Sister Thorn and Catholic Mysticism in Modern America by Paula M. Kane (review)

Abstract

Sister Thorn and Catholic Mysticism in Modern America. By Paula M. Kane. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2013. Pp. xiv, 313. $39.95. ISBN 978-1-4696-0760-3.)Sister Mary Crown of Thorns (nee Margaret Reilly, 1884-1937), a sister of the Congregation of Our Lady of Charity of the Good Shepherd at Peekskill, New York, reportedly endured the stigmata from September to November 1921. The manifestations of a cross on her breast and on the walls of her cell were witnessed by some of her sisters and were brought to the attention of Archbishop Patrick Hayes of New York. However, their publicity beyond the convent walls was the result of communications from overzealous clergy. The appeal of the story could not be quashed, despite the best efforts of Hayes, and newspapers promptly splashed headlines of the Peekskill stigmatic for public consumption.Kane's monograph is a work of American studies, not church history, and still less a biography. It examines an unusual spiritual narrative arising in New York's Gilded Age. It occurs to an Irish American woman with serious health problems. Kane calls herself a bricoleur-one who casually observes the detritus of life, mining it for shards of meaning. As a method, it is wanting. Through some valuable archival work, however, Kane alights on a very intriguing subject whose crosshatches traverse the piety of Irish Catholic New York, convent culture, and authority structures that do as much to promote as to try to contain a story of stigmata.The book relies on primary source data found in archives in the United States and London and an extensive, if tangential, secondary literature. After an initial survey of material related to Sister Thorn's case in the archives of the Good Shepherds, a sudden change in policy there closed the files for the author's research. Similarly, she had difficulty in obtaining information from the archdiocesan archives in New York. Kane did not consult a large file in the Secret Vatican Archives (Archivio della Delegazione degli Stati Uniti d'America, Subseries XIX: Istituti religiosi, Posiz. 1229) pertaining to Thorn's case and the havoc raised over her among the Good Shepherd sisters. Doubtless the book would have been enhanced with further engagement of the sources.In seven chapters, Kane examines Thom's family, vocation to the religious life, the motivations of her champions, Catholics and the scientific study of supernatural phenomena, devotional culture in the United States, and the Americanization of modern sanctity (p. …