Irreverence and Ethnography: Studying Catholic Masculinities

The basement of the Shrine Church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel (OLMC) in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is a room of fragments and dust. There are planks of wood everywhere and pieces of confetti coating the floor. Mouse traps are tucked in all the corners, and every available surface is covered in wood, old nails, used paint brushes, and garbage bags. Huge gambling wheels covered in grime lean against the walls, their lights dead, like refuse from a county fair. The space opens up into side and back rooms, with nooks and crannies where old, broken saints hide. A dented brass holy water font stands in a corner, empty and out of commission. One wall is lined with large metal cabinets and shelves piled with cast away plaster angels. A statue of Saint Jude is tipped over amidst the rubble, the flame atop his head dimmed by soot. A small statuette of Our Lady of Mount Carmel stands atop the messy shelves, presiding over the disorder.

The basement of this Brooklyn church is not just a utilitarian space, but also a devotional space. Every July the parish hosts the Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel and San Paolino di Nola (Saint Paulinus), an annual celebration that is well over a century old in the community.⁶ During the feast, in honor of San Paolino, the patron saint of Nola, Italy, men lift a seventy-foot tall, four-ton tower called the giglio. The spine of the giglio is made of aluminum, but its facade is made of wood and papier-mâché. The facade is typically crowded with architectural and baroque details: arches and columns, papier-mâché saints, and flying baby angels. During the Dance of the Giglio, 120 men gather under the poles of the giglio to lift and dance it down the streets around the parish. It is a spectacle of strength, sweat, and endurance. Heaving and moving the giglio is an accomplishment of a muscular male collective. On the streets one sees a monumental devotional structure, but the basement is the backstage where men paint, repair, and design the giglio and prepare it for the annual ritual. In the basement the giglio lays in pieces on long tables, as if in the morgue, ready to be painted and refurbished. As one man described the sight of the dismembered and incomplete giglio, "it's like seeing a clown before it put its makeup on."⁷

The giglio, July 2015. Photograph by the author.

For months men work in this subterranean space making devotional objects with their own hands and mundane materials from Dollar Tree and Home Depot. The saints they produce are assemblages of paper, spray foam, polyurethane, and cheap acrylic paint. They are crafted with care and improvisation and eventually decorate the giglio. As they construct papier-mâché Saint Ritas, Saint Anthonys, and Saint Paulinuses, the men are responsible for the iconographic legibility of these saints: choosing their color schemes and incorporating iconographic elements like flowers, scapulars, and crucifixes. But these saints are not quite objects of reverence—they are not framed by candles and kneelers, they are not carefully cleaned and dressed.⁸ These saints are assemblages of arts and crafts and home improvement materials, but they are also more than the sum of their ordinary materials. They are destined to become blessed objects as part of the giglio and are reflective of saints' personalities and hagiographies. The men refer to them as persons, with gendered pronouns.⁹ But these saints are also subject to damage and deterioration, and the men take a pragmatic and irreverent approach to the fabrication and repair process.¹⁰ The saints get worn down by rain and weather; as the giglio dances and bounces, their papier-mâché backs and necks snap. To repair these damages, the men saw off their heads or disrobe them. They feel awkward about leaving those heads to sit on a shelf and for having naked saints lying in the basement awaiting reuse.

The decorum and propriety that govern the upstairs...