Sister Thorn and Catholic Mysticism in Modern America

4. We Are Skeptics Together about a Great Many Things: Catholics and the Scientific Study of Stigmata

143 {4} We Are Skeptics Together about a Great Many Things Catholics and the Scientific Study of Stigmata I fully believe in the prevalence of a great deal of subtle and often seemingly purposeless fraud. —Herbert Thurston, Surprising Mystics (1955), 204 There has never been and never will be a social order that does not demand of a female child some conformity to some gender ideal of femininity. —Louise J. Kaplan, Female Perversions: The Temptations of Emma Bovary (1991), 50 Mysticism vs. Positivism To understand Margaret’s diagnosis and treatment at the hands of medical experts, this chapter examines the scientific community’s impact on the American understanding of stigmatization in the early twentieth century. First, it analyzes and contrasts the involvements of the three physicians central to Margaret Reilly’s experience: Thomas Gallen, Thomas McParlan, and James J. Walsh. Margaret fell in love with Gallen, involving her in a romantic triangle that reveals the emerging challenges to rigid gender attitudes and roles in Manhattan for a Catholic woman possessing more life options than she would have in prior decades. Although Margaret loved Gallen, he married someone else, soon becoming the target of anonymous letters that were probably instigated by Margaret around the time she entered the convent. Gallen’s response is unknown, but the actions and opinions of McParlan and Walsh shed light on the Catholic reception of scientific investigation of stigmata and, indeed, on the church’s willingness to accept new scientific methods, including the premises and methods of psychoanalysis and psychology. Catholic medical opinions at that time ranged from a lingering fascination with the fin de siècle interest in hysteria to an emerging critique of psychoanalysis and psychology as threats to religion. 144 Catholics and the Scientific Study of Stigmata Because the terms of both debates in America often followed and relied upon the further-advanced discussion taking place in Europe, this chapter ’s second emphasis traces the connections between Margaret’s Catholic examiners in the United States and their engagement with Catholic commentary on the Continent’s leading medical and psychological interpreters of stigmata (primarily, “Napoleon of the Neuroses” Jean-Martin Charcot and his student, Sigmund Freud). I do not intend to “prove” medical or psychological causes for Margaret’s mystical experiences but rather to locate the reception of such models, first in their Catholic milieu and then in the larger social and political contexts of her lifetime (which included the effects of World War I), the concept of hysteria, and the emergence of psychoanalysis. Third, after examining Catholic engagement with these seminal figures who tried to explain mystical phenomena as rooted in physiology or the psyche, this chapter considers the developments in thinking about stigmatization among contemporary scholars who include stigmata in their study of religious pain. These reflections include revisions to Freudianism offered in the last three decades by post-Freudians and by feminist approaches to the psychology of women. Much has been made of the conflict between science and religion in the modern era, the battle lines of which had been drawn during the Scientific Revolution in seventeenth-century Europe. During the late 1800s, the contours of the debate between supernaturalists and naturalists were further defined. Nineteenth-century medical practitioners now looked to science to debunk mystical phenomena such as religious apparitions, miraculous healings, and stigmata.¹ Neurologists demonstrated how religious passion posed a threat to reason by parading their (mostly) female patients before their students, calling the patients delusional in their claims to have seen the Virgin Mary or the saints, spoken with Jesus, and even received his wounds. Neurologists were soon joined (and also challenged) by new experts— “alienists,” psychoanalysts, and psychiatrists—who began to study religious behaviors, usually employing the category of “hysteria” to dismiss them as inherently neurotic or as the Other to women’s erotic impulses, as seen in the fictional Madame Bovary. The experiences of several female patients of these neurologists became so familiar to fin de siècle audiences that they were known by their first names: Augustine, Genevieve, Madeleine. Sister Thorn would never achieve that degree of notoriety in America, yet in the early twentieth century, she too became part of the attempt to both revive and contain modern mysticism. The substitution of “scientific” explanations for formerly religious categories of diabolic possession or mystical revela- Catholics and the Scientific Study of Stigmata 145 tions is a central part of the intellectual history of...