“St. Gemma is My Girl!”: Devotional Practices among Millennial Catholics and the Making of Contemporary Catholic Saints

Abstract

This article analyzes contemporary devotionalism to saints among a group of millennial-generation Catholics. Devotions to the communion of saints have long-been, for many generations of Catholics, practices of building and sustaining relationships between humans and extra-humans. This article explores a twenty-first century iteration of those practices. Drawing on fourteen months of ethnographic research among Catholic missionaries who evangelize on college campuses in the United States, this article examines how these missionaries remix their devotional practices on and for their contemporary American landscape. The article begins with an introduction to contemporary devotions, paying special attention to the centrality of suffering for this group of Catholics, as well as their efforts to “be saints” in the twenty-first century. Relationships with Saints Gemma Galgani, Faustina Kowalska, and Therese of Lisieux were particularly poignant in this worldview. How these young adults prayed with these saints shaped their Catholic identities. This article contributes to scholarship on contemporary Catholic prayer and the making of religious persons.