The Cult of the Saints and the Reimagination of the Space and Time of Sickness in Twentieth-Century American Catholicism

^ The Cult of the Saints and the Reimagination of the Space and Time of Sickness in TwentiethCentury American Catholicism* Robert A. Orsi Devotion to the saints has been an essential component of the Catholic experience of sickness and suffering for centuries.1 Statues of the saints stand on the bedside tables of the sick and holy images are affixed to the walls above their heads, relics are pinned to their bedclothes by desperate kin, candles are lit for them, they are bathed in holy water and carried to healing shrines. Despite the familiarity of these practices, however , or perhaps because of it, the role of the popular cult of the saints in mediating the Catholic experience of sickness has received little careful attention. What happens when a sick person turns to a beloved holy figure in a moment of fear and pain, and sometimes doubt? What is the meaning of the gestures and rituals performed in the sick room? How do the devout and their kin understand what they are doing on these occasions? What do these gestures accomplish? Since the early decades of the twentieth century, suffering American Catholics have left a record of their feelings, hopes, and understandings in letters they have sent to the shrines of various saints in the United * Research for this study has been supported by grants from the Fulbright Foundation and Fordham University. Literature and Medicine 8 (1989) 63-77 © 1989 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 64 THE CULT OF THE SAINTS States. These letters, sometimes written while the correspondent is sick, sometimes when the crisis is past, recount what the sick person or his or her kin said to the saint, what requests were made, how they were made and when, and the specific uses of various devotional objects associated with the cults (statues, oils, candles, and so on). The letters do not simply record, however: writing them is the action the devout take to recreate their worlds, which have been unmade by suffering. The devout write to the shrines mainly to request or report assistance from the saints. In constructing narrative accounts of what is happening or what they believe has happened to them, they remake the reality of their experience. They open up the closed space of sickness, connecting it to the spaces and times before, after, and outside it. They impose their own sense of the meaning of the experience on it. They identify the loci of power and authority in the experience—who was truly in charge, who was responsible for what. This reconstruction is the work of theodicy, which on one level is a cognitive task, a way of shaping understanding in a disorienting time. But this work always takes place in particular social and political contexts: sick people are already located in other discourses and practices by other authorities, so that on a second level, the work of theodicy is contending with these other powers. All world making is also world claiming. On this level, theodicy making is an oppositional practice in which distressed people draw on the language and gestures of the cult of the saints to construct a world of meaning and practice in opposition to the meanings and practices the dominant cultures—medical, technological , religious—impose on them. This does not mean, however, that theodicy, as the power of world making, creates a space of total freedom from other competing and very powerful arrangements and ideologies: in their everyday lives, and even during much of their experience of sickness, the people who turn to the saints accept the legitimacy of these ideologies. Nevertheless, the letters suggest that in the moment of disorientation occasioned by sickness or pain, the symbols and rituals available to the devout in the cult of the saints offer them one way of reimagining their experience. In this way they can reappropriate it. Almost a hundred years of these letters exist. Therefore, they serve as a running commentary on changes in the experience of sickness in the United States and an ongoing reflection on the changing history of physical and social vulnerability in American society. Doctors and nurses, hospitals and hospital administrators, operating rooms and sickbeds, all appear in...