✦ Nation Saints ✦

This chapter covers 1925 to 1939, a period over which more U.S. causes for canonization were introduced than ever before. The saints U.S. Catholics supported said more about their own position in the United States than they did about the lives of the saints they embraced. They developed a “new ideal of sainthood” that privileged holy people who evoked transplantation of European Catholicism rather than the conversion of native people, who had braved Protestant scorn in urban centers rather than hostile heathens on a remote frontier, and who had embraced the nation rather than antedated it. This chapter shows how these factors worked in favor of Elizabeth Seton and John Neumann and against Rose Philippine Duchesne and Tekakwitha.

✦ Superpower Saints ✦

This chapter focuses on Elizabeth Ann Seton’s cause between papal conclave of 1939, when her cause leaped forward at the Roman Center, through Seton’s beatification in 1963. It analyzes gender and power in the Catholic church through the conflict between Seton’s Daughters of Charity and the Vincentian priest assigned to serve as Seton’s vice-postulator. It explains the fierce competition between Seton’s advocates and those of John Neumann, who was also beatified in 1963. The chapter argues that in the post-World War II era, saints became stand-ins for U.S. Catholics' new role in the nation and in the world--and harbingers of more transformations on the way, in sanctity and beyond.

✦ Introduction ✦

The introduction explains the Catholic concept of patronage, reviews the broad history of the canonization process, and explains the book’s historiographical interventions and transnational approach. It highlights the dissonance U.S. Catholics felt between belonging to a church that moves slowly, such as in a painstakingly sluggish process, and living in an American culture that adapts easily and quickly. Because new moments generated new models of holiness, U.S. Catholics’ attachment to a newly-canonized saint rarely matched the enthusiasm shown by the generation that had originally proposed him or her as a candidate. What remained constant was U.S. Catholics’ desire to use holy figures to cement their connection to the Holy See and to affirm their place in the American nation.

✦ Papal Saints ✦

This chapter examines American sanctity during the papacy of John Paul II (1978-2005). John Paul II canonized more saints then all of his predecessors combined. He canonized Neumann and Duchesne, beatified six other U.S. candidates, and introduced dozens of others. Beyond the numbers, this chapter traces a fundamental shift in U.S. saint-seeking throughout this era. As polarization within the church supplanted marginalization in America as the keynote of U.S. Catholicism, U.S. Catholics became less likely to project their American stories onto candidates for canonization. Instead, prospective saints became signifiers of where Catholic individuals and groups position themselves within the church, often on issues related to gender, sexuality, and social and racial justice.

✦ Epilogue ✦

The epilogue introduces a sampling of the dozens of prospective U.S. saints, including those who have official causes open such as Fulton Sheen and Augustus Tolton as well as those who are regarded more informally as saints such as Mychal Judge and Dorothy Stang. It argues that while these holy figures continue to reveal a great deal about the priorities and perspectives of U.S. Catholics, the contemporary saint-seeking landscape indicates that U.S. Catholics’ goal of finding a single, unifying saint receded with each step taken toward attaining it. The diversity of the U.S. Catholic experience could never be represented by one holy hero.

✦ Aggiornamento Saints ✦

Focused on the 1960s and 1970s, this chapter examines how Lumen Gentium and other documents of the Second Vatican Council intersected with social change to prompt U.S. Catholics to reimagine the lives of their favorite saints. It examines the impact of civil rights and feminism on the stories of Seton, Neumann, Duchesne, and Katharine Drexel. It ends with Seton’s canonization in 1975, positing that U.S. Catholics secured their all-American saint precisely at the moment it ceased to matter, as the original goals of the quest—cementing a connection to Rome and affirming their place in the nation—had been achieved through other means.

✦ Citizen Saint ✦

This chapter focuses on the life and afterlife of Frances Cabrini, founder of the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart who served as a missionary in the United States between her arrival in New York in 1889 and her death in Chicago in 1917. Pope Pius XI beatified Cabrini in 1938, and Pius XII canonized her in 1946. This record speed was owed both to her proximity to the Roman center of power in the Catholic church and her popularity on the American periphery, given the ways her life story could be molded to support American ideals of sainthood that foregrounded immigration, urbanization, and U.S. citizenship.

✦ North American Saints ✦

This chapter traces saint-seeking from 1884 to 1925, providing short biographies of the early U.S. nominees for sainthood, most of whom were European missionaries to North America in the colonial and early national period. It argues that these prospective saints served as double symbols, proving to Rome that holiness had flourished on American soil and demonstrating to Protestant Americans that Catholics could be loyal U.S. citizens. This chapter highlights the connections between hagiography and historiography in the work of prominent church leaders like James Cardinal Gibbons and John Gilmary Shea, provides short biographies of the Jesuit Martyrs and other early nominees for sainthood, explains key terms such as postulator, and outlines the procedures for canonization and its precursor, beatification.