CHAPTER FOUR
Were the Acadians/Cajuns Really Good Catholics?
The study of Cajun Catholicism in Louisiana has not attracted much attention from scholars concerned with the general history of religion in America. Mark Noll’s A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada (1992), for example, makes a few passing references to Acadians in Canada but says nothing about Cajuns in Louisiana. Gaustad and Barlow’s New Historical Atlas of Religion in America (2001) devotes only a single sentence to Cajun Catholics. Further, even though there has been a historiographical turn towards a greater appreciation of religious diversity in America (something that we will discuss in detail in Chapter 6), books concerned with documenting and discussing that diversity typically take no notice of Cajun Catholicism. None of the essays in the books on American religion edited by Robert Orsi (e.g., 1999) and by Thomas Tweed (e.g., 1997) have anything to say about Cajun Catholicism, even though the essays in these books do discuss Irish American Catholicism, Italian American Catholicism, and Hispanic Catholicism. Even authors concerned specifically with the history of American Catholicism tend to ignore Cajun Catholicism. Jay Dolan, for example, makes no mention of this variant of Catholicism either in The American Catholic Experience (1992) or in his more recent book In Search of American Catholicism (2002). Cajun Catholicism, in short, is likely the one form of “ethnic” Catholicism that has been overlooked in the scholarly study of American religion; and, for that reason alone, it seems appropriate to include a chapter on this variant in this book. Examining Cajun Catholicism is also important because a close inspection of what has been written on the subject—usually in specialized works devoted specifically to the study of Cajun history—reveals at least one pattern similar to what we encounter in the literature on Irish American Catholicism and Italian American Catholicism: a historiographical predisposition to construct Cajun Catholics as clinging tightly to religious traditions acquired outside the United States. In this case, as in those others, there are grounds for believing that this construction is problematic.
The Acadians as Devout Catholics
French Catholics began settling in Acadia, a region associated with Nova Scotia and New Brunswick in Canada,1 during the late 1600s, when the region was under French control. Acadia was ceded to Britain by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, and in 1755 British authorities systematically expelled from the colony 6,000–7,000 Acadians, roughly half the population (Lockerby 2001, 4). Thus began the Grand Dérangement (the Great Dispersal), and over the next few years other Acadians were also sent into exile. These exiled Acadians found themselves scattered to a variety of locations, including the British colonies along the Atlantic seaboard, Britain, southern Louisiana, French possessions in the Caribbean, and France itself.2
Some time ago, Norbert Robichaud (1955), Archbishop of Moncton, posed a question to a visiting historian who specialized in the history of the exiles who ended up in France. Why was it, asked Robichaud, that these exiles had worked so hard to return to North America? After all, said Robichaud, only a century and a half separated them from their French ancestors. The historian’s response, according to the good archbishop, was simple. The Acadians were deeply attached both to their religion and to Mother Church, and yet, in a France that was on the threshold of revolution, this was a troubled period for both Catholicism and the church. Local churches were being closed and burnt, priests were being imprisoned or exiled, and the practice of Catholicism was often interdicted by the state. The Acadians returned to North America, this historian continued, so they could more freely practice the Catholicism to which they were so deeply devoted. Robichaud not only accepted this interpretation but went on to assert that this deep Acadian attachment to Catholicism was something that dated from the earliest days of Acadian settlement in North America.
It is easy to criticize the version of history that Robichaud was promoting here. Certainly, there are grounds for believing that attacks on local churches in France during the mid-eighteenth century were less a matter of the state attacking “religion” than a matter of local resentment against the church as the institution that controlled much of the land in France. Then, too, there are other ways to explain the return of the Acadian exiles living in France. Naomi Griffiths (1992, 122–123), for example, suggests that these exiles were dissatisfied with life in France because they had lived for so long in a land marked by relatively greater material abundance and because they were unused to the restrictions and obligations imposed by the French bureaucracy. Even so, the archbishop’s claim that the Acadians generally (not just those that had been exiled to France) had a deep and continuing attachment to Catholicism is a claim with a long history.
The earliest and (seemingly) most authoritative statements depicting the Acadians as devout Catholics appear in the correspondence that Acadian leaders themselves sent to various authorities during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These early self-characterizations, however, need to be approached with caution. As Carl Brasseaux (1989, xiv–xv) points out, when they were writing to French authorities after 1755, Acadian leaders routinely stressed that their expulsion had been occasioned mainly by their loyalty to the French crown; but when writing to Spanish authorities (who governed in Louisiana from 17663 to 1803), they suggested that it had been occasioned by their deep attachment to the Catholic tradition. In other words, it would appear that Acadian leaders stressed whatever seemed most likely to elicit support from the particular authority to whom they were writing. Since historians now recognize that the first claim (that the Acadians were deeply loyal to the French crown) was likely untrue (Griffiths 1973), there are certainly grounds for skepticism concerning the second claim (that they were good Catholics). Modern skepticism notwithstanding, this early Acadian depiction of themselves as devout Catholics would come to be accepted at face value, though this acceptance was less the result of what Acadians wrote about themselves than of what was written about them by an English-speaking New England poet.
Although Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had been born in Maine, and so not far from the Acadian homeland, he did not show any interest in the Acadian expulsion until the mid-1840s. Then, during a dinner conversation, his friend, the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, told him about “a legend of Acadie” in which a girl had sought the lover from whom she had been separated during the expulsion (Johnston 2004a, 77). It was shortly after having heard this story from Hawthorne that Longfellow wrote his famous Evangeline (1856). In that poem, the Acadians of Grand Pré (in pre-1755 Acadia) were honest and hard-working rural folk who freely shared their material goods and delighted in singing ballads and telling tales. They were also devout Catholics who regularly attended church, prayed the Angelus daily, yearly celebrated the festival of the village’s patron saint, and obeyed the gentle but firm admonitions of their local priest, Father Felician. Indeed, the Acadian attachment to Catholicism and to their local priest is made central to the story that Longfellow tells.
Knowing of this devotion, says Longfellow, the British chose to march into Grand Pré on a festival day, when the local men were packed into the church and the women were attending outside in the churchyard. The British commander entered the church with his men, promptly strode to the altar, and from the altar announced that the men standing in front of him would be expelled from the colony. Longfellow tells us that several of the assembled men became visibly upset and tried to leave but were prevented from doing so by the soldiers. Tensions in the church were rising to a boiling point, but then, “in the midst of the strife and tumult of angry contention, Lo!, the door of the chancel opened and Father Felician entered, with serious mien.” The good father talked of his forty years laboring in their midst, and asked if they had still to learn what he had taught them, namely, to love and forgive and most certainly not to profane the house of the Prince of Peace. With that, Father Felician asked his flock to join him in a prayer of forgiveness, which they did. After this, says Longfellow (p. 42),
came the evening service. The taper gleamed from the altar. Fervent and deep was the voice of the priest, and the people responded, not with their lips alone, but with their hearts; and the Ave Maria sang they, and fell on their knees, and their souls, with devotion translated, rose on the ardour of prayer, like Elijah ascending to heaven.
The men remained prisoners in the church for four days, and on the fifth were marched off to the shore to be put on boats, all the while comforting themselves, the poem tells us (p. 47), by singing “a chant of the Catholic Missions—Sacred Heart of the Saviour!”
The immediate and immense popularity of the original 1847 edition of Evangeline quickly led publishers in Boston and London to put out illustrated editions in the 1850s (Johnston 2004b), and those illustrations, like the poem itself, conveyed to readers the suggestion that the Acadians had been good Catholics. Evangeline herself was depicted as a demure lass with downcast eyes wearing a cross and holding a prayer book in one hand and a rosary in the other; kindly Father Felician is shown instructing young children in Bible study or receiving deference from adults who have come to call (see Figure 5).
Longfellow did not invent the idea that pre-1755 Acadia had been a peaceful and idyllic society. The image of it as a type of paradise lost had appeared in several works published in France and England during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (Johnston 2004a). Still, although these earlier accounts certainly acknowledge that the Acadians were Catholic, they do not suggest, as did Longfellow, that the Acadians were devout Catholics. For example, in the account of Acadian life written by Abbé Raynal (1812, 212–218), who did much to popularize the motif of paradise lost (see Johnston 2004a), we are told (p. 216) that the priests living among the Acadians drew up their public acts, wrote down their wills, and conducted religious services, but beyond this he nowhere suggests that Acadians were especially devout. By contrast, a few pages earlier (p. 213), when discussing the Abenaki Indians, who also lived in Acadia, Raynal says that the missionaries working among the Abenaki had not simply inculcated in them the tenets of Catholicism but also made them “enthusiasts” in regard to their new religion. Pierre Maillard, a missionary who worked among the Míkmaq in Acadia in the first half of the eighteenth century, was even more explicit, assessing the state of Acadian Catholicism relative to the Catholicism of the aboriginal population. Not only were the Míkmaq better Catholics, Maillard said, but the bulk of the Acadians led “a life that is completely discordant with the Evangelical maxims” (cited in Faragher 2005, 191)
Fig. 5. Kindly Father Felician instructing young Acadian children in Bible study in an illustration by John Gilbert from an edition of Longfellow’s Evangeline published in 1856. Although illustrations like this suggested that Acadians had regular contact with priests, and by extension the Catholic Church, from an early age, the fact is that priests were scarce in Acadian communities.
In the end, however, these earlier accounts of Acadia never captured the public imagination in the way that Longfellow’s did. The first edition of Evangeline was published in Boston in 1847, and Johnston (2004a, 77) estimates that it would eventually go through 270 editions and 130 translations. More than any other previous work, Longfellow’s poem shaped nineteenth-century perceptions of the Acadians. Given this, it is hardly surprising that Longfellow’s strong emphasis on the Acadians as devout Catholics quickly found its way into scholarly histories. Edme Rameau de Saint-Père (1889, 89), for example, called the Acadians “a decent people—very mindful of one for the other, very religious and very devoted to their families, living happily in the midst of their children without a lot of worries. One can characterize these people in two words: they were happy and they were honest.” Similar depictions can be found in general histories of Acadia straight through to the 1960s. In his Acadia (1968, 13), for example, Andrew Clark—in a line that sounds as if it could have been written by Longfellow himself—declares that the Acadians were “devout in their attachment to the ancient church.” Generally, as regards Acadian Catholicism, scholarly histories differed from Longfellow’s account in only one respect: historians, unlike Longfellow, knew that priests were scarce in Acadia. This, however, was (and is) seen as reinforcing the claim that the Acadians were devout, in that the Acadians were good Catholics despite the scarcity of priests (see Dorman 1983, 37; Sigur 1983, 127–129).
Acadian exiles started to settle in what is now southwestern Louisiana during the early 1760s, when the entire Louisiana Territory was still under French control. This Acadian influx continued through the period of Spanish rule in Louisiana (which effectively began in 1766) and reached its peak in 1785 when the Spanish and French governments collaborated in arranging the transportation of more than 1,500 Acadian exiles from France to Louisiana. We now have several accounts of the Cajun4 communities and traditions that developed in Louisiana, and these accounts routinely suggest that Cajuns retained that deep attachment to Catholicism that had been so much a feature of life in Acadia (see Baker 1983, 102; Bezou and Guidry 2003; Conrad 1983, 12; Dorman 1983, 37).
Anyone who searches for concrete evidence of this longstanding depiction of the Acadians and their Cajun descendants as devout Catholics quickly encounters disappointment. I see no details on what might be called the “the lived experience of Catholicism” in any of the standard reference works on Acadian history (including Clark 1968; Dorman 1983; Griffiths 1973). In her more recent work on the Acadians, Naomi Griffiths (2005) does occasionally discuss what she calls “the strength of Catholic belief” (p. 272) among the Acadians, but only to make the point that their Catholicism was more a basis for social solidarity than a matter of religious devotion (see pp. 311–312). Nor is there much (if any) evidence that the Acadians were good Catholics once they moved to Louisiana; ethnographic accounts of Cajun life are generally silent on what the lived experience of Catholicism was like in Cajun communities. Certainly, there is nothing, for instance, in Lauren Post’s widely cited Cajun Sketches (1990), which deals with Acadian life on the prairies of southwestern Louisiana in the late 1800s and early 1900s, to suggest that Acadians were especially religious.
Studies of “Acadian Catholicism” do exist, but these studies also devote little if any attention to the lived experience of religion in Acadian and/or Cajun communities. Mainly this is because most of these studies have been written from the perspective of the institutional church and so have been concerned mainly with the things of greatest importance to church leaders. John Howard Young’s (1988, 5–6) review of the “classic” literature on Acadian Catholicism prior to 1755, for example, suggests that it is concerned overwhelmingly with the activities of missionary orders like the Jesuits and the Sulpicians in Acadia. Even now, the vast majority of articles dealing with religion in a journal like La Société historique acadienne: Les Cahiers are still articles concerned with things like the careers of particular priests, bishops, or nuns or the early history of particular missionary or teaching orders in Acadia.5 Charles Nolan’s (1993) review of “Louisiana Catholic historiography” makes it clear that exactly this same emphasis on the activities of particular religious orders and particular bishops has also been a feature of the scholarship on Cajun Catholicism.
In part, the strong emphasis on the institutional church in studies of Acadian Catholicism derives from the fact that many of the scholars who have written these studies have strong personal ties to the institutional church. Even now, a relatively large proportion of the articles on a religious subject published in La Société historique acadienne: Les Cahiers are written by scholars who are also priests. On the subject of Louisiana, scholars like Alexander Sigur and Jules Daigle, both of whom wrote extensively on Cajun Catholicism, were priests. But even the authors who are not priests often have strong ties to the church. Roger Baudier, for instance, was the associate editor of the New Orleans archdiocesan newspaper when he was writing his monumental and authoritative The Catholic Church in Louisiana (1939). Baudier, I might add, also makes it clear in the very first paragraph of that book (p. 10) that he began writing it at the suggestion of John W. Shaw, Archbishop of New Orleans, and that one of his (Baudier’s) goals was quite explicitly “to bring before the public these pioneer workers of the Church of Louisiana, many of whom have been too long buried in oblivion and the epic of their heroism too long unsung.” Baudier, I grant, wrote several decades ago, but the linkage between the scholarly study of Catholicism in Louisiana and the institutional church persisted into recent years. Cross, Crozier and Crucible (1993), a collection of more than three dozen essays on the institutional church in Louisiana, edited by Glen Conrad, director of the Center for Louisiana Studies at Lafayette, was copublished by that center and the Archdiocese of New Orleans, and it carries an imprimatur and a nihil obstat. This means that the manuscript was submitted to a church censor for examination and that the censor, and subsequently the local bishop, found nothing objectionable in the book. At the very least, the foreknowledge that a work is going to be submitted to church authorities for vetting makes it likely that interpretations that might otherwise arise in the course of scholarly investigations will be precluded.
Apart from the activities of religious orders and the actions of particular priests, bishops, or nuns, the only topic considered at length in existing studies of Acadian Catholicism is the matter of “priestly influence.” Concern with this topic has a long history. It was common for British colonial administrators after 1713 to suggest that the Acadians were overly influenced by French priests whose loyalty was to the French crown, and British apologists for the expulsions that occurred in the late 1750s routinely cited such “priestly influence” as among the things that justified those expulsions. Of course, this is simply a variant on an even older tendency among English Protestants to see Catholic priests as promoting disloyalty to the English crown by encouraging obedience to a foreign ruler. In the usual case, the fear was that priests promoted obedience to the pope in Rome (and, as we shall see in Chapter 6, a similar fear would come to shape the scholarly study of American Catholics in the mid-nineteenth century), and the implicit assumption always made here was that Catholics did what their priests told them to do. This is precisely why, as Lawrence McCaffrey (1997, 92) reminds us, the victory of William of Orange in 1688 (which would have been fresh in the minds of British administrators in Acadia) was so routinely seen by British Protestants as eliminating “an alien threat to British constitutionalism.” Given this view of Catholics, as mindlessly obedient to their priests, it would have made sense to British administrators in Acadia that if local priests were committed to the French crown then disloyalty to England would be correspondingly high among their parishioners.
This political concern with “priestly influence” became a staple element in scholarly assessments of the Acadians (Griffiths 2005, 272–273). Scholars writing on Acadian history have always felt obliged to assess the British claim, that is, to determine if the Acadians really were under priestly control. Even Carl Bras-seaux (1987), whose work is now central to all accounts of the Acadian experience, devotes most of his chapter on religion (pp. 150–166) to the matter of priestly influence. In regard to the issue itself, scholars now think that the influence exerted by priests on the Acadians was either variable, being highly dependent on the personality and ideology of the priest involved (Griffiths 1973, 46–47), or generally minimal (Brasseaux 1987; Griffiths 2005, 273). The main point, however, is that this longstanding scholarly concern with priestly influence is little more than an intellectual inheritance from English Protestant fears dating back to the Reformation.
John Howard Young: The Two Reasons for Believing that the Acadians Were Good Catholics
John Howard Young (1988) is one of the few investigators who constitutes an exception to the historiographical patterns noted above. Young’s primary goal was to defend the popular stereotype that the Acadians were deeply and devoutly Catholic. In doing this, he sets up this claim against a counter-claim, that the Acadian attachment to Catholicism was primarily a matter of identity politics, that is, that they saw themselves as Catholic mainly because this was a way of distinguishing themselves from other groups with whom they competed for scarce resources. Young’s argument, in a nutshell, is that, while this second hypothesis might explain Acadian attachment to Catholicism in pre-1755 Acadia (where their Catholicism was a way of distinguishing themselves from British Protestants), it cannot explain why the Acadians remained good Catholics in Louisiana, where they regularly interacted with other Catholics (notably Spanish and French Creole Catholics).
Young never once doubts that the Acadians were good Catholics. What is interesting are the two (and only two) pieces of evidence that he brings forward to support this claim. First, he says, one of the recurring themes in the correspondence that Acadian leaders directed to local authorities (French and English officials in Acadia, Spanish officials in Louisiana) was a request to send them priests. Second, the Acadians, in both Acadia and Louisiana, practiced lay baptism of their children, despite the disapproval of this practice by the official church. For Young, both patterns are evidence that the Acadians had a deep desire to participate in the sacramental life of the church on a regular basis and thus fully justify the view that they were devout Catholics. Unfortunately, although the patterns identified by Young are solidly attested to in the historical record, they can be explained in more than one way. Take, for example, the recurrent Acadian demand for priests.
In his analysis of the relationship between priests and people in Acadian communities, Carl Brasseaux (1987, 155) amasses much archival evidence indicating that Acadians regarded their priests as administrators whose job was to record information (relating to property ownership, for example) and occasionally to administer sacraments (mainly marriage). In the end, then, Brasseux’s conclusions seem little different from the already-cited account of what priests did among the Acadians written by the Abbé Raynal (1812, 216) more than two centuries earlier. For Brasseaux, the fact that the Acadians saw priests as functionaries, expected only to perform certain tasks on an occasional basis, explains why the Acadians so often requested priests (the pattern that is so important for Young) and why they were willing to contribute toward the initial establishment of a church; but, it also explains, for Brasseaux, why the Acadians routinely resisted (as they did) contributing to the ongoing maintenance of their local church and why they responded with hostility (as they did) whenever local priests tried to exercise anything more than a loose control over their daily life.
Brasseaux’s account, I might add, seems generally consistent with another pattern: despite their requests for priests, the Acadians themselves—in both Acadia and Louisiana—were always a poor source of priestly vocations. Young (1988, 187–189) himself recognized that this might be seen as undermining the suggestion that the Acadians were attached to their faith, and he explains (or, really, explains away) the lack of Acadian vocations by claiming that the great distance of Acadian communities from the nearest available seminary would have made a seminary education prohibitively expensive for most Acadian families. The fact is, however, that plans to establish a seminary in New Orleans in the late 1700s came to naught mainly because church authorities concluded that the French-speaking families, both Creole and Acadian, simply had no inclination to send their sons to such an institution (Curley 1940, 169–171). This Acadian disinclination to enter the priesthood persisted well into the twentieth century (Ancelet 1985, 26; Sigur 1983, 131).
The main point is that, if Brasseaux is correct in saying that the Acadians regarded their priests as functionaries expected to perform only occasional tasks, then there is nothing in the recurrent Acadian demand for priests which is necessarily indicative of a strongly internalized desire to participate in the sacramental life of the church on a regular and recurrent basis. In the end, then, while the requests for priests proves that they were Catholic, it cannot be taken as clear evidence that they were particularly good or devout Catholics.
What about Young’s second piece of evidence, that Acadians routinely practiced the lay baptism of infants? In interpreting this practice, Young takes it as self-evident that Acadian parents baptized their children themselves only because priests were not available to do it, implicitly assuming that parents would have their children rebaptized “officially” when a priest did visit the community. Yet, in fact, although the evidence is fragmentary, it would appear from Brasseaux’s (1987, 160) analysis of baptismal records in selected Cajun communities that many, and perhaps most, Cajun children were not eventually rebaptized by a priest, even though a priest might have subsequently visited the community. What such data hints at, I suggest, is the possibility that the lay baptism of infants may have had a meaning for Cajun parents that was unconnected to the Catholic sacrament of Baptism. What might that meaning have been? While any answer here must be highly speculative, there is one possibility that comes to mind.
Cajun infants were not the only individuals sprinkled with holy water; it would appear that holy water was also sprinkled on the corpses at Cajun funerals (Daniels 1990, 111). Establishing a symbolic association between infants and corpses by means of a common folkloric practice, which often involves the use of water in some way, is in fact a well-attested pattern in a variety of European cultures. The usual explanation for this (see for example Lombardi Satriani and Meligrana 1982, 107–116) is that infants and corpses both lie at a boundary between “this world” and “the other world” and so both need help in making a successful transition between the two.
In the end, then, there are other ways of interpreting the two bits of evidence that Young brings forward in support of his contention that the Acadians were devout Catholics. Does this mean that the Acadians were not devout Catholics? Not at all. It simply means that the case is not proven. How then to proceed in investigating Acadian Catholicism? One option, I suggest, is to recognize that the standards associated with the official church (regular attendance at Sunday Mass, fulfillment of the Easter duty, knowledge of church doctrine, etc.) are not the only meaningful criteria that might be used to assess Catholic religiosity. In particular, Acadian religiosity might be assessed by looking to see if those things that are routinely taken as indicators of popular Catholic religiosity in other sociocultural contexts were or were not present in the Acadian case.
The Stuff of Popular Catholicism in Other Areas
Although the practices of popular Catholicism have varied over time and across different cultural contexts, there are certain practices that appear regularly in the historical record. In areas like Spain, the Spanish Americas, France, and Italy, for example, rituals centered on a miraculous image (usually of the Virgin) have typically been an important element in the lived experience of Catholicism. Something else central to popular Catholicism is pilgrimage, that is, traveling to a site that is thought to be sacred for some reason. Sometimes the site is thought to possess a particularly powerful miraculous image or a particularly important set of saintly relics; in other cases, a supernatural personage, usually the Virgin Mary, is believed to have made an earthly appearance there. Pilgrims have often traveled some distance from their local community, making the pilgrimage both difficult and time-consuming. The shrine dedicated to St. James at Santiago de Compostella, Spain, for example, has drawn pilgrims from all over Europe since the Middle Ages, and the shrine dedicated to Our Lady of Guadalupe has drawn pilgrims from all over Mexico since the late colonial period.
More usually, however, Catholic pilgrimage has involved traveling to sacred sites relatively close to home. In early modern Spain, the countryside around towns and villages was dotted with chapels and outdoor shrines; and community-sponsored pilgrimages (romerías) to these sacred sites, often involving an overnight stay, were central to the lived experience of Catholicism there (Christian 1981, 70–91; Kamen 1993, 194–198). Local pilgrimages to nearby churches containing especially important images was also common in Bavaria in the early modern period (Lepovitz 1991, 116–121), while in pre-Famine Ireland Catholics routinely made pilgrimages to nearby holy wells, natural springs with sacred significance (Carroll 1999, 19–44). Yet, despite the centrality of such phenomena as image cults, apparitions, and pilgrimage to the experience of Catholicism in other parts of the Catholic world, including France and Spain, I know of no reports suggesting that any of these things played a significant role in the experience of Acadian Catholicism, either in Acadia or in Louisiana.
The fact that “the stuff of popular Catholicism” was absent in Acadia during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is all the more striking given that during this same period miraculous images and pilgrimage (though not, it would appear, apparitions) were part of the lived experience of Catholicism in colonial New France (Cliché 1988). As early as the late 1600s, for instance, the Church of St. Anne de Beaupré in Quebec had become an important pilgrimage site associated with miracles; by the 1730s the number of pilgrims flocking to this shrine was enough to keep four priests busy hearing confessions, celebrating mass, and leading the faithful in prayer (Choquette 2003, 128). St. Anne de Beaupré was certainly the single most popular shrine in New France, but other important pilgrimage sites also existed in and around Montreal and Quebec City (Choquette 2003). In other words, the lived experience of popular Catholicism in New France shared much in common with the lived experience of popular Catholicism elsewhere. This is precisely what cannot be said of the Catholic experience in Acadia.
The Effects of Priestly Scarcity: A Folkloric Experiment
One thing we know for certain about Acadian Catholicism is that priests were scarce. What sort of Catholicism might reasonably have developed in Cajun communities given this relative absence of priests? Some time ago, Ron Bodin (1990) came to wonder about precisely this question. In his own words: “For some 130 years rural Louisiana was often without the services of Catholic priests [and] one wonders what became of the church, and of people’s religious beliefs and practices when there was either no priest or only a few circuit rider priests to visit rural areas every few years (p. 2). To answer this question, Bodin devised what might be called a “folkloric experiment”: he sought out and interviewed Cajun informants over the age of 65 who were from one of two communities in Vermilion Parish that had not been served by a resident priest until the late 1920s. Using the information provided by these informants, Bodin was able to reconstruct a variant of popular Catholicism that, it would appear, had existed in both communities and that had been built around the use of sacramental objects and lay versions of certain official rituals.
Bodin’s data show clearly that the rosary was the single most important Catholic sacramental in these Cajun communities and that “praying the rosary” was central to the lived experience of Catholicism there. He also found that most homes had family altars, which might include a crucifix, pictures of a saint, candles, holy water, and the like, and that these altars served as the focus for family prayer. Finally, he found that the ritual activities associated with the rosary and other sacramentals had for the most part been administered by Cajun women.
In regard to ritual activities, Bodin’s informants also reported that Cajun communities developed lay equivalents for a number of official sacraments, and that here too women had been central. Lay baptism, for example, was common; and most often, an infant would be baptized by a mother, grandmother, or aunt. Women also officiated at weekly “white masses” held in private homes. Sometimes the woman only led the assembled group in prayer; at other times, she would distribute bread, simulating Holy Communion. Finally, these Cajun communities had practiced a form of lay marriage in which jumping the broom was the central ritual act, and here too, Bodin found, the ritual had been administered by women.
There are many elements in the variant of Catholicism reconstructed by Bodin which hint at continuing traditions that date from the earliest years of Acadian culture. As already mentioned, there is solid evidence that lay baptism had long been widespread in Acadian communities. There are also scattered references in the documentary record suggesting that Acadians attended weekly white masses administered by a layperson both in pre-1755 Acadia and post-1760 Louisiana (Brasseaux 1987, 153, 156), as well as in the Acadian communities that sprang up in Cape Breton during the late 1700s (Chiasson 1962, 107–108). Then too, at least in the eighteenth century, it was common for Acadian leaders in Louisiana to note (in the reports they sent to government officials) that a visiting priest had married several different couples during his short stay (Brasseaux 1989, 103, 105); it is easy to imagine that such “clustered” marriages involved the church giving official approval to unions that had previously been established by a folk ceremony.
Still, for Bodin himself, the single most important finding to emerge from his study is that women were central to the maintenance of Cajun Catholicism. This is reflected in the title of his article, which suggests that the Cajun woman functioned as “unofficial deacon of the sacraments [and] priest of the sacramentals.” It turns out, however, that the centrality of women to Cajun Catholicism is a more complex issue than first appears. Reading Bodin’s report carefully, it becomes clear that women were central not simply because they provided leadership but because religiosity itself was gendered. Cajun males apparently did not have much interest in religion. Bodin found that Cajun men did not attend mass even when it was available (Ancelet 1985, 28; Brasseaux 1989, 163), nor were they much interested in the sacramentals and lay sacraments that were so central to the experience of Catholicism for Cajun women. On the contrary, Bodin notes (p. 9), Cajun males identified more with local Haitian-influenced traiteur (healer) traditions than with any aspect of the Catholic tradition.
The fact that Cajun religiosity, at least during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was gendered is—once again—a familiar pattern. As noted in Chapter 2, there is now a relatively large literature documenting the feminization of religion in the United States in both the Catholic and Protestant traditions. In the Cajun case, however, none of the three hypotheses considered in Chapter 2 as possible explanations for this feminization would seem to apply.
First, some scholars have asserted that feminization was caused by the erosion of lay male authority and subsequent “male flight,” that is, as local congregations increasingly came under the control of a professional ministry, lay males—who previously had exerted much authority and influence in these congregations— increasingly abandoned religious activities, leaving them to women by default. But since there is no evidence (Longfellow aside) that Cajun males were ever active participants in the religious life of Cajun communities, and certainly no evidence that lay males had ever exercised authority in the religious sphere, the “male flight” hypothesis seems of little value in this case.
Another way of accounting for the feminization of religion is the “female sociability” hypothesis offered by Robert Orsi and others. In this argument, women gravitated toward the institutional church because it provided them with a “safe haven” outside the confines of their homes where they would discuss issues of common concern with other women. Whatever the value of this argument in the contexts of concern to Orsi and others, it seems not to apply in the Cajun case, because the institutional church had such a minimal presence in Cajun communities and female religiosity was centered in the home.
Finally, feminization in some cases can be explained by an affinity between the values being promoted by the institutional church and the values that women have adopted, or wanted to adopt, for nonreligious reasons, an example being the affinity between the values promoted by the American church in the mid-nineteenth century and the middle-class values that Irish American women needed to acquire to work in middle-class households. But affinity arguments of this sort would seem to be of little use in the Cajun case because, again, the institutional church had only a minimal presence in Cajun communities and there is no evidence that the sort of “official” Catholicism being promoted by the church elsewhere would have been widely known in these communities.
The Cajun case, then, forces us to search for an explanation for the feminization of religion that goes beyond the three formulations that have so far been considered. With that in mind I would like to turn to a theoretical framework which, although it has wide visibility among feminist scholars, is not one that has been much used by scholars concerned with the study of religion.
“Doing Gender”
Over the past two decades, many feminist theorists have suggested that gender is less about a fixed set of psychological attributes that are invariant from one situation to the next, and more about particular things that individuals do in interaction with others in order to establish a gendered identity.6 Jill Dubisch (1995, 204) sums up the new approach succinctly:
Gender [is best viewed] not as a rigid set of rules about male and female nature or about how men and women should behave, but as a framework for discourse and negotiation, worked out in the dynamic context of social life. … To perform [gender], then, is to present the socially constructed self before others, to in a sense argue for that self [and] thus to convince and draw recognition from others of one’s place and one’s satisfactory performance of that role.
One advantage of the “doing gender” approach, and the one that has so far been stressed the most by those investigators using this approach, is that it allows us to understand how and why the meaning of gender can vary from situation to situation, depending upon the particular audience observing the activity (see Thorne 1999). But another advantage of the doing gender approach, and the one that seems most relevant to the academic study of religion, is that it provides us with another way of explaining religious behavior. Simply put: in certain situations, engaging in overtly religious behavior can be a way of validating a gendered identity.
One of the very best studies demonstrating how religious behavior can be a way of doing gender is Dubisch’s (1995) own account of pilgrimage activity at a Greek Orthodox shrine on the Aegean island of Tinos. Dubisch calls attention to the fact that many female pilgrims to this shrine engage in behaviors (like moving up the shrine’s steep stairs on their knees) that to outsiders seem extreme and emotionally excessive. Dubisch rejects (p. 223) those interpretations that explain such behaviors by invoking an essentialist view of women (e.g., women are more emotional than men) or by suggesting that Greek women are more pious than Greek men. Both explanations, she argues, fail to explain why the emotionalism observed at the shrine evaporates quickly when the same women engage in other activities or why, when underlying attitudes are probed, women often seem less attached to the Orthodox tradition than their male counterparts.
Given that religiosity at Tinos is gendered (pilgrimage activity being mainly a female activity), Dubisch argues, the pilgrimage site is a public space in which female pilgrims can act out the “poetics of Greek womanhood” (Dubisch’s term) for an audience consisting mainly of other women, that is, women can engage in a number of performative acts that validate their gendered identity in the eyes of other women. Thus, since “being a mother” and “an idiom of suffering” are both central to the poetics of womenhood in Greek culture, women who appear to suffer at the pilgrimage site (by moving up the stairs of the shrine on their knees, for example), especially if this suffering is part of a vow made on behalf of their family, are engaging in behaviors that demonstrate that they are “good at being a woman.” This does not mean, Dubisch (1995, 218–219) notes, that their religiosity is insincere; on the contrary, every aspect of the religious rituals in which these women engage is pervaded by a deeply felt emotion. However, their religiosity derives principally from a desire “to create expressions of their own identity,” and they use materials from Orthodox religion (p. 219). It is their desire to validate their gendered identity in the eyes of others, in other words, rather than a strongly interiorized or innate piety, that fuels their religiosity.
Although Tinos is a long way from southern Louisiana in a number of ways, Dubisch’s underlying theoretical argument provides us with a new way of interpreting those few bits and pieces of information we do have about Cajun Catholicism during the nineteenth century. For example: when a Cajun wife and mother maintained a home altar, very visibly prayed the rosary in front of others in her family, instructed children in the sacraments, orchestrated a “jumping the broom” marriage in front of the local community, and so forth, it seems entirely possible that she may have been doing exactly what a female pilgrim at Tinos is doing when she moves up the stairs of the shrine on her knees: engaging in behaviors, which happen to be religious behaviors, that establish her as “good at being a woman” in a culture where the maintenance of family and marital solidarity, caring for and instructing children, and other wifely and maternal duties were the things that a woman did.
Do I mean to suggest here that Cajun women should not be regarded as “good Catholics”? Well, it depends. If by “good Catholic” is meant someone characterized by a deeply interiorized piety that motivates them to seek union with God, to engage in Catholic rituals, and to participate in the sacramental life of the church in order to garner spiritual benefits, then the answer would probably be no. On the other hand, given that Cajun Catholicism was gendered (associated mainly with women), it seems entirely plausible to suggest that “being good at being a woman” and “being a good Catholic” might very well have been conflated, that to be “good at being a woman” was what “being a good Catholic” meant in Cajun communities.
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