Unruly Catholics from Dante to Madonna: Faith, Heresy, and Politics in Cultural Studies ed. by Marc DiPaolo (review)

Unruly Catholics is an angry book. An anthology with twelve essays, two by editor Marc DiPaolo and ten by others, it is united by a dire sense of history. The authors practice cultural studies as faithful rebellion.

Which is not to say that there is no fun within Unruly Catholics. Ronald Herzman’s chapter on “Dante: Cafeteria Catholic?” begins and ends with fantasy about what would happen if time travel enabled Notre Dame to invite Dante to give its commencement address. Thomas Aiello’s contribution, “Rosemary’s Baby and Cold War Catholicism,” makes illuminating comparisons between Satanists who lured Mia Farrow’s character into bearing the Devil’s child in the 1968 film and Catholics who lurked in the American Protestant imagination of the 1830s. John Kenneth Muir reflects on Kevin Smith, the film-maker who created Dogma. Topics like the dynamics of power in Star Wars and The Godfather, or angles on Catholicism found in the works of Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene and Oscar Wilde and Gerard Manley Hopkins, have inherent interest. Kate Hanley Averett’s presentation of “The Catholic Worker Ethic and the Spirit of Marxism” is thorough and informative.

Those who assign this book to students should still prepare them for the anger, which appears throughout, but especially in the essays by DiPaolo at the beginning and in the conclusion on “Power, Discursivity, and the Roman Catholic Hierarchy.” As DiPaolo writes in his Preface, the book grew out of his “realization that I was very, very wrong to believe that only conservative Catholics are real Catholics and that my parish priest was wrong to try to coax me into believing that” (xvii). His Introduction, subtitled “Meeting Madonna and C.S. Lewis Again, For the First Time,” provides strong analysis, but always in the context of arguments DiPaolo had with his parish priest, with his former self, and with fellow undergraduates at SUNY Geneseo. His memories of Geneseo could be inspiring to undergraduates. But in the end, DiPaolo offers a tragic view of his liberal commitment. He speculates that the “establishment church,” major corporations, and the “military-industrial complex” will win, but insists that he would “rather be vilified with all the other vanquished enemies of empire than live to serve the growth and perpetuation of the evils of empire at the expense of 99.9 percent of humanity” (li). Here, I think, anger has led the author to over-dramatize.

The final essay, by Dan Wood, applies the concept of power developed by Michel Foucault to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and others who speak for the church. This essay has moments of exciting resistance to power. When Wood reaches for conclusions, however, his anger leads to overly complex expressions. He seeks alternatives, for example, to “disarticulations of the subjectivation and formation of the lay body via ecclesial discourse and liturgical repetition” (166). As one who has rebelled against repeating litanies at Mass, I feel Wood’s pain, but I cannot imagine that many students will understand his language.

While preparing this review, I recalled an anthology I once used in teaching Roman Catholicism: Catholic Lives, Contemporary America, edited by Thomas J. Ferraro (Duke, 1997). That book included essays by “renegade Catholics” (12) like Mary Gordon (on Bing Crosby playing priests), Andrew Sullivan on being Catholic and gay, and Robert Orsi on the culture of suffering among Italian-Americans. There was anger, but the anger was directed less against the church or American empire than against academics who would not take Catholics seriously.

Some differences between these anthologies are revelatory. First, academics have made progress. Madonna appears in both books, but DiPaolo takes her seriously, while in Ferraro’s book Paul Giles misreads “Like a Prayer” as a “gleefully blasphemous song” (126). The scope of “religion” is broader in DiPaolo’s book. But second, the crisis of Catholicism has deepened...