Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918–1965

Abstract

The study of grassroots religious life in modern German history is flourishing. The long-hegemonic ‘milieu’ model, which emphasized social structures and institutions, often to the neglect of lay religious cultures and experiences, has begun to yield to studies foregrounding everyday life, vernacular ritual and belief, gender, sexuality and lived faith. Michael E. O’Sullivan’s wonderful study of early-twentieth-century German Catholic miracles, Disruptive Power, keeps social structures, clerical and lay leadership and institutions in view while also illuminating forms of popular piety and their political impact both within the Catholic community and at regional and national levels. Robert Orsi, whose revelatory scholarship on American Catholics accents the intimate coexistence (or ‘braidedness’, to use Orsi’s metaphor) of religion and modern life, is an important conceptual resource for O’Sullivan. Orsi’s perspective refuses to relegate the religious to its own sphere, isolated from the totality of human behaviour and thought and set apart in time. For all of its centuries-old symbolism—rapturous, bleeding bodies and heaven-turned gazes—the religiosity O’Sullivan uncovers was a resolutely modern one that, as he has written elsewhere, created ‘new meanings out of old traditions’ (‘From Catholic Milieu to Lived Religion,’ History Compass, 2009).