Mother Figured. Marian Apparitions and the Making of a Filipino Universal by Deirdre de la Cruz

Abstract

Reviewed by: Mother Figured. Marian Apparitions and the Making of a Filipino Universal by Deirdre de la Cruz Peter Jan Margry Mother Figured. Marian Apparitions and the Making of a Filipino Universal. By Deirdre de la Cruz. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2015. Pp. xiv, 302. $30.00 paperback. ISBN 978-0-226-31491-4.) Deirdre de la Cruz, currently associate professor in the Departments of History and Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Michigan, focuses her research on Filipino popular and religious cultures. With her study Mother Figured she puts with one major scholarly stroke the Philippines (and Southeast Asia) on the global map of Marian (apparitional) studies. With an ethnological approach, combining the theory and methods of anthropology and history, and with an eloquent style, De la Cruz convincingly portrays the importance of Mother Mary for the Filipino community in the postcolonial era. The title of the book is hence appropriate. Although the work runs up from the mid-nineteenth century, the emphasis lies on the post-World War II era and continues till the beginning of the twenty-first century. The core of her book concerns the 1948 Asian "Fátima"-inspired apparitions in a Carmelite monastery in the city of Lipa. Based on documents from a variety of various churches, convents, libraries, and archives and on ethnographic fieldwork, the author describes and analyzes this cult. Her perspective is not institutional nor on church politics, but by focusing on religion of everyday life and the lay actors within Filipino "marianism," she shows how Marian devotional practice and its inherent networks function. When coming more toward the present, De La Cruz points out how mediation and how technologies and mass media have influenced Marian devotion. An issue in this study is De La Cruz' point concerning the problem of "universal religion," which is taken too often literally for being really universal. Also the term "marianism" contains a universality which for her cannot be established. For example, when the Lipa apparitions were connected to Cold War rhetoric and used in the United States by the Rosary Crusaders in their anticommunism, the Filipino reality was that the apparition had more to do with vernacular issues than with the global fight against atheism. While De La Cruz rightly criticizes uniformity of universalism, she has detected in the Philippines a trend to reshape their Mary into a more 'universal' [End Page 390] figure, taking her away from the local apparitional manifestation. This relates to the Filipino favoring of Mary-centric Christianity and Mary's maternal qualities in particular (in opposition to her perpetual virginity). The author interprets that interestingly as an instrument to subvert the patriarchal and rationalist approach of the universal church. It also gave the Filipinos a new missionary Marian zeal for the Catholic world. This was, for example, expressed in the vanguard role of the lay Marian devotees advocating the acknowledgment of a new fifth Marian dogma by the Vatican. This heavily contested dogma was brought up by another 1950's apparition: the Lady of All Nations in Amsterdam. This apparition has become nowadays also a substantial Marian cult in the Philippines, a perfect topic, I would say, for a new scholarly study by De La Cruz. Peter Jan Margry University of Amsterdam Copyright © 2019 The Catholic University of America Press