The Persistence of the Sacred: German Catholic Pilgrimage, 1832–1937 by Skye Doney (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Persistence of the Sacred: German Catholic Pilgrimage, 1832–1937 by Skye Doney Jonathan Sperber The Persistence of the Sacred: German Catholic Pilgrimage, 1832–1937. By Skye Doney. [German and European Studies.] (Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2022. Pp. xxii, 345. $85.00. ISBN 978-1-4875-4310-5.) Skye Doney's book is a study of two major pilgrimages in western Germany during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the septennial pilgrimage to the relics of the Aachen Cathedral and, especially, the pilgrimages to the Holy Coat of Trier, occurring at irregular intervals. Based on extensive unpublished material in ecclesiastical archives, the contemporary periodical press, the many pamphlets, fliers, memorial images, medallions, and other ephemeral forms of commemoration, and a thorough evaluation of the anthropological and historical literature on popular religious practice, the book contrasts official and expressly stated opinions of the church hierarchy and more bourgeois and educated Catholics on the one hand, and the not explicitly articulated aspirations of the hundreds of thousands or even millions of less educated and lower-middle or lower-class pilgrims on the other. The upshot is an eminently readable and very fruitful study, whose main premises might require some additional consideration. Doney outlines the development of a more bureaucratic organization of the pilgrimages—complete with pre-registration, entry tickets, assigned viewing times, and even medical questionnaires to fill out, in order to evaluate claims of miraculous healing. Proposals for pilgrimage songs or for memorial images and medallions required approval of the cathedral chapter, whose canons applied strict aesthetic criteria. Coterminous with this organizational process was the growth of a more empirical attitude toward the sacred. Positivist historical investigation would demonstrate the authenticity of the relics; pilgrims' claims of being cured of disease would no longer be accepted at face value but would require medical confirmation. The author is critical of this whole line of intellectual development, seeing it as a concession to Protestant and rationalist critics of Catholic piety and the sexist imposition of the evaluation of male clergy and physicians on the claims of miraculous healing by female pilgrims—although he does show that there was a male minority of claimants to the miraculous as well. Doney contrasts these changing opinions with the attitudes of the pilgrims, who yearned for the physical presence of the sacred in their lives. They aspired to touch the relics, to touch objects which had touched the relics, or, at the very least to take home a picture or medallion with an image of a relic. He argues that these attitudes persisted, largely unchanging, spontaneously expressed, and unprepared, over the entire period his book covers. This idea of a naïve, spontaneous, and unchanging popular piety is the weakest point of the book, largely because the author does not investigate any potential influences on it. He has nothing to say about the impact of ecclesiastically sponsored devotions—the two great nineteenth-century ones, to the Virgin and to the Sacred [End Page 414] Heart, and the early twentieth-century Christ the King devotions. (One of the officially disapproved proposals for a pilgrimage song does seem to work from Christ the King devotions.) Widely publicized experiences of other pilgrimage sites, especially Lourdes, are missing from his argument, although his study of potential pilgrims' correspondence with the pilgrimage organizers contains many mentions of Lourdes. Changes in the prevalence of disease, attitudes toward illness, or in the practice of medicine, as well as the increasing familiarity of Germans with medical treatment and the medical profession, as a result of the growth of the social insurance system, do not enter his discussions of claims to miraculous healing. Without any consideration of these developments, the assertion of an autonomous, persisting popular piety, in contrast to a changing clerically sponsored one, remains unproven. Jonathan Sperber University of Missouri Jonathan Sperber University of Missouri Copyright © 2023 The Catholic University of America Press