The Politics of Prayer: White American Catholicism and “Negro” Sainthood

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article interrogates the way in which Western European and American Catholic clerics, theologians, and writers sought to use both prayer and the memory of an Afro-Hispanic holy man, Saint Martín de Porres, as a resource for converting African Americans to Catholicism in the twentieth century. It demonstrates how intellectuals and organizers within the Catholic Church appealed to traditional notions of the sacred and popular ideas about race in the formation of religious ritual.