Faith in Drugs: The Material and Immaterial Effects of Medication in the Early Modern French Catholic World

This article explores a set of medications, called les remèdes des pauvres, that were distributed from the late seventeenth century onward to the sick poor of rural France and to French missions abroad. Although it was eventually absorbed into the French state as a form of royally sponsored poor relief, this drug distribution network began in 1670 as a distinctly ecclesiastical endeavour, aimed at allowing parish priests, missionaries, and charitable laywomen to imitate the healing ministry of Christ and his apostles. While critics saw them as peddling a dangerous chemical drug in poor villages, their promoters argued that the active charity involved in distributing the remedies, and even the faith placed in their effectiveness by the sick, played an important role in effecting their cures. As such they offer a useful perspective on the shifting boundaries between medical charity and medical commerce, as well as between natural and supernatural healing.

Acedia, loneliness, and the mandatory celibacy of Catholic parish clergy: a theological-sociological exploratory analysis

This article utilizes the analytical concept of acedia as the fundamental theoretical framework and applies a systematic literature review of peer-reviewed materials and documents on spiritual sloth, spiritual dryness, Catholic clerical celibacy, social bonding and communal spirituality. This article explores how the Catholic parish clergy’s mandatory celibacy intensifies loneliness and facilitates the spiritual sloth of parish clergy or what is theologically known as acedia. Unlike religious priests who live in religious communities, parish clerics fundamentally live, work, and pray alone in the parish, without strong communal support from fellow priests, bishops, and lay parishioners; thus, making them prone to loneliness, a main component of acedia. This article argues that mandatory celibacy further deprives parish clerics of the social and spiritual support necessary to enhance diocesan clerical spirituality and strengthen spiritual resistance against acedia. It recommends a structural adjustment in the social and spiritual life of parish priests, creating small communities of priests situated in similar territory or districts to allow them to live and work as a team with strong social and spiritual support in the spirit of “living baptismally” to overcome priestly acedia.

Modeling Black Piety and Community Membership in the Virgin of Altagracia Medallions

In the third quarter of the eighteenth century, Santo Domingo archbishop Isidoro Rodríguez Lorenzo (s. 1767–1788) issued a decree officializing the day of the cult for the Virgin of Altagracia as January 21 and made it a feast of three crosses for the villa of Salvaleón de Higüey and its jurisdiction, meaning all races (free and enslaved) were allowed to join the celebrations in church. Unrelated to the issuance of this decree and approximately during this time (c. 1760–1778), a series of painted panels depicting miracles performed by the Virgin of Altagracia was produced for her sanctuary of San Dionisio in Higüey, in all likelihood commissioned by a close succession of parish priests to the maestro painter Diego José Hilaris Holt. Painted in the coarse style of popular votive panels, they gave the cult a unifying core foundation of miracles. This essay discusses the significance of the black bodies pictured in four of the panels within the project’s implicit effort to institutionalize the regional cult and vis-à-vis the archbishop’s encouragement of non-segregated celebrations for her feast day. As January 21 was associated with a renowned Spanish creole battle against the French, this essay locates these black bodies within the cult’s newfound patriotic charisma. I examine the process by which people of color were incorporated into this community of faith as part of a two-step ritual that involved seeing images while performing difference. Through contrapuntal analysis of the archbishop’s decree, I argue the images helped model black piety and community membership within a hierarchical socioracial order.

Confession at a Time of Revolution

Chapter 7 explores how changes set in motion by rapid industrialization first climaxed in the Revolution of 1905, dropping confession rates. The Great War, initially sparking enthusiasm for the sacraments, dropped them further yet. After the February Revolution and the abdication of Nicholas II, all state structures compelling or supporting annual confession vanished. Bishops, parish priests, monastics, and ordinary laypeople struggled to make sense of the revolutionary climate, exploring such new forms as general confession or seeking to drop confession altogether. This experience helped prepare them for the savage attack on religion under Soviet rule and the decades that followed, creating new forms of confession. It also informed the evolution of confession in different strands of the émigré Russian Orthodox Church. The legacy of confession in the empire would become even more important after the fall of communism, when the Russian Orthodox Church rejected Soviet-era changes and tried to embrace pre-revolutionary practice with unexpected fervour.

The Salentine Group

Chapter 9 addresses a group of nomocanons produced in the Salento peninsula between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries. These manuscripts stand out from the others in the book, as they were not produced for monasteries, bishops, or lay judges, but for the secular clergy and parish priests of the Salento. The chapter explores their distinctive aesthetic style and material characteristics, which are highly consistent across the group but noticeably different from those of other Italo-Greek nomocanons. It also discusses their textual content, pointing out that the manuscripts contain lengthy appendices consisting of texts that would have been of particular interest to Salentine Greek clergy of the late Middle Ages, covering subjects like clerical marriage and Lenten fasting. These were all topics on which the Greek church diverged from the Latin, and it seems that the texts were included as a way to defend the Greeks’ distinctive religious practices. The chapter also highlights a fascinating marginal abbreviation that occurs in multiple Salentine nomocanons, ‘Against the Latins’, which was used by scribes and readers to highlight canons that were felt to be especially useful in this effort.