American Catholics in the Protestant Imagination: Rethinking the Academic Study of Religion

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• Johns Hopkins University Press
• pp. ix-xviii
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INTRODUCTION

This book is about several different things at once. Most chapters are concerned with some variant of American Catholicism, and one goal certainly is to provide new insight into the several Catholic traditions that have flourished in the United States over the past two centuries. But every chapter also seeks to identify some historigraphical puzzles in the study of American religion. Thus, we will encounter staunch Irish Presbyterians in the colonial era who weren’t very staunch, Irish Catholic Famine immigrants who came to America in the wake of Ireland’s devotional revolution who weren’t very devout, Italian Catholics clinging to the saints and madonnas they knew in their natal villages who didn’t really cling very hard, Cajun Catholics whose Catholicism may be something quite different from what it appears to be, a strongly matricentered Hispanic Catholicism that turns out not to be matricentered at all, and more. As will become clear, the master puzzle in all this is why American scholars studying religion have accepted some claims about American Catholics (and sometimes about American Protestants as well) when those claims have little or no empirical support and why these same scholars have simultaneously ignored clues that point to interpretations of the American Catholic experience that allow for less passivity and more creativity than the interpretations that have prevailed. When all the bits and pieces of my response to this puzzle are put together, it will be apparent that this book is as much about the conceptual frameworks that American scholars past and present have brought to the study of American religion as it is about Catholics, and even more specifically, it is about the continuing influence of a “Protestant imagination” in studying American religion.

I like to think (though I suspect I’m romanticizing the research process) that this book represents the latest stage in an intellectual journey that began in the Church of Saints Peter and Paul (SSPP) in San Francisco’s North Beach area. The full history of this church will be discussed in Chapter 3. For now, it is sufficient to say that SSPP was designated an Italian national church in 1897 and has always been emblematic of Italian American Catholicism in the San Francisco Bay area, even though for quite some time most of its parishioners have been Chinese Americans. I have a personal connection to SSPP, because ancestors on my mother’s side were Italians who settled in North Beach over the period 1870 through 1915. Pasqualina Demartini (1819–1894), my third great-grandmother, emigrated from Italy in the 1840s, settled originally in Washington D.C., and—if family tradition is to be believed—headed west to San Francisco in the early 1870s, literally walking most of the way. My great-grandfather Raffaele Ciarlanti (1859–1913) decided to emigrate to San Francisco in late 1906, figuring that the devastation caused by the Great Earthquake would make it easy to set up a general store (which is precisely what he did). My mother, Olga Ciarlanti, was born and raised in North Beach. Although my parents (and I) joined the post–World War II exodus of Italian Americans out of North Beach into other neighborhoods in and around the city, we returned to North Beach on a regular basis because my mother’s father owned a restaurant on Grant Avenue. On those Sundays when I was brought to the restaurant and left to amuse myself, I often visited SSPP, one of the few places open on Sunday afternoons in North Beach.

At the time, what most caught my eye at SSPP were the statues, displayed in an abundance that would soon become unfashionable in the wake of Vatican II. Some of the statues in the nave of the church might be found in any Catholic church, for instance, the Infant of Prague, the Immaculate Conception, St. Joseph, and St. Anne. Other statues depicted saints who were more distinctively Italian, like Teresa Mazarello, Gemma Galgani, and Don Bosco. But what I always found most interesting were the statues and other holy images in the three small chapels at the back of the church, where you enter the building.

The images in those back chapels were clearly different. My favorite was a plaster diorama showing Our Lady of Mt. Carmel sitting above a sea of blood-red flames (Purgatory) and holding out a rosary toward a dozen or so suffering souls engulfed by those flames. This particular image, unfortunately, was removed sometime in the early 1990s, presumably because it was a little too graphic for modern Catholic sensibilities. Also in those chapels were a cramped recreation of the grotto at Lourdes showing Mary talking to Bernadette, and images of St. Rocco showing the plague sore on his leg to his dog, the Madonna della Guardia talking to the seer Benedetto Pareto, and several other madonnas tied to certain specific regions or villages in Italy. One of the things that made those back chapel images so interesting, I think, was that they were colorful and “active” in a way not true of statues found elsewhere in the church. I always had a vague interest in finding out more about the sort of Catholicism associated with those back chapel madonnas and saints but did not act on it at the time.

My own parish church was dedicated to St. Emydius, patron saint of earthquakes (a connection that was always good for a laugh in San Francisco), and both the parishioners and the pastors at St. Emydius were overwhelmingly Irish. My suspicion is that most of the sisters who taught us in the parish school were also Irish American, but it was less obvious. Unlike the horrific priests and sisters so often portrayed in plays and books written by ex-Catholics, the ones I knew were for the most part quite likable. They were strict, certainly, but they also had a sense of humor (and my memories of that humor are among the clearest I have of that period in my life), and it was obvious that they truly believed that by helping us to become better Catholics they were helping us become better human beings. What “helping us to become better Catholics” meant, most of all, was fostering devotion to Christ and to Mary and making us aware of the overwhelming importance of the sacraments (and in particular, Holy Communion).

My personal commitment to Catholic practice and the Catholic Church persisted through the experience of a Catholic high school (where the teaching brothers were a little stricter than the sisters at St. Emydius, but not by much) and only began to falter when I went to Stanford. My departure from the church, however, was not the result of being exposed to a secular education. Quite the contrary, my Catholic education provided me with a knowledge of church history that allowed me to become something of a Defender of the Faith in my first year Western Civ class, and there was no shortage of professors in the arts and humanities at Stanford who were quite sympathetic to Catholicism and the Catholic intellectual tradition. No, my departure from the church was the result of something more mundane. As I took to sleeping in on Sundays and skipping mass, I simply found that I did not miss the experience and so simply drifted away from Catholic practice. Vatican II was at the time effecting a revolution in the church, but the final result was a beige Catholicism (to borrow a term from Andrew Greeley) that seemed even less appealing than what I had known, and so eventually the split became complete. When I did return to Catholicism, it was as a scholar not as a practitioner.

As soon as tenure afforded me the opportunity to investigate what I chose, I turned to studying Catholic devotions and beliefs. Partly this was because so few social scientists seemed interested in the lived experience of the Catholicism that had been so important to me, and partly it was because this provided me an opportunity to revisit familiar things. And the methodological template that I consistently brought to bear on the material I studied was borrowed from someone whose work I had stumbled across quite accidentally and whom I regard as one of the most undervalued resources in the academic study of European Catholicism: Herbert Thurston.

Thurston (1856–1939) was an English Jesuit who wrote extensively on Catholic devotions and on Catholic mystics. He contributed more than 170 entries to the old Catholic Encyclopedia and was a regular contributor to The Tablet and The Month. Overall, a list of his publications (which can be found in Crehan 1952) runs to nearly 800 items. Generally, Thurston’s work is appealing, even now, because of the fearlessness and erudition that he brought to bear on a range of devotions that were (and are) dear to many Catholics. He turned a cold analytic eye on claims concerning the antiquity of the rosary, the Stations of the Cross, the Brown Scapular, and the like, and usually found evidence that these devotions had emerged much more recently, and under far more prosaic circumstances, than devotional accounts suggested. He also looked carefully and critically at reports of mystical phenomena—like the stigmata, living without food, apparitions of Mary, and tokens of mystic espousal—and usually found either that the evidence attesting to these phenomena evaporated upon close inspection or that the reported behavior was susceptible to more than one interpretation.

Thurston was not a social historian; he was little concerned with explaining why certain devotions and certain forms of mysticism became popular in particular cultures at particular times. Nevertheless, his work impressed on me the need for skepticism in evaluating the claims made both by religious practitioners and by historians studying religion, and also the need for careful investigation of the historical record even (indeed, especially) in the case of claims about religion that are usually taken for granted.

My very first foray into the study of popular Catholicism was a study of the Mary cult (Carroll 1986). In this case, a Thurston-like attention to the historical record made it clear that this cult had for the most part been absent from the church during the first few centuries of the Christian era and had only emerged as a popular cult with the social transformation of the church’s membership base when Christianity became the only official religion in the Roman Empire. Recognizing this linkage, in turn, provided the basis for a sociological understanding of just why this cult became popular. Similarly, in a later work (Carroll 1989), careful attention to history in the case of devotions like the rosary, the Brown Scapular, and the Stations of the Cross (and here I borrowed heavily from Thurston’s own work) also revealed patterns that pointed the way to a new understanding of why and where these devotions had first become popular.

Increasingly, however, I was drawn to the study of Italian Catholicism. Partly this reflected a growing appreciation of the role that Italian Catholicism had played in shaping the devotions which the Roman church had promoted throughout the Catholic world. But partly too, or so I like to think, it reflected a desire to learn more about the Catholicism I had encountered briefly in the back chapels of SSPP. This led to two extended investigations of popular Catholicism in Italy (Carroll 1992; 1996).

What I discovered in the Italian-language literature on Italian Catholicism was that, from the 1970s onward, Italian scholars like Gabriele De Rosa had increasingly abandoned an older perspective that depicted Italian Catholicism as reflecting the fusion of pagan and Catholic traditions and had moved toward a more “dialectical” model. This newer model suggested that popular religion in Italy was best seen as resulting from the interaction between Tridentine Catholicism and a range of local groups, each pursuing different political, religious, and economic goals.

Certainly, what I found in my own investigations was that many of the popular practices that defined the lived experience of Italian Catholicism during the early modern era had emerged only in the relatively recent past. Cults organized around miraculous images of madonnas, for example, or around liquefying blood relics and the incorrupt bodies of saints proliferated in the century or so following the Council of Trent (1545–1563), even though many historical accounts have given the impression that these were “medieval” cults that Trent had tried to suppress. The Italian Catholics who were emerging in my analysis, in other words, were not mindless peasants clinging tightly and uncritically to semipagan superstitions but rather people who were embracing new forms of religious practice that could be seen as relatively creative responses to changing social conditions.

My next projects were concerned with popular Catholicism in pre-Famine Ireland (Carroll 1999) and—in what can be regarded as the first step in my intellectual return to the United States—Hispano Catholicism, the sort found in northern New Mexico (Carroll 2002). What I found in both cases was an existing body of scholarly literature that had not as yet been shaken by the sort of revolution that De Rosa and others had induced in Italy. In the Irish case, for instance, it was still common to suggest that holy well cults—which were such an important part of popular Catholicism in the three centuries before the Famine—were an archaic inheritance incorporating pre-Christian Celtic traditions into Irish Christianity. The fact is, however, that there is little or no evidence indicating that holy well cults had been an important part of Celtic religion in Ireland, and little or no evidence suggesting that such cults had been popular during the Middle Ages. Similarly, the Penitente cofradías that had come to predominate in the Hispano villages of northern New Mexico during the nineteenth century were routinely depicted in most scholarly accounts as deriving from a tradition of Hispanic piety that dated from the earliest years of Spanish settlement there. And yet, here too, a careful examination of the historical evidence revealed little support for this interpretation.

Eventually, in both the Irish and the New Mexican cases, I suggested that, as in the Italian case, the forms of popular Catholicism involved could be seen as a creative response by local populations to changing social conditions. As will become clear, the analyses in this present book are very much the logical outgrowth of the concerns and conclusions reached in all these earlier works.

As with most academic books, the ordering of chapters in this book does not reflect the order in which the analysis proceeded. Strictly speaking, the critical chapter is Chapter 3, on Italian American Catholicism. Partly, this is because as I examined the literature on Italian American Catholicism it became apparent that the “fusion of paganism and Catholicism” model, which had gone out of fashion in Italy itself, was still very much in vogue among virtually everyone who wrote about the Catholicism that Italian immigrants had brought with them to America. But what was likely even more critical in setting in motion the investigation that led to this book was something very specific: the fact that I finally got around to looking more closely at the history of those back chapel madonnas that had fascinated me as child.

During a visit to San Francisco, I obtained permission to scrutinize the material in SSPP’s parish library; and what I discovered, quite to my surprise, was that these madonnas—which all commentators on San Francisco’s Italian community had associated with the immigrants who had arrived in the late 1800s—in fact had only become the focus of popular cults at SSPP during the 1920s and 1930s, after the great age of Italian immigration had come to a close. What had produced this relatively late explosion of localized madonnas at SSPP, and why had so many scholars been blind to the timing of this pattern? The specific answers I eventually gave to these two question are discussed in Chapter 3. The point is only that my experience with the literature on Italian American Catholicism and its problems led me, in turn, to look critically at what American scholars have said about Irish American Catholics, Cajun Catholics, and Hispanic Catholics.

The Organization of This Book

The material in Chapter 1 is presented first mainly because so much of it deals with religion in the American colonies and in the early Republic. Even so, the chapter starts with something that is very current: for more than two decades now, sociologists have known that most Americans who self-identify as Irish Americans are Protestant, not Catholic; yet the popular, and even scholarly, assumption is that most Irish Americans have always been Catholic. My goal in this first chapter is to demonstrate that the story of how Protestants became a majority among Irish Americans is more complex than first appears. And in telling that more complex story, I advance three interrelated claims. The first is that our understanding of Irish American religion and religiosity has been warped by at least two historiographical biases, one having to do with the so-called “Scotch-Irish” in America before the Famine and the other having to do with Irish Catholics in America after the Famine. The second claim is this: if we correct for these biases, then what emerges from the historical record, albeit dimly, is a story about the Irish contribution to the rise of evangelical Christianity in America that has been largely ignored by earlier commentators. Finally, I will be arguing that this new story about the Irish in America provides us with a basis for understanding the finding reported above, namely, the persistence of an Irish identity among so many American Protestants.

Chapter 2 is concerned mainly with the Irish who settled in the United States in the wake of the Famine of the 1840s. Everyone knows that most Famine immigrants were Catholic and that in the post-Famine period Irish American Catholics became the mainstay of the American Catholic Church, and indeed, came to set the standard for what being a “good Catholic” meant in the United States. Against this background, the purpose of this chapter is twofold. First, I want to demonstrate that arguments offered previously to explain why the Irish became good Catholics in America—explanations which have pointed to Ireland’s devotional revolution, nativist hostility, and the increasing tie between Catholicism and Irish nationalism—are either inconsistent with the historical evidence or (at best) explanations that might explain why the Irish maintained a Catholic identity but not why they became such devout Catholics. A second—and more positive—goal, however, is to develop a new perspective on why the Irish became good Catholics, by looking carefully at their experience in America (not Ireland) and at the ways in which Irish immigrants were different from other European immigrants. This new perspective leads directly to an argument suggesting that ultramontane Catholicism (the form of Catholicism promoted by the American church in the mid-nineteenth century) would have had a special appeal to Irish American females and that this was the critical step in ensuring that the Irish generally (both female and male) became the gold standard in the American Catholic church.

Chapter 3, as I have indicated, is about Italian American Catholicism. The chapter starts by considering the “Standard Story” that scholars—themselves mainly Italian American—have told and continue to tell about this variant of Catholicism. According to the Standard Story, the first Italian immigrants to the United States were strongly attached to the folk Catholicism they had known in Italy, which was a syncretic religion pervaded with pagan beliefs and practices and centered on the strongly localized saints and madonnas who had protected the home villages that these immigrants had left behind. By staging the festas associated with these familiar saints and madonnas, the Standard Story continues, these immigrants were able to ease their transition from Italy to America. A final part of the Standard Story suggests that the attachment of Italian immigrants to this “pagan Catholicism” impeded their conversion to the sort of Catholicism favored by an American church dominated by the Irish.

One of the goals of Chapter 3 is to demonstrate that this Standard Story is problematic for at least two reasons. First, a careful examination of the historical evidence suggests that the earliest Italian immigrants were less characterized by campanilismo (attachment to the culture of their natal villages) than the Standard Story declares, especially in matters having to do with religion. Second, contrary to what the Standard Story leads us to expect, the experience in the San Francisco Italian community was not atypical; in other communities as well, some of the best-known and most popular festas centered on strongly localized saints and madonnas emerged not in the period 1880 to 1920 (the great age of Italian immigration) but in the 1920s and 1930s. Another goal in this chapter is to present an explanation that sees this upsurge in festas organized around localized saints and madonnas as a creative response by Italian Americans to their experiences in America, not Italy.

But if the Standard Story told about Italian American Catholics is so easily seen to be problematic, causing scholars to overlook patterns that hint at cultural creativity on the part of Italian Americans, why has that story retained such a grip on the scholarly imagination in the United States? Answering that question will lead directly to another major theme in this book: the continuing influence of Protestant metanarratives in the academic study of American religion.

Chapter 4 deals with the Acadian/Cajun Catholic tradition. There are few in-depth studies of Acadian/Cajun Catholicism, and what literature does exist is usually written from the perspective of the institutional church. Even so, it is common to find commentators saying—if only in passing—that the Acadians and their Cajun descendants in Louisiana were deeply attached to the Catholic tradition. Since this Cajun attachment to Catholicism is assumed to be a continuation of an Acadian attachment to Catholicism, the apparent pattern is a familiar one: as in the case of Irish American Catholics and Italian American Catholics, Cajun Catholics are constructed as clinging tightly to traditions formed outside the United States. And yet, close inspection of the available data indicates that (1) there is really very little evidence that supports the stereotype of the Acadians and Cajuns as devout Catholics and (2) the few bits of data that might seem to support this stereotype can be explained in other ways. The final section of Chapter 4 uses a feminist formulation relating to “gender performance” to develop a new interpretation of the folk Catholicism that emerged in rural communities in Louisiana that did not have resident priests.

Chapter 5 is about the academic study of Hispanic Catholicism in the United States. The central claim being advanced in this chapter is that a careful examination of what we “know” about Hispanic Catholicism reveals that many commonly accepted claims are, in fact, not supported by the available evidence. As a first step in demonstrating this, we look at something very specific: academic discussions of the shrine at Chimayó, New Mexico, which is routinely characterized as the most popular Catholic pilgrimage site in the United States. What emerges from the analysis is that the history of this shrine and the behavior of the Hispano pilgrims who go to the shrine have been constructed in ways that (1) are not consistent with the historical record, (2) show the clear influence of Anglo stereotypes about Hispanics, and (3) function to divert scholars from empirical patterns that would seem to allow for more creativity on the part of Hispano Catholics.

The last two-thirds of Chapter 5 examines a broader subject: the social scientific literature that purports to discuss Hispanic Catholicism in America generally. Here too, however, as in the more limited Chimayó case, we encounter commonly made claims that do not stand up to scrutiny. These include the claims that Hispanic Catholicism has a “matriarchal core” and that massive numbers of Hispanic Catholics are converting to Pentecostalism. In explaining why so much of what we “know” about Hispanic Catholicism is illusory, the discussion—in the concluding section—builds upon the argument relating to the continuing influence of Protestant metanarratives.

Chapter 6 starts by considering the ways in which the academic study of religion in America during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was shaped by an implicit Protestant norm. For the most part, this is familiar ground, but whereas other commentators believe that Protestantism is no longer the hidden norm guiding the academic study of religion in the United States, my goal in the remainder of this chapter is to show that this judgment is—at best—premature. I attempt to do so by examining three bodies of scholarly literature on American religion.

I first examine the literature associated with the new “multiple narratives” approach to the study of American religion. Although studies in this tradition undeniably treat the wide diversity of religious experiences in North America, the fact that Catholics continue to emerge as a “non-American Other” is evidence of the continuing influence of Protestant metanarratives. Next, I look at three psychological measures of religion—the Intrinsic/Extrinsic Scale, the Quest Scale, the Faith Maturity Scale—that are especially popular in the psychology of religion. Here again, it is easy to detect an underlying Protestant influence by looking carefully at what these scales emphasize and what they ignore. Generally, these scales show evidence of what David Tracy and Andrew Greeley have called “the Protestant imagination.” The chapter concludes by considering recent theoretical developments in the sociology of religion, in particular, the increasing popularity of the theory of religious economies. Here too, we find clear evidence of the Protestant imagination and evidence that it has diverted the attention of sociologists from otherwise important issues in the study of American religion.

The book ends with a brief Epilogue that provides an overview of how the claims being made here might be used, if readers were so inclined, to revitalize the academic study of American religion.