Bones, Blood, Wax, and Papal Potencies: Neo-Baroque Relics in Mexico

Abstract

In Mexico the dispatching of relics—body parts, skin, blood, or other personal objects with saintly residue—has become relatively commonplace. With a focus on the 2011 tour of the wax effigy and relics of Pope John Paul II, this essay draws on recent work at the intersection of religion, aesthetics, materiality, death, and violence to reveal the unique dimensions, coherence, and patterns of movement within contemporary Catholic Church evangelism that is necessarily both spiritual and political. In emphasizing the role of media, I develop two main lines of exploration: first, the dynamics of contemporary mediatic global Catholicism which has increased its reliance on images and objects such as relics; and second, the media-spectacle of narco-violence through which images of dead bodies circulate and saturate the Mexican social imaginary. I suggest that critical scholarly attention to Catholicism as a dynamic theopolitical infrastructure is critical for a broader and more dimensioned anthropology of Christianity.