Sister Thorn and Catholic Mysticism in Modern America

Conclusion

260 Conclusion In the history of Catholic spirituality in interwar America, Sister Thorn represents the dilemmas that faced the in-between generation. This liminal group has been closely identified with the women who brought into being the cult of Saint Jude during the 1930s; they were not immigrants themselves, but as daughters of immigrants, they experienced the unique stresses of being torn between Old and New World gender and religious norms.¹ Sister Thorn, too, is a transitional figure who lived the devotional Catholicism characteristic of immigrant life in America since the mid-1800s, which drew its strength and habits from European precedents. But some of Sister Thorn’s followers were already engaging in the liturgical reforms that would soon produce a more active understanding of a public faith that characterized the European church in the 1930s and international Catholicism during the Cold War. In his analysis of the competing strands of American Catholic spirituality between 1900 and 1950, Joseph Chinnici has identified how the liturgical movement emerged to offer an alternative to an existing devotional (in his terms, Eucharistic) model. Ian Linden describes how this same process shifted the core of Christian action by repositioning the church away from its “sterile and abrasive dualism,” namely, its perception that church and state were inherently opposed.² To take France as one example, the crusade to make the church more integral to society had varying results. It spawned movements on the political right, such as Action Française, which the church condemned in 1926. Yet it also saw the rise of progressive tendencies under the umbrella of “Catholic Action”—movements tailored toward various sectors of the population, from workers, farmers, and sailorstostudentsandmiddle-classcitizenswhobegantounderstandthechurch as having a mission to every dimension of society. Of course, the church did not always applaud these ventures. It usually opposed the militancy of workerpriests and, as it had done with psychoanalysis, rejected any tendency toward materialist thinking that might color Catholic social action. As a consequence of the emergence of an activist understanding of faith, the American who prayed in private to Sister Thorn for intercessory aid in the 1940s was finding a spiritual landscape that now fused household and civic forms. This postimmigrant generation was likely to have joined in intimate family gatherings such as the veneration of the Blessed Sacra- Conclusion 261 ment or the enthronement of the Sacred Heart, but its attentions were also sought for public rituals such as the Block Rosary, the stadium rallies of the Eucharistic Congresses, and the street processions of the Holy Name Society. As anticommunism became a catalyst of much Catholic writing and practice during the postwar decades, Catholics began to perceive that prayer could be a vehicle for turning private spirituality to public purposes, an expansive notion that implied responsibility for the social sphere beyond a welter of purely personal devotions. This was still a distance from Vatican II and Pope John XXIII’s assertion of the need for a faith “adapted to our own times,” but the public presence of prayer signaled a change in Catholic belief and behavior. The tilt in mood and focus toward the public sphere and social justice was demonstrated in the life paths of several nuns who knew Sister Thorn, women who began their lives as cloistered subjects of a male-dominated institution but who went on to become forceful leaders in the new Leadership Conference of Women Religious and spokespersons for the reform of religious life following Vatican II. Yet in the year that Margaret Reilly made her final vows, American attention was riveted by reports of the prolonged Catholic exorcism of a possessed woman in Earling, Iowa, which lasted a record twenty-three days over several months. The Earling exorcism became the best-known supernatural event of the decade and one of the last episodes of demonic possession in modern Catholic history. It reached large audiences through the pamphlet written in German by a witness that was translated into English at St. John’s Abbey in Minnesota. (Forty years later, the case was said to have been a major inspiration for William Peter Blatty’s novel The Exorcist.) The exorcist in the Earling case, Brother Theophilus Riesinger (1868–1941)—a Capuchin friar known as the “warrior knight”—claimed that he drove “billions and billions of devils” from the body of forty-year-old Emma Schmidt by addressing them in English, German, and Latin. The possessed woman had been diagnosed as “a pure hysterical case,” but doctors had failed to help...