Manly Sacraments and Masculine Devotions: Catholic Manhood in the Civil War

Abstract

Manly Sacraments and Masculine Devotions:Catholic Manhood in the Civil War William S. Cossen55 Religion continues to be a subject of growing interest among historians of the Civil War era. Chandra Manning notes that it is in the midst of "a comeback, after decades of more or less benign neglect."56 The war has often been presented by scholars of U.S. Catholicism as a venue in which Catholics claimed for themselves and for their church a firmer inclusion in the American nation. Catholics' wartime loyalty, whether to the Confederate or Union causes, provided them with convincing proof of their patriotic virtue and functioned as a pointed rejoinder to claims of Catholic outsider status. Whether it was through the dedicated service of the Irish Brigade, Father William Corby's much-heralded, mass absolution of Catholic and non-Catholic soldiers at Gettysburg, or the distinguished record of wartime chaplains, Catholics could rightly point to the Civil War era as one that offered great potential for American Catholicism to claim its place as a leader in the wider national community. While the ethnic and nationalist dimensions of Civil War Catholicism have been the subjects of much research in Catholic studies, the topic of Catholic gender has not.57 To be sure, there has been ample scholarship on the work of women religious as nurses and on the dozens of priests who served as chaplains on battlefields and in camps, but what has been lacking in these studies is an exploration of how the war shaped Catholic soldiers as men.58 Additionally, because [End Page 29] research on the everyday, lived religion of Catholic soldiers has also been lacking in the ever-growing body of scholarship on the history of the war—for example, soldiers' reception of sacraments, their use of sacramentals, their prayer practices, and their conceptions of spiritual matters—we should spend some time considering how these wartime activities formed Catholic soldiers as Catholic men. Catholic newspapers, chaplains' diaries, soldiers' correspondence, and reminiscences of women religious who served as nurses in Civil War hospitals provide glimpses of a world in which Catholic women played formative roles in forming Catholic men's religious lives and in shaping a distinctly Catholic manhood. This is not altogether surprising given the conclusion of scholars that so many devotional practices in American Catholic history were frequently understood, whether explicitly or implicitly, as feminine, and that it is common to follow Ann Braude's lead in starting with the assumption that "women's history is American religious history."59 However, one of the dangers in not further interrogating these ideas is that it becomes easy to conclude that men, many of whom devoted themselves in the Civil War era to the cultivation of what historian Amy S. Greenberg terms "martial manhood," were only peripherally connected to these supposedly feminine practices.60 Assuming an innate femininity for the devotional practices of the past also risks reinforcing nineteenth-century anti-Catholic portrayals of an effeminate Catholicism opposed to a masculine Protestantism.61 As Colleen McDannell has explained, Catholic men were active and enthusiastic participants in nineteenth-century [End Page 30] devotional life, and "we do not know how 'feminized' Catholicism was in the late nineteenth century."62 Male Catholic soldiers indeed turned frequently to praying the rosary, wearing Miraculous Medals and donning scapulars, and they saw such items as not just spiritually nourishing but as physically protective as they enacted their martial manhood on the battlefield. Reverend J. Francis Burlando, the provincial director of the Daughters of Charity in the United States, remembered "poor invalid Catholics and Protestants all going to the chapel of the Sisters to assist at the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, at the Way of the Cross, and other practices of piety! . . . And, what eagerness to obtain a Medal of our Immaculate Mother, a chaplet, an Agnus Dei." Burlando noted that "only when furnished with a medal" would "they return to their regiments."63 Another Catholic writer noted of soldiers receiving both communion and scapulars at a Mass in New Orleans during the first summer of the war, "Ah! would to God every Catholic young man who engages in the conflict may so fortify...