Conclusion

This chapter concludes the book by providing some reflections about the meaning of forgeries in early modern Europe. It examines the effects that the growing ability to detect forgeries had on the intellectual and cultural landscape of early modern Europe, and it shows the peculiar tension that this provoked in early modern Catholic culture. The chapter also shows that the relationship between evidence, truth, authenticity, and belief was as complex for early modern people as it is for us, albeit in different terms. Reflecting on what changed between then and now, and on and what didn't, can help us understand better not only the early modern world, but also our own.

An Unexpected Ally

In the summer of 1660, a strange phenomenon followed Mount Vesuvius’s eruption: red or black crosses started appearing on people’s linen, clothes, and even limbs. Since the Neapolitan people feared that the crosses were a supernatural occurrence and a terrible omen, the political and ecclesiastical leaders promoted the publication of books providing reasonable and pious explanations of the phenomenon. Among the authors who intervened in the debate over the nature of the crosses were Carlo Calà (who was hoping to gain favor with both the Viceroy and the Pope) and Athanasius Kircher, one of the leading protagonists of early modern Catholic culture. This chapter explains how the common interest in the crosses and Kircher’s scientific curiosity for fossils and giants provided Carlo with the opportunity to approach Kircher and make him aware of the case of his ancestor Giovanni, with the hope that the illustrious Catholic intellectual might support it.

Alternatywy wobec jednowymiarowości. Fenomen polskiej kultury niezależnej w PRL

In this article devoted to the independent culture in Polish People’s Republic, I put into dichotomic doubt the concept based on the clear division between the official and independent culture. The forms of creative activity that escaped the state censorship between 1976 and 1989 radically disrespected the directives of the state’s cultural policy, yet many years before the emergence of ‘the second circulation’, there were already numerous initiatives that sparked a rich spectrum of independent activity. The authors’ strategies to remain independent changed over time, to varying extent distanced the authors from the official artistic life and differed depending on the character of the authors’ intellectual activity. In the article, I attempt to prove the relatively weak influence of the ‘official dependent culture’ that fully respected the authorities’ instructions, and I propose a classification of creative strategies that also emerged in the official culture and allowed for a relatively free development of art and science. Using multiple examples from literature, cinema, visual arts, music and science, I discuss ‘controlled culture escaping the ideological instructions’, ‘official niche culture’, ‘culture confronting the limitations’, ‘licensed Catholic culture’, ‘second circulation culture’ and ‘third circulation culture.’ The practice of searching for a way out of the official one-dimensionality allowed Polish cultural identity to continue and save its most valuable intellectual and artistic values.

Domesticating the Baroque

ít‘Domesticating’ as a process shows how a larger cultural shift—in this case, that of the Counter-Reformation—became something quotidian, everyday, accessible, and realized on the ground. It was a process by which new cultural developments became part of a broader mentalité. The focus of this chapter is to examine the concrete ways in which Catholic culture was domesticated in burgher homes over the seventeenth century. It examines how Counter-Reformation styles and themes permeated domestic objects, how Counter-Reformation images were newly integrated into domestic scenes, and how new materials contributed to the diversification of Catholic material culture at the end of the seventeenth century in a constant negotiation between ‘official’ and lay demands. From the material evidence—rose motifs, a cold-enamel painted glass beaker, and agnus dei made from a range of materials—emerges a fascinating coalescence of old and new forms of devotion that exemplifies the interplay between local and universal. It represents diversification and elaboration in the formation of a new Baroque Catholic culture in the home that was driven as much by the laity as by the Church in the second half of the seventeenth century.

Planting Catholicism in America

The third chapter explores how Catholic seminaries formed an American priesthood equipped to engage American religious pluralism. There were three models of formation. The first was the diocesan seminary founded by Sulpicians, a French order dedicated to the education of diocesan priests, founded by Fr. Jean Jacques Olier. Bishop John Caroll brought them to Baltimore to build St. Mary’s Seminary in 1791, where they combined the scholastic study of theology with a spirituality of interiorizing the mystical states of Christ’s life, as developed by Fr. Pierre Berulle. Priests became “little Christs” of self-sacrifice and formed an “ecclesiastical spirit” that prepared them as leaders of Catholic culture. The second model was that of religious orders like the Benedictines. Fr. Bonifacio Wimmer came from Bavaria to begin St. Vincent’s seminary in Pennsylvania in 1846. He established a regimen of private devotion, study, work, and the liturgy of the hours that focused on lectio divina of the Psalms. The oral/aural engagement with Scripture accompanied a liberal arts rather than scholastic approach to sacred texts. The third kind of Catholic seminary was the modern, professional seminary pioneered by “Americanists” like Bishop John Ireland. He sought a “civic minded Catholicism” that demonstrated the legitimacy and public value of the faith. Following the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore, Ireland founded a minor seminary (1885), then a major seminary which included historical-critical studies, a science lab, modern periodicals, and a professional ethos.

Wisconsin Marianism and Upper Midwestern Catholic Culture, 1858–2010

In the late nineteenth century, a cultus that included a shrine and devoted followers developed around the claims of Adèle Brise, a Belgian immigrant, asserting that “Our Lady of Good Help” had appeared to her in Robinsonville in northeastern Wisconsin in the late 1850s. In December 2010, the bishop of Green Bay, David Ricken, pronounced the apparitions to Brise valid, making these the only American apparitions to be officially recognized by the Catholic Church. By contrast, in 1955 the bishop of La Crosse, John P. Treacy, found Mary Ann Van Hoof’s claim of receiving apparitions from “the Queen of the Holy Rosary, Mediatrix of Peace” in Necedah, central Wisconsin, to be inauthentic, and he prohibited Catholics from worshipping with Van Hoof and her followers. Van Hoof’s claims briefly attracted thousands of Midwestern Catholics seeking mystical experiences of Mary in an American nationalist idiom during the Cold War. The Robinsonville and Necedah apparitions were Upper Midwestern manifestations of a transnational Marian Revival originating in continental Europe after the French Revolution as European Catholics and their diasporas responded to aspects of liberal nationalism and its advocacy of an expansive modern state that undercut clerical authority and parochial communalism.

The Strange Career of New Orleans Catholicism

This chapter closely traces the history of Our Lady of Lourdes Parish from its founding in 1905 through its closing after Hurricane Katrina in 2006 as a window into the evolution of New Orleans Catholicism from the nineteenth century through the twentieth, with a particular focus on the evolving significance of race and the role of transnational identities. An analytical microhistory of Lourdes Parish in the context of the lengthy history of New Orleans Catholicism reveals that racism and racial identity divided New Orleans Catholics through segregation, desegregation, and integration, even as a common Catholic culture posited a shared religious identity that transcended racial divisions. Throughout the experience of Lourdes Parish, and arguably in New Orleans Catholicism more broadly in the twentieth century, the particularities of white supremacism and racial identity interacted in dynamic tension with the universalistic claims of a common Catholic culture embracing all believers even as the New Orleans Church belatedly Americanized from its Gallic roots. One product of this tension was the distinct black Catholic culture that emerged at black-majority Catholic parishes in the Crescent City as black Catholics struggled against racism in the Church.

La Placita and the Evolution of Catholic Religiosity in Los Angeles

In 1814 a Franciscan priest, Fray Luis Gil y Taboada, laid the cornerstone for a church at the founding plaza of Los Angeles, at the site of the original “sub-mission” chapel established by the Spanish in 1784. Originally intended to serve mixed-race settlers of the Los Angeles pueblo, La Iglesia de Nuestra Señora de los Ángeles (the Church of Our Lady of Angels), nicknamed the Plaza Church or La Placita, became the focal point of Catholic culture in Los Angeles—and of the mediation of cultural relationships between Hispano-descended Catholics and the largely Protestant Americans who migrated into Southern California after American annexation in 1846. The evolving social and cultural matrix of worship at La Placita has charted many shifts amid the creative persistence of Mexican Catholic religiosity. La Placita’s history suggests both significant variation around the West in the development of Catholic cultures and the ways in which the American West diverges dramatically from a model of American Catholic history predicated on nineteenth-century European Catholic immigration and institution building.

The Making of a Midwestern Catholicism

This chapter uses Iowa City’s history of transnational, multiethnic Catholic cultures to trace the complex and varied origins of a regional Midwestern Catholic culture. Iowa can in a sense be seen as indicative of the Catholic experience in the Lower Midwest, where diverse ethnic Catholic enclaves scattered across a largely rural landscape that also attracted large numbers of worshippers from various Protestant denominations, especially Methodists and Congregationalists. Iowa City provides an excellent setting to trace the formation of a regional Catholic Midwestern culture rooted in plural ethnic diasporas and transnational connections. In the antebellum and early postbellum periods, the town encompassed the diverse, heterogenous character of nineteenth-century Midwestern Catholicism, including significant numbers of Irish, German, and Bohemian (Czech) Catholics. Amid the centrifugal pressures initially exerted by their diversity, this chapter argues, Iowa City’s Catholics experienced in miniature larger processes that would play out across the Midwest and among American Catholics more generally. Uneasily integrated for several decades in a single parish housing the town’s three significant ethnic Catholic communities, St. Mary’s Parish would fracture in favor of ethnic separatism, the formation of distinct ethnic parishes, in the latter decades of the nineteenth century.