Religion booknotes
Cunningham, Lawrence S.
RELIGION BOOKNOTES Lawrence S. Cunningham Donald Cozzens's deservedly well-received The Changing Face of the Priesthood (2000) appeared just as the sexual-abuse crisis flooded the airwaves and...
...The martyrs died in allegiance to Christ, who died at the hands of executioners...
...She fit a type easily recognized in the annals of hagiography, and it was on that basis that claims for sainthood were made...
...The book is especially interesting in reminding us that great sanctity is not confined to Europe...
...How did she understand herself in relation to God (let us not be reductionist and claim it was all a psychological response to her social and mental situation), and how did she express that relation with her body, in her behavior, and in the way she looked at the world and others...
...Some studies investigate the diffusion of the cult of saints whose origins were not in the New World (for example, Saint Anne and Saint Anthony of Padua), while others deal with cases like that of the Mexican bishop of Puebla, Juan de Palafox, who was never canonized (except in the hearts of the faithful of the region) for reasons that were political and unedifying...
...Losa continued his hermit life for another twenty years, providing a living rebuke to those clerics who were often dismissed as "poorly educated, venal, and corrupt...
...The point is that before one seeks the exterior scaffolding of literary theory one would do better to look into the sources that shaped Gemma Galgani and others like her...
...In contrast, Bell and Mazzoni focus on one young Italian lay person, Gemma Galgani (1878-1903), who was canonized in 1940...
...Sacred Silence: Denial and the Crisis in the Church Donald Cozzens Liturgical Press, $19.95,208 pp...
...For example, he relies on highly suspect gay activists like Mark Jordan and Ellis Hanson in his discussion of homosexuals in the priesthood...
...The issue framed in this fashion makes the question of celibacy subservient to the more fundamental issue of mission and ecclesiology...
...she creates an abecedarium of words (autobiography, body, clothes, etc...
...After all, Francis of Assisi and Dominic Guzman, not Innocent III, energized the mendicant movement that swept Europe in the thirteenth century...
...Think of the near-farcical episcopal synods in Rome, where the results of the meetings are predetermined and, predictably, fall into a well of oblivion...
...He faced a formidable task...
...When the final decree was published by Rome, however, the more extravagant claims made about Gemma (her stigmata...
...We have a diary she kept in the summer of 1900, some letters, and, from the hands of observers, records of her words while in ecstasy...
...Nonetheless, even when the cult of saints was exported from the Old World to the new, figures like Antony of Padua and Anne transplanted quite well...
...Take the shortage of priests...
...At least one essay makes some links here: Allan Greer expertly examines the way a biography of the Mohawk blessed, Kateri Tekakwitha, was used in Mexico to argue for the right of Indian women to enter the cloister, by showing that indigenous people (women in particular) were capable of heroic sanctity and "constancy" (read: sexual discipline), despite stereotypical judgments to the contrary...
...Some of these reflections are risibly a la mode, but I very much sympathize with Maz-zoni's basic intention...
...His new book, an impassioned plea for openness in the church, takes that scandal into account...
...under which she offers a number of reflections, largely inspired by feminist theory-Cixous, Kristeva, Irigaray, and other French intellectual fashionistas are put in the company of Christian feminists in order to "read" Gemma Galgani...
...Despite these minor reservations, I found this book a valuable contribution to the growing literature on the saints.growing literature on the saints...
...The authors do that with some modern types but only in passing...
...Anyone who is deeply concerned with the life of the church cannot but be angry at the ecclesiastical stonewalling at the highest levels of the hierarchy...
...RELIGION BOOKNOTES Lawrence S. Cunningham Donald Cozzens's deservedly well-received The Changing Face of the Priesthood (2000) appeared just as the sexual-abuse crisis flooded the airwaves and newspapers...
...This was one of the great success stories of the modern church...
...Cozzens relies on Sandra Schneiders's exemplary work on this question, but he could have done more...
...They mine original sources and secondary literature to attempt the construction of a phenomenological and cultural study of this young woman, her significance at a certain moment in history, and how she became a canonized saint...
...The scope of Colonial Saints spans the period from 1500 to 1800, with studies of a large number of saints...
...A few are weak in matters pertaining to Catholic doctrine and practice, but the essays are generally free of academic jargon...
...She wants Gemma to be taken seriously not because she was "constructed" by a superior force (in the person of, among others, the zealous Germano), but on her own terms...
...Interior locutions...
...It may be that, with the rise of equal rights for women, this style of religious life would inevitably diminish...
...One need only think of recent canonizations (for example, the indecently speeded-up process for the founder of Opus Dei) to see that the work of saint making has its own sociological logic...
...So the question then becomes: Do we want the church to be present in a given area...
...Gemma's biographer and spiritual director, a Pas-sionist priest named Father Germano, a self-professed saint maker who bragged that he could get Garibaldi canonized, was the guide...
...For example, 90 percent of all active religious orders of women in the United States were founded after the Enlightenment...
...How did a poor, provincial woman absorb a certain kind of religious language and practice...
...If we do, how do we see that it happens...
...The plural "Americas" in the subtitle is quite correct: the collection includes essays discussing saintliness in Central and Latin America (as well as one on Haiti) and the world of New France, with one paper focused on the thirteen colonies...
...Losa later wrote a life of Lopez but, as Bilinkoff notes, nobody thought it odd that a priest should put himself under the tutelage of a mere layman...
...All of these writings are full of pious banalities, but read closely and sympathetically they provide material for the final, most interesting, part of this study...
...What the Quaker accounts had in common with the oldest acts of the martyrs (think of the Martyrdom of Polycarp) was the Christological reading they gave to sacrificial deaths...
...Colonial Saints: Discovering the Holy in the Americas Edited by Allan Greer and Jodi Bilinkoff Routledge, $24.95, 317 pp...
...None of this deterred Germano, a key player in the canonization of the Passionist lay brother, Gabriel Possenti...
...In that sense, at least, he is telling a well-worn story and perhaps racing back into print too quickly...
...Like many books to which we assign the adjective "impassioned," this work is somewhat overheated, highly rhetorical, and not a little irascible...
...Finally: Can the bishop(s) evade responsibility if the church disappears in this town or that village...
...The demographics are discouraging to all but the more obtuse...
...What, for example, was the character of her visions...
...Those sources are deeply rooted in the traditional forms of sanctity, which would have been the natural vocabulary of a Father Germano and of Gemma herself...
...She is now listed in the canon of the saints...
...One place to look would be the testimonies of women from similar backgrounds...
...Bell's account of the canonization process is an excellent study of the truth that canonizations are political...
...Or take the precipitous loss of religious sisters in this country...
...The papers that make up Colonial Saints were first delivered at a Toronto conference...
...Mazzoni's final words are done in a kind of postmodern style...
...She points out-and this can never be noted enough-that they frequently served as spiritual directors for many lay people...
...more than one critic found her somewhat unhinged, with some of her ecstasies deriving less from piety than from a vivid imagination...
...Others bring to our attention lesser-known figures...
...Cozzens also has a tendency to make his case by citing equally overheated authors...
...The way to assess this dilemma, in my estimation, is not through the prism of social science but in light of a fundamental theological truth: If the Eucharist is not available, there is no Catholic Church...
...The Voices of Gemma Galgani: The Life and Afterlife of a Modern Saint Rudolph M. Bell and Cristina Mazzoni The University of Chicago Press, $30, 320 pp...
...Dominique Deslandres's study of the great women of New France-so central to Catholicism's vigor in the seventeenth century-demonstrates the way these women (some of them great mystics like Marie of the Incarnation) imitated earlier female saints and, at the same time, advanced new modes of holiness, whether as hospital sisters, recluses, or teachers...
...After locating Gemma in her historical milieu, Bell provides a translation of all her extant works, with an introduction to each genre of writing...
...In other words, borrowing a line from Virginia Woolf, was her life a struggle to find an existential room of her own...
...Were they pictures in her imagination...
...A physician who examined her thought that her claimed stigmata was the result of self-inflicted wounds...
...He could have spent more time thinking through the theological issues implicit in the problems he analyzes...
...Here a look at the medieval visionary Julian of Norwich would have been useful...
...It would be easy to stereotype her as what is known among the Italians, often pejoratively, as una zitella-an overly pious young maid, clad in a black dress, given to exuberant piety, priest-ridden, and conspicuously virginal...
...However, contrary to Bell's assertion, that listing is not an exercise of papal infallibility...
...Because she was blocked from entering a convent, was she consciously struggling to develop a way of life reminiscent of the Beguines, or is her life solely to be understood as a drive to become a nun...
...Was Gemma's claim of the stigmata inspired in part by the rather lurid emphasis on the suffering Christ, characteristic of Passionist piety...
...And who hasn't encountered the simple terror of bishops or wannabe bishops when confronted with fundamental issues about which everyone is aware, like the priest shortage, but which nobody dares to discuss...
...a long-time confessor (and a bishop to boot) doubted that her ecstasies were genuine...
...If that is the case, shouldn't we ask what will take its place...
...Many of these studies look closely at the lives of people well known to any educated Catholic (Rose of Lima and Isaac Jogues, for example...
...To criticize Cozzens's tone is not the same thing as objecting to the substance of the case he makes...
...If church history is any guide, new expressions of religious life will come from the bottom up...
...First, Bell traces the process leading to Gemma's canonization...
...her casual conversations with her guardian angel) were bracketed, with consideration given only to her heroic virtue...
...His plan was simple: use counter-arguments, or more drastic means, like keeping scientists and medical personnel away from the dossier (judging them all to be anticlerical positivists...
...Neither Bell nor Mazzoni is so reductionistic...
...Jodi Bilinkoff, one of the editors of this volume and the author of a fine book on Avila in the time of Saint Teresa, provides us with a wonderful study of spiritual friendship in the story of Gregorio Lopez who came to Mexico City and soon developed a reputation for great holiness...
...The authors of these essays are professors of history, literature, or art history...
...Carla Pestana's discussion of Quakers hanged in seventeenth-century Massachusetts because of their perceived heterodoxy raises the issue of how the Quakers themselves could find an adequate language for their martyrs, without identifying with the vocabulary of either Catholics or the popular Protestant martyrology compiled by John Foxe...
...While reading this book I could only think of Hans Kiing's Truthfulness, which made such a stir in the midst of the Second Vatican Council...
...Gemma wrote an autobiography at the insistence of her confessor (we have numerous examples of this kind of writing-most conspicuously, Teresa of Avila's Mi Vida...
...He led the life of a recluse but caught the attention of a local priest, Francisco Losa, who gave up his comfortable curacy to join him as a kind of chaplain, servant, and friend...
...Cozzens discusses these topics relying, for the most part, on reports in the mass media, his own experience, and data gathered hither and yon...
Vol. 130 • June 2003 • No. 11
