Finding Martyrs at Home?: Jesuit Attempts at Redefining Martyrdom in the Seventeenth Century and Their Censure

Pope Francis’s recent recognition of the death of several priests active in Guatemala in the 1980s as martyrdom has reminded the public of a long-term hesitation within Catholicism as to the boundaries of martyrdom. Key aspects of the history of this hesitation played out in the seventeenth century. Several religious orders—most prominently the Jesuits—argued for a redefinition of martyrdom that would include the so-called “martyrdom of charity” (i.e. the death of those who had imperiled their lives to care for the sick). Among the theologians that entered the fray to advocate for such a redefinition, the most prominent is certainly Theophile Raynaud (the “new Bellarmine” of the mid seventeenth century) whose De martyrio per pestem was censured with other texts that promoted the same position, when the Inquisition decided to take a stand against the campaign for the redefinition of martyrdom. By studying Raynaud’s and other treatises, as well as their censure, this paper will try to assess the significance of this debate for Jesuit history and that of early modern Catholicism. It will try and show how it connected with the theological controversies of the time but also how it pertained to an issue within the order, namely that of the hierarchy of ministries that sometimes weighed on how the order operated, particularly in Europe.

Introduction

This chapter discusses the historiographical context in which this book is situated, and the scholarly debates to which it seeks to contribute. The chapter also presents the methodological framework of the book and examines the historical and historiographical benefits of a microhistorical analysis. The chapter shows that the story of Carlo Calà and his allegedly holy ancestor enables us to understand better important political, cultural, and theological aspects of early modern Catholicism. The chapter also puts the past in conversation with the present by suggesting that studying how the Roman Inquisition dealt with the problem of discerning the truth from the fake can provide insight into the relationship between truth, authenticity, and belief.

The Sacrilege of Soot : Liturgical Decorum and the Black Madonna of Loreto

The sanctuary of Loreto, one of Italy’s most renowned pilgrimage destinations, was built to house the relic of the Virgin Mary’s childhood home, but many pilgrims directed their prayers instead to the shrine’s cult image, a Marian statue with a dark appearance. In the late sixteenth century, a time of Catholic reform, many devotees attributed the sculpture’s color to the residue from candle smoke, despite the fact that this departed from reformers’ strict rules of liturgical decorum. The perception of the Virgin of Loreto’s blackened surface as simultaneously sacred and sacrilegious returned agency to the artwork itself. The statue’s sooty accretions suggested negligence and cried out for restoration, but they also defended the cult of images in early modern Catholicism.

The Production of Truth in the Manufacture of Saints. Procedures, Credibility and Patronage in Early Modern Processes of Canonization

This chapter traces the design of truthfulness and credibility in the two modes of decision-making: bureaucratic procedures and spiritual and liturgical settings that converged in the canonization of an early modern blessed or saint. These procedures were linked with the careful framing or, if necessary, obfuscation of local and clientelistic mechanisms that proved pivotal to the manufacture of saintly personae, but that simultaneously threatened to thwart the universal validity of the papal decision to elevate a person to the honour of the altars, shedding light on the production of truth in early modern Catholicism.

A Product’s Glamour. Credibility, or the Manufacture and Administration of Truth in Early Modern Catholicism

This chapter furnishes the reader with a vademecum to the volume. It places uncertainty in the limelight as a key element for understanding confessional cultures and belief systems, and shows how early modern Catholicism struggled to find practical strategies for marrying deepseated uncertainties with its aim of operationalizing an absolute and revealed truth. Inspired by Michel de Certeau and Bruno Latour, among others, this introduction argues that a methodological transfer between science studies, history of knowledge, and religious history offers a toolkit to reconstruct the credibility of past beliefs. It introduces the volume’s focus on the myriad of connected laboratories and work floors of early modern Catholicism, and on the untainted emergence of a universal truth from such a multifarious activity. This praxeological approach is illustrated in the subsequent survey of this volume’s sections and chapters.