American Patroness
Marian Shrines and the Making of US Catholicism
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A vital collection of interdisciplinary essays that illuminates the significance of Marian shrines and promises to teach scholars how to “read” them for decades to come.
American Patroness: Marian Shrines and the Making of US Catholicism is a collection of twelve essays that examine the historical and contemporary roles of Marian shrines in US Catholicism. The essays in this collection use historical, ethnographic, and comparative methods to explore how Catholics have used Marian devotion to make an imprint on the physical and religious landscape of the United States. Using the dynamic malleability of Marian shrines as a starting place for studying US Catholicism, each chapter reconsiders the American religious landscape from the perspective of a single shrine to Mary and asks: What does this shrine reveal about US Catholicism and about American religion?
Each of the contributors in American Patroness examines why and how Marian shrines persist in the twenty-first century and subsequently uses that examination to re-read contemporary US Catholicism. Because shrines are not neutral spaces—they reflect and shape the elastic yet strict boundaries of what counts as Catholic identity, and who controls prayer practices—the studies in this collection also shed light on the contested dynamics of these holy sites. American Patroness demonstrates that Marian shrines continue to be places where an American Catholic identity is continuously worked on, negotiations about power occur, and Marian relationships are fostered and nurtured in spaces that are simultaneously public and intimate.
This is the most comprehensive and up-to-date collection of Marian shrine devotionalism that I have read, and I urge everyone interested in understanding the enduring power and persistence of shrines devoted to the Virgin Mary to read this book. American Patroness is an exciting and important new collection that features top scholars of Catholicism who effectively translate the power and beauty of belief, prayer, and community in shared and communal spaces. Deeply researched and clearly written and excellent for class use.---Kristy Nabhan-Warren, author of Meatpacking America: How Migration, Work, and Faith Unite and Divide the Heartland
American Patroness is a major contribution to the study of US Catholicism and American religion. The helpful introduction and vivid case studies offer surprising insights about the complexity and vitality of devotion today, not only at traditional shrines but also tourist sites, urban underpasses, and digital spaces. Indispensable for specialists but of interest to everyone who wants to know more about the contemporary religious landscape.---Thomas A. Tweed, author of Religion: A Very Short Introduction
American Patroness is beautiful in its multiplicity. This is much more than a book on Marian shrines, it is a book that explores Catholic devotion in its radical, conservative, and irreverent registers. Here we find informal shrines made from murals and underpasses, and shrines in their most triumphalist institutional forms—each offering a different vision of what it means to be Catholic in the US. Across these shrinescapes, Catholics work out approaches to immigration, disability, reproductive politics and gentrification. Shrines are no quaint remnants of a Catholic devotional past, but a key, mutable resource for exploring the contours of Catholicism in our contemporary world.---Alyssa Maldonado-Estrada, author of Lifeblood of the Parish: Men and Catholic Devotion in Williamsburg, Brooklyn
Mary tumbles into material existence at shrines throughout the United States, where devotees celebrate her special powers to help navigate their lives. In American Patroness, we finally have an interdisciplinary collection of studies of Marian “shrinescapes,” from old revered churches to new highway underpasses, in all their endurance, adaptability, mess, and excess. Particularly wonderful is the metaphor of “conversation” used by editors Katherine Dugan and Karen E. Park—a theoretical innovation that invites us to “start anywhere” in understanding places that “pile on” many meanings, including multiple Marys. Anyone interested in US religion will be lucky to tumble into this critical new analysis of Mary’s reach and importance in America. Start anywhere, but get in on the conversation.---Julie Byrne, Msgr. Thomas J. Hartman Chair of Catholic Studies at Hofstra University
Katherine Dugan is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Springfield College in Western Massachusetts. She is the author of Millennial Missionaries: How a Group of Young Catholics Is Trying to Make Catholicism Cool (Oxford University Press, 2019).
Karen E. Park (Edited By)
Karen E. Park is Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at St. Norbert College, in De Pere, Wisconsin. She has written widely on Marian devotion and shrines and American religion and popular culture. She holds a PhD from the Divinity School of the University of Chicago.
Introduction | 1
Katherine Dugan and Karen E. Park
Part I: Mapping Marian Places
“Lourdes of the Southwest”:
The Borderlands Transformation of a Nineteenth-Century French Shrine
Adrienne Nock Ambrose | 21
“Guadalupe Represents La Cultura”:
A Mexican American Mural-Shrine in California
Lloyd Barba | 44
A Global Odyssey: Our Lady of Perpetual Help and the Promise to “Make Her Known”
Patrick J. Hayes | 67
The Battle of Bayside: Contesting Religious Topographies in an Urban Apparition Site
Joseph P. Laycock | 92
Part II: Shifting Marian Meanings
Fatima Family Shrine: Reinterpreting Mary on the South Dakota Prairie
Katherine Dugan | 117
Consolation’s Many Faces:
Ethnic Intersections at the National Shrine of Our Lady of Consolation in Carey, Ohio
David J. Endres | 139
American Czestochowa:
Polish Piety and Haitian Hybridities of Marian Meaning in Pennsylvania
Terry Rey | 159
The National Shrine Basilica of Our Lady of Fatima:
Meaning Making at a Cold War Niagara Falls Tourist Shrine
Karen E. Park | 183
Part III: Devotional Creativity at Marian Shrines
Digital Devotion: Marian Shrines Online
Kayla Harris | 205
Our Lady of the Underpass: Sacred and Social Space in the City
Stephen Selka | 222
Materiality and Attachment:
Universality and Locality at Roman Catholic Pilgrimage Sites
Claire Vaughn and James S. Bielo | 244
“These Are Our Saints”:
A Lourdes Shrine, the St. Coletta School for Exceptional Children, and the Catholic Remaking
of Cognitive Disability
Andrew Walker-Cornetta | 261
Acknowledgments | 287
Bibliography | 289
List of Contributors | 307
Index | 309
