Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918–1965 by Michael E. O'Sullivan (review)

This volume offers a fascinating look at the connections among power, gender, religion, sexuality, and politics in twentieth-century Germany from after the Great War until the early 1960s. Although its title gives the impression that it deals with a number of Catholic women, the central figure of the book is the enigmatic stigmatist and mystic Therese Neumann (1898–1962) of Konnersreuth, Bavaria. Neumann's life and her "Konnersreuth Circle" are emblematic of the complex relations between women's power in a male-dominated church and society, the tensions between a more traditional, conservative, and a "modern" Catholicism, and the ironic fact that these tensions contributed to the present-day secularization of German culture.

After an important introductory chapter, O'Sullivan sets the context for his story with the appearance of a number of mystics and stigmatists – both male and female – in post-World War I Europe, but particularly in Germany. The combination of the shame of defeat and the political and economic turmoil in the war's aftermath produced an apocalyptic atmosphere in which people looked to spiritual phenomena and miracles to help them make sense of their shattered lives. Then several chapters reflect on Therese Neumann and her champions and detractors in the late Weimar Republic. Beginning in 1926, Neumann was a religious phenomenon, with pilgrims flocking to her town of Konnersreuth to view her stigmata and her enactment of Jesus's passion and and to hear her prophecies in periods of "exalted rest." A medical examination was somewhat inconclusive as to the authenticity of her bleeding and fasting, but her family and supporters refused any further scientific study. Several prominent theologians remained highly skeptical, as did her local bishop in Regensburg, but the cardinal of Munich, while also skeptical, supported her cause nonetheless, at least to a certain degree. Subsequent chapters detail Neumann's ambiguous and sometimes compromising relationship with the National Socialist government under Adolf Hitler and her controversial popularity after World War II – in Germany, the United States, and all over the world. Throughout the entire narrative, O'Sullivan shows how Neumann benefited from patriarchal support while, at the same time, skilfully exerting female power in ways subversive both to patriarchy and church hierarchy. Ultimately, this subversion contributed to the decline of German institutional religiosity and more individual styles of religious practice.

O'Sullivan's book is fascinating reading, meticulously researched, and well written, despite being somewhat repetitious in parts. He is influenced especially by historian Robert Orsi's image of a "braided" course to secularization, with the sacred and secular existing side by side, and by Pierre Bourdieu's analysis of power struggles within religion. His use of the term "miracles" could have been sharpened a bit – do they refer to Neumann's healings as well as the phenomena of her stigmata and prophetic utterances? He sometimes confuses the veneration that was given to Therese Neumann and to the Virgin Mary as "worship" and prefers to use the awkward word "bishopric" instead of the more common term "diocese." On the whole, however, O'Sullivan's work is accurate, and his argument is convincing, illuminating, and often quite provocative.