Ordini religiosi, santita e culti: prospettive di ricerca tra Europa e America Latina. Atti del Seminario di Roma 21-22 giugno 2001 (review)

Holiness and sainthood have recently become popular themes among scholars who recognize their importance for understanding Latin American colonial society. New studies on Rose of Lima, for example, analyze the popularity of the first American saint and attempt to answer the question why she was canonized so quickly, before Toribio de Mogrovejo, the Spanish archbishop who confirmed her, or other missionaries who belonged to influential religious orders. In line with these studies, the authors of Ordini religiosi, santità e culti, a collection of essays produced by a seminar organized by the Italian Association for the Study of Saints, Cult, and Hagiography, aim to propose new avenues of research on popular images of holiness and religiosity in Catholic Europe and colonial Latin America. The essays do not pretend to be finished studies, but rather guides for future research.

One of the authors, Giuseppe Dalla Torre, underlines the historical importanceof the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, which was Rome's response to the royal patronage of the Spanish and the Portuguese. Rome attempted to wrest control over missionary activity in the New World from the tight grip exercised by the Spanish and Portuguese monarchs who often subordinated evangelization to their own political interests. Another author, Giacomo Dalla Torre, describes in detail the history and the holdings of the library and the archives of Propaganda Fide, neither of which are well known. Jaime Valenzuela Márquez suggests new lines of research into seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Latin America: processions, confraternities, shrines, convents, popular notions of sin, etc. Two authors, Claudia Rolle and Paolo Broggio, deal with the Jesuits. Roble studies the "policy of holiness" in the Jesuit missions in Paraguay and Bolivia. The missionaries fell prey to a "utopian temptation" when they held up the primitive church as their basic model for the mission Indians. Paolo Broggio shows that the Jesuits applied European baroque piety and practices to their urban missions in Latin America, but there were differences, too. In the New World the sacrament of confession played a key role in the evangelization of the Indians.

Francesca Cantù addresses the question of why Rose of Lima became so popular not only among the Creole élite, but also among the Indians. Rose, of course, became one of the first symbols of a Creole identity, but she also seemed to fulfill several messianic prophecies. Sara Cabibbo reviews the curious but not uncommon case of María d'Ágreda, the seventeenth-century Spanish contemplative who was "transported" in her mystical visions to the New World. In an age in which women could not do missionary work, some of them fulfilled that need in their visions. Oscar Beozzo studies the cult of the saints and the Virgin during the first stages of the evangelization of Brazil. Beozzo carries out a detailed study of the names of parishes from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century as a way of determining the popularity of certain saints and Marian titles. He also proposes further research into the possible connections between certain saints and African cults.

This is not an organically unified work, but rather a collection of essays dealing with the same general subjects. Indeed, the two chapters on Propaganda Fide and its library and archives, although very informative, do not really seem to belong with the other essays. In any case, the individual essays, which the editor terms as "works in progress," contain up-to-date bibliographies and in most cases provide interesting and new avenues for research.