Faithful Passages: American Catholicism in Literary Culture, 1844–1931

4. Sentimental Catechism: James Gibbons and Literary Devotionalism

117 4 Sentimental Catechism James Gibbons and Literary Devotionalism Every impartial student of history is forced to admit that woman is indebted to the Catholic Church for the elevated status she enjoys today in family and social life. James Gibbons, “Relative Condition” (1886) Novels that addressed Christian religious experiences were an extremely important aspect of literary culture in the nineteenth century , but a broader view of religious writing is necessary in order to follow the ways that Roman Catholicism adapted itself to the literary tendencies of the period. Turning from analysis of fiction to consider a widely distributed catechism, this chapter follows another avenue of nineteenth-century sentimental literature and considers its relationship to Roman Catholicism by analyzing Faith of Our Fathers: Being a Plain Exposition of the Church Founded by Our Lord Jesus Christ (1876), written by the American Catholic missionary and bishop James Gibbons (1834–1921). Gibbons’s catechism perpetuates the traditions of European Catholic sentimentality and devotionalism while borrowing from a variety of the newer versions of literary sentimentality found on the American scene. 118 E Sentimental Catechism As such, it is a prime example of religious writing produced in response to popular literary themes and yet adapted to specific Roman Catholic theological ends. A striking bodily consciousness lies at the heart of Gibbons’s book, which follows the metaphorical contours of what the religious historian Ann Taves has described as a pious “household of faith.”1 In Gibbons’s hands, this “household” is a fictive construct that allows the devoted Catholic to participate in a religious domestic scene in which Mother Church, Jesus the Spouse, and the infantilized believer perform a starkly physical version of sentimental domestic bliss. For the purposes of developing the larger debates concerning nineteenth-century sentimental culture, Catholicism in America (and its encounter with Protestant hegemony) provides several important components : vast numbers of Catholics, who will read sentimental culture through the filter of Catholic teaching; a systematic missionary effort, which rapidly came to understand and to implement the power of massprint culture in America; and finally a centuries-old post-Tridentine tradition of devotionalism, in both print and iconography, of bodily discourses.2 The objections made by Orestes Brownson to sensational and sentimental texts, especially those written by and for women, are important evidence of how the most influential American Catholic intellectual of the period failed in significant ways to account for women’s experiences of reading and religion. However, Brownson’s reservations about the nineteenth-century culture of sentiment that James Gibbons adapted for his catechism should not prevent us from seeing the relationship between American Catholic writers and their responses to popular works inflected with sentimental themes. Gibbons’s Faith of Our Fathers shows the extent to which the popular sentimentalism of American mass-print culture, combined with a legacy of sentimentality drawn from European devotional writing, provided a textual method for negotiating tensions between American Catholic evangelical efforts and Protestant hegemony. Gibbons’s creative and successful use of European and American models of religious/literary sentimentality, tempered by his personal experience as provincial missionary , points toward a better understanding of the ways and means by which the expression of Catholic dogma was conditioned by contemporary literary trends. In addition, the success of his catechism sheds brighter light on nineteenth-century Catholic literary culture and the ways that Catholic writers like Gibbons advanced their religious cause Sentimental Catechism E 119 with an acute awareness of the commercial print marketplace and the sensibilities of ordinary American readers. E The night I arrived in Wilmington, there was a torch-light procession of emancipated slaves, many of them now holding office and domineering over their former masters. If one can imagine an enormous crowd of negroes, most of whom were intoxicated, all of whom were waving torches in the blackness of the night, one can very easily imagine the first impressions of a new and very young Bishop.3 With this diary entry from 1868, a thirty-four-year-old Irish American Catholic bishop named James Gibbons marked the beginning of his missionary experience in North Carolina and started a process of evangelism in the Protestant South, with its smattering of Catholic residents. His work would culminate nearly a decade later in Baltimore with the publication of his popular and widely distributed Catholic catechism, a “manual of devotion” titled Faith of Our Fathers (1876...