“We’re All Catholics Now”

‘We’re all Protestants now,’ has been claimed by some religious commentators in the light of Vatican II reforms, and these words have still wider resonances as a way of referring to ‘a world-historical configuration’ that has far exceeded its particular doctrinal affiliations. The anthropology of Christianity has tended to privilege Protestantism in providing diagnoses of ‘modern’ consciousness, not least through developing particular interpretations of the fate of sincerity, materiality and selfhood in much of the contemporary world. Such an argument has resonance, but what are its limits? And what are the potential ingredients of an alternative claim, that ‘We’re all Catholics now’? This chapter explores an alternative genealogy of modernity, invoking different notions of the self and of materiality, ones that can be traced not only in Roman Catholic populations, but also among believers conventionally assumed to be Protestant as well as in more secular discourses. Such a conception includes flexible and adaptive ritual forms such as pilgrimage that have sometimes been dismissed as mere tradition, but which contain powerful means of addressing current political, economic and cultural conjunctures, as well as indicating possible future modalities of relating to religion in a much wider sense.

Excerpt from “Women Mystics and Eucharistic Devotion in the Thirteenth Century”

In this chapter the renowned medievalist scholar Caroline Walker Bynum brings our attention to a striking historical occurrence: in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Europe the concern with and attachment to Eucharistic devotion was overwhelmingly female. Why this gender bias, and at that time? Christian women were predominantly “inspired, compelled, comforted and troubled by the Eucharist” and in many different forms—from miraculous apparitions, to experiences of ecstasy connected to the attendance and ingestion of the Eucharist, to the showing of sensorial excesses in its presence. Bynum shows how material and physical receptions of the body of Christ were expressed not only as forms of ecstasy but also as gendered modes of living the Imitatio Christi. This thirteenth-century corporeal, female experience of the Eucharist is connected to a particular moment in the life of Christ—the transition between life and death. Positioned as “brides” and hence as the erotic counterparts of Christ, women and female mystics exploited the full potential of Christ’s own corporeality rather than his otherworldly nature. Bynum’s work constitutes a formative reference point for scholars of Catholicism across a range of disciplines for the obvious reason that it deals so elegantly with themes of substance, gender, bodies, and devotional forms of Catholic practice. Her work continues to be an original source of inspiration for anthropologists because of its remarkable sensitivity to religion as an embodied, practice-generative engagement with the world. Bynum should also be considered as important for the “new” anthropology of Catholicism for her pioneering work on the gymnasticity of gender and for the attention it draws to the sublimated erotic tension that exists between institutional doxa and mystical aesthetics.2 In Bynum’s work, gender is not presented as merely one among a number of potential analytical foci for elaboration of Catholicism; rather, it is the very ontological architecture of the religious, and hence an essential topic for scholars seeking to understand Catholicism as a translocal force.

Possession and Psychopathology, Faith and Reason

The early 21st century has seen a resurgence in the performance of exorcism in the Catholic Church. Exorcism is a solemn rite that must be performed by a priest with the express consent of the bishop with jurisdiction in the area where the exorcism takes place. Both a form of healing for afflicted individuals and a discourse on evil at large in the contemporary world, exorcism lies at the intersection of therapy and cosmology in the world's largest religious institution. Its social and cultural significance is therefore worthy of analysis. This chapter takes a step in that direction through consideration of ethnographic material from exorcists, mental health professionals who assist and consult with them, and the afflicted people who seek their help.

What Is Catholic about the Clergy Sex Abuse Crisis?

This chapter explores a question often asked about survivors of clerical sexual abuse: do they remain Catholic? Such a question, this chapter argues, fails to account for the complex reality. Survivors were abused as youngsters so they were usually unable to determine this for themselves. The insistence of adults that children and teenagers who were abused continue going to church was another way of denying the reality of the abuse. (“They drove me to my abuser,” one survivor said of his parents.) Many survivors remained faithful Catholics into adulthood. But most survivors describe a moment when being at Mass became physically and emotionally painful. For many the decision to stay or leave was not simple or final. Some survivors developed strategies for protecting themselves from further fear and harm as they continued attending Mass; others found ways of being both inside and outside the church; still others made different choices over time. The struggle of many survivors with the church in which they were religiously formed, encountered the sacred, and were abused—abuse that always had religious context and significance—offers a revealing perspective on Catholics and Catholicism in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Opulence and Simplicity

In various forms of Catholicism sacrifice holds a central position. The centrality of the divine sacrifice literally embodied in the sacrament of the Eucharist works in a wider sense as a model for action and thought outside the Church as a place for worship. Sacrifice here places the individual in various positions of moral debt that one can more-or-less willingly work towards suspending. In Damascus, Syria, a popular Catholic ethic of simplicity often collides with clergy who appear to collect money for this-worldly purposes or for the sake of what is perceived as their own benefit. Lamentation over such perceived opulence attests to a tension between grace, gift, and debt. This chapter explores such tension in attending to how moral personhood is fashioned through various engagements with prayer, surrender, and debt. Where David Morgan has argued for a particular Catholic sacrificial economy (2009), wherein individuals are placed in charged relationships, this chapter examines the inherent tension between simplicity and opulence. Catholicism, it argues, may very well work by asserting a particular emphasis on the holy office that appear opulent, which necessitates a counter-movement in the form of purification and work towards greater simplicity.

Containment and Contagion

This chapter concerns the contradiction in modern Catholicism that women can be God-like but not priest-like. Drawing on research into the Roman Catholic Women Priest movement, it explores how this contradiction persists through the manipulation of metaphors of contagion and containment in relation to notions of sin and virtue. Just as the sins of the one couple (Adam and Eve) contaminate the many and for generations thereafter, the moral failures of any one individual, by analogy, can be applied metaphorically to all of humankind. Yet grace, too, can be contagious, spreading among persons (underlying certain Catholic models of religious practice). Problems arise when some people’s sins turn out to be more contagious than others. Through a mixture of ethnographic and historical sources, the discussion traces how sin and grace are differently containable or contagious according to gender. The infinite manipulability of this sin/grace complex helps to illuminate how opposition to the ordination of women remains institutionally entrenched even as male sex-abuser priests have come to dominate the media. The chapter concludes that Catholicism’s multiform problems with gender are reproduced via this politics of contagion and containment, and that radical repercussions are at stake in sin’s containment.

“Complexio Oppositorum”?

This chapter concerns Roman Catholicism in rural Tamil society as the product of shifting socio-political and institutional conditions. It argues that narratives of ‘Christian modernity’ — deepened and made more sophisticated with recent ventures in this field (Robbins 2004, Keane 2007) — have drawn attention away from settings where Christianity was introduced in ways that facilitated its localization within existing social and representational structures; where rather than disrupting existing socio-political arrangements it provided another means for their reproduction. At the same time, it shows how an over-commitment to the idea of cultural continuity fails to detect the ways in which, over time, participation in the realm of ‘Christian religion’ opened space for types of thought and action beyond traditional roles, and altered modes of signification within indigenous systems that were/are socially transformative. The tension between continuity and rupture in the history of Christianity in south India, and the co-existence of apparently antithetical moral traditions and social spaces— the ‘complex of opposites’—is bound up with five hundred years of fraught and shifting understandings of the categories of ‘religion’ and ‘culture’ themselves.

The Media of Sensation

This chapter discusses the significance of medieval practices of prayer both for the modern rediscovery of media and for the anthropology of sensation. It demonstrates how medieval theories of reading, prayer, and contemplation thematize ways in which specific media—words, images, and music—are to be used in order to produce sensual and affective cognition. In doing so, these theories develop a sophisticated understanding of media on one side, and a specific understanding of the human soul as a sphere of evocation of possible sensation and affect on the other side. In working through this complex intersection of media and soul-formation I focus on this very notion of possibility, its significance in the context of an ‘anthropology of Catholicism’, and its presence in catholic discourses from the Middle Ages up to the twentieth century. Through discussion of the source texts an understanding of the seemingly established anthropological distinction between “inner man” and “outer man,” “interiority” and “exteriority” is challenged and what remains is a radically different way of thinking about interiority.

Excerpt from “Iconophily and Iconoclasm in Marian Pilgrimage”

Before he died, the well-known anthropologist of African religion Victor Turner (1920–83) turned his attention to Catholic forms of pilgrimage and, with Edith Turner, traveled across the world visiting Marian shrines. Victor and Edith Turner were themselves Catholic. The book that resulted is a classic of early anthropological writing about Catholicism and has done much to lay down an analytical “grammar” for thinking about it. In this chapter the Turners draw attention to the long-standing tension in Christianity between iconoclasm and iconophily—a topic that resonates deeply with contemporary debates about semiotics.1 In this chapter the Turners explore the potent affordances of material form through an analysis of shrines, images, and statues. Of interest here are the multiple and sometimes contradictory layers of personification and signification that accrue to devotional objects and places over time, through repeated human interaction. The shrine’s semantic field has a diachronic axis as a well as a synchronic one—both axes further layered with political and historic events that inscribe themselves upon the place. Both in and out of structure and time, shrines condense symbols, practices, histories, and culturally specific influences and affordances. An analytical question running through this chapter is thus whether the power of the divine is compressed within and hence generated by the image or whether the image simply represents the power of the divine. This, of course, is something of an age-old theological problem in Christianity, which the Turners as Catholics themselves are eminently aware of. In their treatment of this issue, however, they remain steadfastly anthropological, taking seriously the sensorial plasticity of devotional objects and their inherent capacity to exceed the roles intended of them by official theology. Rather than “materiality” or “aesthetic formations,” the Turners describe devotional objects as “outward vehicles” for symbols. “Outward vehicles,” they argue, have a tendency to become more bound up with the orectic pole of signification than the normative pole. Here the “orectic” encompasses the emotional, sensorial, and affective field of semantics, whereas the “normative” encompasses the abstract, ideational field. The Turners see this as a basic religious structure common to all religious traditions, although the respective stability of each pole is reversed in different cultures. Thus in non-Christian “tribal” societies the orectic pole is more stable than the normative one, whereas in hierarchically organized, scripturally complex religions such as Christianity the normative is more stable than the orectic. Although the language the Turners employ is reflective of the structuralist and symbolic-humanist fields they were very much embedded within, their work is relevant to a renewed anthropology of Catholicism for the way it helps to make sense of the relationship of parts to wholes, and for the creative attention it draws to the circulation of ideas and affects within Catholic institutional territories.

Excerpt from “The Place of Grace in Anthropology”

Julian Pitt-Rivers’s masterful essay was originally published in 1992 as the culminating piece in Honor and Grace in Anthropology, a volume that this renowned ethnographer of the Spanish Mediterranean and student of E. E. Evans-Pritchard at Oxford edited with his colleague J. G. Peristiany, almost a decade before his death in 2001. The essay reveals the erudition and breadth of his ethnographic vision. Why, asks Pitt-Rivers, despite its implied presence in wide-ranging ethnographic contexts, have anthropologists ignored the concept of grace? “Grace is a whole,” he argues, a socially constituted concept that we cannot understand outside of social interaction and principles of exchange and reciprocity. Unlike Mauss’s classic explanation of the gift within an economy of return, however, grace is a kind of “nonreciprocity” or gratitude. Pitt-Rivers observes that grace is much older than Christianity, yet he roots all current forms of the idea of grace in the Christian concept and its etymological roots in Latin (gratia, or favor, or a gift freely given), tying it with individual salvation. Grace, therefore, is “a free gift of God” that implies no obligation on the part of the receiver. God bestows grace, “the friendship of God,” on humankind out of his free benevolence, for their eternal salvation. Pitt-Rivers’s insistence on understanding grace as exemplary of a “reciprocity of the heart” (versus the law of contract) and the “affective side of life” echoes recent scholarly awareness of modes of being and ethics—even religiosities—that cannot be explained through recourse to rational, economic models. It pertains to a consciousness of life as that which binds us together, modes of conviviality, commensality, and interrelatedness that underpin Catholicism as a living form. Inasmuch as grace as a concept constitutes an otherworldly force or originary substance that sets things in motion, it bears a family resemblance to ethnographic concepts like manaor hau. 1 Although Pitt-Rivers’s discussion of grace was never an explicit attempt to generate conversation with other scholars of Christianity, his framing of grace as a proto-Christian version of mana began a process that would eventually make Christianity a “legitimate topic” for mainstream anthropological theorizing.