Christian Homes: Religion, Family, and Domesticity in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries ed. by Tine Van Osselaer, Patrick Pasture (review)

Historians of women have subjected the concepts of domesticity and separate spheres to critical analysis for many years, but in this collection of essays emerging from a project at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, historians of religion “re-address the omnipresence of this feminine archetype” (p. 7). The essays in Christian Homes mostly conclude that domesticity is a useful tool to work with— and to work against. The nine authors in the collection cover considerable geographical breadth—from the United States through Great Britain, Western Europe (especially France), and Scandinavia. Some contributions focus on prescriptive sources about religion and domestic life (notably Bernhard Schneider’s essay on German Catholic masculinity), whereas others examine practices and experiences of Christian domesticity. Recognizing that the scholarship on the “angel in the house” originated in a Protestant, Anglo-American world, the editors emphasize Catholicism, although there are Protestant exceptions (Alexander Maurits writing on the domestic life of Swedish pastors and Jonathan H. Ebel on American religious interpretations of World War I).

The most successful essays suggest that Catholicism inflected domestic ideology in ways that set it apart from the better-known Protestant version. Magali Della Sudda presents this argument effectively in her essay on the Ligue patriotique des françaises, an early-twentieth-century organization of Catholic Frenchwomen opposed to the secularizing initiatives of the Third Republic. Instead of seeing the domestic sphere as separate and sheltered from the world of politics, Della Sudda argues, Catholics claimed that the state was composed of a multitude of families. Women’s participation in politics as members of households (but not as individual voters) was thus fundamental to Catholic conceptions of democracy. Rejecting “the indivisible Nation concept, inherited from the Revolution” (p. 146), French Catholics instead imagined the household as the fundamental unit of Christian democracy.

This insight into Catholic interpretations of the relationship between the domestic and the political resonates through many of the strongest essays in the collection, particularly those that examine “domestic” spaces that Barbara Welter, in her classic 1966 essay on “The Cult of True Womanhood,” might not have recognized.¹ The homes of the stigmatics who feature in Paula Kane’s chapter, for instance, were hardly refuges from moral challenges of state and market. As pilgrim-tourists trooped through bedrooms to watch stigmatic women bleed, they believed they were witnessing atonement for the world’s sins. Similarly, the ceremonies in which interwar Belgian families enthroned images of the Sacred Heart in their homes affirmed the openness of domestic spaces and their intimate connection to a political order that acknowledged Christ’s reign over human society. The chateaux of the aristocratic Arenberg family, at the center of Bertrand Goujon’s contribution, and the charitable home visits practiced by the male members of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul that Matthieu Brejon de Lavergnée describes similarly upset the expectations of gendered separate spheres. Alana Harris’s closing essay on English Catholics in the mid-twentieth century draws our attention to the growing impact of ideas about domesticity on Roman Catholicism: the church “family” conceived of the Eucharist “as a familial, ‘domestic’ and redemptory meal rather than a visual, atoning, and hieratic sacrifice” (p. 180, emphasis in original).

The essays of Christian Homes represent a necessarily partial approach to a large question, and, as one expects, they are uneven, not least in their facility with English. Nonetheless, they represent a useful reminder that the historians’ “angel of the home” was often tacitly Protestant. They suggest that Catholicism is a useful avenue of inquiry into a conceptual tool—the cult of domesticity—that, in spite of extensive critique, remains important to our notion of European modernity.