A Saint of Our Own: How the Quest for a Holy Hero Helped Catholics Become American by Kathleen Sprows Cummings (review)

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In this astute and lively book, Kathleen Sprows Cummings explores the history of saint-seeking—the complicated, often frustrating process through which Catholics seek to have someone recognized as a figure of heroic virtue and an intercessor with God—from the 1880s through 2015. The work's gracefully interwoven stories and analysis illuminate individual personalities, religious communities, and the transformations of "U.S. Catholics' understanding of themselves both as members of the church and as citizens of the nation" (4).

Drawing on painstaking work in archives in Rome and throughout the United States, Cummings tells the stories of the people who became candidates for sainthood—Elizabeth Seton, Philippine Duchesne, Frances Cabrini, John Neumann, and many others—and of the men and women who dedicated themselves to the promotion of their causes. The argument that a community's choice of saint reflects its priorities, circumstances, and self-conception may seem straightforward (and Cummings demonstrates its veracity convincingly), but the relationships among saints, causes, and promoters turn out to be as complex as they are riveting. As Cummings explains, canonization involves people and events in Rome, in the United States, and often, because the candidates belong to Italian or French religious orders, in a third nation, as well (5). In campaigns for a figure's canonization, the facts of the case mattered, but so did the energy and skill of a saint's promoters. And although women were in many cases the holy people around whom causes formed, the story Cummings tells is often about the decision-making power of men.

Cummings divides her chronology into several overlapping phases, persuasively arguing that each of them—North American saints, nation saints, citizen saints, superpower saints, aggiornamento saints, and papal saints—sheds light on the Catholic Church, which she presents as simultaneously national and transnational, an institution and a set of communities. We learn, for example, that in the 1880s, the distinction between Canada and the United States was subsumed by a shared desire for a North American saint (there were already seventeen from Central and South America), but that by the early twentieth century, prominent Catholics insisted on the need for a saint tied more explicitly to the American nation. That this change became evident just as six Jesuits known as the North American martyrs were beatified, only to seem alien to Catholics in the United States, highlights one of Cummings's many insights: the society that begins a saint's cause is not the society that will witness the saint's canonization.

To properly tell the stories of saint-making, Cummings must depict a fair amount of bureaucratic infighting, incompetence, and delay, yet because she keeps the stakes and the personalities in view, the narrative never lags. Her accounts of the causes of John Neumann and Elizabeth Seton are particularly rich and engrossing. Redemptorists doggedly promoted the cause of John Neumann, a polyglot immigrant from Bohemia who labored in Baltimore, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia. The cause of Seton, an Episcopalian turned Catholic who lived from 1774 to 1821, was for its part taken up by an array of admirers, including her spiritual daughters of various communities, Archbishop James Gibbons of Baltimore, the Vincentian priest Salvator Burgio, and Catholic laywomen who signed petitions in support of her holiness. Both Neumann and Seton seemed suited to the "new ideal of sainthood" that emerged in the early twentieth century, which valued "saints who evoked transplantation of European Catholicism rather than the conversion of native people, who had braved Protestant scorn in urban centers rather than hostile heathens on a remote frontier, and who had, above all, embraced the nation rather than antedated it" (72). Yet neither cause ran smoothly.

It's difficult not to picture an arcade-style race of the would-be saints...