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127 WOMEN IN NORTH AMERICAN CATHOLICISM Rosemary Radford Ruether CATHOLICISM IN NORTH America (Mexico, the United States, and Canada) is the largest Christian church in this region. In the year 2002 Catholics were 62.4 million in the United States, 12.5 million in Canada , and (at least nominally) about 89 percent of Mexico ’s 102 million people. Catholics in these three countries are ethnically diverse and bring a variety of distinct ways of being Catholic from different cultural backgrounds . The earliest form of Catholicism in North America was brought by the Spanish who colonized Mexico in the sixteenth century. The indigenous peoples of Mexico had enjoyed a rich culture under the preHispanic empires that developed over 2,000 years before colonization. The Spanish arrival was a violent collision with these traditional cultures. Magnificent temples and palaces were destroyed, codices of learning were burned, and vast numbers of people died from disease, war, and exploitative labor. Native people who survived were incorporated into a Catholic Christianity that often harbored remnants of their religious beliefs and practices under the surface. Religious leadership, as clergy or nuns, was monopolized by Spanish-born or Mexican-born Spaniards (Creoles). Catholicism was slow to allow indigenous people to join the priesthood or women’s religious orders. But by the late sixteenth century, some women from the Indian elites were allowed to become nuns. In addition to convents , there were also less formal types of vocation as beatas, or holy women, who adopted a religious lifestyle in their homes and served local parishes (Myers, “Religious Women in Colonial Mexico). Confraternities and sodalities were organized on a parish basis around patron saints, and women exercised leadership in these local religious organizations. From New Spain, Catholicism spread into the North American continent from Florida to California. Missionary churches dotted these areas, bringing Spanish settlers and evangelizing local indigenous peoples. The descendants of these people were incorporated into the United States in the early to mid-nineteenth century through purchase or conquest of territory claimed by Spain and then by Mexico. The second major form of Catholicism in seventeenth-century North America came from France. New France or French Canada became the base for French colonization and missionary work that spread southward along the Mississippi River from Detroit and Chicago to St. Louis and New Orleans. French settlers tended to be fur traders and often married Native women. Frenchwomen arrived as nuns and founded schools and hospitals in Quebec and Montreal. Missionary outreach also brought indigenous people into the church, and some were elevated as saints and role models of devotion. French Canadian Catholics spread down the East Coast from Maine to Boston in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, seeking work opportunities. English Catholics also arrived in the seventeenth century , seeking escape from religious repression in England . English Catholics in Maryland promoted a practice of religious tolerance in contrast to anti-Catholic discrimination in England but ironically were themselves disenfranchised at the end of the seventeenth century when the Church of England became the established church of the colony. In Maryland Catholic laywomen played the major role in keeping the faith alive by leading devotions in their households and evangelizing servants. To attract landed settlers English Catholic women were given the opportunity to become landholders in their own right. Both indigenous people and enslaved Africans would become Catholics through these colonial households, with the mistress of the household often serving as godmother for these Indian and African converts (Poirier, “Godmothers and Goddaughters : Catholic Women in Colonial New France and New England”). Catholics came to the United States in successive waves. They came primarily from England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, from Ireland and Germany in the mid-nineteenth century, and from other parts of Europe and also the Middle East in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Each of these groups brought distinct cultural forms of Catholicism. Significant numbers of Irish women migrated as single women, rather than dependent wives, and sought employment as servants and factory workers. In New England and along the Atlantic coast Irish people often encountered hostility from Protestants. Many jobs were advertised with the phrase “No Irish need apply,” and Catholics often had difficulty finding housing, loans, and adequate schools for their children. This hostility was sometimes directed at Catholic nuns, the most visible group of Catholic women. Some anti-Catholic literature portrayed convents as dens of iniquity where women were forced into sexual servitude by priests. The burning of...

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