How Does the Supernatural Matter to Our Study?

Abstract

How Does the Supernatural Matter to Our Study? James Padilioni21 Jr. In my research and teaching of Catholicism across the African Diaspora, the supernatural as a category of analysis matters very much. While the etymology of super-natural describes experiences of an ethereal and elusive nature, my scholarship foregrounds the supernatural as a thoroughly embodied and everyday phenomenon experienced by Catholics of the African Diaspora. As a cradle Catholic and descendant of enslaved Africans, the stakes of my ancestral lineage are tied with my scholarship, and I proudly take up the intersection of Blackness, ritualized memories of slavery, and sainthood as observed through the figure of San Martín de Porres Velázquez, OP (1579-1639), the sixteenth-seventeenth century Afro-Peruvian friar canonized by Pope John XXIII in 1962 as the patron of social justice and interracial harmony. My forthcoming book project, To Ask Infinity Some Questions: San Martín de Porres and the Black Hagiographic Mysteries of Florida (Fordham University Press), explores hagiographic rituals of Martín de Porres performed by South Florida's twentieth and twenty-first century African-American, Cuban, Bahamian, Haitian, Dominican, and Puerto Rican communities that invoke the sacred memory and sensuous-material presence of Martín de Porres in their everyday endeavors "to ask infinity some questions" about the mysterious and sublime nature of Black being.22 I further interpret the supernatural experience of Afro-Catholic sainthood in my classes at Swarthmore College, a majority-minority [End Page 11] institution of Quaker heritage in the suburbs of Philadelphia.23 As a member of the religion department affiliated with environmental studies, Black studies, and Latin American and Latino studies, my classes feature an array of Black and brown students from diverse ethnic-national backgrounds who are eager to recover histories of the African Diaspora and the global geography of colonialism, and who wish to reclaim knowledge of their ancestral and indigenous religious traditions that lay encrusted within Catholic devotional practice. Thus, I encourage Catholic Studies scholars to "think with saints" and honestly reckon with the full implications of saintly supernatural phenomena, not only as a folkloric measure of personal devotion, but an archive for scholars who wish to "free subjugated knowledge" and center the metaphysical perspectives of American Catholic communities forcibly brought into the church via the strong arm of slavery and conquest.24 The freeborn son of an emancipated African mother and Spanish colonial administrator father, Martín de Porres came of age during a violent and tempestuous time in the history of the Catholic Church, characterized by the religio-racial antagonisms of the Counter-Reformation, the transatlantic slave trade, and the conquest and colonization of the Americas.25 Though he was an apprenticed herbalist and "surgeon-barber," Martín entered the Dominican Order as a tertiary donado domestic servant, legally barred from taking full vows because of his mulatto racial status within the colonial casta system.26 However, Martín's holy charisma exceeded the scope of this lowly position, and as he enacted a ministry of healing and consolation among the enslaved African and oppressed indigenous Andean communities of Lima, he earned a reputation for the mighty powers he wielded: bilocation (the ability to be in two places at once); subtlety (the ability to pass through solid objects); zoolingualism (the ability to talk with [End Page 12] animals); herbal curing and miraculous healing, either through sympathetic objects that Martín had touched or by the direct laying on of his hands; episodes of ecstasy; and, most-spectacularly, eyewitness accounts of levitation. In my research, I hold up Martín as a figure of multiplicity in African diasporic culture, as the ultimate "meaning" of his legendary power is not singularly controlled by the church's authorized hagiographic narrative. I analyze together the various ways Martín manifests within both institutional and folk Catholic rituals of devotion, particularly Cuban Santería and Dominican Vodú. I contend that these rituals open points of encounter between Martín and his devotees in which Martín's "real presence" radiates through the bodies of his devotees, and is present in their beloved sacramental objects of statues, candles, and prayer cards.27 Because I write for...