esp. 101. 28. Gabriel Lorenc, American Czestochowa (Brooklyn: Polstar, 1989), 69. 29. “Our Lady of Czestochowa Shrine,” https://­czestochowa​.­us​/­about​-­us​/­history​/­. 30. Joseph Pronechen, “A Visit to the ‘American Czestochowa,’ ” National Catholic Register, August  26, 2012, https://­w ww​.­ncregister​.­com​/­daily​-­news​/­a​ -­visit​-­to​-­the​-­american​-­czestochowa. 31. Rzeznik, “National Shrine of Our Lady of Czestochowa,” 97.

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32. Michael J. Gibson, “Creating Sacred Spaces in the Suburbs: Roman Catholic Architecture in Post-­War Los Angeles, 1948–76,” in Modernism and American Mid-20th ­Century Sacred Architecture, ed. Anat Geva (London: Routledge, 2018), 155–174, 172,n48. Szeptycki would enjoy an illustrious ­career in architecture, especially as a church builder in California. He had taken an MA at USC in the field, filing a thesis on church architecture. George Szeptycki, “A Study of Prob­lems and Functions of Ecclesiastical Architecture,” (MA thesis, School of Architecture, University of Southern California, 1952). 33. Rzeznik, “National Shrine of Our Lady of Czestochowa,” 97. 34. Kerry Gallagher and Marta Trzebiatowska, “Becoming a ‘Real’ Catholic: Polish Mi­grants and Lived Religiosity in the UK and Ireland,” Journal of Con­temporary Religion 32, no. 3 (2017), 431–445, esp. 440. 35. First colonized by the Spanish in the late fifteenth ­century, and then becoming the lucrative French slave plantation colony of Saint-­Domingue ­until the triumph of the Haitian Revolution in 1804, Hispaniola has always been steeped in Marianism. 36. Karen McCarthy Brown, Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 101. 37. Terry Rey, Our Lady of Class Strug­gle: The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Haiti (Trenton: Africa World Press, 1999). Terry Rey, “­Toward an Ethnohistory of Haitian Pilgrimage,” Journal de la Société des Américanistes 91, no. 1 (2005): 161–183; Terry Rey, “Saut-­d ’Eau,” in World Religions and Spirituality Proj­ect, ed.  David  G. Bromley, 2017, https://­wrldrels​.­org​/­2017​/­10​/­24​/­saut​-­deau​/­. 38. Robert Maniura, Pilgrimage to Images in the Fifteenth ­Century: The Origins of the Cult of Our Lady of Czestochowa (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2004), 125. 39. Deborah O’Neil and Terry Rey, “The Saint and Siren: Liberation Hagiography in a Northern Haitian Village,” Studies in Religion / Sciences Religieuses 41, no. 2 (2012): 166–186, esp. 175. 40. To this day, in Haiti, ­there is a community of Polish-­descended peasants, mostly in and around the rural village of Cazale, in the Central Plateau. On this community, see Sebastian Rypson, Being Poloné in Haiti: Origins, Survivals, Development, and Narrative Production of the Polish Presence in Haiti (Warsaw: Wydawca, 2008). 41. Michael Duricy, “Czestochowa Black Madonna: Black Madonnas: Our Lady of Czestochowa,” University of Dayton Marian Library, All about Mary, n.p. n.d., https://­udayton​.­edu​/­imri​/­mary​/­c​/­czestochowa​-­black​-­madonna​.­php. ­There are many other stories and beliefs about Czestochowa’s scars in Polish Catholic history. For an excellent discussion of this, see Niedźwiedź, The Image and the Figure, 48–87. 42. Brown, Mama Lola, 228.

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43. Diane Ferry Pilon, Personal electronic communications, July 1, 2019; July 17, 2019. 44. On the festival’s history, see Chris Magnuson, “History.” Polish American ­Family Festival and County Fair, 2019, http://­polishamericanfestival​.­org​/­​?­page​_­id​=­66. 45. Karen McCarthy Brown, “Staying Grounded in a High-­Rise Building: Ecological Dissonance and Ritual Accommodations in Haitian Vodou,” in Gods of the City: Religion and the Urban American Religious Landscape, ed. by Robert A. Orsi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 90. 46. Terry Rey, “Catholic Pentecostalism in Haiti: Spirit, Politics, and Gender,” Pneuma: Journal for the Society of Pentecostal Studies 32, no. 1 (2010): 80–106. 47. Meredith B. McGuire, Pentecostal Catholics. Power, Charisma and Order in a Religious Movement (Philadelphia: ­Temple University Press, 1982); the Renewal started in Pennsylvania, at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh in 1966/1967. By the early 1970s, it had arrived in Latin Amer­i­ca, where it spread widely among the faithful, especially in Brazil, Haiti, and Mexico. 48. Such is the impression that Margarita Mooney reflects in her study of Haitian Catholics in Miami, Montreal, and Paris. Margarita A. Mooney, Faith Makes Us Live: Surviving and Thriving in the Haitian Diaspora (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008): 244–246. I make similar observations in the case of Miami in Terry Rey, “Marian Devotion at a Haitian Catholic Parish in Miami: The Feast Day of Our Lady of Perpetual Help,” Journal of Con­ temporary Religion 19, no. 3 (2004): 353–374. 49. “In fact, we have seen that if collective life awakens religious thought on reaching a certain degree of intensity, it is b­ ecause it brings about a state of effervescence which changes the conditions of psychic activity. Vital energies are over-­excited, passions more active, sensations stronger; t­ here are even some which are produced only at this moment.” Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Joseph Ward Swain (London: Allen and Unwin, 1964 [1912]), 422. 50. Pronechen, “A Visit to the ‘American Czestochowa.’ ” 51. In Thomas Tweed’s study of a Cuban Catholic shrine in Miami (for Our Lady of Charity of El Cobre), he coins the terms “translocative” and “transtemporal” to capture key functions of a similar mural ­there—­the mural transports believers into their p­ eople’s past and back to the ancestral homeland. Thomas A. Tweed, Our Lady of the Exile: Diasporic Religion at a Cuban Catholic Shrine in Miami (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). For a rich description of the Czestochowa mural and stained glass win­dows at the shrine in Doylestown, see Mary Gowatny Higgins, Witraze, Stained Glass Win­dows (Lawrenceburg, IN: The Creative Com­pany, R. L. Reuhrwein, 2004). Furthermore, the Shrine is “believed to be the largest display of stained-­glass win­dows in one building in the United States.” Charles J. Adams, “A Day Away: Appreciating Our Lady of

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Czestochowa,” Reading ­Eagle, June  27, 2019, n.p., https://­w ww​.­readingeagle​.­com​ /­2019​/­06​/­27​/­a​-­day​-­away​-­appreciating​-­our​-­lady​-­of​-­czestochowa​/­. 52. Personal field notes, Shrine of Our Lady of Czestochowa, Doylestown, PA, August 25, 2019. 53. A video recording of the Coronation can be found ­here: https://­w ww​ .­youtube​.­com​/­watch​?­v ​= ­oBG5Wje86​-­0, last accessed March 29, 2020. The crowns had been blessed in Rome by Pope Francis prior to the Coronation. 54. On Wenksi’s influence among Haitian Catholics in South Florida, see Terry Rey and Alex Stepick, Crossing the ­Water and Keeping the Faith: Haitian Religion in Miami (New York: New York University Press, 2013). 55. ­Father Jason Kulzcynksi, in interview with author, Oreland, Pennsylvania, June 27, 2019. A Polish American, Kulzcynski had been a monk at the shrine in Doylestown and is now a parish priest elsewhere and the overseer of the National Shrine of St. Philomena. I asked him what is the first word that comes to mind when he thinks of Our Lady of Czestochowa, and he said “defender.” 56. Thomas A. Tweed, Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 54.



The National Shrine Basilica of Our Lady of Fatima Meaning Making at a Cold War Niagara Falls Tourist Shrine k a ren e. pa rk

Since the early 1960s, Catholics in the Niagara Falls region of upstate New York have gathered to pray for the intercession of Our Lady of Fatima ­under a large plexiglass dome contoured with stainless steel continents of the northern ­hemisphere. This unusual, globe-­shaped shrine translates both the fears and desires of ­those who worship ­there into material form. Worshippers entering the sanctuary are physically placed ­under the protection of the power­ful Our Lady of Fatima, represented by a 13-­foot, 10-­ton statue perched atop the exterior of the dome. In side chapels of corrugated steel and cement, candles burn in futuristic votive holders, and a massive mural depicting a coming nuclear holocaust which once hung b­ ehind the altar can still be seen in the ambulatory. To visit the National Shrine Basilica of Our Lady of Fatima t­ oday is to be transported to a time when the terror of nuclear war was horrifyingly imminent. The retro-­futurist design of the site is not only a quaint reminder of stylistic changes in architecture and design—it is also a reminder that the ­people who built it and first worshipped ­there w ­ ere living, working, and praying alongside the ever-­present terror of nuclear annihilation. The architecture of the National Shrine Basilica of Our Lady of Fatima reflects the desire of ­those for whom it was built to be sheltered from harm, both spiritually and physically. This shrine was not intended to be a local attraction, however. Instead, it was conceived as a national one. During the 1950s and 1960s, Niagara Falls, New York, was a major automobile tourist destination, and the shrine was also built with ­these middle-­ class honeymooners and day-­trippers in mind. To understand the National Shrine Basilica of Our Lady of Fatima, one must contextualize the site within ­these intersecting geo­graph­i­cal and temporal contexts—­namely, automobile tourism and the Cold War nuclear threat. Now that the threat of nuclear Armageddon no longer animates the American imagination and Niagara Falls itself is mostly a “lowbrow tour-

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figure  28. Advertisement for the National Shrine Basilica of Our Lady of Fatima. (From Karen E. Park’s personal collection.)

ist trap” (Dubinsky, 1992), the site has, despite what would appear to be a particularly inflexible aesthetic, proved surprisingly malleable to the changing priorities and experiences of the Catholics who visit it t­ oday. ­After its heyday in the 1960s and 1970s, the shrine gradually fell into disrepair. An attempt to remodel the dome church in 2004 by adding an anachronistic natu­ral stone ambulatory failed not only aesthetically but practically. It leaks. Many of the 130 marble statues, purchased voraciously in the 1950s and 1960s by the families and fraternal socie­ties of Polish and Italian immigrant groups, are now crumbling to ruin ­because the marble they are cut from was never meant to be exposed to the ele­ments. And the stately elms which once formed an outdoor main aisle and transept are, of course, nothing but a memory. When the intersecting lines of history, religious devotion, architecture, and tourism that once created this vibrant religiopo­liti­cal space became severed, new lines and new meanings eventually emerged. New statues of Korean and Lebanese saints like St. Andrew Kim Taegon and St. Nimatullah Kassab Al-­Hardini provide evidence of this ongoing evolution.

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Nuclear Preparations and Preoccupations in the Niagara Region Few ­people ­today think of Niagara Falls when the development of nuclear weapons and bombs comes up. That history is associated more with Los Alamos than with upstate New York. But the factories and facilities of the Niagara region w ­ ere essential to the creation of Fat Man and L ­ ittle Boy, as well as countless other unnamed bombs and weapons, and this industry employed many thousands of p­ eople in the region. The geo­graph­i­cal location of the shrine, one of the major epicenters of nuclear weapons development, disposal, and preparedness, is essential to understanding its meaning. The National Shrine Basilica of Our Lady of Fatima, completed in 1962, was built eight miles from the Niagara Falls Air Force Missile Site, also called the 35th Air Defense Missile Squadron, a major Cold War U.S. Air Force launch complex for surface-­to-­air missiles. This missile site was activated on June 1, 1960. Between 1960 and 1969, forty-­six Boeing BOMARC missiles w ­ ere h ­ oused h ­ ere, poised and ready to defend the region against ­enemy attack. The missile site also ­housed forty-­eight model IV “coffin” bomb shelters and was constructed with plans for dozens more that ­were never built. Given the architectural design of the shrine, its proximity to what was then the largest missile launch site in the eastern United States is indeed striking. When my f­ ather, who was born in 1942, first visited the shrine church with me, he said, “This feels like a bomb shelter,” before knowing anything about the military history of the region. The headquarters of the Bell Aviation Corporation, a large and significant aircraft manufacturer and developer, was also very close to the shrine. During the World War II years before the shrine’s construction, at least twenty-­eight thousand ­people from the immediate community ­were employed making as many as ten thousand military aircraft. But the Bell plant was more than an airplane factory; it was the site of major aviation and weapons development throughout the twentieth ­century. ­After World War II, Bell played a crucial role in the development of rocket propulsion technology, and its engineers ­were responsible, in 1957, for the first nuclear-­ tipped air-­to-­surface missile and the Agena rocket engine. This rocket engine was responsible for inserting into orbit nearly all the satellites launched by the United States during the 1960s. Linde Air Products, a division of ­Union Carbide, also played a key role. Already using uranium to

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produce vari­ous dyes before World War II, they turned to the production of uranium dioxide, uranium tetrachloride, and uranium hex­a­fluor­ide, all of which are used in nuclear weapons development. While many of ­these developments took place in secret, the residents of the Niagara region in the World War II and postwar eras would have been particularly aware of the global threats to the United States and the technological innovations being designed to thwart them.1 Also significant is the location of the Lake Ontario Ordnance Works (LOOW), less than a mile from the National Shrine Basilica. This large tract of land (approximately 7,500 acres) was procured in 1941 by the U.S. Federal Government, initially for use in the production of TNT during World War II, production of which ceased in 1943. Between 1944 and 1948, the Manhattan Engineer district dumped over ten thousand pounds of radioactive sludge into a concrete reservoir at the LOOW, and during the 1950s and 1960s, this land was used extensively to store ­these highly dangerous materials. Shockingly, much of this waste was not disposed of properly and was “piled up wherever space could be found” and often left out in the open. This site remains the Northeast’s only operating hazardous waste dump.2 To summarize, then, The National Shrine Basilica of Our Lady of Fatima was built very nearly on top of a nuclear waste disposal site and nested within a landscape filled with bomb shelters, nuclear waste storage facilities, surface-­to-­air missiles, and a major military aircraft manufacturer and developer. It is hard to imagine a place in the United States during the mid-­ twentieth ­century where the imminent threat of nuclear annihilation would have loomed larger. The National Shrine Basilica of Our Lady of Fatima is, in many ways, a physical expression of the world as the Catholics of the region experienced it: a world divided into good and bad, Communist and Cap­i­tal­ist, ­Russian and American, Catholic and non-­Catholic, contaminated and uncontaminated. ­Here it all was, literally placed u ­ nder Our Lady of Fatima’s protection in a place that allowed patrons to fulfill their overlapping religious and patriotic duties and helped them to make sense of their place within a truly terrifying landscape.

Our Lady of Fatima Comes to Buffalo and Niagara Falls In mid-­t wentieth-­century Amer­i­ca, the power­f ul figure of Our Lady of Fatima, a Marian apparition that had occurred in rural Portugal during

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World War I, came to dominate Catholic piety, especially in the U.S. Promoted by Pope Pius XII, Archbishop Fulton Sheen, and a slew of religious publications and ­organizations, in par­tic­u­lar the Blue Army of Our Lady of Fatima, devotion to Our Lady of Fatima increased exponentially during the 1950s, as did anxiety over the planned revelation of the “third secret” of Fatima, expected in 1960. During the Cold War, Our Lady of Fatima occupied an impor­tant psychological role for American Catholics: As the ultimate protectress of the United States and its allies, devotion to her offered, for many, a path to peace and security and a defense against chaos and destruction. Neglecting her directive to pray the Rosary to convert Rus­sia and defeat Communism was a threat to both patriotism and piety.3 By the early 1950s, the Buffalo, New York / Niagara Falls area had become enthralled by Our Lady of Fatima. The region was something of an “early adopter” of the devotion. John M. Haffert (1915–2001), the f­ ounder of the Blue Army of Our Lady of Fatima, a group whose mission was to “wage spiritual warfare against atheistic Communism and stave off cosmic catastrophe,” had attended seminary at the Mt. Carmel Seminary in Niagara Falls, Ontario.4 In December 1947, he was instrumental in bringing the Pilgrim Statue of Our Lady of Fatima to Buffalo, an event that brought over two hundred thousand ­people to see the statue in just three days.5 From 1947 on, Buffalo and Niagara Falls newspapers show a flurry of activities related to Our Lady of Fatima, including meetings of newly formed groups such as the Our Lady of Fatima Society and the Blue Army, along with novenas, block Rosaries, and the installation of backyard shrines. When a small group of Italian priests from the Barnabite Order came to the Buffalo / Niagara Falls area in the 1940s hoping to found a seminary and school, they arrived just as devotion to Our Lady of Fatima was taking off, and they found a way to hitch their wagon to Our Lady of Fatima’s rising star. In 1950, a local Polish farmer who had recently been cured by Our Lady of Fatima’s intercession, sold a 15-­acre parcel of his land to the Barnabites for one dollar, with the sole stipulation that they build a shrine to her somewhere on the property.6 Hearing of this arrangement, another local man donated a statue of Our Lady of Fatima and the three c­ hildren to whom she appeared, and with that, the shrine was established. The subsequent fund­rais­ing campaign was a smashing success b­ecause the shrine “basically sold itself.” Fr. Julio Ciavaglia, the director emeritus of the shrine who was in his novitiate with the Barnabites during the mid1950s, explained to me, “Once we put the statue of Our Lady of Fatima

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up, ­people w ­ ere begging us to take their money! It poured in!!” 7 The Barnabites’ modest seminary was soon completed, and very quickly, the outdoor shrine to Our Lady of Fatima became a ­popular Niagara Falls spiritual and tourist destination. By the end of the 1950s, with the success of the small shrine surpassing all their hopes, the Barnabites began to plan something truly monumental—­the first National Shrine Basilica to Our Lady of Fatima. The intense local experience of the global nuclear threat is vis­ i­ble in the architecture—­but so is the awareness of Niagara Falls as a national tourist destination, and an international attraction, one of the “Seven Natu­ral Won­ders of the World.” 8 With no shortage of money or interest in the proj­ect, the basilica was completed within two years, and when it opened in 1962, it was a striking example of mid-­twentieth-­century Catholic modernist architecture. As Jeffrey S. Bennett explains in writing of the influence of the Fatima apparition story in the American context, “the Fatima prophesies—­and the apparition story more generally—­became templates that ­organized the way real­ity was perceived, even providing blueprints for how one should act, religiously, po­liti­cally, and other­wise.” 9 In the case of the National Shrine Basilica of Our Lady of Fatima, ­those blueprints became literal, not just figurative.

Nuclear Fears Translated into Sacred Space In 1943, when Pope Pius XII commemorated the 25th anniversary of the Fatima apparition by making the content of the apparitions public for the first time, he outlined what would become a clear transactional relationship between the American Catholic faithful and the fate of the world. Within the “divine economy” of the mid-­t wentieth-­century devotion to Our Lady of Fatima, praying the Rosary became an a­ ctual means to ending the Cold War and destroying Communism.10 The Rosary had long been linked to the intercession of Mary on the side of Christians or Christendom, and the atomic threat of Soviet / Communist Rus­sia became part of that ongoing cosmic b­ attle. The b­ attle and weapons imagery w ­ ere more than meta­phorical; they ­were believed to provide physical defense from nuclear attack. One nun, Sr. Mary Pierre, composed a play written for schoolchildren in 1948 titled “Our Atom Bomb—­The Rosary.”11 The website of the Blue Army, World Apostolate of Fatima, USA, relates a story from a Jesuit priest, who was living at the Church of Our Lady’s Assumption in

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Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, the day the Enola Gay dropped the first atomic bomb. This priest, ­Father Hubert Schiffer, and his fellow Jesuits ­were spared on that day, while more than one hundred thousand w ­ ere killed instantly. Schiffer is quoted as saying, “We believe that we survived ­because we w ­ ere living the message of Fatima. We lived and prayed the Rosary daily in that home.” According to this piece, Schiffer claimed throughout his life that the priests received a “protective shield” from the Blessed ­Mother which “protected them from all radiation and ill-­effects.”12 Mary’s words to the visionaries at Fatima are widely available online and in print. They are reprinted in a pamphlet from 1950, which is still available for sale at the National Shrine Basilica entitled “Our Lady of Fatima’s Peace Plan from Heaven.” In the section entitled “The Vision Foretells World War II and Communism,” Mary is quoted as having revealed that “The War [glossed as the First World War, then raging] is g­ oing to end. But if p­ eople do not stop offending God, another worse one w ­ ill begin in the reign of Pius XI . . . ​to prevent this, I s­ hall ask for the consecration of Rus­sia to my Immaculate Heart.” Mary had also asked the ­children at Fatima for daily prayer of the Rosary back in 1917. When this World War I message delivered to some c­ hildren in the Portuguese countryside was presented to the world by Pope Pius XII in 1942, it resonated powerfully with American Catholics who found in it a way for them to be good patriotic Americans and good Catholics, d­ oing their part to fight Amer­i­ca’s enemies by praying the Rosary for Mary’s intercession. B ­ ecause the Fatima devotion si­mul­ta­neously highlighted their Catholic identity and American patriotism, it allowed t­ hese ­children and grandchildren of Catholic immigrants to assert both their American and Catholic identities in a power­ ful, clear, and coherent way. The Rosary meant peace for the United States and her (good) allies. Neglect of it meant annihilation at the hands of the godless R ­ ussians. In Our Lady of Fatima and the Rosary, American Catholics found a practical and effective weapon in the war against Communism—­a war that transcended economics and geopolitics into a cosmic strug­gle between good and evil. In thinking about t­ hese fears within the par­tic­u­lar context of the Buffalo / Niagara Falls region, let us turn now and take an even closer look at the shrine itself. As described e­ arlier, it is a stainless steel and plexiglass dome, 100 feet in dia­meter and 55 feet high. The plexiglass lets light into the worship space, except where the steel contours of the continents of

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the northern h ­ emisphere block it. The worship space h ­ ere is a plexiglass and metal model of the geopo­liti­cal landscape where the cosmic drama of Our Lady of Fatima’s message was being enacted. Lacking adornment, the space is strikingly plain—­just cement and cinderblock, plexiglass, and stainless steel. The sanctuary is nearly devoid of any recognizable traditional Catholic markers—no gold, no stained glass, nothing ornamental. It is a gravely threatened world ­imagined as a sacred space—­a world that can be saved and protected by the divine transaction taking place inside and the power­ful ­woman who guards it from on top. Catherine Osborne explores how architectural innovation, in the form of materials like concrete, steel, and plexiglass, reflected what was largely a theological optimism of the early and mid-­twentieth c­ entury. At the Our Lady of Fatima Shrine, the modern materials feel less theologically optimistic and oriented t­ oward building a f­ uture kingdom of God, and more about the dire need for protection, shelter, and power.13 A shrine brochure from 1968 summarizes the story of Fatima and the purpose of the shrine with charming brevity. This brochure was designed to attract Niagara Falls tourists to the shrine during their vacation, so it had to explain the shrine’s purpose and convince visitors to come with as few words as pos­si­ble. The copy reads, “Fatima is a town in Portugal where Our Lady appeared in 1917 to three c­ hildren, Jacinta, Francisco, and Lucia. From the conversation, which took place between Our Lady and Lucia, we can gather ­these ele­ments: (1) God is very displeased with the many sins committed by men, which are the cause of wars. (2) Our Lady wants to do something to save sinners and bring peace to mankind. She asked for conversion and repentance, reparation, fulfillment of daily duties, daily recitation of the Rosary, and First Saturday Mass.” A schedule of masses and Rosaries follows. While the basilica was designed in a modernist style, the rest of the site adhered to a more traditionalist aesthetic, one more familiar to the older Polish and Italian American Catholics who first worshipped t­ here. The “Ave­nue of Saints,” for example, eventually morphed from a single ave­nue into an entire neighborhood of saints, as several hundred large marble statues, each purchased by and dedicated to a dif­fer­ent f­ amily, most of them with e­ ither Polish or Italian surnames, filled the grounds of the shrine. Smaller shrines to Our Lady of Czestochowa, the Queen and Protectress of

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figure 29. The interior of the dome at the shrine. (From Karen E. Park’s personal collection.)

Poland; ­Mother Cabrini, the Italian immigrant saint and first American citizen to be canonized; St. Antony Mary Zaccaria, a relatively unknown sixteenth-­century Italian saint and ­founder of the Barnabite Order; and other shrines with par­tic­u­lar significance to the Polish and Italian Catholic devotees of Our Lady of Fatima are also found haphazardly located throughout the grounds. A brochure listing scheduled events at the shrine in 1963, the year ­after the basilica was completed, includes daily rosaries, Italian Days on the first of ­every month, and Polish days on the 15th of ­every month as well as feast day masses for Italian and Polish saints, special days devoted to commemorating the Fatima apparition and dozens more events. A coronation festival was held annually on the second Sunday of August to correspond with the Feast of the Assumption (August 15). A poster from the late 1960s advertising this event reads, “Among other s­ervices, the statue of the Blessed ­Mother on top of the dome ­w ill be crowned at 4:00 p.m. Why not plan your vacation to take part in this unique event?”

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Atomic Age Tourism in the Niagara Region As the advertising poster from 1960 makes clear, the shrine basilica was conceived as a religious site as well as a Niagara Falls tourist attraction, which had to compete with a wide variety of other attractions and activities available to tourists and families on holiday. In the mid-­or late 1960s, a Catholic ­family from New York or New Jersey could arrive for a weekend visit to Niagara Falls to marvel at the natu­ral scenery; enjoy the arcades and other tourist attractions; tour the Bell aircraft fa­cil­i­ty, taking pride in American aviation engineering and military might; and end their visit with a Sunday picnic and pilgrimage to the National Shrine Basilica. ­There they would encounter a dramatic and aesthetically power­f ul scene enacted through the religious architecture of the site: The real space in which they lived, a divided world u ­ nder threat of nuclear annihilation, sacralized and brought ­under control as Our Lady of Fatima, high atop the half dome, stood watch over the western h ­ emisphere, protecting it with the help of her patriotic and devoted faithful. Tourists and pilgrims interacted with and made use of the space by climbing the steps on the outside of the dome to stand directly in Our Lady of Fatima’s protective shadow and by gathering to pray ­under the plexiglass ­hemisphere, a sacred model of their own threatened world, for American peace and victory. The Niagara Falls Chamber of Commerce has published many guides for tourists over the years. One undated official guide that appears to be from the late 1960s, titled “Niagara Official Guide: What to See / Where to Stay / Where to Dine,” lists seventeen attractions from Fort Niagara to Wax Museums to the Famous Maid of the Mist Boat ­Ride. The National Shrine Basilica of Our Lady of Fatima makes the list as number 13. I first encountered the shrine in 2012 while on a road trip to Niagara Falls as a tourist with my f­ ather and my c­ hildren. In the lobby of our h ­ otel was a large rack of brochures, the kind that have been printed and distributed for ­decades to attract and entice tourists. Among t­ hese, I came across one for the National Shrine of Our Lady of Fatima, which looked spectacular from the images on the brochure, and soon headed out to see it. When I arrived, the vast parking lot was nearly empty and choked with weeds. It happened to be August 14, a Tuesday, and the day before the feast of the Assumption, a time when I might have expected to find the place

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bustling with activity. But it was nearly deserted, no signs of the kinds of coronation festivities or large crowds that I would learn of ­later in my research. At midday, the cafeteria was closed, and the huge picnic area was empty. I picked up a self-­g uided tour map and began to search out the many points of interest, shrines, and statues on my own. Much of it was in a state of decay: cracked sidewalks, unmowed grassy areas, rust-­stained cement, and water-­damaged signage. I climbed the domed basilica, which has two sets of metal stairs on its outside, taking in a view of the Niagara Valley and getting up close to the impressive 13-­foot statue of Our Lady of Fatima that is perched t­ here. It is clear from shrine lit­er­a­ture that this place, the top of the dome, was the epicenter of the shrine and the ultimate goal for pilgrims who traveled h ­ ere. One brochure from the gift shop reads, “At the top of the Dome, one can enjoy a beautiful view of the Shrine grounds and surrounding hills. The large statue of Our Lady of Fatima is 13 feet high and weighs 10 tons. It was sculpted in Vermont granite. The grayish color of the stone dis­appears at night u ­ nder the spotlights and the statue seems to beam as a star for all ­people.” The stairway to the top of the dome is lined with plaques placed ­there by faithful families grateful for prayers answered or hoping for blessings from Our Lady of Fatima, but this stairway had obviously gone unpainted for many years, and the rust from t­hese plaques stained the walls and stairs. In the 1960s, Niagara Falls was amid a building boom of structures designed for tourists to take in the spectacular views. The Seagram Tower, on the Ontario side, was built from March 1961 to June 1962, nearly contemporaneously with the construction of the Fatima Shrine. This massive structure billed itself as the “first concrete and steel structure of its kind in North Amer­i­ca,” designed to provide “a panoramic view of Niagara Falls, one of the Seven Natu­ral Won­ders of the World.”14 The Seagram Tower featured seven lookout platforms, vari­ous dining rooms, and a large duty-­free gift shop. On one level, visitors could request “photographic assistance by Eastman Kodak” to perfect their shots of the falls. Similarly, the Oneida Tower, billed as the “tallest observation tower in Canada,” was completed in June 1964 and boasted “350 tons of steel embedded in four concrete blocks each weighing 300 tons” and elevators that could carry 1,800 visitors an hour.15 Space-­age concrete and steel architecture and observatories from where one could take photo­graphs

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figure  30. A stairway takes visitors to the top of the dome. (From Karen E. Park’s personal collection.)

and observe the natu­ral surroundings ­were being built at a rec­ord pace in the 1960s, the grandest of which was perhaps the Skylon Observatory, “The World’s Most Modern International Pavilion,” whose massive revolving dining room weighed over 60 million pounds.16 Interestingly, the weight of the materials used in ­these structures is mentioned over and over again, as if the sheer magnitude of the concrete and steel structures was something to marvel at. Similar language is found in con­temporary descriptions of the shrine, referring to the specifics of the building materials and their weight. My self-­guided tour included “The Fatima Hill,” which was described this way on the map: “This statuary group of Our Lady of Fatima and the three ­children is the original Fatima group, which has attracted thousands of pilgrims since the very beginning. The rosary beads surrounding the Fatima group are au­then­tic cannonballs—­a symbol of humanity’s surrender to the Queen of Peace.” However, I could not find this statuary group, which consisted of the original statues gifted to the shrine in the 1950s,

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figure 31. The brochure for nearby Seagram Tower, from 1968. (From Karen E. Park’s personal collection.)

even before the construction of the basilica. The w ­ oman working in the gift shop did not know where it was e­ ither and claimed she had never seen it. Eventually, I found the statues of Our Lady of Fatima and the three child seers, which had once attracted thousands of pilgrims. It was broken and balanced unevenly ­behind a tool shed. The cannonballs ­were nowhere to be seen. The once compelling tableau of Our Lady of Fatima’s appearance in Portugal to warn the world of coming destruction was, by 2012, no longer the reason for this shrine’s existence or appeal. Along the path leading from the Rosary pool to the gift shop, I encountered a series of signs. They ­were architectural renderings of a planned renovation of the Basilica and grounds—­scheduled to be completed in time for the centennial anniversary of the Fatima apparitions in 2017. The signs ­were nearly illegible due to having been faded by sun and rain, and the metal frames w ­ ere speckled with rust. The message “Look to the ­Future. Be a Part of It” was just vis­i­ble at the bottom. ­These renderings ­were dated 2007, so when I first saw them in 2012, they had been exposed

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to the ele­ments for five years. Phase 1 of the renovation had clearly never gotten off the ground despite t­ hese elaborate plans and renderings. Fund­ rais­ing for the renovation had been stalled with one exception: on the gift shop door, someone had hung a printed appeal. It read: “­Bottles and Cans for the Basilica. Collecting b­ ottles and cans for the shrine’s expansion and renovation proj­ect. Drop up at office or call for pick up. $2,600+ collected to date.” ­A fter my 2012 and 2014 visits, I concluded that the meaning of the Fatima apparition for the Italian and Polish Catholics of Buffalo in the 1950s was so specific, namely fear of imminent nuclear destruction, that it could not readily be translated into a new era. It seemed that the concrete, steel, and plexiglass of the basilica dome w ­ ere not flexible enough to accommodate another generation, another era. The fact that over time ethnic identity fades and saints like Gaudenza and Antony Mary Zaccaria become strangers to the great-­grandchildren of t­ hose who once knew them well, would not have been enough. T ­ here are many examples of ethnic parishes dedicated to local E ­ uropean saints like Willibrod or Josephat that remain thriving communities for new groups of Catholics who have no connection to the original patron saints of the community at all. The Our Lady of Czestochowa shrine in Pennsylvania (Rey) and the Our Lady of Consolation Shrine in Ohio (Endres), included in this volume, are further examples of this. But I had thought that perhaps the National Shrine Basilica of Our Lady of Fatima was dif­fer­ent from sites like t­ hese, in part b­ ecause of its space-­age architecture. Unlike a more traditional church or cathedral made of stone or brick with a steeple and stained glass, the metal-­and plexiglass-­domed Basilica of the National Shrine of Our Lady of Fatima could not be successfully updated or adapted. It seemed static, a crumbling shell, a nearly perfect physical manifestation of the overwhelming concerns of American Catholics over a period of a few ­decades at most. The transactional economy of the site, the fear of annihilation and defeat represented by the cement and steel Northern ­Hemisphere dome, and the answer to this profound fear found in the g­ iant Fatima statue and protective space-­age dome once had a precise cultural logic. The prayers offered to Our Lady of Fatima by mid-­century American Catholics who visited h ­ ere had to do with par­tic­u­lar geopo­liti­cal and economic issues that, over time, became irrelevant.

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Benches and Statues: New Communities Staking Out New Meanings Over the last d­ ecade, I returned to the shrine several times and have since revised the assessments I made in 2012 and 2014. This shrine has not been closed or torn down like so many Niagara Falls h ­ otels and attractions. Nor has it become completely dilapidated. In fact, it looked better in 2020 than it did a ­decade before. My most recent visit in late summer 2020, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, revealed a site that is evolving on its own terms. ­There are new statues dedicated to Saints, which hold meaning for newer immigrant groups. T ­ hese include St. Nimatullah Kassab Al-­Hardini, donated by Pete’s Lebanese Bakery, the Marionite Catholic Saint Sharbel Makhloof, as well as the V ­ ietnamese Catholic martyrs canonized by Pope John Paul II in 1988. T ­ oday the site also features dozens of marble benches inscribed with the names of beloved ­family members. I noticed that, despite their solid construction and significant cost to t­ hose who purchased them, the benches are, by and large, not installed correctly. Many have not been placed on flat ground or stabilized, and they lean in ways that make them impossible to sit on. They too, like the statues in the Ave­nue of the Saints, exist not as practical places to rest while touring the grounds, but as memorials and commemorations—­a way to mark space. The Barnabite order, which founded and built this site, was never able to establish a lasting presence in the U.S. As of 2021, ­there w ­ ere approximately 350 Barnabite priests in the world, with the majority of ­these in Italy and the Philippines. Three of t­ hose priests are at the Fatima Shrine, but two are retired and no longer in active ministry. This means that the Barnabites can no longer provide a central authority or vision for the site. The current rector, ­Father Peter Calabrese, explained to me, “­People want to do ­things in­de­pen­dently now. They a­ ren’t interested in visiting h ­ ere in large groups. They want their visit to be part of a personal journey—­maybe involving immediate ­family members, but that’s it.”17 Perhaps ­because the meaning-­making at this site is decentralized and mostly left up to individual or f­amily groups, and also b­ ecause the shrine has long strug­gled financially, the site is particularly notable for its abundance of commemorative plaques and dedications. Even if someone cannot afford a statue or bench, bricks and inexpensive plastic and metal labels are available to

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figure  32. Benches at the shrine dedicated to loved ones, pictured here in August 2021. (Photo­graph by Karen E. Park.)

all and are attached to walkways, podiums, and walls throughout the shrine. While, aesthetically, ­these labels give the place a “ragtag” and chaotic feel, they also make it imminently accessible, perhaps part of its ongoing appeal. ­These thousands of names, some of them recent and some of them dating back to the earliest days of the shrine, together convey a sense of welcome and that “­there’s always room for one more.” The newer statues mentioned previously have mostly come from immigrant groups located in Canada. Although the pandemic temporarily halted travel across the American / Canadian border, Niagara Falls has a long history as a busy international border. Located just a few miles from the Canadian side, the Our Lady of Fatima Shrine has been steadily utilized by Filipino Catholics from Ontario. In the last five to seven years, immigrants to Canada from Sri Lanka, Goa, and Tamil, India, have become regular visitors and, according to Calabrese, “have found welcome” at the site. A dedicated group of ­Vietnamese Catholics from Syracuse, New York, donated a large statue to the ­Vietnamese martyrs in 2014. ­These 117 ­Vietnamese Catholics who ­were tortured and killed during

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p­ olitical vio­lence in the eigh­teenth and nineteenth centuries ­were canonized by Pope John Paul II on June 19, 1988. The local ­Vietnamese group is currently raising funds to add their own large statue of Mary at the site as well. Perhaps this “outdated” shrine near a potentially dangerous nuclear waste storage fa­cil­i­t y is available ­because no one ­else ­really wants it anymore, making it fair game for any group or ­family who cares to make it their own. That is itself a par­tic­u­lar type of dynamism. As a long-­term observer of this site, I predicted its demise and guessed it might even be demolished. That has not happened. Even ­here, in a space that sometimes feels neglected or irrelevant, t­ here is evidence of the nearly infinite capacity for adaptation that so often characterizes Marian devotion. In the last sixty years, the National Shrine Basilica of Our Lady of Fatima, which was created in response to the acute fear of nuclear annihilation, has evolved. The Polish and Italian immigrants who once filled the grounds for First Saturday Mass, d­ oing their part to protect the U.S. from Communism by praying the Rosary, are no longer around. Buses once picked them up en masse on a route that wound its way from parish to parish in Buffalo and the surrounding areas, but no longer. And yet, the shrine survives. Even in this context, a shrine whose architectural style and founding concerns are seemingly inflexible and par­tic­u­lar, the desire to seek out a place from which to view the world and one’s place within it, u ­ nder the watchful and power­ful gaze of Mary, persists. Notes 1. Ginger Strand, Inventing Niagara: Beauty, Power and Lies (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007), 227. 2. When news anchor Tom Brokaw’s desk was contaminated with anthrax in September 2001, it was sent to the LOOW to be destroyed and stored. For a lengthy treatment of the history of nuclear and hazardous waste in the region, including the Niagara Falls Love Canal disaster, see Strand, Inventing Niagara, 223–289. 3. For more on the psychological dimensions of mid-­century American devotion to Our Lady of Fatima see Jeffrey S. Bennett, “The Blue Army and the Red Scare: Politics, Religion and Cold War Paranoia,” Politics, Religion, and Ideology 16 (2015): 263–281.

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4. Bennett, “Blue Army and the Red Scare,” 266. 5. Thomas Kselman and Steven Avella, “Marian Piety and the Cold War in the United States,” The Catholic Historical Review 72 (1986): 441. 6. The uranium used to produce the first atomic bombs between 1942 and 1948 was pro­cessed in nearby Tonawonda, New York, and nuclear waste was being stored at the LOOW by the late 1940s. The farmer’s decision to donate the adjacent property to the Barnabites should be understood within this context. The land was without value due to the massive and dangerous amounts of atomic waste h ­ oused ­there. Thorium, uranium, and the world’s largest concentration of radium-226 are all stored t­ here to this day, amid numerous serious safety concerns. See Safety of the High-­level Uranium Ore Residues at the Niagara Falls Storage Site, Lewiston, New York (Washington, DC: Matopma; Research Council Committee on Remediation of Buried and Tank Wastes, 1995), 7. 7. Conversation with Fr. Julio Ciavaglia, CFSP, October 14, 2014. 8. T ­ here is no “official” list of the Seven Natu­ral Won­ders of the World, but much of Niagara Falls tourism lit­er­a­ture includes it on this imaginary list. The Niagara Falls ­Hotels and Tourism website claims that “It’s not the tallest waterfall in the world, but it’s still a massive display that captures the public imagination. It’s an extreme and striking part of the G ­ reat Lakes landscape that stands out in its environment more than other natu­ral won­ders. And it’s more embedded in the North American consciousness, not only as a beautiful spectacle but as a source for much of the electricity consumed by both Ontario and the state of New York, not to mention it’s (sic) prominent place in p­ opular culture and media,” https://­w ww​.­niagarafallshotels​.­com​/­blog​/­niagara​-­falls​-­8th​ -­wonder​-­world​/­. 9. Bennett, “Blue Army and the Red Scare,” 272. 10. Paula M. Kane, “Marian Devotion Since 1940: Continuity or Casualty?,” in Habits of Devotion: Catholic Religious Practice in Twentieth-­Century Amer­i­ca, ed. James M. O’Toole (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 89–129. 11. ­Sister M. Pierre, “Our Atom Bomb, the Rosary,” Catholic School Journal 48 (May 1948): 165–66 12. Fr. Paul Ruge, OFMI, “The Incredible Story of the Miracle at Hiroshima,” https://­w ww​.­bluearmy​.­com​/­t he​-­i ncredible​-­story​-­of​-­t he​-­m iracle​-­at​ -­h iroshima​/­. 13. Catherine R. Osborne, American Catholics and the Church of Tomorrow: Building Churches for the F­ uture: 1925–1975 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018). 14. Seagram Tower promotional brochure, ©1968. From author’s private collection.

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15. Oneida Observation tower promotional brochure, undated. From author’s private collection. 16. Skylon Observatory souvenir booklet, ©1964. From the author’s personal collection. 17. Conversation with Fr. Peter Calabrese, rector of the Our Lady of Fatima Shrine, June 24, 2021.

Part III: Devotional Creativity at Marian Shrines



Digital Devotion Marian Shrines Online k ayl a h a rris

“LET US PRAY FOR YOU!” This emphatic directive in capitalized letters, appeared in a pop-up win­dow across an image of Washington, DC’s iconic cherry blossoms, framing the dome of the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception on the shrine’s website in the spring of 2019. The text appealed directly to the individual, asking, “Do you have a need you would like to entrust to Mary Immaculate?” and also encouraged visitors to submit the names of loved ones and personal prayer intentions that could be prayed for at the National Shrine. This type of popup win­dow seems to be a recurring feature used by the National Shrine, as a similar win­dow appeared in January 2021 with a slightly dif­fer­ent prompt for engagement, this one stating “Let Us Light a Candle for You!” with a form for visitors to share their special intentions. The tone h ­ ere seems more encouraging than insistent. T ­ hese pop-up features link to other pages on the site u ­ nder the navigational heading “Enrollments & Devotionals,” which provides more information on requesting a prayer or lighting a candle. Pop-up win­dows are one tool that the National Shrine uses to create an online relationship and guide the visitor’s navigation of the website. The homepage for the shrine offers several dif­fer­ent navigational features for visitors to choose from upon landing t­ here. Within a banner at the top of the site, visitors can first select from ten languages. Next, ­there are the site’s main headings: “About the Basilica,” “Visit Us,” “News & Events,” “Enrollments & Devotionals,” “Donate,” and, fi­nally, “Shop.” Below t­hose headings are several rotating visual highlights, such as one with the tag­line “Amer­i­ca’s Catholic Church, ‘A ­Century in the Making,’ ” against an aerial image of the shrine that highlights the grandeur of the building within its surrounding landscape. Each highlight on the carousel links to several more web pages. Below the carousel are more featured aspects of the website, including, for example, a short one-­ minute-­a nd-­twenty-­two-­second video titled “Welcome to the Basilica of

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figure  33. Screen capture taken from the homepage of the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception website on April 20, 2019. (Screen capture by Kayla Harris.)

the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception.” Letting the impressive visuals speak for themselves, the video features no narration. Instead, it offers the sounds of the choir as the visitor is gracefully guided from the building’s exterior to the vari­ous chapels and oratories inside. Space on the main homepage also includes a link to a full Rector’s welcome letter, written by Reverend Monsignor Walter R. Rossi, and information about touring the shrine in person and through a self-­guided, 360-­degree virtual tour. Shrines to Mary range from large basilicas to backyard gardens. Mary is everywhere, including, of course, the Internet. When COVID-19 was officially categorized as a pandemic on March 11, 2020, by the World Health ­Organization, public health ­measures ­were implemented to mitigate the spread of the disease, including restrictions on large gatherings and mandates that all nonessential activities be canceled for a period. The question ­of whether religious ­services should count as an “essential activity” was debated. But for at least part of the spring of 2020, in-­person cele­brations of Mass and other religious ­services ­were canceled throughout the United States. Engaging online devotional experiences, such as

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the vari­ous features that the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception had already implemented on its website, became even more valuable as ­people had to adapt how they practiced religion. This chapter explores the existing opportunities, and potentially new directions, for Marian devotional experiences online—on official shrine websites, social media channels, and even interactive phone apps. Irrespective of the merits of what constitutes a shrine, evidence suggests that ­people use t­ hese digital spaces for devotion, to engage with Mary and ­others in the community. Using the online features offered from the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception as the primary example, this chapter considers the ways that online devotion is dif­fer­ent, and at times provides a more accessible path to the sacred, which has historically been especially impor­ tant for marginalized and oppressed groups to assert power. A few other examples are briefly examined, such as an app developed by students at the University of Dayton that highlights the tension between pious devotion and entertainment. Together, ­these Marian devotional experiences illustrate the innovation and adaptability of twenty-­first-­century American Catholicism.

Pilgrimage as Power The Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, DC, is nicknamed “Amer­i­ca’s Catholic Church” and has more than eighty chapels dedicated to honor Mary, making it one of the most vis­i­ble manifestations of Marian piety in the United States. In Amer­i­ca’s Church: The National Shrine and Catholic Presence in the Nation’s Capital, Thomas Tweed challenges a ­popular criticism of the National Shrine—­that it is primarily a product of the influence of the bishops. Tweed highlights the presence of marginalized and oppressed groups by the Church hierarchy, including ­women, ­children, and immigrants, by studying the shrine’s pilgrims. For example, he uses the creation of the Filipino oratory, known as the Our Lady of Peace and Good Voyages Oratory, as an illustrative case study to show how one ethnic group was able to push for repre­sen­ta­tion of their community at the National Shrine. Tweed interviewed Filipino pilgrims throughout 1997, the year the oratory was dedicated, to understand what it meant for them to have their presence represented in the National Shrine. As Tweed explained, it was a way “not only to construct

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collective identity but also to claim their place in the national ecclesiastical community.”1 And so, this effort begun by a pilgrim to create a physical space within the shrine, which reflected the Catholic Filipino community in the United States, has led to continued annual pilgrimages that attract thousands. Attempts by Church authorities to control the activities of pilgrims by validating or invalidating which sites and devotions are worthy are only partially successful b­ ecause many pilgrims ultimately make up their own minds. ­There are numerous Marian shrines throughout the United States that pilgrims continue to travel to, despite Church doctrine. For example, sites like Bayside, New York (see Laycock, Chapter 4 in this volume), continue to draw interest and a devoted following of pilgrims regardless of how many declarations are issued urging ­people not to.2 Digital pilgrimage, a movement online through a website or social media channels, offers some of the same spiritual experiences that a physical pilgrimage can offer. It is a way to enact one’s beliefs and values, sometimes within Church bound­aries, and sometimes outside of them. Pilgrims can make their identity within Catholic Amer­i­ca known and can have the power to influence f­ uture directions of the Church. Although the website for the National Shrine places g­ reat emphasis on making a physical trip to the shrine, it also makes it pos­si­ble for individuals to practice their Marian devotion online. The website and digital presence of the National Shrine serve as lenses with which to explore digital Marian devotion and some of the compelling components of digital pilgrimage.

Why Digital Marian Pilgrimage? The field of digital religious studies is dedicated to examining how religious groups practice their beliefs online, and how ­those activities and communities are interconnected with the offline equivalents.3 Methods of interaction on the Internet between and among websites and individuals are continually evolving and can never exactly replicate offline activities. From the rise and fall of chat rooms and message boards to the now more ­popular livestreams, social media, and video conferencing Zoom sessions, religion is filtered and mediated through communication technology. One example of cyber-­Marian pilgrimage4 is offered by Lourdes Hospitality of the Amer­i­cas. This ­organization of volunteers, laity, clergy, and

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religious, based out of Syracuse, New York, exists to bring ­those in need of physical healing to Lourdes, France. For ­those unable to make the physical journey to ­Europe, they now offer a virtual pilgrimage experience. The program is advertised as “the perfect spiritual experience for parishes, schools, universities, nursing homes, convents and prisons!”5 Illustrating Hill-­ Smith’s observation about virtual pilgrimage not being synonymous with Internet pilgrimage, this program is intended for a group that is gathered physically while they hear the message and surround themselves with objects from Lourdes. The traveling program includes “sights and sounds” of Lourdes, such as images of the sanctuary, ­water from the spring, and ­music similar to what the pilgrims would hear in France. ­These virtual pilgrims even receive their own ­bottle of ­water from Lourdes as a souvenir from their journey. A drawback to the term “virtual pilgrimage” is that the word “virtual” connotes a replacement or stand-in for the “au­then­tic” version. The question most often explored by scholars when discussing virtual, digital, or cyber pilgrimage is w ­ hether t­ hese alternative forms are valid on their own or only in tandem with physical travel. Mark M. MacWilliams argues that some virtual pilgrimage sites “are informational only, designed to provide clever simulations or repre­sen­ta­tions for instructional purposes.” 6 Similarly, Hill-­Smith claims that “cyberpilgrimage often seems to function as a precursor to terrestrial pilgrimage, providing a s­ imple, self-­directed means of gathering knowledge about a tradition’s geo­graph­i­cal and cultural contexts.” 7 How, then, does one differentiate between what “counts” as mere information gathering and what would be described as an au­then­tic online spiritual movement? And what unique aspects of digital pilgrimage have the potential to influence f­ uture directions of accepted Church bound­aries, especially in light of the COVID-19 pandemic and the period when access to the sacred had to take place in the digital realm?

Accessing and Archiving the Sacred Christopher Helland’s classification of two dif­fer­ent types of religious participation online helps delineate a digital shrine from a repository of information online. The first category, religion-­online, denotes when a website is utilized for traditional forms of communication on the Internet. Information is communicated in a “one to many” fashion, and t­ here are no ave­nues for site visitors to engage with the website ­owners or other

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visitors. The second category, online-­religion, is interactive and allows the visitors to contribute their beliefs. Helland states, “­Here the web traveler is allowed to network with the website in a variety of active and interactive ways, including online prayer, worship, and even meditation.” 8 Many of the features of the National Shrine website, such as the pop-up win­ dows for prayer intentions, would fall into this second category. This dif­ fer­ent method of “­doing” religion even has some advantages over related offline devotions. Access to the sacred is a key component of pilgrimage and is one way that digital shrines can facilitate a similar, perhaps better, experience for digital pilgrims. For example, digital pilgrimages are f­ ree and, therefore, may be more accessible to some without associated travel costs. Reverend Monsignor Vito A. Buonanno, Director of Pilgrimages at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, discusses the potential challenges of embarking on a pilgrimage, explaining that sacrifices and discomfort are a necessary part of the experience.9 However, sacrifice and discomfort are in tension with the needs of marginalized or oppressed groups within the Church. Jill Dubisch writes, “Insofar as pilgrimage, and especially Marian pilgrimage, is often undertaken by the marginal and less power­ful, it represents an affirmation by such pilgrims of their possibility and ability to gain direct access to the sacred.”10 Pilgrimage is one impor­ tant way that the marginal and less power­f ul seek access to the sacred—­ and digital, virtual pilgrimage provides direct access without associated travel costs and potential financial sacrifice. This accessibility question hovers in both online and on-­ground versions of shrines. When discussing the diverse immigrant voices within the National Shrine, Tweed argues that for several ethnic groups, repre­sen­ta­tion with a dedicated chapel or oratory was especially impor­tant ­because it came at a time when many felt that they w ­ ere not being supported within their own parish. He explains that “[m]any Asian and Latino / a mi­grants, and some older immigrant groups, too, said they felt neglected or abandoned by the Catholic Church. As other newcomers had complained in the nineteenth c­ entury, ­those new mi­grants noted, for example, that the priests c­ ouldn’t speak their language and the parish c­ ouldn’t meet their needs.”11 This point about sharing a common language is particularly relevant for digital devotion. According to the National Shrine Mass schedule online, one weekly Mass is offered on Sunday after­noons in Spanish.12

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An accessibility description on the website also mentions that the shrine offers sign language interpretation during a single Mass on Sunday and on other select Solemnities.13 This contrasts with the accessibility of the website, which is offered in ten dif­fer­ent languages, including Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, E ­ nglish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, R ­ ussian, and Spanish. Although the translations do not apply to video content, external links, or social media, the variety of languages means that the website may be able to connect more personally with individuals and communities from many cultures. It is now relatively easy for anyone on the Internet to translate a web page into a language of their choice. But the fact that the National Shrine chose to include the translate feature on their website suggests an effort t­oward building and establishing more inclusive community relationships. Visiting a Marian shrine in person is often a dif­fer­ent experience each time, leading many pilgrims to make more than one trip. Tweed explains, “It’s impossible to step into the same building time. Both the viewer and the building change. Even t­ hings that seem static, like buildings (the Shrine) and landscapes (Washington), are always in flux and it’s impor­tant to attend [to] ­those changes by noticing all the traces left on the terrain and following the flows of p­ eople, artifacts, institutions, and practices.”14 The difference may be, then, that when studying the experience of a digital pilgrim, ­there are sometimes very few artifacts to be “noticed” in the online environment. The National Shrine employs an archivist who archives physical materials, including the visitors’ logs used by Tweed.15 But when examining the shrine’s website to look at the history of digital devotion, the main tool available is the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. Since the National Shrine does not crawl, or archive, their own website, the captures that do exist are largely random, created by automated bots, known as “crawlers,” or occasionally by other cultural heritage institutions like libraries and archives.16 This means that changes to the online shrine are less seen by visitors. The archival life of the shrine is dif­fer­ent online than in person. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the National Shrine had been offering the option to watch Mass online, both as a livestream and as a recording that is made available through their YouTube channel. Based on the account’s play­list, it appears that this option has been offered since at least 2018. In April 2020, the National Shrine YouTube channel had over 31,000 subscribers and all the videos together had amassed over 4 million

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views since 2014.17 By January 2021, the account’s subscribers had grown to 54,500, and total video views numbered over 9 million.18 This increase in subscribers and total views can perhaps be attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic. As churches across the United States closed, ­those seeking spiritual connection could seek new online locations and resources, including the well-­established National Shrine. On March 17, 2020, the National Shrine posted a notice on its blog titled, “Basilica Closed to the Public u ­ ntil Further Notice.” In this post, Shrine Director of Communications Jacquelyn Hayes and Monsignor Walter R. Rossi, Rector of the National Shrine, explain that the closure was the first in nearly one hundred years, aside from occasional weather-­related closings. They cite the Center for Disease Control and Washington, DC, guidelines regarding COVID-19 as the reason for the closure and remind visitors that Mass continues to be celebrated as a livestream e­ very Sunday at noon. According to Rossi, “This livestream has quickly become a national and international online community of faith and support during the COVID-19 pandemic, with thousands of viewers tuning in to participate in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass with other faithful from across our nation and around the world. We are committed to continuing the livestream for as long as pos­si­ble while ensuring that the dedicated staff and volunteers ­here at Mary’s Shrine are kept safe.”19 On June 19, 2020, the shrine shared its plans to reopen to the public on June 22, 2020, in accordance with local health guidelines. To allow for social distancing, visitors in the pews would have to be spaced further apart, and therefore all visitors ­were required to register in advance for Mass, presenting an additional barrier for in-­person visits.20 The live and recorded Masses on YouTube have no limits on participation and can be accessed 24 hours a day. Tension emerges when comparing ­these digital and physical experiences of the shrine. On the one hand, t­ here is an excitement about the possibilities that digital shrines offer in terms of reaching and engaging new audiences. But this optimism is countered by a sense of concern that, given the “easier” digital option, pilgrims would have no reason to visit in person. As Oren Golan and Michele Martini observed, “Holy sites have long been the vis­i­ble domain of the Church, and a key means to its legitimization. In the digital age, online access may represent a threat to the Church’s traditional mode of authority.”21 Indeed, the National Shrine does attempt to balance its promotion of the interactive components of the

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website by reminding visitors that the most sacred experience is in the shrine itself. This remains the tension of digital shrines: How w ­ ill Catholics engage ­these multiple shrine spaces? What is apparent is that the virtual pilgrimages are a creative way for Catholics to visit shrines previously inaccessible to them.

The Fun of Finding Mary: Other Digital Shrine Experiences The Maria Stein Shrine of the Holy Relics in western Ohio contains several Marian relics and serves as a site of devotion and pilgrimage for visitors. While being physically pre­sent at a Marian shrine is always valued, it is, perhaps, amplified at Maria Stein, where the focus is on the large collections of relics. The Relic Chapel provides not just a spiritual connection to the saints, but also physical, material, and tangible connections to them. Yet, even with Marian Stein’s emphasis on materiality, ­there is a digital option: An app called eShrine allows t­ hose interested to interact with its collection of over twelve hundred relics. Released in November 2016 by Midnet Media, the app emerged from the Shrine / Museum Committee to engage a youn­ger generation of the faithful. Inside the Relic Chapel, visitors use a paper directory of where to locate each relic on the vari­ous altars, and the app was originally developed as an improved replacement for the paper directory. With eShrine, users can look up a par­tic­u­lar saint and discover the associated relics and their physical location. The app also allows visitors to read contextual background information about each saint and view vari­ous Feast Days within a calendar year. Matthew Hess, Director of Programming at Maria Stein, explained that the original intent of the app was not necessarily for use at home but that he himself had used the app at home to look up information, read a biography of a Saint, or learn an associated prayer. It occurred to him that this could be a resource for planning a physical visit to the shrine to familiarize oneself in advance with the altars and relics one wants to see in person. When asked w ­ hether eShrine was meant as a form of digital pilgrimage, Hess emphasized the dif­fer­ent experiences between the digital and physical. He said that he viewed pilgrimage as “a movement of the heart manifested in the movement of self,” as something that utilizing an app like eShrine prob­ably does not do.22 The digital and physical sit side-­by-­side within the Relic Chapel at Maria Stein. eShrine is loaded onto an iPad that is

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made available for users, but the paper directory is still accessible. Hess mentioned occasional Wi-­Fi issues causing delays when connecting to the app but also that some visitors just felt more comfortable using the paper directory. In addition to eShrine, ­there are many apps specifically for online Marian devotion. The Marian F ­ athers of the Immaculate Conception, a fraternal community of consecrated life, are the creators b­ ehind three f­ ree apps available for both iOS and Android users. One of ­these apps is simply named “Mary” and includes three distinct components: “Doctrine,” “Devotion,” and “Mary Plus.” All three sections include ways for visitors to “grow closer to Mary,” such as an interactive Rosary with audio, images of Mary, and Marian prayers.23 The app has generally positive ratings, with 4.7 stars in the Apple Store. One reviewer, “Heartintraining,” referred to it as “Our Lady’s Tool,” while another writes, “Let me tell you guys something. This app has increased my spiritual life im­mensely. In this technology age, a virtual Rosary is as good as any. Easy to use, ­doesn’t crash, clean and ­simple interface. Also has the additional trivia ­behind the histories of prayers and devotions. You ­will not regret downloading this app.”24 In ­these digital spaces, users can infuse fun into Marian devotion. One interdisciplinary proj­ect, created by the University of Dayton undergraduate students, was intended to be entertaining. Led by Professor of Religious Studies Neomi De Anda, undergraduate students in the religious studies department researched titles and devotions to Mary in North and South Amer­i­ca using the University’s Marian Library. Meanwhile, a team of undergraduate students from the School of Engineering Innovation Center created an app called Benchmark LLC to read QR codes. The combined result was “like Pokémon GO! . . . ​but for Marys on campus.”25 With QR codes placed throughout the University of Dayton campus, t­ hose with a smartphone could scan the code, and a dif­fer­ ent title of Mary would “appear” on their phone, similar to the way that Pokémon could be captured in the massively p­ opular mobile game released in the summer of 2016. Just as the National Shrine provides the website in dif­fer­ent languages to connect with its community members, digital devotion is an opportunity to “speak” the language of a dif­fer­ent population and create spaces for other ways of worship. If t­ hese spaces

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are not created by Marian shrines themselves, then users ­will still seek to fill that gap on their own, creating a tension between official Church bound­aries and practiced religion.

Amer­i­ca’s Online Church ­ hese app-­based shrines illustrate the bound­aries between devotion and T entertainment and between the digital and physical spaces. T ­ hese bound­ aries are part of the National Shrine’s virtual life, too, especially in their “Virtual Tour.” The website enthusiastically encourages visitors to “take our 360° Virtual Tours to see the Basilica’s ­Great Upper Church, the ­Great Upper Church Sanctuary, the Crypt Church and Memorial Hall up close and personal! With the click of your mouse, you can look up, down, and all around, and zoom in and zoom out.”26 This virtual tour uses 3D technology powered by Matterport, where users can click to move through the layout of each room. This 360-­degree technology is used in several industries other than cultural heritage institutions, such as real estate, hospitality, and facilities management. Matterport’s tour includes the ability to ­measure the physical distance between dif­fer­ent points so interested users can have a very realistic understanding of the physical layout if they want to. The experience can be even more immersive by walking through the dif­fer­ent chapels using a Virtual Real­ity (VR) viewer. VR viewers utilize a smartphone and range from homemade with folding instructions easily found on the Internet to branded cardboard boxes (called Google Cardboard) that can be purchased for less than twenty dollars to slightly more sophisticated headsets. The virtual tour is created by compiling pa­norama images, and most of the images in the National Shrine’s virtual tour are absent of other ­people, providing an unobstructed view of artwork and architectural details. This is one of the ways that the website provides an experience that is potentially more meaningful than a physical one. Hill-­Smith believes that one of the benefits for cyber-­pilgrims is a “greater visual (albeit virtual) proximity to shrines, artwork and artefacts, and closer, less hurried scrutiny and contemplation.”27 ­There are no crowds of p­ eople obstructing views, and t­ here are no time constraints as ­there might be with a physical pilgrimage to Washington, DC. Users can spend as much time as

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they want in each area and return frequently. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, many tourist landmarks in Washington, DC, and throughout the United States began offering virtual tours to maintain engagement with their visitors. For example, an article published on April 15, 2020, in the Washingtonian offered “100 ways to virtually experience DC during the coronavirus pandemic,” including curated activities and tours related to food, museums, theater, fitness, and more.28 Though religion was not mentioned in the Washingtonian article, the Basilica of Saint Mary in Alexandria, ­Virginia, created a list of Marian sites around the world to take a virtual tour during COVID-19 and included the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception on their list.29 Several other features of the website re-­create aspects of a physical visit to the shrine, and some experiences are unique to an online devotional experience. The pop-up win­dow that periodically asks for prayer intentions links to a page within the website titled “Request a Prayer.” This page provides more information on the logistics of the p­ rocess, explaining that the prayer requests are put in prayer boxes near the altar so that they can be prayed for during the shrine’s daily Masses. This suggests that someone prints out each submitted intention to place it physically in the box. Like the example of the Lourdes Hospitality’s virtual pilgrimage program, which offers the “sights and sounds” of visiting the shrine at Lourdes, the National Shrine’s website brings the sights and sounds of the National Shrine to the digital visitor. ­Under the main navigational “About Us” tab, users can click on “Sacred ­Music” to “be transformed through the power and beauty of ­music in the Roman Catholic Liturgy.”30 Several videos of the Basilica’s musicians and choir are shared through YouTube and embedded into the website page. ­There are also videos of the Carillon bells ringing, and a downloadable PDF file that provides an in-­depth history of the Knights’ Tower Carillon. The National Shrine makes an online experience fun and encourages visitors to use their dif­fer­ent senses to transport themselves. In addition to the YouTube channel, the National Shrine also maintains Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts. In early 2020, the National Shrine’s Facebook page had close to three hundred thousand likes, which remained roughly the same by the beginning of 2021. The shrine’s rating slightly improved on Facebook from 4.8 / 5 stars in April 2020—­from

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figure 34. Screen capture of a Facebook Post made March 28, 2020, by the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception illustrating users commenting and engaging with each other in prayer. (Screen capture by Kayla Harris.)

over twelve thousand reviews—to 4.9 / 5 stars in January 2021, from over nineteen thousand reviews.31 Many of the posts made by the National Shrine on this platform seem designed to encourage visitors to reply with their own prayers or to echo their agreement by posting “Amen” with the hands-­praying emoji. Sometimes the visitors even use this channel to interact with each other. For example, on a post made on March 28, 2020, of an image of a Marian statue in the National Shrine’s Mary Garden, several users responded to another poster’s own unique prayer—­ evidence of spontaneous virtual connection among the devout who visit the page.

Conclusion Pilgrimage to Marian shrines allows individuals to physically and imaginatively transport themselves closer to Mary. In Hill-­Smith’s 2011 article on cyber-­pilgrimage, she suggests several advantages of the online

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experience over the physical, including a prescient mention of “pandemic potential.”32 The COVID-19 pandemic has forced religious institutions to examine their position on digital devotion out of necessity. The possibility of ­future pandemics still exists, and Marian shrines that have nurtured relationships with their online communities w ­ ill be better prepared. At the same time, many are ­eager to return to in-­person spiritual activities with renewed enthusiasm ­a fter a lengthy absence. Marian shrines ­w ill have to consider how digital engagement was successful during the pandemic and decide what aspects they ­will continue to maintain and develop in the ­future. ­There seems to be a fear that the ­convenience of digital shrines ­w ill preclude Catholics from participating in the Church’s preferred manner, which is in person. Yet, Catholics have often been at the forefront of making devotional practices accessible in vari­ous communication modes. Catholics in the U.S. have a long history of using available media in devotional practices—­from rosaries on the radio to Fulton Sheen on ­television to an increasing presence of Catholics in social media spaces. In the 1930s, when secular comic books posed a threat to impressionable youth with their alleged immoral content, Catholics responded by creating their own series called ­Treasure Chest (1945–1972). With exciting tales of saints and Mary and heroes from the Bible, ­Treasure Chest was distributed throughout parochial schools and gave parents a means of satisfying ­children’s desire to engage with this p­ opular new form of media without compromising moral beliefs. Similarly, Fulton Sheen realized the potential of ­popular media through radio and ­television to reach and influence Catholic viewers. He embraced the ways that he could foreground Catholic issues on a national stage through his weekly t­elevision show, Life Is Worth Living (1952–1955). Catholics’ relationship with available media has historically relied on creativity and reinterpretation—­digital shrines are the next chapter in that creative p­ rocess. Using media and technology has often been a point of pressure between the official position of the Catholic Church and clergy and how ­people have chosen to use it. Yet this conflict has also facilitated some of the more creative and forward-­thinking innovations that resulted. The Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception offers controlled virtual spaces for users to access the sacred and participate in online devotional activities and did so long before they had no other option. This explora-

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tion of digital Marian shrines illustrates how virtual experiences are a growing component of modern Catholic devotion. Notes 1. Thomas Tweed, Amer­i­ca’s Church: The National Shrine and Catholic Presence in the Nation’s Capital (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 222. 2. Joseph Laycock, The Seer of Bayside: Veronica Lueken and the Strug­gle to Define Catholicism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). 3. Heidi A. Campbell and Alessandra Vitullo, “Assessing Changes in the Study of Religious Communities in Digital Religion Studies,” Church, Communication, and Culture 1, no. 1 (2016): 74. 4. The scholars currently researching and writing about virtual, cyber, and digital pilgrimage do not agree on terminology. For example, most scholars writing on the subject use the term “virtual pilgrimage.” However, Connie Hill-­Smith advocates for the use of the term “cyberpilgrimage” for travel on the Internet, stating, “the term ‘virtual pilgrimage’ incorporates non-­computer-­ based pilgrimage forms such as storytelling or physically enacting pilgrimage rituals from afar (Connie Hill-­Smith, “Cyberpilgrimage: The (Virtual) Real­ity of Online Pilgrimage Experience,” Religion Compass 5, no. 6 [2011]: 236). 5. “Lourdes Virtual Pilgrimage Experience,” Our Lady of Lourdes Hospitality of the Amer­i­cas, accessed October 30, 2019, https://­lourdesvolunteers​ .­org​/­what​-­is​-­a​-­virtual​-­pilgrimage​/­. 6. Mark W. MacWilliams, “Virtual Pilgrimages on the Internet,” Religion 32 (2002): 317. 7. Hill-­Smith, “Cyberpilgrimage,” 238. 8. Christopher Helland, “Surfing for Salvation,” Religion 32 (2002): 294. 9. Reverend Monsignor Vito A. Buonanno, “Pilgrimage Primer: Your Most Essential Questions, Answered,” Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception blog, published September 12, 2019, https://­w ww​ .­nationalshrine​.­org​/­blog​/­a​-­pilgrimage​-­primer​/­. 10. Jill Dubisch, “The Many ­Faces of Mary,” in Moved by Mary: The Power of Pilgrimage in the Modern World, ed. Anna-­Karina Hermkens, Willy Jansen, and Catrien Notermans (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), 231. 11. Tweed, Amer­i­ca’s Church, 224. 12. “Liturgy,” Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, accessed January  4, 2021, https://­w ww​.­nationalshrine​.­org​/­mass​ -­confession​-­times​/­#schedule. 13. “Hours and Location,” Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, accessed January 4, 2021, https://­w ww​.­nationalshrine​.­org​ /­hours​-­location​/­.

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14. Tweed, Amer­i­ca’s Church, 242. 15. In a phone call with Dr. Geraldine Rohling, she indicated that she was the first in her position as Archivist / Curator when she began twenty-­two years prior. 16. The Internet Archive has been archiving websites on the Internet since 1996. They provide access to t­ hese archived websites based on URL through a portal known as the Wayback Machine. The website for the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception has an in­ter­est­ing history. The Wayback Machine is only searchable by URL, and a search of the National Shrine’s URL, nationalshrine​.­org, shows that the first capture of this website took place on December 22, 1997. At that time, the domain belonged to the National Shrine of Our Lady of Lebanon, a Marian shrine located in North Jackson, Ohio. Jacquelyn Hayes, Director of Communications, explained via email that the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception had owned the domains “nationalshrine​.­org” and “nationalshrine​.­com” since at least 2006 when she joined the o­ rganization, at which time she promoted the use of the .org domain. A search of the Wayback Machine for nationalshrine​.­com shows the ­actual first capture for the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception occurred on October 19, 1997, even though the website may have existed longer. Any previous versions of the site before 1997 are likely lost. 17. National Shrine, YouTube, accessed April 7, 2020, https://­w ww​.­youtube​ .­com​/­user​/­marysshrine​/­about. 18. National Shrine, YouTube, accessed January 1, 2021, https://­w ww​ .­youtube​.­com​/­user​/­marysshrine​/­about. 19. “Basilica Closed to the Public ­Until Further Notice,” Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, published March 17, 2020, https://www.nationalshrine​.­org/blog/basilica-­closed-­to​-­the-­public-­until-­further​ -­notice/. 20. “Basilica Reopens to the Public,” Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, published June 19, 2020, https://www.nationalshrine​ .­org/blog/basilica-­to-­reopen-­to-­the-­public-­on-­monday-­june-22/. 21. Oren Golan and Michele Martini, “Digital Pilgrimage: Exploring Catholic Monastic Webcasts,” The Communication Review 21, no. 1 (2018): 29. 22. Matthew Hess, phone conversation with author, December 17, 2019. 23. “Mary App,” Marians of the Immaculate Conception, https://www. marian​.­org/app/?redirect=marian-­apps 24. “Mary” Apple App Store Preview, https://­apps​.­apple​.­com​/­us​/­app​/­mary​ /­id483256944. 25. Maureen Schlangen, “Like Pokémon Go! . . . ​but for Mary’s on campus,” Marian Library blog, University of Dayton, published May 2, 2018, https://­udayton​.­edu​/­blogs​/­imri​/­2018​-­05​-­02​-­mary​-­of​-­the​-­americas​.­php.

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26. “Virtual Tour,” Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, https://www.nationalshrine​.­org/virtual-­tour/. 27. Hill-­Smith, “Cyberpilgrimage,” 242. 28. “100 Ways to Virtually Experience DC During the Coronavirus Pandemic,” Washingtonian, published April 15, 2020, https://­w ww​ .­washingtonian​.­com​/­2020​/­04​/­15​/­100​-­ways​-­to​-­virtually​-­experience​-­dc​-­during​ -­the​-­coronavirus​-­pandemic​/­#AROUND​-­TOWN. 29. “Virtual Tours of Marian Sites,” The Basilica of St. Mary, published December  31, 2020, https://stmaryoldtown​.­org/virtual-­tours-­of-­marian-­sites/. 30. “Sacred M ­ usic,” Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, https://www.nationalshrine​.­org/sacred-­music/. 31. Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, Facebook, March 28, 2020, accessed April 7, 2020, and January 20, 2021, https://­w ww​ .­facebook​.­com​/­nationalshrine​/­. 32. Hill-­Smith, “Cyberpilgrimage,” 242.



Our Lady of the Underpass Sacred and Social Space in the City stephen selk a

While driving home from work at St. Elizabeth Hospital in April 2005, Chicago resident Obdulia Delgado noticed an image resembling the Virgin Mary on the wall of the Fullerton Ave­nue / I-90 underpass. She ­stopped her car. “I was so stunned I c­ ouldn’t move. P ­ eople w ­ ere honking,” the thirty-­one-­year-­old commuter told the Chicago Tribune. “It was a dream. I d­ on’t even know how I got home.” As the writer for the Tribune explained: Delgado said she had been praying to the Virgin Mary to help her pass a final in culinary school when she saw the image. “­There are many ­people ­here who believe in her. She’s ­here for a reason,” she said. “For me, it’s not a watermark, it’s the Virgin Mary.”1

Word soon spread, and the underpass became a pilgrimage site, especially for Mexican and Polish immigrants and mi­grants in the city. Crowds gathered to take pictures, light candles, and leave flowers. Many of the news reports mentioned the recent death of Pope John Paul II less than two weeks before as part of the context for the apparition. John Paul II had promoted Marian devotion in general and to Our Lady of Guadalupe in par­tic­u­lar.2 That made him particularly relevant to the religious lives of many Mexican and Mexican American Catholics, while many Polish and Polish American Catholics revere him b­ ecause he was the first Polish pope. The site drew increasingly large crowds that April, and the police put barricades in place to prevent cars from driving into the area of the underpass. At first, the Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT) said that it would treat the site “just like we treat any type of roadside memorial” and that ­there w ­ ere no plans to clean it.3 But on May 6, a few weeks a­ fter the image appeared, the Chicago Tribune reported vandalism at the site:

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figure  35. The shrine at the site where the image of Our Lady of the Underpass appeared in 2005. (Photo­graph taken 2021 by Stephen Selka.)

A man on a bicycle ­stopped and scrawled “Big Lie” over part of the image in shoe polish, which prompted maintenance workers to cover the entire image with brown paint. Shortly thereafter, however, employees of a nearby car wash used a de-­greasing agent to scrub away the paint and shoe polish, leaving the image in the somewhat vis­i­ble shape it’s in ­today.4

The Anderson Herald Bulletin reported that someone also scrawled “Go Cubs!” next to the image and that IDOT downgraded the site from a roadside memorial to graffiti.5 This reflects how public entities often define the bound­aries between what is religious and what is not by default, as Winnifred ­Sullivan explores in her work.6 Indeed, what is a shrine, and who designates a site as such? Visitors have maintained this site as a devotional space from 2005 u ­ ntil ­today, refreshing the flowers and lighting the candles that remain in front of the wall below the image. That is, no m ­ atter how IDOT classifies the marks on the wall, and even though the Catholic Church does not recognize

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figure  36. The view of the Fullerton / I-90 underpass from a few steps east of the shrine. (Photo­graph by Stephen Selka.)

the salt stain as an apparition, the site works as a shrine in practice, mainly through the ways that the devotees care for the space. At the same time, a photo with an “Emergency Parking Only” sign from March 2018 reminds us that the area where the apparition occurred is also an accident investigation site. Vehicles must be able to access the underpass, so it is not enclosed by fences like most o­ thers in the city. This lack of fencing makes the area accessible to the un­housed, who use it for shelter; during the winter it is lined with tents and beds. The underpass is a place for ­things that are marginal and supposedly exceptional, including car crashes, homelessness, and apparitions. It is also a crossroads: the intersection of a major interstate with a road that runs through a gentrifying neighborhood, one in which Latinx residents are increasingly surrounded by white upper-­middle class neighbors. The site puts immigration, homelessness, and gentrification—­all forms of movement and displacement—on display while making certain forms of Catholic devotion publicly vis­i­ble. As I explore in this chapter, the underpass is not simply a containment area for ­those who have been ejected from

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middle-­class respectability (the un­housed) or for ­those who ­will eventually ­settle down and assimilate (the immigrants, along with their excessive religion). On the contrary, it is a place where narratives of containment break down. I approach this site as a place where borders are continually negotiated and contested, including ­those between neighborhoods, nations, and between what is and is not American religion. Drawing on sources that include news reports, theatrical p­ erformances, and my own ethnographic observations, this chapter explores the story of the apparition against the backdrop of the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood around the underpass. Indeed, many of the reports about the image on the wall fix on the incongruity of the underpass as a profane space and a sacred site. Yet I follow Sarah Wasserman’s suggestion that urban apparitions do not simply “reenchant the secular world, they make vis­i­ble what other­wise remains hidden.” 7 Note her emphasis ­here on the agency of the apparition and how it makes ­things vis­i­ble.8 Wasserman draws our attention to the “perceptual work that apparitions can perform” and stresses “their ability to consolidate onlookers into temporary communities that see and make seen the material and social inequalities that often characterize urban life in Amer­i­ca.” 9 What, then, does this image reveal? Does it reveal something that is simply ­there? Or is it more, following Wasserman, a site of creativity and reaction against gentrification? And what does it tell us about the border and bound­a ries of American religion?

Religion in the Amer­i­cas The story of Our Lady of the Underpass complicates our understanding of “American religion” in several ways. For one ­thing, Marian apparitions like this challenge narratives that construct the United States as a place with a certain religious trajectory that leads to a kind of unmarked Protestantism. At the same time, the story of Our Lady of the Underpass ­illustrates how Catholicism is i­magined as an outsider religion, an exception in contrast to which American religion is defined. But it also reminds us that the U.S. exists in a part of the world—­the Amer­i­cas—­that is predominantly Catholic. The story of this shrine is one that flows across the border; it sheds light on what is at stake in shoring up the border and highlights the roles borders and bound­a ries play in how we imagine American religion.

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Our Lady of the Underpass raises the question of what “American” means in this context. As a cultural anthropologist whose work has focused on Brazil and who teaches in a department of Religious Studies, the U.S.-­centric orientation of the field of American Religion is an issue for me. In response to this issue, some departments, including mine, have changed the language they use to describe this field from “American Religion” to “Religion in the Amer­i­cas.” Ideally, this shift in terminology points to an expanded analytical frame that encompasses the crosscutting flows of ­people, images, and money that circulate back and forth across national borders in complicated ways. ­Those flows, such as ­those that form the context for devotion to Our Lady of the Underpass, draw our attention to the massive work (of the imagination, of institutions, ­etc.) required for borders to appear as clearly defined lines. From this perspective, national borders are not the limits of the analytical frame but objects of inquiry in themselves.10 One effect of widening the scope to encompass Latin Amer­i­ca is that Catholics become the majority. The story of American religion shifts in impor­tant ways when we consider the U.S. as one part of a region with diverse religious landscapes. Then we see the story of religion in the U.S. as a narrative constructed through vari­ous kinds of engagements across the Amer­i­cas. We see that in Zora Neale Huston’s writing about the ­Caribbean as a place to imagine African American religion,11 for example, and the story of how the American occupations of Haiti constructed “voodoo” as an object of fear and fascination.12 Following this line of thought, what does the “American” in the idea of Mary as an American patroness refer to? As Maria, a w ­ oman at Su Casa Catholic Worker H ­ ouse who I interviewed about Latinos and Catholicism in Chicago, asked rhetorically: “If the Virgin of Guadalupe is the patroness of the Amer­i­cas, ­doesn’t Our Lady of the Underpass belong to the Amer­i­cas too?” Indeed, devotees often link the Virgin of Guadalupe and Our Lady of the Underpass by leaving images of Guadalupe at the site. And more broadly, Maria points to how both ­these figures are central to the religious lives of ­people who circulate between Latin Amer­i­ca and North Amer­i­ca—or across las Américas. ­These questions force us to wrestle directly with the ambiguity of the term “American” h ­ ere. For one t­hing, t­hese questions disrupt the idea that the United States is a Protestant nation and that Catholicism is somehow foreign to it. Much of the recent scholarship on American

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religion has pushed back against that view.13 At the same time, practices such as devotion to Our Lady of the Underpass are linked with first-­generation immigrant communities. On the national level, a disproportionate number of the p­ eople who reported that they witnessed a Marian apparition—­ around 30 to 50 ­percent, depending on the list—­were immigrants.14 Most of the news reports between 2005 and 2010 stressed that the majority of t­ hose who visited Our Lady of the Underpass w ­ ere immigrants, mi­grants, or descendants of immigrants from Latin Amer­i­ca or Poland.15 Indeed, the Catholicism that many Mexicans and Mexican Americans practice in Chicago is a way of both negotiating an American identity and affirming a Mexican identity.16 The story of Polish and Polish American Catholics in the city is similar. Several Polish American Catholic institutions remain around the city, and most of the existing Polish communities in Chicago cohere around historically Polish churches.17 Furthermore, manifestations of Mary—­Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico, Our Lady of the Apparition in Brazil, and Our Lady of Charity in Cuba—­are central to national identity in Latin Amer­i­ca. P ­ eople carry t­ hose devotions with them as they cross borders and find ways to integrate them into new contexts. ­These devotions are both on the margins of a religious landscape that is oriented ­toward an unmarked Protestantism and respond to the social exclusion of the immigrants who practice them.18 At the same time, immigrant religion is central to dominant ways of imagining American religion. We see this in the familiar narrative of assimilation through which religions in the U.S.—­such as Catholicism, Judaism, and Buddhism—­Americanize (“protestantize”) over time, a story that often draws upon the classic ­metaphor of the melting pot. More recently, of course, many scholars of American religion have shifted from this narrative of assimilation to a story that attends to how the religious landscape in the U.S. has always been more diverse than this narrative can capture.19 As the critical scholarship on diversity demonstrates, however, the emphasis on diversity in the U.S. ­today is mostly about becoming diverse in distinctly American ways.20 With that in mind, we might ask how ­these devotions both refer to a place of origin and respond to the U.S. context. Asking that helps us locate ­these practices and devotions not only within the story of the United States but in the broader context of the Amer­i­cas, highlighting the continuous negotiations across borders that are key to that story.

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The Site Along with its broader context of the Amer­i­cas, the location of the shrine on the social landscape of the surrounding neighborhood and within the built environment of the city is key to this story. The underpass is the epitome of bare, unadorned construction. Although ­there was no h ­ uman intention b­ ehind the stain on the underpass wall, it resulted from the salt that the city uses to de-­ice roads during the winter. The image in the underpass is made up of the stuff of urban grittiness: salt runoff. Unlike many of the best-­known Marian apparitions, this one did not occur in an isolated rural setting—­like Tepeyac Hill in the case of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the cave of Massabielle in the case of Our Lady of Lourdes—­and that ­matters. The surrounding neighborhood and the built environment make up what David Morgan calls the ecol­ogy of the image21, that is, the way that the shrine is situated within the dense “social assemblage” of the city. To see the Virgin Mary in the salt stain takes perceptual work. That work is informed by Marian iconography: the stylized repetition of features in repre­sen­ta­tions of Mary that would be familiar to most Catholics. In many traditional depictions in Catholic painting and statuary, for example, Mary appears adorned in a white tunic u ­ nder a blue mantle, and her head is often slightly bowed and covered with a shawl. T ­ hese are features that can be suggested by ­simple outlines and contours. Looking at photos taken shortly ­after the original image appeared, for example, one can see the resemblance to a tracing of Our Lady of Guadalupe is particularly striking. One can make out what looks like a bowed head, a shape that resembles a body covered with a flowing garment, and the suggestion of arms coming together in prayer. The perceptual work ­here is part of a centuries-­old tradition of seeing; moreover, the stain resembles the Marian image that would be most familiar to most Catholics in the neighborhood. Following Morgan, the traditional iconography is impor­tant part of the interpretive context ­here, but the ecol­ogy of this image is much wider: it includes the local devotions, religious antagonisms, and concerns about the changing demographics of the neighborhood that the image brings into focus. Seeing the resemblance to Mary is one t­ hing, but official recognition of the image is another. The Roman Catholic Church rarely authenticates apparition claims, and when they are approved, it often happens centuries

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a­ fter the original event. In 2010, for example, the Bishop of Green Bay, Wisconsin, deemed the first and only apparition site in the U.S. “worthy of belief” more than 150 years a­ fter a Belgian immigrant named Adele Brise claimed that the Virgin Mary appeared to her.22 But Catholic officials sometimes affirm the value of the devotion while withholding judgment about or explic­itly denying its super­natural basis.23 During a news conference in 2005, for example, Cardinal Francis George commented on the image in the underpass, saying that “God has many ways to stir up devotion in ­people’s hearts” and that “it’s a purely natu­ral phenomenon. If it’s helpful in reminding ­people of the Virgin Mary’s care for us and love for us, that’s wonderful.”24 While it is difficult to estimate the exact impact the Church’s statement had on the flow of p­ eople to the underpass, the media coverage, in general, brought crowds of pilgrims and onlookers to the site in the spring of 2005. And although the number of ­people who visited the site dwindled ­after that spring, the devotion continued. In 2011, the Chicago Sun-­Times reported that the continuing signs of devotion at the site “made an impression on Bishop James A. Wilkowski, who leads the Evangelical Catholic Church, a denomination ­independent of the Roman Catholic Church and claims 5,000 members.”25 The Sun-­ Times went on to quote Wilkowski’s comments about the site: “This has not faded away, places like this are a testament to ­peoples’ faith,” he said on a visit to the underpass Sunday. “You c­ an’t take away faith no m ­ atter how hard you try. You can dismiss it, you can belittle it, but faith is far more power­ful than a paint-­over job,” Wilkowski said. Pointing at the many messages to the Blessed Virgin scrawled on the concrete wall, Wilkowski said they demonstrate “the hunger” for something spiritual in the lives of many. “Maybe this was not like Lourdes or Fatima,” he said, speaking of two Virgin Mary apparitions officially recognized by the Roman Catholic Church. “But something happened ­here in Chicago that touched ­people and caused a response.”

Bishop Wilkowski’s statement that “something happened ­here” left the question of the nature of the image open. Both the Roman Catholic cardinal and the Evangelical Catholic bishop focused less on the ontological

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status of the image than on issues of faith and spirituality. Put another way, the comments from the cardinal and the bishop focus on interiority: how an image can stir up devotion in ­people’s hearts or reflect a hunger for something spiritual. To the extent that becoming American is about interiorizing religion—­ making it more of a habit of the heart than a set of practices focused on objects and icons—­devotions like ­those at the underpass often appear somewhat out of place. The following excerpt from an article titled “Pet Turtle Offers a Bit of Heaven to Behold”26 provides a good illustration: ­You’ve seen Our Lady of the Underpass. Now meet Our Lady of the Underbelly. A miracle of reptilian proportions may be occurring in Glendale Heights, where a pet turtle’s markings look eerily similar to the Virgin Mary. Resident George Sourile noticed the spot on the turtle’s tummy while cleaning his tank several months ago. Sourile ­didn’t think much about the spot ­until a few weeks ago when ­people swore they saw a Marian apparition on the Kennedy Expressway. The faithful and the curious have flocked to the image, a salt stain located on a concrete wall near Fullerton Ave­nue in Chicago. Dubbed Our lady of the Underpass, the spot’s resemblance to Mary is, at best, debatable. The suburban turtle, named Red Belly, bears a much stronger likeness to the Blessed Virgin—­even if his ­owners ­don’t believe ­Mother Mary has come to comfort them. “I’m Catholic,” George Sourile said, laughing. “But not that Catholic.”

“Catholic, but not that Catholic” sums it up; that way of putting it captures the difference between white suburban and urban immigrant Catholics. Turning back to Orsi’s work on Our Lady of Mount Carmel, for example, we could say that many of the Italian Americans he writes about who move out of the city to the suburbs remain Catholic, but not that Catholic.27 This way of seeing ­popular devotions as excessive is ­shaped not only by generational shifts, but by broad changes in the Catholic Church. The

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Second Vatican Council affirmed the vernacular as the medium of worship, but that was not necessarily the same ­thing as embracing ­popular devotions.28 The move to replace Latin with vernacular languages was a mode of modernization; that is, the change was more about making the universal message of the Church comprehensible to local Catholics than about allowing local cultures to shape Catholic practice. We can see this tension in the following text about Chicago’s Catholic history: Mexican, Central American, V ­ ietnamese, and African immigrants found [. . .] a Church in the 1980s and 1990s that had changed from the one that had so welcomed previous waves of newcomers. Not only was it lukewarm to their desire for a sensuous faith ritualized in the language of their birth, but it also faced continuing ­budget deficits, a decaying infrastructure, and increasing demands for its l­ imited resources.29

The reference to “sensuous” and “ritualized” faith echoes the language of the Protestant Reformation and recalls Webb Keane’s discussion of encounters between Calvinist missionaries and Indonesian locals.30 Similarly, we have seen how the above statements from the cardinal and bishop affirm such practices, not b­ ecause they are “au­then­tic” but b­ ecause of their potential to generate faith. ­Here, the distinction between dif­fer­ent modes of religiosity is deeply entangled with the distinction between American and immigrant religion. That is not to say that ­there is necessarily a clear distinction between immigrant religion and American Catholicism and, more broadly, between immigrant and assimilated communities in Chicago. The Mexican and Polish American churches in the city mediate between immigrant and American religion; Latino communities in Logan Square, Humboldt Park, and Pilsen cohere around social networks, cultural institutions, p­ olitical ­organizations, language practices, and religious traditions that are deeply transnational. Churches with masses in Spanish, murals in Pilsen and throughout the city painted by Mexican and Mexican American artists, and the National Museum of Mexican Art all exist in between the marginal space of the immigrant and the privileged spaces of upwardly mobile professionals who move into the city. The bound­aries of t­hose spaces shift over time, including through waves of immigration and displacement by gentrification. Devotion to Our Lady of the Underpass highlights t­hese bound­aries and how they become blurred.

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This is further illustrated in the shifts in demographics around the underpass apparition. The population of Logan Square had been mostly Latino since the 1960s and 1970s, but that began to shift in the 2000s as increasing numbers of white residents began to arrive. The streets around the site of the apparition ­were in the m ­ iddle of such a shift at the time of my first visit in May 2005. I was already familiar with the neighborhood. From 2000 to 2002, my wife and I rented a small apartment only a few blocks away from the underpass. I walked along Western Ave­nue from Fullerton to the Western El station to get to work, passing several Cuban restaurants, a store specializing in Brazilian products, and a few hipster coffee shops filled with p­ eople in their twenties along the way. In 2002, we moved a few miles south to Ukrainian Village, but in 2005 my wife took me back to Fullerton Ave­nue to check out the site of the apparition. She urged me to write about the story, but I did not follow up u ­ ntil ­after we bought a h ­ ouse not far from the site in 2014. Our ­house is on a street that is a ­little less than a mile west of the site and was a more-­or-­less typical cross section for Logan Square in the 2010s:

figure  37. The appearance of businesses such as this rec­ord store in Logan Square reflects the influx of young, mostly white residents into the neighborhood. (Photo­graph by Stephen Selka.)

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a combination of Latino, white working-­and middle-­class homeowners, most of whom have been on the block for more than a ­decade. ­There are apartment buildings on both ends of the streets; most of the residents are young, white, and do not have c­ hildren. Some parts of the street have changed significantly in the past eight years, however. When we arrived in 2014, t­ here was a h ­ ouse a few lots south on our side of the street owned by a Latino f­amily. It was demolished and an eight-­unit condo building was built on the lot. ­There is a large turn-­of-­the-­century multiunit structure at the other end of the street that was boarded up when we moved in. It was soon renovated, and new residents moved in. Walking along Fullerton Ave­nue ­toward the apparition site, you could see clear signs of transition: You pass Puerto Rican restaurants and other businesses with signs mostly in Spanish, for example, next to coffee roasters and a hipster pinball hall. The neighborhood has reached the point where some of the businesses that w ­ ere part of the first wave of change have been priced out: The vinyl rec­ord store on the corner closed b­ ecause of rent increases and the influx of families with young ­children into the neighborhood (not the stores’ target demographic). Although several groups in the neighborhood have ­ organized against gentrification, developers have succeeded in putting up several big and boxy apartment buildings near the Blue Line over the past few years.31 What I argue ­here, of course, is that t­ hese changes in the landscape of the city also change the landscape of the devotion. ­After we moved to Logan Square, I passed the apparition many times a week whenever I exited the highway. I visited the shrine on foot at least once a month. It is not clear to me if pilgrimage is the correct term for what ­people do when they visit the site, at least if we think of pilgrimage as a kind of collective, public practice. Most ­people access the area on foot; ­there are no signs to mark the way and no established route to get ­there. I never saw anyone ­else who was obviously ­there to visit the shrine; the only other ­people in the area included an occasional pedestrian passing by on the sidewalk and residents of the encampment that begins about fifty feet away from the site. As a site of devotion, the space seems to work much like a home altar, but in a public space. It blurs the bound­aries between public and private practice—­that is, t­ here is no formal institution or authority in charge of the site; anonymous visitors care for the space and add t­ hings like flowers, prayer cards, and images of Mary to it.

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Just as the site complicates the distinction between public and private, it blurs the bound­aries between the vis­i­ble and invisible. The site is unobstructed and easy to see from the road or the sidewalk. But it is also easy to miss ­because of how the road directs the commuter’s gaze forward. The shrine is an example of ambient religion, as it fades in and out of the background of the busy underpass.32 What remains unseen, however, is the work of maintaining the site. Someone lights the candles and brings fresh flowers, but I never found out who it is. I found no written material at the site that would provide clues. I visited the site on Sunday mornings, figuring that was the day that devotees ­were most likely to show up, but no luck. I posted on neighborhood-­specific social media just in case, but no one had any information. Many of the p­ eople I talked to who live in the neighborhood e­ ither had not heard about the apparition or barely remembered it; the flow of ­people to the site peaked in 2005 and had fallen to a trickle by 2010. COVID-19 eventually ­limited my in-­person investigation of the site, but even if it had not, it is not easy to find ­those caring for the site. We find degrees of anonymity at more official shrines, of course, but what stands out ­here is the lack of anything like a sign-in book or a way of making donations. Looking at a photo­graph I took on March 2, 2018, I see that several bouquets of flowers are spaced haphazardly around the site as if they had been left t­ here by dif­fer­ent p­ eople. A panel propped against the wall seems to function like a bulletin board. It has a calendar pinned to it that features a picture of a dif­fer­ent Marian shrine for e­ very month. Figurines of Mr. and Mrs. Santa Claus sit on top of the panel, and several unlit candles stand in front of and on the side of it. Three of them feature images of Our Lady of Guadalupe, one of Pope John Paul II, and two of Jesus. By the time I took another photo on December 10, 2019, someone had placed a glass lamp on the ground in front of the image. It ­housed three votive candles, all of which w ­ ere still lit b­ ecause they w ­ ere protected from the wind. Pinned to the panel ­behind the lamp was a prayer card for Our Lady of the Highways, along with a bumper sticker that reads “Help Amer­i­ca Pray the Rosary.” A plastic jug of w ­ ater sat next to the panel; someone prob­ably placed it ­there to ­water the plants. By December 22, 2019, a visitor had attached a portrait of Our Lady of Guadalupe to the wall above the panel. It was drilled into the wall, covered with plastic, protected with a sort of pitched roof, and outlined with small lights. In the following

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months, someone came to replace the batteries for the lights whenever they died. I have stressed that the apparition and reactions to it reflect and respond to the changing social and religious landscape around the site. To be clear, I am not suggesting that this is simply a story about gentrification and religious responses to it. It is more about how the social and religious landscapes of the city shape each other and how we must think about them together. Other examples of the intersection of social and religious space include the trend of converting churches into private residences. We can think of this as an inversion of what happens in the underpass; the shrine transforms public space into sacred space, and the conversions transform sacred space into private space. Two such conversions in Logan Square are especially relevant. The first is the conversion of a nineteenth-­century church located right off Fullerton on Washtenaw into a single-­family residence. This article in Logan Squarist from September 20, 2018, describes the space: The old Polish-­speaking parishioners of St. Hedwig’s might be confused by the Tibetan prayer flags that now drape the entry­way, or the profusion of skele­tons, skulls, and gothic curios that line the walls. But ­there is still plenty they would recognize, from the altar fresco to the stained-­glass win­dows and stenciled ceiling beams. [. . .] The current o­ wners, Jim Jacoby and Molly Currey, purchased the building in 2016 and added their own touches, like the darkly playful décor that gives a nod to the building’s past. Furnishings include a church prayer kneeler, vari­ous skulls and religious figurines, and a baptismal font converted into a bar.33

We can see ­here how the site illustrates the ways that new residents appropriate formerly ethnic spaces. The stained glass and the baptismal font become part of a pastiche of local flair, something that gives the “vintage” space lots of “character” and “history,” to couch it in the discourse of real estate marketing. The ethnic is subsumed into something that adds monetary value and cultural capital. The second conversion was of a church on Logan Boulevard into upscale apartments. The church had closed in 2016 “­after it lost Nuestra Señora de las Américas, the oldest Latino congregation in the Episcopal Diocese of Chicago, which covered half the bills before it vacated the church space.”34 The displacement of a congregation with this name—­Our Lady of the Amer­i­cas—is particularly resonant.

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Along with ­these changes, new religious ­organizations have moved into the neighborhood with the new residents. They include a small Soto Zen group and a progressive post-­Christian church founded by former University of Chicago divinity students. Moreover, some of the existing religious ­organizations in the neighborhood are reaching out to the new residents. The Coptic Orthodox Church on the corner of Talman Ave­nue and Altgeld Street, for example, advertised itself as “seeker-­friendly” on its marquis, and some of the other messages on its sign have been deliberately punny, including “Jesus Changed a Grave Situation.” The Seventh Day Adventist Central Hispanic Church that occupies one of the most prominent buildings on Logan Boulevard—­several stories high with towering Roman columns—­placed a poster on the doors in E ­ nglish that emphasized its “relevance”; the church was making an effort to reach out to young anglophone Christians in the neighborhood. ­There are two botánicas on Fullerton Ave about half a mile from the apparition site; with the faded signs in Spanish and statues of saints in the win­dow, they are inscrutable to most p­ eople moving into the neighborhood. But t­ here is also a santero further West on Fullerton who has a website in E ­ nglish that seems to be aimed partly at the seekers that the Coptic Church is reaching out to. All this indicates a space in transition, but also the kinds of negotiations that happen in places like Bucktown and Logan Square. The major theme is still displacement and uneven relations of power between t­ hose who have lived h ­ ere for d­ ecades and t­ hose now moving in, but t­ hese attempts to appeal to upwardly mobile new neighbors are also part of the story. ­These changes to the religious landscape form the backdrop for the apparition: churches converted into single-­family homes, new religious ­organizations emerging that focus mostly on new residents, and existing religious ­organizations reaching out to new neighborhood residents. Always in the background are shifting images of what American religion looks like and of what should be included and excluded from that category.

Framing the Site ­ hether one thinks of it as divine or not, seeing the apparition is a kind W of revelation. That is, it takes perceptual work to see anything in the salt stain. Wasserman writes: “The apparition dismantles the difference between waste and relic, the eternal and the ephemeral, loss and restoration. In

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d­ oing so, it reorganizes perception so that our orientation to objects is temporarily changed.”35 This vivid report, published ten years a­ fter the image first appeared, captures what I think Wasserman is attempting to evoke: A road cone. A fallen broom. A white plastic industrial-­sized bucket still festooned with the label for “Artisan Chicken” institutional-­serving meat. ­These are ways Our Lady of the Fullerton Underpass Accident Investigation Site is honored. In 2005, rain leached through the concrete of a highway underpass, leaving a salt runoff stain somebody de­cided looked like the Virgin Mary. Crowds numbering in the hundreds flocked to the accident investigation site, a spot for ­people in minor crashes on the tollway to pull over and trade paperwork or get yelled at by the cops. Votive candles, floral arrangements, artwork, police barricades ­were piled for yards around the Virgin as supplicants wept and prayed. ­ oday, it’s a small cluster of garbage around a ­water stain. Mary has T been covered in brown spray paint, itself covering the purple horns, fangs and “666” a vandal added in 2009. Three flickering votive candles sit tucked b­ ehind a plastic chicken bucket filled with folded paper and withered bundles of ­roses. An orange road cone protects a folded box that once held craft-­ish beer. . . . It was a novelty. A freak accident. A cute news story of 2005 with juuuuust enough racial ele­ment in the background to get a chuckle at the majority Hispanic supplicants. But somebody lit ­those three candles. Somebody’s picking up that broom and tidying for the Virgin ­Mother. Interstate traffic screams above. The underpass is a homeless nesting site too, with elaborate bedding and, in one spot, a large pile of neatly folded blankets. Among filth and grime, shit and holler, three candles to the virgin flicker in the wind.36

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The repetition of “somebody” ­toward the end highlights the anonymous, invisible ­labor that maintains the site. The piece constantly invokes the profane—­the traffic, the bedding, the shit—­but the piece ends with “three candles to the virgin flicker in the wind,” framing the site as a sacred place. It attempts to r­ eorient our perception of what the underpass is. Another example of an effort to r­ eorient our perception and shape the meaning of the site is Tanya Saracho’s aptly titled play, “Our Lady of the Underpass.” 37 The stage setting is ­simple and re­creates the site itself, centering on the image on the wall of the underpass. Against that backdrop, the actors perform a series of monologues based on Saracho’s conversations with devotees and visitors at the site. As one of the reviews of the ­performance points out, “Through this production, Saracho [. . .] extended the repertoire of the performative commemorative beyond the roadside cross and onto the shrine of the stage, illuminating the form and function b­ ehind this example of theatre of testimony.”38 As another reviewer put it, “with the erection of the memorial, immigrant Catholic communities left their cultural mark on a cityscape that had increasingly ignored them through gentrification.”39 Indeed, Saracho has been dubbed the “Chicana Chekhov” ­because of her characteristic blend of humor and drama—­and ­because she wrote and adapted a version of Chekhov’s “Cherry Orchard.” 40 As a New York Times reviewer wrote, “What Ms. Saracho seems destined to write about, no m ­ atter the place, is socio­economic class. Raised comfortably in an upper-­middle-­class f­ amily, she said she d­ idn’t confront prejudice against Mexicans—or the troubling notion that she was exempt b­ ecause of her privilege and her fair skin—­until she moved.” 41 The first reviewer I cited above focuses on the cast of characters Saracho develops, who include: Tony, “The Deacon” (Juan Gabriel Ruiz), an El Salvadorian who considered himself the Virgin’s protector; Ofelia, “La Tia” (Charin Alvarez), an illegal immigrant who prayed for the health of her infirm nephew; Matt, “The Jogger” (Chris Cantelmi), irritated that his route had been incon­ve­nienced by the “city’s unfortunates”; Magdalena, “The Healer” (Amanda Powell), a nurse who brought her Polish m ­ other to the site; Terri, “The Huppie” (Suzette Mayobre), a Hispanic yuppie; and Mrs. Shriver, “The Liberal” (Rosie Newton). Taken as a ­whole, the monologues mirrored the public debate that erupted over the site, including issues of faith, immigration, and city infrastructure. By

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satirizing the social ­stereotypes that emerged in the wake of the Virgin’s discovery, both director and playwright revealed the biases and social divisions within the community.42

Saracho does not simply use the story of Catholic devotion to reveal social divisions. The play is just as much about Catholic devotion, even if Saracho sometimes satirizes it with a kind of irreverent affection. We see this in the reviewer’s description of the opening scene of the play: As the ­house lights dimmed, a sense of ritualistic reverence and social relevance pervaded the space. A streak of headlights projected onto Bembridge’s reconstruction of the underpass wall slowly dissolved into the glow of altar candles. Graffiti e­ tchings w ­ ere revealed as prayers on behalf of loved ones in the hospital or at war in A ­ fghanistan. The hum of traffic merged into a polyglot of Latin, E ­ nglish, Spanish, and Polish prayers as pilgrims, who served as chorus throughout the play, entered with crosses, flowers, and pictures of the late pope, leaving their offerings at the foot of the saw­horses that now served as prayer rails. Through subtle design choices the minimalistic though ample set was transformed into what one character described as an “urban altar”—­a small reclamation of sacred space within the sprawling concrete city.43

The juxtaposition of “ritualistic reverence and social relevance” and how it culminates in “a small reclamation of sacred space” is right to the point. The sacred and the social are not reducible to each other; the “reclamation of sacred space” h ­ ere is both ritual in nature—it sets up and complicates the bound­aries between the sacred and the profane—­and unfolds within the shifting social field of social forces in the changing landscape of the neighborhood.

Conclusion Saracho’s play helps illuminate the relationships between space and meaning at the site ­here. The play—­like the tradition of Marian iconography I discussed e­ arlier—­frames the site and channels the viewer’s interpretation of it, even if part of the point of the ­performance is to focus on the variety of ways that dif­fer­ent ­people in the city make meaning of the image. The ­actual site translates perfectly into a stage set; the space you see, as you drive or walk through it, is bordered by columns that sort of crop

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the shot and provide a frame around the part of the wall where the image and the shrine are. The murals I mentioned above also provide a good point of comparison ­here, beyond the obvious point that they, like the salt stain, are found on a wall. Plays and murals rely on a framed field of vision, within which scenes appear that are meant to tell a story; in the Catholic tradition, examples of this include morality plays and church frescos. In all t­ hese examples, the interpretations are not imposed on the audience or viewer, but the interpretive possibilities are channeled—­toward reflections on devotional traditions or social inequalities, for example. While the site may be like a stage or a mural in some ways, again, the salt stain was not the result of h ­ uman intention. Yet what was originally on the wall dis­appeared over time—­long ago washed away and painted over—­and the sacredness of the site becomes more about the work, the practice, and the space-­making that goes on at the site. What that work of space-­making looks like changes over time, of course, as shrines have their own rhythms or life cycles. The week ­after the salt stain appeared in 2005, for example, the police placed barricades in front of the wall, the story of the image circulated in the media, and crowds gathered to take photos. The number of visitors eventually waned, but devotees maintained an eclectic assemblage of images and offerings at the site. By 2022, however, the underpass shrine was so sparse that I thought it had dis­appeared, which somehow fit with the burnt-­out vibe of the second year of the pandemic. All that remained that January was a ­little bit of something on the wall and maybe a few candles or flowers on the ground in front of it. Then, at the end of June 2022, I visited the site and found five bouquets of flowers on the wall around the place where the image had appeared almost two ­decades e­ arlier. The stems of the flowers w ­ ere placed through holes in metal brackets that someone had screwed into the concrete as if to challenge any notion that the shrine’s life cycle is linear. Practice is not the only f­actor to consider when we think about what makes a space sacred. But ­here, years a­ fter the salt stain has faded, practice constitutes the site as a shrine. The practice takes the shape of invisible l­abor and anonymous work, the results of which are publicly vis­i­ble in “the sprawling concrete city.” ­Here, the site has taken shape at the intersection of the efforts and interventions of IDOT, the devotees who maintain the shrine, ­those who deface it, and ­those who make plays about it. Not to mention t­ hose who walk or drive by who may see it as an example

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of excessive religion, superstition, or immigrant practices that do not fit into the social or religious landscape. That is, the practice of maintaining this space and the perceptual work that goes on around the site point to the shifting social geography of the city, the contested bound­aries of American religion, and how t­ hose two t­ hings are intertwined. Notes 1. “Faithful See Mary on Underpass Wall,” Chicago Tribune, April 19, 2005. 2. Timothy Matovina, “Theologies of Guadalupe: from the Spanish Colonial Era to Pope John Paul II,” Theological studies 70, no. 1 (2009): 61–91. 3. “Faithful See Mary on Underpass Wall.” 4. “Our Lady of the Underpass, one year ­later.” Chicago Tribune, April 10, 2006. 5. “What Happens When the Sacred and Profane Collide?” Anderson Herald Bulletin, July 19, 2005. 6. Winnifred Fallers ­Sullivan, The Impossibility of Religious Freedom: New Edition, (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press), 2018. 7. Sarah L. Wasserman, “Ephemeral Gods and Billboard Saints: Don DeLillo’s Underworld and Urban Apparitions,” Journal of American Studies 48, no. 4 (2014): 1041–1067; 1043. 8. Hillary Kaell, “Seeing the invisible: ambient Catholicism on the side of the road.” Journal of the American Acad­emy of Religion 85, no. 1 (2017): 136–167. Kaell discusses the question of the agency of roadside crosses in Quebec. 9. Wasserman, 1043. 10. In Religious Studies, Thomas Tweed’s Our Lady of Exile (Oxford, 1997), Kevin O’Neil’s The City of God: Christian Citizenship in Postwar Guatemala (California, 2009), as well as Winni ­Sullivan, Pamela Klassen and Paul Johnson’s Ekklesia: Three Inquires in Church and State (Chicago, 2018) are just three examples. In addition, Micol Seigel’s “Beyond Compare: The Comparative Method ­After the Transnational Turn” (Radical History Review 91, 2005) outlines the transnational turn for American Studies. 11. Zora Neale Hurston, Tell My H ­ orse: Voodoo and life in Haiti and Jamaica (New York: Harper Perennial, 2009). 12. Alexandra Boutros, “Gods on the Move: The Mediatisation of Vodou,” Culture and Religion 12, no. 02 (2011): 185–201. 13. See Matthew J. Cressler, Authentically Black and Truly Catholic: The Rise of Black Catholicism in the G ­ reat Migration, (New York: New York University Press, 2017) and Robert Laurence Moore, Religious outsiders and the making of Americans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). 14. “Alleged Apparitions in the United States,” https://­udayton​.­edu​/­imri​ /­mary​/­a​/­alleged​-­apparitions​-­in​-­the​-­united​-­states​.­php and “Marian Apparitions

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in the Amer­i­cas,” https://­w ww​.­ewtn​.­com​/­catholicism​/­library​/­marian​ -­apparitions​-­in​-­the​-­americas​-­5642. 15. Indeed, most foreign-­born residents In Logan Square ­today are Mexican, followed by Polish (­today, Polish is the third most spoken language in the city ­after ­English and Spanish). See http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory​ .­org/pages/761.html, accessed 3/16/21. 16. Gabriela F. Arredondo, Mexican Chicago: Race, Identity, and Nation, 1916–39. Vol. 43. (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2008). 17. See Dominic A. Pacyga, American Warsaw: The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of Polish Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019) 18. Kristy Nabhan-­Warren, The Virgin of El Barrio: Marian Apparitions, Catholic Evangelizing, and Mexican American Activism, (New York: New York University Press, 2005); Elaine A. Peña, Performing Piety: Making Space Sacred with the Virgin of Guadalupe, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); and Thomas A. Tweed, Our Lady of the Exile: Diasporic Religion at a Cuban Catholic Shrine in Miami (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 19. Catherine L. Albanese, A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion, (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007). This book is particularly impor­tant in the way that it complicates narratives of early American religion. 20. This is one of the central points in Henry Goldschmidt’s Race and Religion Among the Chosen ­People of Crown Heights, for example. 21. David Morgan, “The ecol­ogy of images: Seeing and the study of religion.” Religion and Society 5, no. 1 (2014): 83–105. 22. See Karen E. Park, “The negotiation of authority at a Frontier Marian apparition site: Adele Brise and Our Lady of Good Help.” American Catholic Studies (2012): 1–26. 23. Michael O’Neill, “Marian Apparition Claims in the United States and Canada in the Twentieth ­Century.” Marian Studies 63, no. 1 (2012): 13. 24. “Our Lady of the Underpass, one year l­ ater.” 25. “Our Lady of the Underpass H ­ asn’t Faded Away, Bishop Says.” Chicago Sun Times, December 23, 2011. 26. Arlington Heights Daily Herald, 2005. 27. Orsi, 2010. For a fictionalized look at similar themes in Jewish communities, Philip Roth, “Eli, the Fanatic.” Commentary 28 (1959): 292, which deals with a man trying to run a Yeshiva in a postwar suburban town, much to the chagrin of his Jewish, but not that Jewish neighbors. 28. David R Maines and Michael J. McCallion. Transforming Catholicism: Liturgical Change in the Vatican II church (Lexington, KY: Lexington Books, 2007). 29. “Roman Catholics,” Encyclopedia of Chicago, http://www.encyclopedia. chicagohistory​.­org/pages/1090.html.

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30. Webb Keane, Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter, Vol. 1. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). 31. “ ‘Micro-­Apartments’ That Symbolized Logan Square Gentrification Set To Open With Tiny $1,750 Studios,” Elevated Chicago, August 22, 2018, https:// www.elevatedchicago​.­org/news/micro-­apartments-­that-­symbolized​-­logan-­square​ -­gentrification-­set-­to-­open-­with-­tiny-1750-­studios/ 32. Drawing on Engelke’s concept of “ambient religion,” Kaell analyzes roadside crosses in Quebec as ambient Catholicism. See Matthew Engelke, “Angels in Swindon: Public religion and ambient faith in ­England.” American Ethnologist 39, no. 1 (2012): 155–170. 33. Tim Frisbie, “Local Church Demonstrates Power of Reincarnation,” Logal Squarist, September  19, 2018, https://­logansquarist​.­com​/­2018​/­09​/­19​/­logan​ -­square​-­church​-­reincarnation​/­. 34. Mina Bloom, “Historic Logan Square Church Now A Luxury Housing Complex, With Apartments Renting For Up To $4,000,” January 31, 2019, https://blockclubchicago​.­org/2019/01/31/logan-­square-­church​-­apartments-­renting​ -­for-­up-­to-4000/. 35. Wasserman, 1042. 36. Wasserman, 1001 Chicago After­noons, 2015. 37. The play was first produced and performed in 2009. See Kari-­Anne Innes, “Our Lady of the Underpass,” Theatre Journal 64, no. 1 (2012): 107–108. 38. Innes, 108. 39. Innes, 107. 40. New York Times, 2011. Saracho does not identify as Chicana or Mexican American; she is a Mexican citizen who has lived in the U.S. since 1989. 41. “Mexican? American? Call her writer,” New York Times, March 22, 2011. 42. Innes, 107. 43. Innes, 107.



Materiality and Attachment Universality and Locality at Roman Catholic Pilgrimage Sites cl a ire vaughn a nd ja mes s. bielo

The two green doors creaked as they opened, and the smell of wood and must replaced the subtle fragrance of summer breeze. The floor was a mix of dust, mud, and sand. The paint on the walls was chipping. Plastic boxes sat atop e­ very workbench, including the t­ able in the m ­ iddle of the room. They ­were filled with gallons of sand, shells, and a heap of odds and ends, like costume jewelry sorted by color. Stacked in one corner was a jumbled pile of cardboard boxes and unopened envelopes, addressed from far-­flung zip codes. They reminded me (Vaughn) that I, too, had traveled several hundred miles just to be ­here, at the Ave Maria Grotto in northern Alabama. They reminded Dave—­the Grotto’s caretaker since 2016—of work still to be done. Box by box, Dave explained the contents of the containers. He noted dif­fer­ent colors he liked, where in the Grotto he planned to put dif­fer­ent items, and how he thought they would look. He grabbed a piece e­ very few minutes; a pearl h ­ ere, a glass stone t­ here. My eye landed on a small crucifix brooch; it might well have adorned a w ­ oman’s Easter lapel at some point in its past but was now sitting in Dave’s denim overall pocket. Soon, he would add it to one of the 125 miniature replicas that comprise the Ave Maria Grotto. Curious about his method, I asked, “How do you decide what goes where?” He thought for a second and shrugged, noting that when he sees something in­ter­est­ing, he uses it, ­whether it be a marble, a bead, or a piece of old stained glass. He thought for a moment longer and said, “I try to make t­ hings look the way B ­ rother Joseph intended.” Dave’s devotional ­labor replicated the site’s creator, ­Brother Joseph, who created miniatures of biblical scenes, Marian pilgrimage centers, and other sites of Christian and civil veneration from 1918 u ­ ntil his death in 1961. I was awed by the mass of boxes filling the room from floor to ceiling with their miscellany of contents, and their distant origins. “Where do all of ­these ­things come from?” I asked Dave. He was busy searching through a

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plastic bin of hot pink beads and marbles, but replied without missing a beat: “Everywhere, all over the world.” This practice began when ­Brother Joseph was still alive. Visitors who cherished their experience at the Grotto and ­house­bound ­people who had heard about the place mailed pieces of their lives so that ­Brother Joseph could incorporate them into his work. Sixty years ­after his death, new materials still arrive nearly ­every day. Dave explained, “We ­don’t r­ eally ask ’em to, but they keep coming in. I’ll find a use for ’em.” Touring the work shed with Dave was a pivotal moment in my brief fieldwork at the Grotto; it altered my experience of walking the pathways and viewing the miniatures. ­After closing the ivy-­colored doors, I returned to the site anew. Before, the collection of sculptures melded together as a single object, the Ave Maria Grotto. Now, each sculpture stood out separately, and the dozens or hundreds of materials used for each replica stood out separately as well. I could imagine Dave’s routine of poking around the shed, and his satisfied feeling when finding the perfect piece for a par­ tic­u­lar spot. I was also compelled by the devotional act of sending one’s own ­little ­treasure to the Grotto and wondered why using material culture to forge a connection with this place might ­matter for so many ­people.

Throughout the world, pilgrims travel near and far to Catholic devotional sites, seeking healing, help, spiritual intimacy, and peace. Following Coleman, pilgrimage always entails a journey. While pilgrimage is about seeking a place classified as separate from home, pilgrims also engage in “localisation.”1 They locate ele­ments of home within pilgrimage sites. “The sense of being at home does not necessarily correspond directly with a single physical environment, but rather with developing a routine set of practices that can be known and repeated, and indeed transported through space.”2 Through practices revered by tradition and creatively improvised by individuals, pilgrims attach themselves to sites in diverse ways. This often includes practices involving material culture. For example, travelers collect natu­ral objects from pilgrimage sites and bring them home, such as ­water from Lourdes or rocks from Jerusalem.3 In this chapter, we engage fieldwork and archival data from two sites—­ the Ave Maria Grotto and the Sorrowful ­Mother Shrine in northern Ohio—to extend Coleman’s analy­sis of localization. While pilgrims do find ele­ments of home as a means of attachment, they also create ele­ments of

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home. In finding home, pilgrims discover something onsite (e.g., a shrine object) with which they already have a special connection. For example, Latinx pilgrims to the Sorrowful M ­ other Shrine find and venerate the site’s repre­sen­ta­tion of Our Lady of Guadalupe. In creating home, pilgrims actively contribute something to a site, material or other­wise, as a way of forging an enduring attachment between themselves, the pilgrimage place, and Catholic tradition. The steady arrival of envelopes and boxes to the Ave Maria Grotto exemplifies this p­ rocess, but it can take many dif­fer­ent forms. At the Sorrowful ­Mother Shrine, Latinx pilgrims create home with the Guadalupe replica in vari­ous ways, such as leaving ex-­voto objects and posting selfies to Instagram, contributing to the site’s online presence and the public circulation of devotional imagery. Through embodied rituals and material extensions of the self, pilgrims create enduring attachments with the sites to which they travel. By examining embodied and material practices in the context of devotional places, we can develop our understanding of Roman Catholic identity and performance. H ­ ere, we argue that, through pro­cesses of finding and creating home, pilgrims oscillate between two expressions of belonging: universal and local. A core tension that animates Catholicism is the relationship between universality and locality. Mayblin, Norget, and Napolitano pre­sent this as a junction of axes: “[The] longitudinal axis—­its sheer age and its conscious self-­elaboration as a faith revealed only in and through a singularly enduring material institution is crossed by its latitudinal axis of diversity in terms of practice.” The centrifugal-­centripetal interplay of this dynamic may even help explain Catholicism’s global success and stamina. A “toleration of locality and difference” coexists alongside a “highly centralized, ‘infallible’ core.” 4 The tension of universality and locality is expressed in vari­ous forms of lived religion. Pilgrimage and Marian devotion are two ways in which Catholics engage the tension, both of which are historically resonant and enduringly ­popular.5 Apart from Holy Land tours,6 Catholic pilgrimage is most often centered on Marian apparition sites,7 including ­those authorized by the Vatican (e.g., Lourdes in France,8 Knock in Ireland,9 Guadalupe in Mexico,10 Fatima in Portugal11) and t­ hose with denied or pending authorization (e.g., Kerizinen in Brittany,12 Medjugorje in Bosnia13). Replication, like pilgrimage and praying the Rosary, is also a historically resonant Catholic practice.14 We see this in the ubiquitous replication of

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dif­fer­ent Marian forms as portable statues15 and in the production of shrine environments modeled a­ fter Marian apparition sites and / or incorporating multiple Marian forms. The latter is exemplified by the Ave ­Maria Grotto and the Sorrowful M ­ other Shrine. Neither is an apparition site or is built around a single expression of Our Lady. They draw together numerous Marian forms and integrate them with other ele­ments of Catholic and biblical tradition. Contrary to secular ideologies that devalue replication,16 Catholics are prone to endow replicas with the power of the original.17 Following Orsi, the moments and aftermaths of miraculous Marian apparitions and healings circulate as “abundant events,” defined by an excess of divine presence.18 The eruption of presence into ­human space-­time is engaged as inexhaustible, radiating from original places, objects, and ­people and through associated material forms, such as replica objects and shrines. For sites like the Ave Maria Grotto and the Sorrowful ­Mother Shrine—­which include numerous Marian, Catholic, and biblical features—­part of their power is grounded in their practice of assembling multiple histories of radiating presence.

Contexts Research Methods This chapter is grounded in fieldwork and archival data collected in 2018– 2019. I (Vaughn) conducted exploratory fieldwork at the Ave Maria Grotto (Cullman, Alabama) and the Sorrowful ­Mother Shrine (Bellevue, Ohio). ­These two sites ­were selected ­because they provide a useful comparison along several axes: located in dif­fer­ent geographic and cultural regions; affiliated with differing Catholic institutions; and, as explained below, emerging from dif­fer­ent histories of production. During July and August 2018, I traveled to each site, documented the spaces photographically, wrote field notes about self-­g uided and formal tours, and conducted informal interviews with other visitors and semi-­ structured interviews with site directors and caretakers. To complement this fieldwork, I analyzed archival materials at the University of Dayton’s Marian Library, including multiple genres of pilgrimage texts (e.g., guidebooks, brochures, prayer cards) from seven U.S. Catholic pilgrimage centers (including the Cullman and Bellevue sites). In addition, I conducted

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an Instagram analy­sis of the onsite images that visitors post to the social media platform: pictures of nature, devotional objects, selfies, and other posed portraits. Using the geotags “Sorrowful ­Mother Shrine” and “Ave Maria Grotto,” I analyzed the most recent photos from the Ave Maria Grotto (N=300) and all of the ones available from the Sorrowful M ­ other Shrine (N=200). To supplement this data, I (Bielo) analyzed additional archival materials from the Cullman and Bellevue sites and travelers’ reviews from newspapers and periodicals. Archival materials from the Ave Maria Grotto include five brochures (late 1950s–2000), three guidebooks (1965–2000), postcards (1960–1980), a documentary film (2013), a p­ opular hagiography of ­Brother Joseph (1991), and the site’s application for inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places (1978). Archival materials from the Sorrowful M ­ other Shrine include postcards (c. 1970) and a centennial history produced by the Shrine (1950). The newspaper and periodical reviews are wide ranging, dating from 1941 to the pre­sent and representing national, regional, and local publications.

Ave Maria Grotto Cullman, Alabama, is a small city fifty miles north of Birmingham. The Grotto sits on the campus of St. Bernard Abbey, which was founded in 1891 when Benedictine monks from Metten, Germany, w ­ ere sent from Pennsylvania to Alabama to minister to local German Catholics. One of the ­brothers, born Michael Zoettl in 1878, ­later known as ­Brother Joseph, had an accident when he was young, which caused him to have a hunched back. B ­ rother Joseph sought to become a priest, but in the early 1900s, Catholic priests conducted Mass facing the altar with their back to the congregation. Clerical officials de­cided that ­Brother Joseph’s physical ailment would distract ­people during the holy rite, foreclosing any possibility of his a­ cceptance into the priesthood. He performed vari­ous jobs at the Abbey and was eventually placed in charge of the power­house. He worked in this position for thirty years, during which he began sculpting miniature figurines from concrete. He created his first miniature, a grotto of ­Mother Mary, in 1918. Fellow monks and visitors to the Abbey favored the scene, and he began crafting them by the hundreds to fill purchase o­ rders. He envisioned a series of sculptures that could be arranged onsite, but he lacked the necessary

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materials. A few weeks l­ ater, a local train derailed; amid the wreckage was a large sheet of marble that B ­ rother Joseph requested. He understood this potential waste as a divine gift and created the Grotto’s first shrine from the excess marble. The Ave Maria Grotto was dedicated and opened for public visitation in May 1934. From train wreck marble to the thousands of donations sent from across the globe, B ­ rother Joseph worked entirely with discarded and used items. Reading across archival sources, a partial inventory includes concrete, marble, beads, chicken wire, seashells, jewelry, bits of glass, beverage and ink ­bottles, cold cream jars, tiles, dinner plates, toilet tank floats, watches, figurines, bird cages, bicycle reflectors, rocks, and chandelier prisms. ­Brother Joseph’s forty-­year proj­ect was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1984. The application’s framing is striking. The Catholicity of the site and its creator are de-­emphasized, while its status as a folk art environment and B ­ rother Joseph’s identity as a visionary artist is foregrounded. Most visitors come as devotional pilgrims, but the site operates in the double-­voiced way of being equally valuable in religious and secular registers. In this way, the Ave Maria Grotto is akin to other Catholic grottoes built by self-­taught artists, including other German immigrants.19 Similar examples include the Grotto of Redemption in northern Iowa, the Dickeyville Grotto in southwestern Wisconsin, and the Black Madonna Shrine just west of St. Louis. The Cullman shrine’s placement within this par­tic­u­lar tradition of place-­making is part of its attraction for many visitors, and part of the rationale for its inclusion on the National Register. The Grotto stretches across four acres, and its winding path takes visitors among 125 miniature shrines and replicas. Guided tours can be scheduled, but most visitors elect to take a self-­guided tour, facilitated by a guidebook with information on each replica that is included with the eight-­ dollar entry fee. The Grotto receives roughly forty thousand visitors annually, primarily Catholic and Protestant tour groups.20

Sorrowful M ­ other Shrine The Sorrowful ­Mother Shrine is run by the Missionaries of the Most Precious Blood in Bellevue, Ohio, a rural town located halfway between Toledo and Cleveland. The Shrine’s history traces to a small group of German Catholics who settled in the area in the early 1800s. Led by Fr. Francis de

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Sales Brunner, they created a small church on the grounds, which became increasingly ­popular with other German immigrants. Its appeal widened in 1909 when reports of a healing miracle at the site began circulating. Subsequent miracles w ­ ere reported, and the site developed in the early to mid-­twentieth c­ entury as a regional pilgrimage center, especially for Italian, Polish, Slovakian, and Hungarian immigrants. The site includes two chapels, indoor and outdoor; an outdoor Stations of the Cross; life-­size dioramas of Jesus’ “Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane” and Jesus’ tomb; replica grottoes for Lourdes, Fatima, Czestochowa, and Guadalupe; and other visitor amenities (e.g., picnic areas and a dog walking area). In addition to ­these areas, the Shrine includes pathways winding in and out of picturesque wooded areas. The paths are dotted with dozens of statues of figures from Catholic and biblical traditions, such as St. Joseph, St. Jude Thaddeus, Our Lady of Fatima, and Jesus. ­These statues have accumulated throughout the years, added by diverse groups and reflecting the work of many hands. Fi­nally, a pilgrim center functions as a central gathering place, providing rest­rooms, brochures, information about the site, a business office, a cafeteria, a lounge area with Catholic books and magazines, and a gift shop. Like the Ave Marie Grotto, guided tours can be scheduled, but most visitors opt for a self-­guided tour using an informational brochure. ­Today, the Shrine’s history of welcoming Western and Eastern E ­ uropean immigrants is complemented by a substantial presence of Latinx pilgrim groups, reflecting more recent immigrant patterns. Altogether, more than 120,000 ­people visit the Shrine annually.

Presenting the Ave Maria Grotto and the Sorrowful ­Mother Shrine side by side helps to draw out shared and distinct practices of finding and creating home. The origins of both sites trace to German Catholic settlers, and both visionaries (­Brother Joseph, ­Father Brunner) ­were immigrants whose nostalgia for wayside shrines in the German countryside guided their replication efforts. Both sites are located in rural areas, fostering the pilgrimage sense of journeying to a place separate from home. And both receive diverse sets of pilgrims on pre-­arranged and impromptu visits. In many ways, though, ­these two sites do not mirror each other. Consider the biographies of their f­ ounders. ­Brother Joseph is remembered as

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a physically slight man, gentle and extremely shy, a vulnerable soul who found a much-­desired home in Cullman, and who diligently developed a craft over ­decades. Brunner is remembered as a more charismatic figure, called by Catholic authorities to lead a territory, traveled back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean numerous times, and fulfilled a lifelong dream of building a Marian shrine. The sites reflect this difference. The Grotto is much smaller and denser: 125 miniatures in 4 acres, whereas the Shrine hosts just over 40 attractions spread across 120 acres. The Grotto is synonymous with Joseph, whereas the Shrine has a more collective identity; a work over time of many hands and many nationalities. The two sites also operate in largely dif­fer­ent experiential frames.21 The Shrine operates entirely within a Catholic devotional frame. It is a place to venerate familiar manifestations of Our Lady (Lourdes, Fatima, Guadalupe, Czestochowa) and perform traditional rituals (attend Mass, pray the Rosary, walk the Stations of the Cross). It is a pilgrimage center, a place for regional churches to gather and ethnic communities (from E ­ uropean to Latinx) to celebrate their immigrant Catholicisms. And it is a place whose history is told in familiar Catholic terms: the site of many physical healings, evidenced by discarded crutches and wheelchairs. In contrast, the Grotto integrates multiple frames. It does key the frame of Catholic devotion, including replicas of Lourdes, Fatima, and Guadalupe, and the entire place is understood to be ­Brother Joseph’s work of reverential love for God and Mary. ­There are also frames of U.S. nationalism (keyed through replicas of the Alamo and the Statue of Liberty) and immigrant nostalgia (keyed through replicas of German folktales, c­ astles, and wayside shrines). While the site is unmistakably Catholic, it has also been secularized through its designation as folk art and its active (and strategic) mobilization of this frame.22 In the folk art frame, the Grotto is less about divine miracles and more about visionary’s industriousness, a “creative genius” who worked with “ordinary materials” to produce a “dreamlike environment.”

Locality, Universality, Home Ave Marie Grotto and the Sorrowful M ­ other Shrine are pilgrimage centers oriented around replications: of other shrine environments, Our Lady apparitions, biblical stories, and other scenes of devotion, nostalgia, and ideology. No less than sites of officially authorized or popularly ratified

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apparitions, replications are stages for engaging the Catholic tension of universality and locality. The former is about belonging within the global Church and its historic traditions, connecting individuals and communities to an expansive, enduring institution. The latter is about adapting belonging to a home context, foregrounding locally distinctive dimensions of place, ethnicity, nationality, and other forms of socio-­historical identity. How, then, are ­these tensions engaged at Ave Maria Grotto and the Sorrowful M ­ other Shrine? How do caretakers and visitors actively create attachments to home through onsite practices?

Locality The Ave Maria Grotto consists of a myriad of statues, replicas, and other handmade artifacts which have been crafted out of diverse and often mundane or discarded materials. One of its most ­popular shrines is St. Therese of Lisieux, the ­Little Flower. ­Brother Joseph revered St. Therese and saw himself as having a special connection with her. They both grew up in large families and strug­ gled with physical illness. They both saw the beauty in nature and felt called to share it with ­others. Therese’s global appeal as “a saint for the ordinary person, a heroine without heroics”23 resonated with Joseph, who served the abbey quietly in his role as power­house steward. ­Because of the intimacy he experienced with her, it was one of the first shrines he built using the divinely gifted marble from the train wreck. During fieldwork at the Grotto, I walked the paths with one of the ­Brothers. As we steered around a ­little boy playing with pebbles on the

figure 38. St. Therese shrine at the Ave Maria Grotto. (Photo­graph by Claire Vaughn.)

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sidewalk, he recounted for me the famous story of the marble’s arrival (shifting small details—­a truck for a train—as oral narratives often do): Years ago, t­ here was a truck hauling this marble for a construction proj­ ect. However, the truck was in an accident. Every­one was fine, but the marble had cracked and broken into many pieces. Since they had no use for the broken marble, the com­pany donated it to B ­ rother Joseph for the construction of his statues and re-­creations. This ­couldn’t have come at a better time, since ­Brother Joseph needed building supplies. Once he saw the marble, he knew exactly what he would do with it. He used it to build the two most special shrines in the site: the Ave Maria Grotto, and the Shrine to St. Therese.

The miraculous arrival of the marble is part of its sacrality and is complemented by another dimension of its materiality. It is Sylacauga marble, a type of stone indigenous to Alabama. With ­Brother Joseph’s use of local material to express his spiritual intimacy with St. Therese, this shrine exemplifies the practice of locality. The shrines which utilize local building materials are among the most p­ opular at the Grotto. For example, the Instagram analy­sis revealed that 21 ­percent of the photos posted on the platform ­were of or with ­these shrines. Another 6 ­percent of the photos posted on Instagram contain images of the “­Little Alabama” diorama. This section is made up of almost twenty l­ittle buildings, all of which are located in or near Cullman, including the local Catholic church and school. ­There are also local ways of creating home at the Sorrowful M ­ other Shrine, though the execution differs. An established practice ­there is what they call “Ethnic Days.” ­These are events that take place on specific days in the summer and are dedicated to dif­fer­ent ethnic groups, including Hispanic, Polish, Italian, Slovenian, and Filipino. On t­ hese days, members of the ethnic group are invited to the Shrine for a Mass in their native language, along with a parade around the site with a flag from their nation(s) of origin. Collective cele­brations include m ­ usic, dance, food, and other material markers of immigrant identity. Through ­these rituals, the local incorporation of diverse immigrant groups is incorporated into the social life and history of the pilgrimage center. ­There are also small statues tied to the trees lining the Sorrowful ­Mother paths, all of which have been left by visitors. Generally, a pilgrim might leave their patron saint or a saint that they feel can help them with

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figure 39. St. Philomena Statue on Tree at the Sorrowful M ­ other Shrine. (Photo­graph by Claire Vaughn.)

a specific prayer need. For example, Saint Philomena, the patron saint of infants, babies, and youth, can be found on one of the first trees while walking the path to the woods. ­These saints immediately caught my attention. They are relatively small, no more than a foot tall or wide. It is easy for them to dis­appear into the background amongst the green leafy

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trees, especially the ones standing further off the path. I turned the p­ rocess of searching for them into a spot-­the-­saint-­on-­the-­tree game, a Catholicized I-­Spy. For each statue, I thought about each person who placed the object ­there and how the statues bond person, place, and prayer. For me, as a participant observer, ­these statues ­were not separate from or in addition to the shrine but had become part of it.

Universality Devotional sites also use materiality to mediate the Catholic imperative for universality. This refers to Catholicism’s translocal claim of continuity across far-­reaching geographic, cultural, and temporal settings. Through their annual visitors, both the Ave Maria Grotto and the Sorrowful ­Mother Shrine encourage and embrace a diverse community, echoing the promise of a universalizing tradition. The Sorrowful ­Mother Shrine and Ave Maria Grotto provide spaces for large groups to intermingle, a thoughtful counterpart to the narrow paths geared more ­toward individual and small-­group devotional practices. Both sites include sizable sections of picnic benches and other benches sprinkled throughout. ­These spaces encourage eating, talking, and socializing with o­ thers: perhaps with traveling companions or strangers who have also made the journey. Both sites also provide at least one large gathering space for worship ­services and the cele­bration of the Eucharist, arguably the central ritual of Catholic universality. The sites also use other strategies for embracing a diverse community of visitors. For instance, the Ave Maria Grotto keeps a large book on a podium directly inside the gift shop at the end of the main walking path. This visitor book includes spaces where travelers can write their names, where they are from, and how they heard about the Grotto. This provides a visual repre­sen­ta­tion of the number and geo­graph­i­cal diversity of visitors. When I examined the book, I noted that p­ eople traveled from nearby (within Alabama) and distant states (e.g., Arizona). Similarly, the Sorrowful ­Mother Shrine keeps a corkboard with a map of the United States directly outside their gift shop. The board asks visitors, “Where are you from?” and ­people place a push pin on the location where they traveled from. When I examined the map, it was filled with pins, fostering the sense that individual travelers are part of a wide-­ranging community of pilgrims.

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figure 40. Visitor map at the Sorrowful M ­ other Shrine. (Photo­graph by Claire Vaughn.)

Presented in a Catholic pilgrimage context, materialities like visitor maps and guest books exemplify the promise of universality, making one’s belonging in the i­magined community of the global Church immediately sensible. The most prominent example of universality at the Ave Maria Grotto returns to this chapter’s opening vignette and the practice of donating building materials. Stained glass, costume jewelry, seashells, beads, crucifix brooches, and other objects are sent from all around the world to be incorporated into the replicas onsite. The milk jugs sitting on shelves in the shed are more than recyclable plastic. The gallons of sand lying in buckets are more than a component for concrete. They hold memories and intentions, transforming mundane items into sacred building materials. Beads are no longer merely beads, pebbles no longer just pebbles; they become repre­sen­ta­tions of support for ­Brother Joseph, cele­brations of his devotional ­labor, a forged bond between sender and place, and mutual belonging in a shared tradition. The shrine replicas at both sites are also an engagement with universality. Pilgrimage centers such as Knock and Fatima are iconic in Catholic tradition and represent belonging within a universal community. And, while

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they are each irreplaceable, they are also replicable. By drawing them together in one place, Ave Maria Grotto and the Sorrowful ­Mother Shrine condense the universality that spans space-­time into one devotional site. The replica shrines also provide pilgrims an opportunity to experience the originals in another way. Instagram data shows that p­ eople regularly pose with the replicas, especially if they have already visited the originals. Instead of being in Ireland, standing at the base of the Knock Basilica with the steeple casting a g­ rand shadow, you are in Cullman casting a shadow over the basilica. In analyzing Instagram posts, especially at Ave Maria Grotto, the practice of creating digital attachments to place and engaging universality is striking. Images are posted from diverse locations onsite, from spots of cultivated landscape to the replicas and seemingly casual selfies in front of the entrance. By posting the photo on the platform and geotagging it, it is now available for any user to see. Consistent with other cases of Instagram self-­posing at sites of religious tourism, this represents a “par­ tic­u­lar communicative act: ‘I was h ­ ere, I want my presence h ­ ere known, this image performs a self I desire to circulate publicly, and I think it might secure desired likes.’ ”24 For photos from the Sorrowful M ­ other Shrine and Ave Maria Grotto, this par­tic­u­lar communicative act is expanded to include the idea of connection to the site; a sense that “I have been ­here, just as thousands of ­others have, and am now part of this community.” It is not only about individual self-­representation, but about being included in a collective community of ­people who have journeyed to the same site. This resonates with what Kaell refers to as creating relations with “a pious ancestor,” the idea that, like you, someone before has used the place for sacred devotion.25 Instagram posting extends the work of other ritual practices, connecting visitors to a universal Church: o­ thers who are onsite that same day and ­those who have left their imprint through guest book signatures, map pins, ex-­voto shrine offerings, and the vari­ous other material ways in which home is created at pilgrimage centers.

Conclusion Like their more famous counter­parts in Mexico, E ­ ngland, France, Ireland, Portugal, and elsewhere, the Ave Maria Grotto and the Sorrowful ­Mother Shrine offer impor­tant insight into the dynamics of lived Catholicism.

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­ ere, our focus has been the intersection of pilgrimage, place-­making, and H engagements with materiality. In par­tic­u­lar, we examined some ways in which objects and practices are used to mediate two ele­ments of a tension that animates Catholicism: universal and local belonging.26 To close, we reflect on why replica shrines like Alabama’s Grotto and Ohio’s Sorrowful ­Mother are so effective in bringing t­ hese themes of materiality and attachment into sharp relief. We noted ­earlier that the power of replica shrines traces to the ongoing, radiating presence attributed to Mary’s miracles.27 While they lack the status of officially authorized or popularly ratified apparitions, ­these sites take a dif­fer­ent route t­oward accessing the “abundant events” of Catholic history. They assem­ble and accumulate multiple devotional histories, add their own enchanted stories and characters (e.g., ­Brother Joseph), and invite visitors to contribute their own stories to the mix. In this way, replica shrines are multilayered sites of Catholic emplacement. They draw together vari­ ous influential Catholic stories and materialities and create an opportunity for everyday adherents to bond with both the local place and the universal tradition. By integrating diverse pasts, Marian expressions, and ritual forms, ­these shrine environments represent Catholicism’s spiritual abundance for visitors. Though certainly a ­jumble of diverse replications, ­these sites do not operate in a disjointed way but rather constitute a cohesive vision of spiritual power, Catholic universality, and localized belonging.

Notes 1. Simon Coleman, “Meanings of Movement, Place and Home at Walsingham,” Culture and Religion 1 (2000): 156. 2. Coleman, “Meanings of Movement,” 155. 3. Hillary Kaell, Walking Where Jesus Walked: American Christians and Holy Land Pilgrimage (New York: New York University Press, 2014). 4. Ma­ya Mayblin, Kristin Norget, and Valentina Napolitano, introduction to The Anthropology of Catholicism: A Reader, ed. Kristin Norget, Valentina Napolitano, and Ma­ya Mayblin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017), 7. 5. Anna-­Karina Hermkens, Willy Jansen, and Catrien Notermans, introduction to Moved by Mary: The Power of Pilgrimage in the Modern World, ed. Anna-­ Karina Hermkens, Willy Jansen, and Catrien Notermans (London: Ashgate, 2009). 6. Kaell, Walking Where Jesus Walked.

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7. Victor Turner and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), 8. John Eade, Order and Power at Lourdes: Lay Helpers and the ­Organization of a Pilgrimage Shrine (London: Routledge, 1991). 9. Edith Turner, “Legitimization or Suppression? The Effect of Mary’s Appearances at Knock, Ireland,” in Moved by Mary: The Power of Pilgrimage in the Modern World, ed. Anna-­Karina Hermkens, Willy Jansen and Catrien Notermans (London: Ashgate, 2009), 201–214. 10. Elaine Peña, Performing Piety: Making Space Sacred with the Virgin of Guadalupe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011) 11. Ali Murat Yel, “Appropriation of Sacredness at Fatima in Portugal,” in Materializing Religion: Expression, P­ erformance, and Ritual, ed. Elisabeth Arweck and William Keenan (London: Routledge, 2006). 12. Ellen Badone, “Echoes from Kerizinen: Pilgrimage, Narrative, and the Construction of Sacred History at a Marian Shrine in Northwestern France,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13 (2007): 453–470. 13. Marc Loustau, “The L ­ abor of and L ­ abor in Post-­Medjugorje Slideshows,” Journeys 20, no. 1 (2019): 31–52. 14. Colleen McDannell, Material Chris­tian­ity: Religion and ­Popular Culture in Amer­i­ca (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995). 15. David Morgan, “Aura and the Inversion of Marian Pilgrimage: Fatima and Her Statues,” in Moved by Mary: The Power of Pilgrimage in the Modern World, ed. Anna-­Karina Hermkens, Willy Jansen, and Catrien Notermans (London: Ashgate, 2009), 49–65. 16. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 1994) 17. Coleman, “Meanings of Movement.” 18. Robert Orsi, “Abundant History: Marian Apparitions as Alternative Modernity,” in Moved by Mary: The Power of Pilgrimage in the Modern World, ed. Anna-­Karina Hermkens, Willy Jansen, and Catrien Notermans (London: Ashgate, 2009), 220. 19. Lisa Stone, Sacred Spaces and Other Places: A Guide to Grottos and Sculptural Environments in the Upper Midwest (Chicago: School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 1993). 20. Timothy K. Beal, Roadside Religion: In Search of the Sacred, the Strange, and the Substance of Faith (Boston: Beacon, 2005). 21. Sarah Bill Schott, “ ‘Standing Where Your Heroes Stood’: Using Historical Tourism to Create American and Religious Identities,” Journal of Mormon History 36, no. 4 (2010): 41–66. And James S. Bielo, “Flower, Soil, ­Water, Stone: Biblical Landscape Items and Protestant Materiality,” Journal of Material Culture 23, no. 3 (2018): 368–387.

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22. Sally Promey, “Testimonial Aesthetics and Public Display,” The Immanent Frame, online, February 2018. 23. Barbara Corrado Pope, “A Heroine without Heroics: The L ­ ittle Flower of Jesus and Her Times,” Church History 57, no. 1 (1988): 46–60; esp. 46. 24. James Bielo, “Like-­able Me, Like-­able ­There,” American Religion, online, December 2019. 25. Hillary Kaell, “Marking Memory: Heritage Work and Devotional L ­ abor at Quebec’s Croix de Chemin,” in The Anthropology of Catholicism: A Reader (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017), 122–138. 26. Kristin Norget, Valentina Napolitano, and Ma­ya Mayblin, eds., The Anthropology of Catholicism: A Reader (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017). 27. Orsi, “Abundant History.”



“­These Are Our Saints” A Lourdes Shrine, the St. Coletta School for Exceptional ­Children, and the Catholic Remaking of Cognitive Disability a ndrew wa lker- ­c or netta

Introduction About halfway between Madison and Milwaukee, not far off Highway 18, sits a modest Marian shrine. A Lourdes replica, one of many “mimetic grottoes” in the United States, it consists of a pile of farmyard stones that hold an illuminated statue of the Virgin, a small iron fence draped with rosaries, and a shrouded St. Bernadette figure kneeling with her face lifted. It juts out like a molar from the surrounding countryside, but might easily be missed, tucked as it is ­behind a huddle of large, shuttered buildings.1 ­Those buildings composed the campus of the now-­closed St. Coletta School for Exceptional ­Children, once perhaps the most celebrated institution in North Amer­i­ca for persons with cognitive disabilities. Founded by Milwaukee’s S­ isters of St. Francis of Assisi at the outset of the twentieth c­ entury in Jefferson, Wisconsin, St. Coletta’s eventually became a lodestar for parents, priests, politicians, and o­ thers who ­were in search of answers to what one of the school’s early leaders dubbed the “challenge of the retarded child.”2 By 1955, the school boasted a 700-­acre campus, where more than five hundred residents (ranging from six years old to over sixty) w ­ ere meant to be transformed into “useful” citizens and community members through l­ abor, learning, and spiritual formation. A d­ ecade ­later, the reputation of the school (as well as its extensions in Chicago and Boston) was bolstered when its leaders received the Joseph P. Kennedy Foundation’s S­ ervice Award, a national honor recognizing excellence in disability-­related research and treatment.3 That recognition coincided with an influx of funding and attention in ­popular media such that, for much of the second half of the twentieth ­century, “St. Coletta’s” was, for many, synonymous with the progressive treatment of the “mentally handicapped.” This chapter takes this institution’s Lourdes shrine as a focusing lens for exploring the larger history of U.S. Catholic engagements with cognitive

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disability. It situates the school’s grotto within mid-­twentieth-­century public discourse about intellectual impairment and provides a unique look at how Marian devotional grammars informed efforts to make sense of ­those marked as “exceptional.” 4 Examining St. Coletta’s leaders’ use and repre­sen­ta­tions of the grotto on their campus and the broader memory of Lourdes, this chapter offers a discussion of how said leaders, alongside a growing collection of clergy, educators, and parents, worked to orient their peers around cognitive disability as a crucial site of religious activity and identification. This chapter suggests that St. Coletta’s shrine distinctively incarnates many aspects of this growing group’s efforts and, as such, provides a valuable opportunity for exploring both the making of U.S. Catholicism and the mid-­century making of cognitive disability.

Remembering “Forgotten” ­Children The postwar U.S. witnessed a significant cultural reckoning in relation to cognitive disability. In reaction to early-­twentieth-­century alarms about the “menace of the feeble-­minded” and broader ideas that regarded persons with cognitive impairments as sources of social shame, an emergent group of largely white, middle-­class parents and their allies set about transforming public attitudes surrounding this population. They hoped to mark a shift from fear and derision to affection and accommodation. This was an attempt, as it was frequently framed, to remember “forgotten ­children” within homes, communities, and the nation.5 Such efforts took a variety of shapes. Some focused on questions of etiology and the work of detaching ­these forms of difference from explic­itly eugenic associations with heredity. Shifts in scientific interpretations of many conditions’ origins, accompanied by the public disclosures of several celebrities that they w ­ ere the parents of ­children with cognitive impairments, worked to establish the argument that such persons could be born into “any ­family”—­a formulation that was ubiquitous in magazines, memoirs, and newspapers throughout the 1950s. This insistence helped to reassure families comfortably situated within the United States’ racial and class hierarchies that their association with such conditions need not jeopardize their social identities. It guaranteed that one could have a child with cognitive impairment and still be recognized as a “nice, average American.” 6

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Another shape that the postwar “remaking of intellectual disability” took, to use the historian James Trent’s phrase, was the insistence upon persons with cognitive disabilities’ economic and educational potential. This was concisely conveyed in the motto for the National Association for Retarded ­Children (NARC, formed in 1950), which eventually came to be one of the most influential lobbying groups in the country. The group insisted: “The Retarded Can Be Helped.” This slogan, printed on billboards, newspaper advertisements, and trumpeted on radio spots, was meant to ­counter what was a still common suggestion that persons deemed “mentally handicapped” w ­ ere, by definition, “hopeless.” Against this consensus, parents and their peers set about demonstrating that many persons with cognitive impairments could in fact contribute to a broader economic and social world if provided with the right opportunities.7 ­There was a third ave­nue for this “remaking.” However, it was decidedly more improvisational than the previous two sets of claims. It entailed efforts to establish the social value of persons with cognitive impairments apart from—or against—­questions of l­abor and academic potential. Whereas the insistence that such persons “can be helped” was tied—­ directly and indirectly—to the promise of ­labor and productivity, parents and their allies also ventured a host of claims about the social worth of this population in arenas that w ­ ere i­ magined to be distinct from the economic: t­ hose that related to religious faith, love, and moral pro­gress. One finds ­these claims especially prominent in parent testimonies from the period that strove to highlight the leavening effects of such persons when it came to their ­family members’ piety and character. Parents like the celebrity Dale Evans Rogers touted how her d­ aughter, Robin, made her siblings more “thoughtful” and “unselfish,” while making her and her husband (the Hollywood star Roy Rogers) more avid in their evangelical commitments. The author and educator Willard Abraham described how his ­daughter, Barbara, humbled him, “shak[ing] him out of a complacency” that had left him inattentive to his own life and the suffering of ­others. Such personal testimony made the case that persons with cognitive impairments should be regarded as social assets that spurred ­others into more au­then­tic and virtuous ways of being in the world.8 U.S. Catholics, although largely absent from existing histories, ­were involved and invested in ­every facet of the postwar “remaking” of cognitive disability. Catholic leaders joined their peers in contesting narrowly

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hereditarian interpretations of such forms of difference, affirming (at least in terms of biology) their “accidental” origins. Through educational and research programs, Catholic clergy, ­women religious, and ­others promoted new means for proving and cultivating this population’s academic and economic abilities. Catholic residential schools like St. Coletta’s and other day schools proliferated, while Catholic colleges and universities developed programs to train special educators, vocational rehabilitators, and other “­mental deficiency” specialists. At the heart of ­these diverse engagements, however, was an insistence upon the spiritual significance and treatment of this population: their value relative to eternal questions and economies. That insistence saturated the growing body of Catholic commentary on the “exceptional child” as it emerged in Catholic periodicals, parents’ memoirs, and advice manuals. Such claims helped to hail and recommend U.S. Catholics as a community uniquely sensitive to t­ hese forms of difference.9

A Hermeneutic of Cognitive Impairment The Lourdes replica at St. Coletta’s School for Exceptional ­Children in Wisconsin had a host of resources built into it for assigning spiritual value to persons who w ­ ere other­wise classified in terms of “deficiency.” The first among them had to do with what we might think of as an existing Catholic hermeneutic of cognitive disability, one that was basic to the story of Lourdes but certainly not exclusive to it. As the historian Ruth Harris explains in her panoramic history of the Virgin’s appearance to the young Bernadette Soubirous in the French countryside in 1858 and its memory, much of the credibility and purchase of the story of Lourdes has depended upon the suggestion that Bernadette was, in some sense, cognitively impaired. Accounts of her contemporaries ­were replete with assessments of her as “ignorant,” “­simple,” and “slow.” While Harris notes that such appraisals functioned in part to guarantee against the possibility of the young w ­ oman’s duplicity, they also functioned to situate Bernadette within existing Catholic frameworks for esteeming vulnerability and difference.10 ­Those frameworks posited an inverse relationship between one’s capacity for participating in the demands of social life and one’s relation to holiness. Figures who ­were understood to be unable to engage in vari­ous

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kinds of conduct (e.g., sexual, economic, and intellective) w ­ ere regarded as especially conducive when it came to super­natural communication. Within this paradigm, what Harris describes as Bernadette’s assigned “ignorance and marginality” ­were crucial to her availability to the Virgin and her messages. Her impairment (­whatever its origins) surfaced in narrative accounts of her life as a kind of exfoliate that guaranteed that she accrued none of the worldly sediments that might have impeded the movement of the divine in her life.11 Such notions, Harris explains, took on a special force in the context of nineteenth-­century France, reinforcing juxtapositions between the putative dangers of the modern and an imperiled tradition. Bernadette’s purported deficits—­and their resonance with other i­ magined dimensions of her identity—­child, girl, rural, and poor—­allowed her to stand for what Harris describes as a “world uncontaminated by materialism and secularism.” Cognitive limitation provided a power­ful means to name what worried one about the age.12 Ideas about Bernadette’s “slowness” traveled with memories of Lourdes to the twentieth-­century U.S. in narrative as well as ritual objects. In novena prayer manuals and ten-­cent pamphlets like the 1948 Bernadette of Lourdes, Bernadette’s exemplary holiness was communicated through notions of diminution and impairment. The authors of such texts worked to establish this young w ­ oman’s status as “the lowliest implement” by which God might communicate with the world and did so through descriptions of her as “unlettered,” “­simple . . . ​[and] unimaginative,” or, as her neighbors branded her in the ­popular 1943 film, The Song of Bernadette, simply, “stupid.” Such word stock was fundamental to her all-­but-­ubiquitous veneration among postwar Catholics.13 It was with t­ hese repre­sen­ta­tions at hand that U.S. Catholics waded into the mid-­century “remaking” of cognitive disability. The leaders of places like St. Coletta’s, parent-­advocates, and o­ thers marshaled the connections that the story of Lourdes and o­ thers posited between cognitive impairment and holiness to celebrate persons with cognitive disabilities as emblems of Catholic piety. St. Coletta’s chaplain, the Rev. James Feider (who authored the first U.S. Catholic catechism for persons with cognitive impairments), gave voice to this at the National Catholic Educational Association’s 1952 conference. In a paper titled “The Spiritual Potential of the Mentally Deficient Child,” Feider explained to attendees, “ “The limitations of the

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mentally deficient very naturally obviate any undue attachment to the mundane.” Such persons’ supposed inability to compete with their peers left them “­free and unencumbered in their spiritual life,” he opined, and, therefore, “adamant in their faith in God.”14 As was true in Bernadette’s case, such appraisals w ­ ere meant to stand out against the backdrop of troubling times. One anonymous m ­ other, in an essay for the Catholic magazine Integrity, offered a description similar to Feider’s of her “mentally defective” child’s faith and praised it as a rebuke to what she dubbed “the irreligion and materialism of a world in which he would never move.”15 ­Others criticized the times in which they found themselves in dif­fer­ent genres, as illustrated in a poem reproduced in the priest Gerard Breitenbeck’s pamphlet For Parents of Retarded Children. Rhetorically inquiring about the advantages of the cognitively impaired person’s life when contrasted with the social ambitions of the seemingly “unexceptional” individual, the speaker asks: Is it so tragic to live out one’s life, ­Free from the worry of strug­gle and strife? ­Free from the gnawing of envy and greed? ­Free from the desire to fill ­every need? To show the world ­we’re so big and so smart, To spend all our time just playing a part For which perhaps ­we’re not even fitted?16

Such repre­sen­ta­tions of “exceptional” individuals’ credulity and social detachment communicated to Catholic audiences that they ­were already in possession of idioms to appreciate this population, that ­there was space for them within their tradition. Such persons could be embraced, many suggested, like Bernadette, as icons of pure religion and as vehicles for voicing one’s longing to transcend this world, its corruptions, and accruing pressures.17

Staging Sainthood St. Coletta’s replica grotto helped to make t­ hese ideas material. It furnished resources for the p­ erformance of students’ kinship with a holy figure like Bernadette and their value within the broader universe of Catholic devotionalism. Sometimes the ­performance of ­these connections was announced

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as a ­performance. As part of the school’s curriculum, and in ways that ­were consistent with Catholic enthusiasm for dramaturgy at mid-­ century, students at St. Coletta regularly reenacted the story of Lourdes for peers, parents, and broader audiences. With plenty of competition and envy, no doubt, a young girl would be cast in the role of Bernadette, charged with enfleshing the stone statue that many audience members regularly encountered on the school’s campus. In d­ oing so, this child assumed the task of personifying the purity of faith that was supposed to characterize every­one who shared her diagnosis.18 This was, however, not the only way that St. Coletta’s leaders staged their students. Residents could also demonstrate their occupation of a “­free and unencumbered” spiritual life by simply engaging the shrine as a site of devotional practice. On regular visits to pray the Rosary and on feast days, the grotto could be used to highlight what many mid-­century Catholics claimed was this population’s “uncanny sense of religion.”19 What distinguished the shrine from other devotional sites on the school’s campus was its function as place of interposition. Unlike the chapel and many of the other shrines that populated the institution, one of the affordances of a Lourdes grotto was that students and o­ thers could position themselves alongside Bernadette in her communication with the Virgin. Its form as a tableau joined devotees with Bernadette as recipients of the Blessed M ­ other’s confidence. In some sense, it invited individuals to enter the scene as the young girl, in a similar pose of receptivity. That affordance had photographic advantages. For example, in one black-­and-­white image, reproduced in a postwar prospectus published for the institutions’ benefactors, community members, parents, and a group of students stand in front of the grotto at the right of the frame. A collection of ten boys—­perhaps the residents of one of the school’s many “cottages” or the members of a catechism class—­are dressed in starched white shirts tucked into slacks. They appear to be looking intently at the statue of the Virgin who is held between stones several feet off the ground. On the left side of the image, the figure of Bernadette kneels, whose colorless brightness against the grey of the grotto and grass rhymes with the students’ shirts, as does her upward gaze with theirs. This image helped to turn Bernadette and this collection of students into mirror images of one another. By manifesting a small congress of devotees in the countryside, it helped to make accessible the connections

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figure  41. Photo­graph from the institutional prospectus, “St. Coletta School for Exceptional ­Children,” ca. 1948. The image features a group of ten boys neatly dressed gazing at a figure of the Virgin Mary, who is surrounded by stones at the school’s Lourdes grotto. A s­ ister, in a black habit, perhaps the boys’ “­house ­mother,” stands to the students’ left and to the right of a kneeling Bernadette, who is vis­i­ble b­ ehind an iron fence. (Reproduced with permission of the ­Sisters of St. Francis of Assisi Archives, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.)

between the hermeneutic of cognitive disability that structured accounts of Bernadette’s devotion and St. Coletta’s students. It provided evidence for—­a means to see and to feel—­such persons’ “adamant faith.” As we w ­ ill see, in ­doing so, it also buttressed arguments mid-­century Catholics ­were making about places like St. Coletta’s and their positions within broader social and sacred landscapes.

Exceptional Geographies The postwar era witnessed mounting criticism of large, mostly state-­run institutions for persons with psychiatric and cognitive impairments. Parents, advocates, and activists (including the members of the aforementioned NARC) eagerly pursued alternatives to such places’ “custodial”—­and ­often carceral—­conditions.20 In this context, new and established Catholic residential schools sought to distinguish themselves by emphasizing how their work was motivated by regard for the spiritual potential of ­people with cognitive disabilities. Unlike their public counter­parts, many

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Catholics assumed and suggested, the operation of their institutions was predicted on the value of the cognitively impaired individual. Catholic leaders described their institutions as places that presumed their residents’ “inherent dignity” by virtue of their “super­natural destiny” and possession of souls. Many took for granted that ­these motivating premises led to better care.21 Even persons who might not other­wise be in f­ avor of c­ hildren’s incorporation into Catholic ritual could be heartened by the religious orientation of a place like St. Coletta’s. John Frank, a Jewish l­awyer in Bloomington, Indiana, recounted a discussion with his Protestant doctor in his 1951 memoir, My Son’s Story, in which the latter praised Catholic schools for cognitively disabled individuals. Encouraging Frank to delegate his child’s care to St. Rita’s Home in Buffalo, New York, which was operated by the Congregation of the S­ isters of St. Felix, he averred, “[Catholic institutions] usually do a very good job. . . . ​Your own peace of mind ­will be greater if your child’s care is entrusted to someone who sincerely believes that the spirit of God is in that child.” Frank soon enrolled his son at St. Rita’s.22 St. Coletta’s Lourdes shrine was one among many ways to telegraph the kind of “belief” that Frank’s doctor named and in which many parents took comfort. It could function—­alongside images of First Communions, crucifixes, and religious—as a kind of promissory note, a guarantee of feeling and commitment. For fellow Catholics, reminders of St. Coletta’s religious orientation provided additional comfort and confidence. One could find the cultivation of such trust in a stone relief on the exterior wall of the school’s central chapel that depicted three haloed angels, ten feet tall ­behind three small ­children. Each angel extended a hand onto the ­children before them in gestures of restraint and guidance.23 This sort of imagery invited parents to imagine St. Coletta’s students in the custody of not only s­ isters and priests who believed in the “spirit of God” within their charges but also in the care of far more power­ful beings. Depictions and knowledge of the school’s Lourdes shrine no doubt served similar functions. They invited a student’s m ­ other or other f­ amily members to remind themselves that placing their loved one at St. Coletta’s might be understood as a unique way of enfolding them into the protection and affection of the ­Mother of God.24 The shrine helped to mark the uniqueness of St. Coletta’s on yet another front. The grotto’s function as a site of interposition and devotional

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practice helped to animate a claim that was increasingly a mainstay of mid-­century Catholic discourse surrounding persons with cognitive disabilities—­namely, that members of this population ­were saints. Such persons did not only represent qualities associated with holiness (simpleness, innocence, e­ tc.), but they o­ ught to be recognized and addressed as uniquely power­f ul spiritual agents within a wider devotional universe. Chaplain Rev. Feider hedged his bets slightly by frequently referring to St. Coletta’s residents as “the most probable saints of God” (this phrase was e­ tched in marble in the school’s administration building), but many of his peers saw less need for caution. Sr. John Minetta, a mid-­century leader of a religious educational program for ­people with cognitive disabilities in California, referred to persons labeled accordingly as “born” and “ready-­made saints.” San Francisco’s diocesan newspaper the Monitor was equally bold when a postwar headline informed its readers: “Mentally Deficient C ­ hildren: ­These Are Our Saints.”25 ­Those in charge at St. Coletta’s advertised and mobilized this (probable) sainthood to turn o­ thers’ attention to their institution as a special locus of holiness. The school’s first superintendent, Sr. M. Anastasia, once announced, ­after learning the school would be permitted to have daily exposition of the eucharist for an extended period, that “[the] prayers of the innocent [i.e., her students] are bound to win untold graces and blessings for us, our parents, friends and benefactors.” The prospect of “graces won” was constantly put before readers of the institution’s quarterly newspaper and ­others to recruit new members to the school’s sponsor club. This was a rather straightforward proposition: the exchange of financial and moral support for access to uniquely immediate spiritual power.26 ­These promises fused to broader claims about the roles of “exceptional ­children” as intercessors. Mid-­century Catholic advocates regularly suggested that this population could compensate for the sins of ­others. St. Coletta’s long-­serving second superintendent Sr. Mary Theodore summarized this notion, writing, “We trust that the liveliness of the faith of ­these retarded ­children w ­ ill make reparation to God for the sins of defiance committed by some of the intelligent­sia.” This notion of “reparation,” the Catholic understanding that one might work to expiate the sins of another, was often invoked and helped advocates to make the case for putatively non-­“exceptional” individuals’ dependence upon this population

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in light of eternity. As saints-­on-­earth, they ­were ­doing nothing less than helping to save the world.27 The school’s shrine was not the only means for reminding ­people of this idea, but it was a preferred one. St. Coletta’s leaders produced and circulated postcards of the grotto as a way of suturing the imagination of vari­ous publics to the school and its residents. Artifacts of this kind ­were everywhere in twentieth-­century Catholic devotional culture, but what was perhaps distinctive about this object was its potential to communicate the Blessed Virgin, St. Bernadette, as well as saints not yet in heaven. Like many cognate postcards, the image pictures no ­human figures, and their absence helps to facilitate a sense of immediacy for the beholder, as if they w ­ ere at the shrine. However, for t­hose who knew anything about what the card announced as “The St. Coletta Institute,” this object offered a chance of contact with not just a shrine but also with the population whom the school’s chaplain christened as spiritual “monuments of greatness.”28 What might that contact have been like? What sorts of images and ideas of persons with cognitive disabilities did recipients mobilize in their engagements with this object as they stood by their postbox, as t­ hese cards sat propped on desks or windowsills? Did they feel the prayers of the “exceptional” through the linen paper as they offered their own to the Virgin? Did they hope that some of the spiritual power of St. Coletta’s students might ferry their own petitions to heaven with greater speed? When situated within broader mid-­century Catholic discourse about the “exceptional child,” affirmative answers to many of ­these questions seem likely. We might, for example, look to the St. Louis ­mother who reported to Rev. Gerard Breitenbeck, a prominent Catholic advocate for the “exceptional,” that her neighbors regularly called her home to request the prayers of her cognitively impaired c­ hildren.29 It seems—­a nd as ­Breitenbeck and ­others reported—­many ­were ready to find more immediate connections to the divine via ­these forms of difference.30 The leaders at St. Coletta’s drew upon and advanced the notions that motivated this kind of request and offered artifacts like the Lourdes postcards as ampullae of sorts, objects that could transport bits of power and presence from the life of their school. Such objects and the ideas they affirmed recommended St. Coletta’s, its students, and ­others who shared

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figure  42. Postcard labeled “ ‘Shrine.’ The St. Coletta Institute, Jefferson, Wis,” date unknown. The image captures the school’s Lourdes grotto from several yards away. It includes the Virgin, who is positioned in its center, and Bernadette, who kneels below her and to the left. The statues and rocks are grey, while color has been added to the grass (green), trees (brown and green), sky (light blue), and flowers at the foot of the shrine and surrounding the Virgin (pink and yellow). (Reproduced with permission of the ­Sisters of St. Francis of Assisi Archives, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.)

their identities as something like “clusters of radiance” within the wider landscapes of postwar devotional culture.31

Cloistering, Containing How can—­and should—we read Catholics’ constructions of ­these “probable saints” on the other side of the disability rights movement and the subsequent arrival of disability studies as a field of critical inquiry?32 For one, ­those historical developments help to make plain—­perhaps glaring—­how constructions of exceptional sainthood justified the social segregation of ­people with cognitive disabilities. Although the mid-­century leaders of St. Coletta’s refused regnant logics that sought to permanently sever the “mentally deficient” from society, they nevertheless supported such persons’ removal from their communities and families of origin as part of a broader rehabilitative promise. By casting this population’s

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social remove in terms of its members’ spiritual identities, their kinship with a figure like Bernadette and her hinterland holiness, the grammars of Catholic devotionalism likely siphoned attention from the wider forces and facts of social exclusion. This was made especially apparent in yet another ­popular sobriquet mid-­century Catholics sometimes applied to this population, one that classified p­ eople with cognitive disabilities as “God’s cloistered ­children.”33 Resonating with notions of “reparation” and spiritual (inter)dependence, this label helped to obscure questions about the sources of this population’s isolation—­and their lack of say in the ­matter. Such classifications surely provided ­little comfort to persons who felt exiled from the places they might have other­wise called home. Disability studies has also supplied a host of resources for analyzing other dimensions of ­these assignments of holiness. From its earliest inception, the field has interrogated what ­political scientist Harlan Hahn referred to as the “asexual objectification” of persons with disabilities.34 As the literary scholar Robert McRuer notes, in many modern contexts, disabled persons have been constructed through a punitive binary that renders them e­ ither hypersexual—­and therefore as a threat—­or as “incapable of having sexual desires or a sexual identity.”35 He explains that the l­ater construction most often surfaces through notions of “innocence.” In the case of the “most probable saints of God,” such constructions w ­ ere unapologetic and explicit. Responding to lingering eugenic s­ tereotypes of sexual deviance and drawing upon enduring theological notions of chastity, part of the means by which mid-­century Catholics conferred value to this population, as noted ­earlier, was by placing them beyond the sexual. That (dis)placement was reinforced by figures like Bernadette and the Blessed Virgin and underscored in virtually all the classifications ­we’ve encountered. “Cloistered ­children,” “exceptional ­children,” and “probable saints” all painted this population in terms of sexual naivete and purity. Disability scholars’ critique of this kind of “asexualization” helps to draw attention to its contingency—to the fact that it required and encouraged the management of the bodies it tried to claim. This is exemplified in what Sr. Mary Theodore described as St. Coletta’s “hands-­off policy with self and o­ thers” in The Challenge of the Retarded Child. She touted a system of punishment and reward that prevented what she referred to as “unpleasant and immoral situations” among the institution’s residents.36

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­ ere we have a reticent admission of desires and acts that contradicted H widespread fantasies of the cognitively disabled’s “innocence.” P ­ leasures taken in private. Wanted and unwanted advances. Sex in the unobserved spaces of institutional life. Such an admission underscored the fact that this population’s holiness regularly required coercion and restraint—­ requirements that registered bodily in relationships prohibited, intimacies interrupted, and other unnamed penalties. All of which is to say, disability studies helps to draw our attention to scenes like ­these where the making of “ready-­made saints” was a m ­ atter of compulsion—­and 37 could hurt. Both lines of assessment—­noticing complicity in the ideologies of institutionalization and “asexual objectification”—­seem to affirm more general critiques of religious discourses surrounding bodily difference. Many scholars have challenged how (usually Christian) theological renderings of ­human impairments tend to turn disabled bodies into “props and instruments” for ­others.38 Such acts of what the historian of U.S. Catholicism Robert Orsi calls “religious and p­ olitical transubstantiation” tend to reduce the populations they mark as “special” to symbols and “vehicles for the anx­i­eties, hopes, and values of o­ thers” in ways that are often disconnected from helping t­ hose they name to “live better lives.”39 Indeed, in the case of so-­called exceptional c­ hildren, assignments of “specialness” incentivized the denial and repression of vast arenas of experience. T ­ hese included sexual desires and acts, but also many other affective states and longings. The kinds of descriptions encountered above of this population as f­ ree from “worry” and “mundane attachments” helped to occlude ambitions and disappointments that might complicate romanticized notions of easy faith and steady contentment. Such rhetorical moves underscore what many have identified as religious discourse’s extractive and repressive tendencies when it comes to extraordinary bodies.40 In addition to occluding vast arenas of experience, another prob­lem with religious constructions of ­human impairments, according to many scholars, is how they “obfuscate the social construction of disability.” 41 In their article “Jesus Thrown Every­thing Off Balance,” pioneering disability studies scholars David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder condemn, with the help of Friedrich Nietz­sche, how notions of salvation, redemption, and the super­natural deflect attention away from “the demands of earthly existence—­including the ability to accommodate lives that, at least

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outwardly, appear lacking in social utility.” They decry how attempts to register h ­ uman impairments in otherworldly terms distract from what we might gloss as the ideological and material conditions of disablement—­ debarring ­political questions and critique in the h ­ ere and now. This section’s discussion of how repre­sen­ta­tions of “exceptional ­children” sacralized institutional life could easily serve as a case in point for Snyder and Mitchell’s thesis.42

Conclusion And yet, many of the sources discussed in this chapter complicate the durable notion that theological renderings of disability necessarily inhibit ­political inquiry and activity. The broader context of the mid-­century “remaking” of cognitive disability” brings into relief how claims about the “exceptional child’s” saintliness surfaced as answers to urgent p­ olitical and cultural questions. T ­ hese included: What values and assumptions had led to the widespread social abuse and neglect of this population? What sorts of beliefs and practices would support recognition of its members’ personhood? How might they be sustained? In taking up ­these queries, mid-­century Catholic advocates for the “exceptional” developed pointed critiques of twentieth-­century U.S. society and its roles in the disablement of p­ eople labeled “mentally handicapped.” For instance, Sr. Mary Theodore pronounced, “The greatest handicap of any retarded individual is the dearth of tolerance, sympathy, and understanding on the part of the public.” 43 She was joined by many ­others in decrying what one postwar f­ ather of a child with a cognitive disability named the “cold and impersonal logic” that governed medical and economic appraisals of h ­ uman difference in the modern world, leading to ­whole groups of p­ eople being (dis)carded as social “waste.” 44 Far from ­aspiring to completely escape the temporal through acts of symbolic arrogation, many Catholics w ­ ere committed to diagnosing and treating the ills of what Rev. Breitenbeck referred to as a “thoughtless society.” 45 St. Coletta’s and its sibling schools w ­ ere experiments. In ways reminiscent of some nineteenth-­century asylums, they w ­ ere attempts to rewrite the institution for p­ eople with cognitive disabilities not as a site of abandonment but as a center in the spiritual and social life of a broader community.46 St. Coletta’s leaders hoped that their efforts to educate this

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population “in an atmosphere of confidence and joy” (as one postwar brochure put it) would corroborate broader attempts to integrate the “mentally handicapped” into U.S. American life in new ways. Through the care they provided, ­these leaders and advocates aspired to address the “dearth” that Sr. Mary Theodore named, carving out novel space and possibilities for the “exceptional.” Making such persons “saints” in order to do so was dangerous. It enabled the kinds of alienation and exploitation to which scholars of disability have drawn our attention—­and which some of the actors in this chapter would come to repudiate themselves.47 But it also proved a central part of efforts to think of “exceptional” bodyminds as “something other than a prob­lem,” to borrow historian of religion Mary Dunn’s recent formulation.48 ­These claims helped Catholics to theorize the social value of vulnerability and to argue for the ways in which putatively “unexceptional” persons’ lives might be implicated in (and responsible to) ­those of persons at society’s margins.49 St. Coletta’s Lourdes grotto mediated this saint-­making. As I have sought to demonstrate, it furnished established scripts for holiness, helping to set the terms for Catholic audiences’ investment in persons with cognitive disabilities. Not unlike the photo­graph discussed above, it provided means to “capture” this population in tightly defined roles. However, like any shrine, it fixed but also opened space for making relationships anew. By helping to mark a place like St. Coletta’s and its students as crucial nodes in the networks of postwar devotional life, this shrine invited its audiences to reimagine the pos­si­ble connections between institution and community, between parent and child, and between the “exceptional” and supposedly “unexceptional.” In ­doing so, it served as both an index of and a means to realize other worlds—in heaven and on earth. Notes 1. The label “mimetic grottoes” appears in Robert Orsi, History and Presence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2016), 52. On the history of Lourdes replicas in the U.S., see Colleen McDannell, Material Chris­tian­ity: Religion and ­Popular Culture in Amer­i­ca (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 132–162. For more on shrines, holy sites, and practices of reproduction, see James Bielo, “Replication as Religious Practice, Temporality as Religious Prob­lem,” History and Anthropology 28, no. 2 (2017): 131–148.

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2. Sr. Mary Theodore [Hegeman], O.S.F., The Challenge of the Retarded Child (Milwaukee, WI: Bruce Publishing Com­pany, 1959). For more on the school’s history, see Sr. Mary Theodore Hegeman, History of St. Coletta: Jefferson, Wisconsin, 1904–1994 (n.p., 1995); Sr. Mary Eunice Hanousek, A New Assisi: The First Hundred Years of the ­Sisters of St. Francis of Assisi, 1849–1949 (Milwaukee, WI: Bruce Publishing Com­pany, 1948), 127–140. This chapter features several classifications for cognitive impairment (e.g., “­mental retardation,” “­mental handicaps,” “exceptional,” “­mental deficiency”), many of which have since been rejected as offensive and denigrating thanks to the work of many self-­advocates and their allies in the last quarter c­ entury. I make clear throughout that this older vocabulary belongs to my subjects. When speaking in my voice, I use the terms “persons with cognitive disabilities” or “persons with cognitive impairments” interchangeably. My choice to preserve some mid-­century language for describing t­ hese forms of difference is motivated by a desire to underscore the contingency of all t­ hese descriptors and, indeed, of disability itself. It is worth noting that the category perhaps most offensive t­ oday (the “R-­word”) was promoted in this period as a solution to ­earlier era’s prejudices, as it was meant to mark a confidence in the capacity of persons thus labeled to learn and develop, albeit at a dif­fer­ent pace. Readers w ­ ill also notice the subjects in this chapter’s frequent use of the phrase “exceptional c­ hildren,” which was employed by both Catholics and non-­Catholics. The notion that ­people with cognitive disabilities of any age ­were developmentally “­children” was essential to public plays for their social ­acceptance in this period and had par­tic­u­lar resonance within the context of Catholic devotionalism. I discuss the costs of this rhetorical infantilization ­later in the essay. For more on classifications of cognitive impairment and the activism that has driven the most recent shifts in vocabulary, see Marty Ford, Annie Acosta, and T. J. Sutcliffe, “Beyond Terminology: The Policy Impact of a Grassroots Movement,” Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities 51, no. 2 (2013): 108–112. 3. For more on the Foundation and the Kennedy f­ amily’s role in shaping the politics of cognitive disability in the U.S., see Edward Shorter, The Kennedy ­Family and the Story of ­Mental Retardation (Philadelphia: T ­ emple University Press, 2000). An impor­tant point of connection ­here, but not elaborated on in this chapter, is that St. Coletta’s garnered public attention at several points throughout the second half of the twentieth c­ entury as audiences learned (and relearned) that Rosemary Kennedy lived on the school’s campus from 1949 to 2005 in a cabin built by her parents. U.S. audiences w ­ ere first informed that Rosemary had a cognitive impairment a­ fter John F. Kennedy’s election as president in a 1962 article penned by their sibling Eunice Shriver. It was much ­later that both her siblings and the public learned that her institutionalization

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at St. Coletta’s (which was not mentioned in Shriver’s article) was precipitated by her ­father’s choice to have her lobotomized in 1941, which led to increased interest in her life. See Eunice Shriver, “Hope for Retarded C ­ hildren,” The Saturday ­Evening Post, Sept. 22, 1962, 71–75; Elizabeth Koehler-­Pentacoff, The Missing Kennedy: Rosemary Kennedy and the Secret Bonds of Four W ­ omen (Baltimore: Bancroft Press, 2015); Kate Clifford Larson, Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy ­Daughter (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2015). 4. I focus roughly on the two ­decades that followed the Second World War. The life of St. Coletta’s Lourdes shrine precedes this period, having been built in 1912, less than a d­ ecade a­ fter the ­Sisters of St. Francis began caring for persons they referred to at that time as “backward ­children.” However, the shrine does not surface much in the institution’s archives u ­ ntil l­ ater, and it is my suspicion that the broader cultural changes tracked in this chapter increased its importance to ­those in and around St. Coletta’s. 5. James Trent, Inventing the Feeble Mind: A History of Intellectual Disability in the United States, 2nd edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017); Allison Carey, On the Margins of Citizenship: Intellectual Disability and Civil Rights in Twentieth-­Century Amer­i­ca (Philadelphia: T ­ emple University Press, 2009); and Allison Carey, Pamela Block, and Richard Scotch, Allies and Obstacles: Disability Activism and Parents of C ­ hildren with Disabilities (Philadelphia: ­Temple University Press, 2020); Janice Brockley, “Rearing the Child Who Never Grew: Ideologies of Parenting and Intellectual Disability in American History,” in M ­ ental Retardation in Amer­i­ca: A Historical Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2004), 130–164; Brockley, “Rearing the Child Who Never Grew: Parents, Professionals, and ­Children with Intellectual Disabilities, 1910–1965,” (PhD diss., Rutgers University, 2001); and Katherine ­Castles, “­Little ‘Tardies’: M ­ ental Retardation, Race, and Class in American Society, 1945–1965,” (PhD diss., Duke University, 2006). On “forgotten c­ hildren,” see Stanley High, “Forgotten C ­ hildren No Longer,” Reader’s Digest, September 1960, 121–123; and The Forgotten Ones: Third Annual Workshop on Special Education of the Exceptional Child (Washington, DC: Catholic University of Amer­i­ca Press, 1955). It is impor­tant to note that the break with the past that t­ hese actors announced was aspirational and decidedly l­ imited. As scholars have shown, t­ here was plenty of ideological and personal continuity in discourse about disability and reproduction between the eugenic and postwar eras. See Alexandra Minna Stern, Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern Amer­i­ca (Berkeley: University of California, 2005). 6. Kathleen W. Jones, “ ‘Nice, Average Americans: Postwar Parents’ Groups and the Defense of the Normal F ­ amily,” in M ­ ental Retardation in Amer­i­ca: A Historical Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2004), 351–370. The

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bound­aries of the categories “­mental deficiency” and “­mental retardation” ­were flexible. Most interpreters agreed that such diagnoses named a “permanent condition” that was appraised in terms of a combination of “social inadequacy” and a lack of intellectual ability as appraised via IQ tests and other assessment techniques. T ­ hese conditions w ­ ere contrasted with “­mental illness,” which was regarded as “disturbance” of “­mental power” rather than an “inability to develop.” ­These classifications still accommodated a wide range of differences, from “brain damage” to “mongolism” (a racist categorization that would soon be reclassified as Down Syndrome), and c­ erebral palsy. See Sr. Mary Theodore, Challenge of the Retarded Child, 22–61. As many scholars have noted, the capaciousness of t­ hese terms enabled their arbitrary application when it came to ­things like institutionalization; they w ­ ere sometimes a catchall for persons ­others simply wanted “put away.” See, for example, Dave Bakke, God Knows His Name: The True Story of John Doe No. 24 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000). For more on the (ongoing) history of such categories’ racist application in the field of education, see DisCrit—­ Disability Studies and Critical Race Theory in Education, ed. David Connor, Beth Ferri, and Subini Annamma (New York: Teachers College Press, 2015). 7. Trent, Inventing the Feeble Mind, 216–258. For more on the NARC, see Carey, On the Margins of Citizenship; Brockley, “Rearing the Child Who Never Grew”; and C ­ astles, “­Little ‘Tardies.’ ” The historian Sarah ­Rose has provided a robust account of how industrial capitalism produced persons with cognitive impairments as “unproductive” subjects around the turn of the twentieth ­century. See No Right to Be Idle: The Invention of Disability, 1840s–1930s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017). For more on postwar rehabilitative ambitions, see Audra Jennings, Out of the Horrors of War: Disability Politics in WWII Amer­i­ca (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), and Mary Klages, Woeful Afflictions: Disability and Sentimentality in Victorian Amer­i­ca (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 197–212. 8. Dale Evans, Angel Unaware (Westwood, NJ: Fleming Revell, 1953), 57–58, 20–22; Willard Abraham, Barbara (New York: Rinehart & Co., 1958), 91. The improvisational quality of this lit­er­a­ture stems from an abiding uncertainty among t­ hose producing it about ­whether they might make the case for cognitive disability as a good in itself. The attempts to establish the social worth of persons identified accordingly often was accompanied by balking, which clarified that the author in question did not consider ­these impairments ultimately desirable. For more on ambivalence and the desirability of disability, see Robert McRuer and Abby L. Wilkerson, “Introduction,” Special Issue, “Desiring Disability: Queer Theory Meets Disability Studies,” GLQ 9, nos.1–2 (2003): 1–23. 9. For a full list of Catholic institutions founded in this period, see Directory of Catholic Special Facilities and Programs in the United States for Handicapped

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­ hildren and Adults, ed. E. Behrman and M. Ann Dolores, 4th ed. (Washington, C DC: National Catholic Educational Association, 1965). See also, “Catholic Schools for Retarded ­Triple in 5 Years,” Monitor, August 22, 1958, 5S. For a sense of Catholics’ broader pedagogical and professionalizing efforts, see The Aty­pi­cal Child: Proceedings of the Second Annual Workshop on Special Education of the Exceptional Child (Washington, DC: Catholic University of American Press, 1954). As the title of the NCEA’s workshop suggests, the rehabilitative aspirations of Catholic leaders, like their counter­parts, w ­ ere not restricted to persons with cognitive disabilities. 10. Ruth Harris, Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age (New York: Penguin Books, 2000), 23–24, 51, 68. An impor­tant scriptural reference for this framework is 1 Corinthians 1:27–29 in which the apostle Paul suggests that “The foolish ­things of the world hath God chosen that He may confound the wise.” This passage serves as the epigraph to the British priest Alban Goodier’s ­popular Saints for Sinners (London: Sheed & Ward, 1945), which features another prominent icon of the hermeneutic I am describing, the seventeenth-­ century priest St. Joseph of Cupertino, whom Goodier names “the dunce.” 11. Harris notes that t­ here was a crucial kind of lamination that took place in repre­sen­ta­tions of Bernadette’s “marginality.” While her supposed impairments preserved her from the less than holy, so too, it was assumed, did the social and geographic isolation of a place like Lourdes, her ­family’s place on the lower rungs of its ­political and economic hierarchies, and her position within her f­ amily as a young girl. That is to say, the repre­sen­ta­tion of Bernadette’s disability reinforced and rhymed with a host of social / symbolic positions that ­were likewise ­imagined as disabling, including childhood itself. Harris, Lourdes, 150. For more on modern Catholic constructions of childhood and Marianism—­the mutual constitution of the “age of Mary” and the “age of ­children”—­see Robert Orsi, “Material ­Children: Making God’s Presence Real for Catholic Boys and Girls and for the Adults in Relation to Them,” in Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds ­People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them (Prince­ton, N.J.: Prince­ton University Press, 2005), 73–109. 12. Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth, 24. 13. ­Father Ralph S.V.D., Bernadette of Lourdes (Techny, Ill.: The Mission Press, 1948), 3 and 9. For other instances of similar language, see Novena Prayers in Honor of Our Lady of Lourdes and St. Bernadette (New York: Paulist Press, 1938); directed by Henry King, The Song of Bernadette (1943; Beverly Hills, CA: Twentieth C ­ entury Fox, 2010), DVD. As was the case in the nineteenth ­century, t­ here was productive ambiguity in repre­sen­ta­tions of Bernadette’s difference in the twentieth-­century U.S. In some instances, an author or interpreter might emphasize her social displacement as a “lowly peasant” or her “childishness” instead of a par­tic­u­lar impairment. However, crucial to

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constructions of her subjectivity—to her holiness—in all instances was some notion of cognitive limitation. 14. Rev. James Feider, “The Spiritual Potential of the Mentally Deficient Child,” in Bulletin: National Catholic Educational Association, Proceedings and Addresses Forty-­Ninth Annual Meeting (Washington, DC, 1952), 219. This same language was often reproduced, in some cases, without direct attribution. See Thomas Skinner, Instructional Manual for First Communion of God’s Holy Innocents (New Hartford, NY: St. John the Evangelist Church, 1959), viii. See also James Feider, My Guide to Heaven (Milwaukee, WI: Husting Printing, Co., 1952). 15. This essay was reprinted in some St. Coletta’s promotional materials. Prospectus, “St. Coletta School for Exceptional ­Children,” ca. 1950, Box 9700, Folder 7, S­ isters of St. Francis of Assisi Archives, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. 16. Gerald Breitenbeck, For Parents of Retarded ­Children (Liguori, MO: Liguorian Pamphlets 1958), 5. 17. For more on the pressures felt by predominately white, socially ascendant postwar Catholics and their ambivalence about their new social footing, see John Seitz, “Altars of Ammo: Catholic Materiality and the Visual Culture of World War II,” Material Religion 15, no. 4 (2019): 401–432. 18. Sr. Mary Theodore, Challenge of the Retarded Child, 152. 19. Charles Bauer, Retarded ­Children Are P­ eople (Milwaukee, WI: Bruce Publishing, 1964), 52. 20. Steven Taylor, Acts of Conscience: World War II, M ­ ental Institutions, and Religious Objectors (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2009). For a recent effort to situate residential institutions for p­ eople with disabilities within a broader history of incarceration and policing, see Liat Ben-­Moshe, Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020). 21. The quoted language can be found in “Philosophic Aspect Is Background of Thesis,” St. Coletta’s Homelights, April 1952, 4. T ­ here was truth to ­these claims to better care, at least in part, b­ ecause Catholic institutions w ­ ere not subject to the ­political and economic constraints that state institutions faced. They could limit the amount and kinds of students they admitted and, at least in the m ­ iddle of the twentieth ­century, they did not need to worry about ­labor as other institutions did, thanks to the work of the religious who staffed them. It was also the case that St. Coletta’s leaders and their allies ­were self-­consciously committed to correcting what they saw to be the errors of the past and to finding new ways to educate and cultivate meaningful lives for persons with cognitive disabilities. 22. John Frank, My Son’s Story (New York: Alfred P. Knopf, 1952), 92–93. 23. This relief is still vis­i­ble on St. Coletta’s abandoned campus in Jefferson.

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24. ­Doing so might have also helped parents to believe that their c­ hildren’s differences w ­ ere signs of their election by God to play privileged roles in the plan of salvation. Postwar parents ­were regularly encouraged by their peers and Catholic authorities to identify with the Blessed M ­ other as “chosen” parents. See Esther Vanamee Griffin, “The Angel,” Catholic World (April 1951), 35; Breitenbeck, For Parents of Retarded ­Children, 7. 25. Clipping, “ ‘Born Saints’ Need Religion Too,” ca. 1958, Box 3, Folder 11, Work of the ­Sisters SHF03, ­Sisters of the Holy ­Family Archive, Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, California; “Mentally-­Deficient C ­ hildren: ­These Are Our Saints,” Monitor (San Francisco), March 13, 1959, 3. 26. Sr. Mary Theodore, History of St. Coletta: Jefferson, Wisconsin, 1904–1994, n.p., 1995, 29. For an example of newsletter promises / advertisements, see St. Coletta’s Homelights, October 1959, 7. 27. Sr. Mary Theodore, Challenge of the Retarded Child, 149. See also, Breitenbeck, For Parents of Retarded ­Children, 18. 28. Rev. James Feider, “Catholic Child Psy­chol­ogy: A Niche in Catholic Philosophy for the Handicapped Child,” in Prospectus, “St. Coletta School for Exceptional C ­ hildren,” ca. 1950, Box 9700, Folder 7, ­Sisters of St. Francis of Assisi Archives, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. St. Coletta’s leaders produced a wide variety of postcards that featured images of the school’s grounds and buildings that served similar purposes. My focus h ­ ere, however, is on what was uniquely condensed in the image of the institution’s grotto. 29. Gerard Breitenbeck, The Role and Value of the Retarded Child (Liguori, MO: Liguorian Pamphlets, 1965), 16. Breitenbeck was a Redemptorist priest who positioned himself as an expert adviser and advocate for persons with cognitive disabilities and their families in the 1950s and 1960s. In addition to the two pamphlets cited ­here, he produced several other texts via his congregation’s publishing arm, including, May the Retarded Receive Communion? (Liguori, MO: Liguorian Pamphlets, 1964). 30. For a moving portrait of what ascriptions of sainthood might look like on the interpersonal level, see Robert Orsi, “ ‘Mildred, Is it Fun to Be a Cripple?’: The Culture of Suffering in Mid-­Twentieth C ­ entury American Catholicism,” in Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds ­People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2005), 40–41. 31. Brenna Moore, Kindred Spirits: Friendship and ­Resistance at the Edges of Modern Catholicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022), 1. 32. While Audra Jennings makes the case that ele­ments of the disability rights movement w ­ ere nurtured in the postwar era, it is generally agreed upon that the movement—as an articulation of identity and demand for self-­ determination—­was born in the 1970s. See Jennings, “Introduction,” Out of the

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Horrors of War. See also Joseph Shapiro, No Pity: ­People with Disabilities Forging a New Civil Rights Movement (New York: Crown, 1994). 33. See, for example, “Holy Innocents: You Can Assist T ­ hese Handicapped ­Children,” Monitor (San Francisco), August 19, 1960, 17. 34. Qtd. in Rosemarie Garland Thomson, “Shape Structures Story: Fresh and Feisty Stories about Disability,” Dialogue 15, no. 1 (2007): 113–123; 115. For more on discussions of sex and disability, see Margaret Shildrick, “Sex,” in Keywords for Disability Studies (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 164–166; Robert McRuer, “Sexuality,” in Keywords for Disability Studies, 167–170; Sex and Disability, ed. Robert McRuer and Anna Mollow (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). See Also, Anna Fin­ger, “Forbidden Fruit,” New Internationalist, July 5, 1992, https://newint​.­org/features/1992/07/05/fruit, accessed May 10, 2022. Fin­ger notes the correspondence of “silence” surrounding the sexuality of both c­ hildren and persons with disabilities and “widespread sexual abuse” of members of t­ hese groups. I know of no instances of sexual abuse at St. Coletta’s, but anecdotal data on rates of abuse within institutions points up the high likelihood of vio­lence and exploitation in t­ hese settings. 35. McRuer also notes how this perilous binary is often applied to other marginalized subject positions: queers, w ­ omen, and ­people of color. For an excellent discussion of such intersections, see Michelle Jarman, “Dismembering the Lynch Mob: Intersecting Narratives of Disability, Race, and Sexual Menace,” in Sex and Disability, ed. Robert McRuer and Anna Mollow (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 89–107. 36. Sr. Mary Theodore, Challenge of the Retarded Child, 137. 37. This is not to say that sainthood could not also feel quite good. Certainly, many persons with cognitive disabilities found vari­ous kinds of ­pleasure in playing the holy part and the rewards it conferred, earthly or other­w ise. I take for granted that persons with cognitive disabilities ­were integral to the “making up” of what it meant to be “the most probable saints of God” in places like St. Coletta’s. That said, my focus ­here, t­ oward the conclusion of the essay, is on the sharper edges of ­these scripts. I have borrowed the phrase “making up” from Ian Hacking, “Making Up P ­ eople,” in Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought, ed. Thomas C. Heller, Morton Sosna, and David E. Wellbery (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986), 161–71. 38. This language comes from Rebecca Spurrier’s recent summary and elaboration of the work of the pioneering theologian of disability Nancy Eiesland in Spurrier, The Disabled Church (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), 13. 39. Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth, 77. It is impor­tant to note that Orsi comes to ­these insights via sources that overlap significantly with my own:

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twentieth-­century Catholics’ constructions of physical disability and sickness as well as notions of childhood. 40. Of course, ­these dynamics are not exclusive to disability. As Françoise Meltzer and Jaś Elsner write of saints and their “excesses,” “To sanctify excess is a form of domestication; in the institutionalization of a saint t­ here frequently lies the attempt to neutralize, to appropriate or other­wise bring ­under rule.” Françoise Meltzer and Jaś Elsner, “Introduction: Holy by Special Application,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 3 (Spring 2009): 375–379. 41. Stephen Knadler, “Dis-­abled Citizenship: Narrating the Extraordinary Body in Racial Uplift,” The Arizona Quarterly 69, no. 3 (August 2013): 99–128, 119. 42. David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, “Jesus Thrown Every­thing Off Balance: Disability and Redemption in Biblical Lit­er­a­ture,” in This Abled Body: Rethinking Disabilities in Biblical Studies, ed. Hector Avalos, Sarah Melcher, and Jeremy Schipper (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Lit­er­a­ture, 2007), 179. 43. Sr. Mary Theodore, Challenge of the Retarded Child, 41. 4 4. Breitenbeck, For Parents of Retarded ­Children, 27; B. R. Schmalzried, Sunshine: A Slow Miracle (Boston: D ­ aughters of St. Paul Press, 1965), 96. 45. Breitenbeck, For Parents of Retarded ­Children, 8. Sometimes t­ hese critiques of “cold logic” w ­ ere pointed at specific practices like sterilization. More often they named what ­were understood to be pervasive attitudes that stood in the way of this population’s “­acceptance” and filial belonging. For more on the ­earlier history of U.S. Catholic engagements with eugenics, see Sharon Leon, An Image of God: The Catholic Strug­gle with Eugenics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). For an example of a postwar response to practices of sterilization, see Rosemary French, “Letter: H ­ uman Sterilization Proposal,” Amer­i­ca, May 2, 1953. 46. On nineteenth-­century asylums (and picnics at them), see Benjamin Reiss, Insane Asylums and Nineteenth-­Century American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 47. Sr. Mary Theodore continued to work in disability ­services throughout the twentieth c­ entury. In her ­later work, she criticized assignments of perennial “childhood,” emphasized the importance of recognizing persons with cognitive disabilities’ sexuality, and navigated the transition away from institutional s­ ervices to a more “community-­based” model. See Sr. Mary Theodore Hegeman, Developmental Disability: A ­Family Challenge (New York: Paulist Press, 1984). 48. Mary Dunn, Where the Paralytics Walk and the Blind See: Stories of Sickness and Disability at the Juncture of Worlds (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2022), 4. On the use of the neologism “bodyminds” to try to deconstruct Cartesian assumptions in the study of disability, see Sami Schalk,

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Bodyminds Re­imagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black ­Women’s Speculative Fiction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018). 49. In this re­spect, they anticipated subsequent communal experiments surrounding cognitive impairment, most famously the network now known as L’Arche International, which was founded at the tail end of the period considered h ­ ere. On L’Arche, see Jason Reimer Greig, Reconsidering Intellectual Disability: L’Arche, Medical Ethics, and Christian Friendship (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2015).

Acknowl­edgments

Throughout the introduction of this book, we use “conversation” as a ­metaphor for understanding Marian shrines in the U.S. But it also reflects our own p­ rocess of working on this book together and learning from the authors ­here. At an American Acad­emy of Religion session years ago, Kate gave a paper focused on the study of rural Catholicism and used the shrine in this collection as a case study. As is the nature of ­these conferences, Karen and Kate chatted ­after that session about other Marian shrines—we swapped stories about visits to shrines and shared questions about their absurdities, curiosities, and their capacity to draw p­ eople in. Eventually, this proj­ect grew out of that conversation. Scholarship is always a series of conversations, and this collection reflects several. We are both indebted to the many ­things we learned from the authors in this collection—­impor­tant ideas about Marian devotion, shrines’ materiality, and questions about change at shrines. As authors and editors, we ­were continually struck by how visiting and researching Marian shrines can be an emotional experience and how easy it is to become attached to t­ hese places. We want to thank each of our contributors, who worked on this proj­ect throughout the pandemic and lockdown and often had to significantly adjust their work based on travel restrictions and ­family obligations. We are indebted to each of them for making this book pos­si­ble, and we learned so much from them while putting this proj­ect together. A sense of intimacy between author and shrine courses under­ neath t­ hese texts. We are grateful for the academic work and the h ­ uman care put into t­ hese chapters. We also want to express our gratitude to the anonymous manuscript reviewers whose careful comments and suggestions have made this proj­ect much better than it would have been without their expertise and attention. Karen is also grateful to the members of the Theology and Religious Studies department at St. Norbert College, who are the best, most supportive

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colleagues imaginable. Par­tic­u­lar thanks go to Bridget Burke Ravizza for her longtime friendship, the Zoom rosaries we did together during lockdown, and for coming with me on the twenty-­five-­mile “Walk to Mary” pilgrimage to the Shrine of Our Lady of Good Help to mark the end of the first pandemic year. And, as always, I am grateful to my dear husband, Martyn Smith, who is my greatest conversation partner and my best travel companion to religious sites of e­ very kind. Kate is grateful to the members of the BLS writing group: Amanda Baugh, Justine Howe, and Michal Raucher. They are, of course, brilliant lady scholars whose careful reads of my chapter and the introduction strengthened the collection. But they are also moms and ­women in academia—­and sharing this chapter of our c­ areers and lives is a true joy in my own. This proj­ect began, for me, in gradu­ate school at Northwestern University, with Bob Orsi advising my early thinking about what exactly Fr. Fox was d­ oing on the prairies of South Dakota. As would be true for many ensuing years, his careful attention to detail and ways of understanding religious worlds have helped me think in myriad ways. At Springfield College, Susan Joel has been, hands down, the best department chair ever; her dogged support of faculty has made this work pos­si­ble. Fi­ nally, much of this book was written and edited during the COVID-19 pandemic, which has meant that my now-­thirteen-­year-­old d­ aughter, Aza, has listened to me talk about Marian shrines for months as we have hiked and biked all over Western Mas­sa­chu­setts. She is an unexpectedly fantastic conversation partner and astute observer of the world. Thanks, Bug.

Bibliography

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Contributors

adrienne nock ambrose is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio, Texas. Her research interests include traditions of Marian devotion, American Catholicism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and visual culture and religion. Her book, Hollywood: Lights, Camera, and Catholics in the Age of American Spectacle is u ­ nder contract with Fortress Press. lloyd barba is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion and core faculty in Latinx and Latin American Studies at Amherst College. His book, Sowing the Sacred: Mexican Pentecostal Farmworkers in California (Oxford University Press, 2022), uses photo­graphs and oral histories of early and mid-­century Mexican Pentecostal farmworkers to render counter-­narratives of their religious and cultural productions. james  s. bielo is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Northwestern University. He is the author of five books, most recently, Materializing the Bible: Scripture, Sensation, Place (Bloomsbury, 2021). k atherine dugan is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Springfield College in Western Mas­sa­chu­setts. She is the author of Millennial Missionaries: How a Group of Young Catholics Is Trying to Make Catholicism Cool (Oxford University Press, 2019). david j. endres , a priest of the Archdiocese of Cincinnati, is Academic Dean and Professor of Church History and Historical Theology at Mount St. Mary’s Seminary and School of Theology in Cincinnati. In 2018, he was the preacher for the National Shrine of Our Lady of Consolation’s largest annual event, the novena culminating in the solemnity of the Assumption of Mary. k ayl a harris is the Director of the Marian Library and Associate Professor at the University of Dayton. Her research interests include teaching with primary sources and digital humanities proj­ects. patrick j. hayes is the archivist for the Redemptorists and is based in Philadelphia. He has taught at several Catholic colleges in the United States and, in

308 con tr ibu tor s

2010, was a visiting professor at the University of Makeni in Sierra Leone. The author or editor of five books, as well as numerous essays and reviews, Hayes serves on the board of man­ag­ers of the American Catholic Historical Society. joseph  p. l aycock is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Texas State University. He is a co-­editor for the journal Nova Religio. His recent books include Speak of the D ­ evil: How the Satanic T ­ emple Is Changing the Way We Talk About Religion (2020) and The Penguin Book of Exorcisms (2020). k aren  e. park is Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at St. Norbert College, in De Pere, Wisconsin. She has written widely on Marian devotion and shrines and American religion and ­popular culture. She holds a PhD from the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. terry rey was formerly Professeur de sociologie des religions at l’Université d’État d’Haïti and is currently Professor of Religion at T ­ emple University. He is the author of over one hundred scholarly articles, chapters, and reviews, and author or editor of eight books, including Bourdieu on Religion: Imposing Faith and Legitimacy (Routledge 2007) and The Priest and the Prophetess: Abbé Ouvière, Romaine Rivière, and the Revolutionary Atlantic World (Oxford University Press, 2017). stephen selk a received his PhD in cultural anthropology from the University at Albany, SUNY. He is currently an Associate Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies at Indiana University. His work focuses on religion and race in the Amer­i­cas, particularly Brazil and the United States. cl aire vaughn is a recent gradu­ate of Miami University. She majored in Anthropology with a focus in linguistic anthropology and religious studies. She is a coauthor of “Materializing the Bible: A Digital Scholarship Proj­ect from the Anthropology of Religion,” with Dr. James S. Bielo, and is currently pursuing gradu­ate programs to further foster her commitment to religious and anthropological studies. andrew walker-­c ornet ta is Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Georgia State University in Atlanta. His research explores cultural locations of disability as sites of religious practice. He is currently working on a book manuscript about U.S. Catholics and cognitive impairment in the ­middle of the twentieth ­century. Prior to joining the faculty at Georgia State, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis, and he is currently part of an emerging scholar cohort at Indiana University’s Center on Religion and the ­Human.

Index

abortion. See Our Lady of Guadalupe; pro-life Alexandria, South Dakota, 118, 120, 122, 125–26, 128–29, 133–34 anti-communism, 132–34 apparitions, 11–13, 16–17. See also Our Lady of Fatima; Our Lady of Guadalupe; Our Lady of Lourdes; Our Lady of the Roses; Our Lady of the Underpass architectural details, 5, 14, 183–85, 190–96, 199, 215 Augustinians, 69–71 Ave Maria Grotto. See Cullman, Alabama Bakersfield, California, 45, 58 Barnabites, 187–88, 191, 197 Bayside, Queens. See Our Lady of the Roses Bellevue, Ohio, 13, 100, 245–53, 255, 257–58 Bernadette of Lourdes, 265–66, 268 Black Madonna. See Our Lady of Czestochowa Blue Army of Fatima, 83, 117, 187–88 Brooklyn, New York, 92, 98, 102, 109 Carey, Ohio, 2, 139–46, 149–50, 153–55 Caribbean, 159, 164, 172, 226 Central Valley, California, 2, 4, 8, 11, 44, 50 Chaldean Catholics, 140, 148; Iraq, 140, 143–45 Chicago, Illinois, 1, 5, 8, 37, 59, 85, 167, 222, 226–27, 229–31, 235–36, 261 Chicano Movement, 49 Chicanx studies, 47

childhood, 70, 142, 218–19 Cleveland, Ohio, 142, 150, 153, 249 communication technology, 82, 208, 214–15, 218; YouTube, 211–12, 216 Confession, Sacrament of, 141–42, 148–49, 152–53 Creole, 6, 161–62, 171, 173, 175–76 Cullman, Alabama, 5, 13, 244–45 Doylestown, Pennsylvania, 159–61, 164–72, 176–77 Elizondo, Virgilio, 39, 53 ex-votos, 6, 12, 141–42, 246, 257 Èzili Dantò, 170–72, 176. See also Vodou Facebook, 1, 216 farmworkers, 154 Fatima. See Our Lady of Fatima Felician Sisters, 167 Franciscan order, 28, 143–44, 149 Guadalupe. See Our Lady of Guadalupe Haiti, 163, 165–66, 170–71, 173, 226 Hispanic, 38, 44, 236–38, 253 Hungarian, 148, 152, 250 icon: of Our Lady of Czestochowa, 160–61, 164, 171–72, 174; of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, 67, 69–72, 75, 77–79, 82–86 iconography, 50, 228, 239 Illinois, 37, 166–67, 174 Immaculate Conception: Basilica of the National Shrine, 1, 205–7, 210, 216–18; feast of, 26, 89; Marian Fathers of the Immaculate

310 inde x

Immaculate Conception (continued) Conception, 214; teaching on, 21, 81, 117. See also Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception immigration, 3, 6, 14; Chaldean, 6, 140–45, 148; German, 72, 147–48, 150–52, 211, 248–51; Haitian, 1, 3, 6, 159–64, 169–77; Irish, 6, 69–70, 72, 83, 146, 148, 150–51; Italian, 14, 141, 148–49, 153, 184, 187, 190, 196, 199, 211, 230, 250, 253; Lebanese, 184, 197; Mexican, 30–34, 36, 47, 58, 59, 149, 154–55, 222, 227, 231; Polish, 159, 166–67, 176, 222; Vietnamese, 197–99, 231 Indiana, 27, 166, 269 indigenous, 10, 27–28, 48, 52–53, 172, 253 Instagram, 15, 216, 246, 248, 253, 257 intercession of Mary, 1, 29, 51, 75, 81, 129, 139, 142, 183, 187–89 Internet, 206, 208–9, 211, 215 Jesuit, 70, 77, 188 Kassab, St. Nimatullah Al-Hardini, 184, 197 Latino/as, 6, 53, 140, 148, 154, 210, 226, 231–33, 235 Latinx, 38, 44, 46, 49–50, 55, 60, 224, 246, 250–51 Lewiston, New York, 11, 14 liberation theologies, 39, 53, 79, 84 Los Angeles, California, 34, 45, 50, 57 Lourdes. See Our Lady of Lourdes Lueken, Veronica, 92–94, 96, 98–104, 106–7, 109–10 Maronite Catholics, 142, 148 memorials, 36, 78, 197, 215, 222–23, 238 Mexican migrant workers, 4, 11, 34, 38, 47, 49, 94, 154 Mexico, 8, 26–29, 31–32, 37–38, 48–50, 58, 126, 128, 134, 227, 246, 257 Michigan, 141, 145, 150, 154, 167 miraculous, 7, 48, 55, 69–70, 72, 75, 77, 79, 98, 146, 164, 170, 174, 247, 253 missionaries, 25–26, 67, 231, 249

murals, 2, 11–12, 44–48, 50–51, 53, 55–60, 183, 231, 240; Chicano muralism, 49, 54–55; Chicano muralists, 49, 54 mural-shrine, 8, 11, 44, 46–48, 51–53, 55–60 Niagara Falls, 3, 5, 183, 185–90, 192–93, 197–98 novenas, 38, 67, 77–84, 141–45, 153–55, 187, 265 nuclear waste, 186, 199 nuclear weapons, 185–86 Oblates of Mary Immaculate, 21–23, 25–27, 31, 36 Orsi, Robert, 92, 94, 97, 110, 247, 274, 288 Our Lady of Consolation, 2, 6, 12, 14, 69, 139–40, 142, 144, 146, 148–50, 152–53, 155, 196. See also Carey, Ohio Our Lady of Czestochowa, 8, 12, 149, 250–51; Black Madonna, 164–66, 168, 171, 177, 249; Jasna Góra Monastery in Czestochowa, Poland, 165, 167, 170, 174; National Shrine in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, 1, 3, 6, 159, 161–65, 167–71, 174, 176–77, 190, 196, 248. See also immigration: Haitian; Queen of Poland Our Lady of Fatima, 1, 4, 8, 10, 117, 124, 183, 186, 189; apparition of, 8, 17, 118, 186, 190, 195; Basilica of Our Lady of the Rosary of Fatima in Fatima, Portugal, 8, 117–18, 120, 125, 129, 190; Blue Army of Fatima, 135, 187; Fatima Family Shrine (see Alexandria, South Dakota); National Shrine Basilica of Our Lady of Fatima (see Lewiston, New York; Niagara Falls) Our Lady of Guadalupe: Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City, 48; Diego, Juan, 27, 37, 48, 55; Mexican and Mexican-American devotion, 28, 36–37, 44, 53, 59, 155; La Morenita, 28, 53, 155; Pope Leo XIII, 62; pro-life politics, 2, 118–19, 125–26, 128–29, 134–35; Tepeyac apparition, 9, 27–28, 37–39, 48,

inde x  311 57–60, 228; tilma, 28, 34, 37, 48, 55. See also murals; Our Lady of the Underpass; San Antonio, Texas Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, 161 Our Lady of Knock, 13, 246, 256–57 Our Lady of Lourdes, 2–3, 6, 8–9, 13–14, 24–27, 92, 265, 276; apparition of, 8, 26, 209, 264–65; devotion to, 261–62, 264–65, 267, 269, 271, 276; Grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes in South Bend, Indiana, 27; Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes in Lourdes, France, 21, 37, 149, 208–9, 250. See also Bernadette of Lourdes; Carey, Ohio; St. Coletta School for Exceptional Children; San Antonio, Texas Our Lady of Perpetual Help, 67, 69, 71–72, 75–76, 78–85; Boston, 2, 4, 72, 75–77, 80, 82, 85, 118, 174, 261. See also icon Our Lady of the Roses: apparition of, 92, 96–98, 100–2, 106–7, 109–10; Queens, New York, 11, 92–94, 105–6, 109. See also Lueken, Veronica Our Lady of the Underpass, 3, 6, 222, 224–32, 234–35, 237–40; apparitionshrine, 8 patriotism, 11, 81, 93, 104, 153, 187, 189, 192 Philippines, 69, 83–84, 197 pilgrimage, 1, 3, 15; shrines as site of, 58–59, 85, 93, 140, 143–46, 150–53, 159–60, 169–70, 222, 244–47, 251; virtual, 207–10 popes: Francis, 1; John Paul II, 14, 126, 128, 135, 138, 162–63, 174, 197, 199, 222, 234; Paul VI, 109; Pius IX, 67, 71; Pius XII, 123, 187–89 power, 2, 270–71; and agency, 4, 10, 50, 170, 207, 210, 236; of Mary, 7, 25, 48, 50, 69, 72, 85–86, 93, 160, 165, 183, 190, 199, 247, 258; negotiations, 5, 10–12, 15–16, 208, 210. See also Our Lady of Czestochowa; Our Lady of Guadalupe; Our Lady of Perpetual Help

pro-life, 2, 118–19, 125–26, 128–29, 134–35 protectress, 29, 126, 187, 190 purity, 132, 267, 273 Queen of Poland, 159, 162–65, 168, 177, 190 Redemptorists, 67, 70–71, 74–85 relics, 5, 213, 236 ritual, 7, 78–79, 100, 108, 170, 173, 239, 255, 257–58, 265, 269 Rome, 23, 67, 69–72, 81 Rosary, 1, 9, 37, 75, 77–78, 96, 99, 104, 106, 109–10, 119, 123–24, 129–30, 133–34, 141, 144, 147–48, 159, 161, 169, 174, 187–90, 194–95, 199, 214, 234, 246, 251, 267 sacred space, 3, 23, 49, 57, 60, 85, 100, 108, 188, 192, 235, 239–40 St. Coletta School for Exceptional Children, 3, 261, 267, 271 sainthood: and disability, 266, 270–75 saints: ethnic identity, 153, 159, 169–70, 184, 190–91, 196–97; statues of, 163, 190, 197, 253–54 San Antonio, Texas, 21, 23–24, 28–33, 36, 38–39 Seagram Tower, 193 Second Vatican Council (Vatican II), 96, 148, 231 segregation, 25, 30–34, 161, 272 selfies, 246, 248, 257 sexual identity, 265, 273–74 Sheen, Fulton, 123, 187, 218 shrine replicas, 21, 26–27, 34, 36–37, 72, 129, 133, 146, 150, 245–47, 249–50, 256–58, 261, 264, 266 shrinescapes, 3, 13–15 Sorrowful Mother Shrine. See Bellevue, Ohio Spanish colonization of North America, 28, 38, 44 statues of Mary, 14, 25, 34, 36, 96, 99–100, 105, 118, 120, 126, 144–47, 150, 151, 183, 187, 191, 193, 195–96, 217, 247, 261, 267 Syracuse, New York, 198, 209

312 inde x

Tepeyac. See Our Lady of Guadalupe Texas, 6, 21, 23, 25–26, 28–32, 35–36, 38, 167. See also San Antonio, Texas tilma. See Our Lady of Guadalupe tours and tourism, 3, 5, 12, 143, 183–84, 192–93, 215–16, 246–47, 257 traditionalist Catholics, 5, 9, 96, 190 transnational devotionalism, 49, 85, 126, 134, 143, 231 Tweed, Thomas, 7, 51, 82, 122, 177, 181, 207, 210–11 United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), 98, 101

Vatican City, 60 Vietnamese. See immigration: Vietnamese Virgen. See Our Lady of Guadalupe visionaries: Diego, Juan, 27, 37, 48, 55; of Fatima, 117, 121, 130, 189 (see also Our Lady of Fatima); Fowler, Nancy, 109–10; of Mary, 69; of Our Lady of the Roses, 92, 96, 109–10. See also Lueken, Veronica Vodou, 170–73, 176–77 Washington, D.C., 205, 207, 211–12, 215–16 Weedpatch, California, 8, 44, 47 Wisconsin, 14, 17, 167, 229, 249, 261–64

catholic practice in the amer­i ­c as James T. Fisher and Margaret M. McGuinness (eds.), The Catholic Studies Reader Jeremy Bonner, Christopher D. Denny, and Mary Beth Fraser Connolly (eds.), Empowering the ­People of God: Catholic Action before and a­ fter Vatican II Christine Firer Hinze and J. Patrick Hornbeck II (eds.), More than a Monologue: Sexual Diversity and the Catholic Church. Volume I: Voices of Our Times J. Patrick Hornbeck II and Michael A. Norko (eds.), More than a Monologue: Sexual Diversity and the Catholic Church. Volume II: Inquiry, Thought, and Expression Jack Lee Downey, The Bread of the Strong: Lacouturisme and the Folly of the Cross, 1910–1985 Michael McGregor, Pure Act: The Uncommon Life of Robert Lax Mary Dunn, The Cruelest of All ­Mothers: Marie de l’Incarnation, Motherhood, and Christian Tradition Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker: The Miracle of Our Continuance. Photo­graphs by Vivian Cherry, Text by Dorothy Day, Edited, with an Introduction and Additional Text by Kate Hennessy Nicholas K. Rademacher, Paul Hanly Furfey: Priest, Scientist, Social Reformer Margaret M. McGuinness and James T. Fisher (eds.), Roman Catholicism in the United States: A Thematic History Gary J. Adler Jr., Tricia C. Bruce, and Brian Starks (eds.), American Parishes: Remaking Local Catholicism Stephanie N. Brehm, Amer­i­ca’s Most Famous Catholic (According to Himself): Stephen Colbert and American Religion in the Twenty-­First ­Century Matthew T. Eggemeier and Peter Joseph Fritz, Send Lazarus: Catholicism and the Crises of Liberalism John C. Seitz and Christine Firer Hinze (eds.), Working Alternatives: American and Catholic Experiments in Work and Economy

Gerald J. Beyer, Just Universities: Catholic Social Teaching Confronts Corporatized Higher Education Brandon Bayne, Missions Begin with Blood: Suffering and Salvation in the Borderlands of New Spain Susan Bigelow Reynolds, P­ eople Get Ready: Ritual, Solidarity, and Lived Ecclesiology in Catholic Roxbury Katherine Dugan and Karen E. Park (eds.), American Patroness: Marian Shrines and the Making of U.S. Catholicism