The Not-So-Great Cat Massacre: An Episode in American Catholic History

The setting of this piece is a small German Catholic town in central Minnesota at the turn of the last century. Its subject: a joke masquerading as a news story that appeared in the local weekly just before Lent. Blending insights taken from both the literature on European Carnival and Roman Catholic theology, the essay interrogates the joke's multiple meanings and in the process illuminates major themes in village discourse. The joke worked, the author argues, because it addressed key tensions and contradictions in the structures of everyday life, and the most enthusiastic participants in the debates that followed—debates over the importance of tradition, the efficacy of family and the shifting roles, and competencies of men and women—were members of the village's small merchant class. In emphasizing the difficult role played by merchants and craftsmen as they sought economic security and leadership positions within the village, the piece invites a reassessment of and a renewed appreciation for the second-generation middle class as economic and cultural brokers. The author's approach here is to evoke the playfulness of Carnival and experiment with a narrative form expressive of a distinctly Catholic or "analogical" way of imagining the world. Another primary goal, then, is to provide a unique access point to the cultural world of immigrant Catholics, their descendents and perhaps other peoples caught in the betwixt-and-between of modern life.