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Introduction: A Notorious Case of Bleeding
- The University of North Carolina Press
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1 Introduction A Notorious Case of Bleeding In 1922 a priest stationed in Manhattan was becoming annoyed by the number of persons confiding to him in the confessional that they were having mystical manifestations. After encountering one particular individual, he advised the archbishop of New York to “cut the publicity or notoriety of a case which, in my mind, must be stamped ‘non probatus.’”¹ The case referred to was that of a woman under his spiritual direction who was convinced that she had received thestigmataofChrist.Thisbookexaminesherunlikelystory—thatofaCatholicwomanfromManhattanwhospentmostofheradultlifeparalyzedandillin a convent after claiming that she exhibited the bleeding wounds of the Passion and endured demonic torments because she accepted God’s demand to suffer vicariously on behalf of others. After her death in 1937, this controversial sister was promoted by a group of American laypersons, bishops, priests, monks, nuns,andsistersasacandidateto become thefirstAmericansaint.Whilemany American readers will already know of Elizabeth Ann Bayley Seton, a convert from the Episcopal Church who received the title of the first American-born saint in 1975; or of Frances Cabrini, an Italian immigrant who was canonized in 1946; or of Bishop John Neumann, an immigrant from Bohemia who was canonized in 1977, few, if any, will have heard of Margaret Reilly, Sister Mary of the Crown of Thorns. Sister Thorn’s celebrity spanned less than two decades, from 1921 to 1937. Because efforts to launch canonical investigations into her sanctity stalled around the time of Vatican II in the 1960s, and because the generation of Catholics who knew her and prayed to her are themselves departed, her life has been nearly forgotten. I was fortunate to gain access to Reilly’s uncataloged archives, held by her religious community, to meet several Good Shepherd archivists, and to contact some few remaining relatives and friends. My task in this book is twofold: first, I intend to represent the life and Catholic milieu of Margaret Reilly; and second, I will show that her experience, while unusual, reveals American Catholicism in a transitional moment between the urban immigrant church of the nineteenth century and the assimilated one of the mid-twentieth. It examines that underexplored period in a unique 2 Introduction way. We are accustomed to studying American Catholics through the lenses of ethnicity, leadership, movements, and institutions, but we are still expanding our ways of understanding the faith as experienced by ordinary Catholics. The expansion of studies of “lived religion” in America has been a phenomenon of the last twenty years, and it has often been conducted through ethnographic work. My investigation of Sister Thorn could tap ethnography only slightly, given the death of most of her generational cohort , leaving me reliant upon traditional archival work that has its limits as well. Thus far, the study of religion-as-lived has taught us much about the complex devotional practices of Catholics, which has included veneration of the saints, the activity of prayer, and the use of holy objects. Through Sister Thorn, whose stigmata are the first such case reported in the United States and which unfolded in a convent setting, we are able to perceive how one subset of Catholic experience—mystical forms of religion—also contributed to the long-term structural forces at play in the assimilation of American Catholics. In its mystical dimensions, of course, the tale of Margaret Reilly is not representative of all or even many American Catholic women of her generation . While thousands of Catholic women did enter religious life, more of them became wives and mothers. To categorize Reilly as a mystic further posits her on the margins of religious orthodoxy among her own community . The Catholic Church has often perceived mystics as threatening to church authority and dogma because of the highly individual nature of mysticism and its often prophetic criticisms of institutional religion. Yet Margaret ’s mystical claims are important because they transcended her own life to distill two important themes—pain and sacrifice—that resonated strongly with Catholics worldwide in the interwar period. After 1919, Europeans and Americans were contending with unbearable loss and grief. The sacrifice of an entire generation on the battlefields of Europe during the First World War unleashed extreme physical and emotional pain and in its wake created an obligation to honor the war dead for their heroism. In the final year of the war, an influenza pandemic led to the added deaths of millions around the world—including in the United States, where the misnamed “Spanish flu” probably originated.² On the religious front, the combination of...