Karin Vélez, The Miraculous Flying House of Loreto: Spreading Catholicism in the Early Modern World

Abstract

American Religion 27, no. 1 (Fall 2019), pp. 158–162 Copyright © 2019, The Trustees of Indiana University • doi: 10.2979/amerreli.1.1.12 Book Review Karin Vélez, The Miraculous Flying House of Loreto: Spreading Catholicism in the Early Modern World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019) Brandon L. Bayne University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA In February of 1701, the Milanese Jesuit priest Juan María de Salvatierra set out on an exploration of northwestern Mexico, joined by fellow missionary Eusebio Kino, several native allies, and a small military escort. Their goal was to explore the convergence of the Colorado River and the Gulf of California to finally establish the peninsularity of California and survey a possible overland route from mainland New Spain. Before the group ventured north from the settlements of northern Sonora into what they considered an untamed indigenous frontier, they gathered themselves beneath a large, framed banner. Emblazoned on its canvas was an image of the Madonna of Loreto, a powerful, personal devotion for Salvatierra as well as the patroness for the California missions that he had inaugurated just a few years earlier. As the group proceeded, Father Salvatierra counted on the Lauretian Virgin’s protection against raiding Apache and her power to pacify recently rebellious O’odham in the region. Baptizing sick children and wooing reticent elders in the towns of Tubutama and Caborca, Salvatierra brought fearful converts to the foot of Loreto’s banner and assured them of the eternal gifts secured by the Mother of Christ. Marching under that same standard, Fathers Salvatierra and Kino then moved forward, optimistic about the advance of Christendom into this expanding corner of Spanish North America. Brandon L. Bayne 159 The invocation of the Virgin of Loreto pointed away from the Pacific Ocean, where Salvatierra and Kino hoped to spread the Catholic religion, back across the Atlantic, through the Mediterranean, and up the Adriatic coast to the Italian port city of Loreto. Beyond traversing space, the image meant to transport devotees back in time to 1295 to that small coastal village. It is then and there that, according to tradition, the very house of Mary had fallen from the sky to the astonishment of the region’s residents. In The Miraculous Flying House of Loreto, Karin Vélez tracks the story of this Casa and its Madonna, beginning with early accounts of its incredible transportation from Nazareth to Dalmatia and eventually across the waters to Loreto. Ultimately, Loreto’s Flying House would spread even further to Germany and Britain, and then to New France, New Spain, Peru, and Paraguay in the Americas. In this fascinating study, Vélez explores Loreto’s “mythohistory” in both its medieval origins and global expansion across early modern Catholic networks . Plumbing material, visual, and written sources, she produces a remarkable account of a far-flung devotion that crosses both centuries and oceans. Throughout, the author displays an impressive mastery of diverse sources and intellectual boldness as she crosses disciplinary lines between history, religious studies, and literary analysis. The Miraculous Flying House is expansive, creative, and theoretically rich. In eight chapters, Vélez takes us from the first authors and patrons who established the ideal visual and literary markers of the Loreto story to the myriad pilgrims, Popes, priests, and native people who took up those tropes and made them their own. Throughout, she urges the reader to abandon the illusive search for stable authenticities or essentialized practices, and instead prompts us to see the way participants copied, created, rehearsed, and recapitulated the Flying House for their own diverse purposes. In the process, Vélez moves her readers beyond dominant scholarly binaries, calling attention to shared participation rather than mere imposition or resistance . This is one of the more controversial elements of the work as she maintains that a focus on violence, empire, and “the combative side of Christian expansion ” (40) has reduced our understanding of colonial religion to political and utilitarian concerns. While admitting that violence was important, Vélez nevertheless contends that “aggressive imposition alone cannot explain the reach and hold of Catholic devotion in the early modern period” (41). Instead, The Flying House features the untidy, quotidian, and...