Catholic Imagination Research Articles

A Smothering Embrace? Hermeneutical Issues in Catholic Discourse about Jews and Judaism

AbstractThis article examines how Jews and Judaism are envisioned in the Catholic imagination, through a critical reading of contemporary Catholic discourse on Judaism. It identifies three problematic areas. The first concerns the tendency of Catholic discourse to project a specifically Christian vision of salvation history onto the Jewish people, which reflects Christian rather than Jewish self-understanding. Second, this article analyzes patterns in language and imagery in Vatican documents about Judaism, alert to troubling allusions implicit in the texts. The third area concerns a hermeneutical obstacle to deep interreligious understanding, one which may be ultimately insurmountable: namely, the challenges of understanding the religious other according to its own self-understanding. This article reaches an ambivalent conclusion, conceding that the goal of recognizing the self-understanding of another religious tradition may ultimately be impossible.

The Pope’s New Clothes

The Pope’s New Clothes

The Catholic Horror Show

Among horror films and books, The Exorcist has attracted a disproportionate amount of commentary from a variety of perspectives, ranging from gender studies and psychoanalysis, through to the histories of medicine and science. This article delves into two aspects of the book and film phenomenon to highlight its cultural significance, especially in the United States, and particularly among Roman Catholics. First, it investigates the background of the book and film and positions it within the type of ethnic melting pot Catholicism from which its author, William Peter Blatty, emerged and its vernacular beliefs about the devil and exorcism, focusing on the type of “Catholic supernaturalism” which Blatty drew on in writing The Exorcist and his own ambivalent relationship with this type of devotional Catholicism. Second, it examines the reaction to the book and the film amongst Catholic audiences, focusing on the extensive commentary provided on the film by several Catholic priests, all of whom found themselves pastorally and professionally challenged by the film’s impact in various contexts. It concludes by discussing how The Exorcist has become an iconic example of the dark side of the American Catholic imagination.

American Religion at The Met Cloisters

This article traces the religious history of The Cloisters, the branch of The Metropolitan Museum of Art devoted to medieval European architecture and art in northern Manhattan, providing a case study of how Americans have used images of the medieval to articulate a moralistic American spirituality. It focuses on particular moments in the museum’s history—the 1914 museum created by sculptor George Grey Barnard; the 1938 opening of The Met Cloisters, funded by John D. Rockefeller, Jr.; its reception in the mid-twentieth century; a series of Episcopal Masses in the 1970s; and the spring 2018 exhibit Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination—in order to unpack and contextualize the changes and constants in the visual vocabulary of religion at this museum. Throughout the twentieth century, founders, donors, curators, critics, and visitors saw a “right” way to respond emotionally to The Cloisters. One’s response to the museum demonstrated not only one’s sensitivity but also one’s character, especially the moral superiority of elite white Protestant men. In the twenty-first century, the design of Heavenly Bodies and its reception both drew upon and pushed back against the masculine Protestant paradigm of American medievalism that had long been established at The Cloisters.

Striving for Fashion: Historical Voices in the Chorus of Beauty

Historical and cultural themes as a source of inspiration in postmodernism are a structuring factor in the organization of communication between designers and consumers. The boundaries are being gradually erased not only between different forms of art, mass and elite cultures, but also between such opposite fields of human activity as fashion and religion. The article is devoted to the semantic aspects of one of the most interesting events of the recent time–the exhibition “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination” organized by the Costume Institute of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in collaboration with the Vatican, which took place from May to October 2018. In this regard, the voices of authors from various fields are explored within the realm of fashion and religion, before the psychological interpretation is focused on the historical dimensions of the specific relationship of Catholicism and ceremonial costumes. Concludingly, this analysis provides evidence of the century long tradition of Catholic play with ornaments and fashion as a mimetic means for socially distancing the divine from the profane.

Modern Practice, Archaic Ritual: Catholic Exorcism in America

The following ethnographic and folkloric analysis of American exorcism practices post-1998 centers on four Catholic priest-exorcists currently active in the United States. After a brief commentary regarding the place of Satanism within contemporary Catholic imagination, this article posits that the Catholic Church’s recent institutional support of its office of exorcist must not be viewed separately from its discursive fear of Satanic cults and larger narratives of religious declension. The current era of exorcism practice in America is chiefly characterized as a response to the media sensationalism surrounding not only prior cases of demonic possession but also of Satanic ritual abuse. Moreover, beyond these explicit issues of religious competition (e.g., Catholics versus Satanic conspirators), the current era of exorcism practice is also implicitly characterized by the changing belief systems of contemporary Catholics. Thus, this article ultimately concerns issues related to religious modernization, the apotropaic use of established religious tradition, popular entertainment and the mediatization of contemporary exorcism cases, institutionalized training curricula and the spaces allowing ritual improvisation, and the vernacular religious consumption of unregulated paranormal concepts that possess no clear analogues within official Church theology.

Conscience: An Investigation in Stenian Philosophy in Relation to Bioethics

This article investigates how Edith Stein’s philosophical work on conscience is relevant for appreciating conscience today. In particular, this article shows how Stein’s contributions to conscience explicates what it is and why it is relevant for moral decision making. Moral decision making is necessary in bioethics and healthcare. However, leading bioethicists today lack an understanding of what conscience is, how it applies to healthcare practice and why it should be respected. Recent developments in obligatory referrals for healthcare professionals reveal further challenges related to appreciating conscience in current bioethical contexts. In this article, I consider the importance of Stein’s work on conscience to address the gap in knowledge related to conscience in bioethics today. To do so, I will outline the main aspects of Stein’s phenomenological and metaphysical approaches to the psycho-spiritual-physical aspects of being human. I will then describe her work on conscience. Next, I will discuss how contemplation vis à vis the Catholic imagination could provide a way to perceive how conscience is a response to morality. Finally, I will show how Stein’s work can refute contemporary approaches to conscience and obligatory referral.

Michael O’Brien’s Theological Aesthetics

This essay introduces and examines aspects of the theological aesthetics of contemporary Canadian artist, Michael D. O’Brien (1948–). It also considers how his philosophy of the arts informs understandings of the Catholic imagination. In so doing, it focuses on his view that prayer is the primary source of imaginative expression, allowing the artist to operate from a position of humble receptivity to the transcendent. O’Brien studies is a nascent field, owing much of its development in recent years to the pioneering work of Clemens Cavallin. Apart from Cavallin, few scholars have focused on O’Brien’s extensive collection of paintings (principally because the first catalogue of his art was only published in 2019). Instead, they have worked on his prodigious output of novels and essays. In prioritising O’Brien’s paintings, this study will assess the relationship between his theological reflections on the Catholic imagination and art practice. By focusing on the interface between theory and practice in O’Brien’s art, this article shows that conversations about the philosophy of the Catholic imagination benefit from attending to the inner standing points of contemporary artists who see in the arts a place where faith and praxis meet. In certain instances, I will include images of O’Brien’s devotional art to further illustrate his contemplative, Christ-centred approach to aesthetics. Overall, this study offers new directions in O’Brien studies and scholarship on the philosophy of the Catholic imagination.

A work of death: martyrdom, myth and dead women in contemporary Spanish film

ABSTRACT In the same moment that the Spanish government passed the Ley de memoria histórica, recognizing the rights of those persecuted during the Civil War and dictatorship, the Spanish Church escalated its own project of remembering, more than doubling between 2007 and 2013 the number of beatifications of clergy killed during the war. This discordant combination of circumstances has been reflected in cultural production where cinematic representations of the Civil War dead have often reanimated tropes of the Catholic popular imagination. While these films mark a broader cultural move away from the Church rhetoric of sacrifice and martyrdom and towards human rights frameworks as a way to deal with past traumas, their reliance on the culturally charged motifs of traditional hagiography has meant that contemporary martyr narratives remain entangled in older national myths. Taking examples from Emilio Martínez Lázaro's 2007 film Las 13 rosas, Mikel Rueda's Izarren Argia (2010) and Benito Zambrano's La voz dormida (2011), this article will demonstrate how the interpenetration of opposing discourses both undermines the films’ contribution to the project of historical memory while also offering powerful moments of reflection and empathy at the intersection of traditional martyrology and cosmopolitan memory practices.

Moving from Vatican Bling to Malchus’s Ear: Taking the “Catholic Imagination” Seriously When Thinking About Catholic Devotions in Centuries Past

Moving from Vatican Bling to Malchus’s EarTaking the “Catholic Imagination” Seriously When Thinking About Catholic Devotions in Centuries Past Michael P. Carroll (bio) Every year the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City stages a gala to raise money for its Costume Institute and that gala is always associated with a themed exhibition that is open to the public once the gala itself is over (the Met Gala for 2020, of course, was canceled because of Covid-19). In 2018, the exhibition theme was “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination.” Most press coverage of the gala itself focused on the female celebrities who attended (including, among others, Rihanna, Madonna, Miley Cyrus, Serena Williams, and Lady Gaga) and the costumes they wore in order to reflect the exhibition’s theme. But what would make the 2018 exhibition especially distinctive was that it would become the most visited exhibition in the recorded history of the Met, beating out the King Tut exhibition in the 1970s.1 On the face of things, then, it would seem there is much public interest in the “Catholic Imagination.” What did people see at this particular exhibition? As commentators were quick to note, the exhibition had a tripartite organization. [End Page 124] One section was devoted to what one churlish commentator called “Vatican bling.”2 On view there were nearly four dozen papal vestments on loan from the Sistine Chapel sacristy, many of which had never been outside Rome, and which included tiaras (including a tiara set with 19,000 gems, mostly diamonds); papal chasubles, and pectoral crosses. By agreement with Church authorities, these objects were kept separate from the more secular fashions displayed in the rest of the exhibition. A second section of the exhibition displayed secular clothing by leading fashion designers that had been inspired by religious dress and religious art. Finally, a third section was on display at the Cloisters, the Met’s extension in northern Manhattan, and this also involved secular designs that had been inspired by sacred art. At one level then, the exhibition was concerned with exactly what its title suggests, namely, the influence of Catholic art and clerical dress on secular fashion—though as one commentator noted, this was only true if “fashion” consistently meant “women’s fashion.”3 On the other hand, reading through the scholarly essays published in the exhibition catalogue, it seems clear that the organizers had an aspirational goal that reached for a bit more, namely, they wanted to explore the nature and importance of the “Catholic Imagination” in the Catholic tradition generally. This is especially clear in the introductory essay in the exhibition’s catalogue, which was written by Andrew Bolton, curator of the Costume Institute and the organizer of the exhibition. Bolton starts by noting that the term “Catholic Imagination” was popularized by the priest/sociologist Andrew Greeley (1928–2013) in his book of that title, and Bolton summarizes Greeley by saying that “metaphor is the essential characteristic of a distinctively Catholic sensibility, or consciousness, which he [Greeley] defines as the Catholic Imagination.”4 Bolton goes on to quote an extended passage from Greeley’s book. Since that particular passage also appeared on a wall of the exhibition (which, incidentally, I did visit at the time), it is worth repeating here: [End Page 125] Catholics live in an enchanted world, a world of statues and holy water, stained glass and votive candles, saints and religious medals, rosary beads and holy pictures. But these Catholic paraphernalia are mere hints of a deeper and more pervasive religious sensibility to see the Holy lurking in Creation. . . . The Catholic Imagination in all its many manifestations . . . tends to emphasize the metaphorical nature of creation. . . . Everything in creation, from the exploding cosmos to the whirling, dancing, and utterly mysterious quantum particles discloses something about God and, in so doing, brings God among us. Greeley’s argument, Bolton notes, was derived from an earlier argument developed by the theologian David Tracy,5 and indeed Tracy contributed his own essay to the exhibition catalogue.6 Despite the fact that this very explicit acknowledgement of Andrew Greeley’s work was (literally) built into the exhibition, the exhibition and...

Latino Catholics and Parish Boundaries: Notes from Chicagolandia

Latino Catholics and Parish Boundaries:Notes from Chicagolandia Deborah E. Kanter14 Parish Boundaries offers an engrossing, magisterial account of U.S. Catholic life in the twentieth century through the 1960s. In John McGreevy's capable hands, the history of parishes in Buffalo, Milwaukee, New York, Philadelphia, and elsewhere makes for a surprisingly unified narrative about the ways that "black" and "white" came to the forefront of "the Catholic imagination."15 The book, however, only sparsely considered the experience of Latinos, a group poised today to become the majority of the Catholic laity. As we reflect back on McGreevy's work, I would like to draw upon my own work to invite us to dig deeper into how Latino Catholics fit into the Parish Boundaries story. As I began to research the history of Chicago's Mexican churches, McGreevy offered an indelible lesson in how a parish meant more than a church to local people. I shifted my attention from the church building and, when visiting, I prowled the entire block, spying the rectory, school, sometimes a gym, and always a convent. With the parish as my lens into ethnic identity and community formation, I wrote Chicago Católico: Making Catholic Parishes Mexican, which argues that Mexicans who settled in Chicago were fortunate to arrive in a multi-ethnic, Catholic city.16 In the 1920s, two national parishes were established to welcome the "Spanish speaking." When subsequent waves of Mexican immigrants and their children arrived in areas like Pilsen, they took over existing parish structures (built by European immigrant predecessors) and created more refugios. In more recent decades, arrivals from Mexico, Puerto Rico, Ecuador, Guatemala, and beyond inherited a church shaped by the story that McGreevy tells, while also invigorating Catholic Chicago. Since the 1990s new Latin American devotions have emerged in the parishes, annual processions once again wind their way through city streets, and the sanctuary of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Des Plaines, northwest of the city, welcomes [End Page 14] teeming crowds of the faithful.17 At the same time, Latinos also inherited an archdiocese in contraction, weighed down by huge, aging physical infrastructure that had been built for densely populated, ethnically diverse, Catholic neighborhoods. Step back a century. As Mexicans presented a new immigrant stream in Chicago and other Midwestern cities, social workers, landlords, bishops, teaching sisters, and priests all found themselves asking where these newcomers fit. What happened when Latin Americans and their children moved into a neighborhood, testing parish boundaries as fellow Catholics who were not Black, but not perceived entirely as white either?18 McGreevy devotes two pages to the postwar Latino growth in which he summarized that Euro-Americans proved more accepting of Latinos than African Americans. Based on secondary sources, he further surmised that Mexicans were relatively accepted, while Puerto Ricans in places like New York "faced more barriers." McGreevy contended, correctly I believe, that Euro-American parishes initially had tenuous ties with Spanish-speaking newcomers.19 In my own work, I found that Euro-American laity and clergy were not necessarily hostile to the new Mexicans in the pews, but the parishes hardly welcomed the new arrivals. In time, Catholicism offered common ground between Euro-American clergy and laity and their newer Spanish-speaking counterparts.20 The desire to maintain parish structures explains Euro-Americans' willingness to live with Mexican newcomers. Priests came to understand that Mexican Catholics could become part of the parish structure. If they developed loyalties to a fading Czech or Croatian parish, if they enrolled their children at the school, if they dropped a dollar into the weekly collection, the Mexicans would enable an aging parish to keep its doors open. Even so, these new parishioners often opted to attend Mass or Holy Week liturgies at a Spanish-speaking church. Chicago Catholic Charities reported in 1955 on the recent arrival of Mexicans in the majority Slavic Pilsen neighborhood. "Mexicans are still viewed as `invaders' by the older residents . . . However, the Mexican is considered a much lesser evil [End Page 15] than the surrounding Negroes."21 In the shadows of Spanish-speaking integration often lay the specter of "Negro invasion." The history of Latino Catholics offers a...

“Like a doll …”

Abstract In the 1990s there was a growing and renewed interest on the practice of clothing images of saints after, as Richard Trexler put it, the negligence demonstrated towards it by art historians until then. In 2018, following the publication of new and unprejudiced studies about it, the presence of two dresses belonging to statues of the Virgin Mary in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination” testified to the impact clothed images had on fashion creators and, according to David Morgan, the Church’s ritual and performative life. While focusing on the miraculous image of Nossa Senhora da Lapa from Quintela, Portugal, this article aims to acknowledge the many roles played by its clothes and jewels, assessing the complexity of this phenomenon and aiming for a wider understanding of how the faithful engaged with devotional sculpture.

Nostalgia in Print and Performance, 1510–1613: Merry Worlds. Harriet Phillips. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. vii+239.

<i>Nostalgia in Print and Performance, 1510–1613: Merry Worlds</i>. Harriet Phillips. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. vii+239.

Linden Bicket, George Mackay Brown and the Scottish Catholic Imagination

Linden Bicket, <i>George Mackay Brown and the Scottish Catholic Imagination</i>

Rural Waterscape and Emotional Sectarianism in Accounts of Lough Derg, County Donegal

The story of Lough Derg in Ireland’s County Donegal is arranged around clusters of sectarian narratives in juxtaposition, synthesis and conflict. The Sanctuary of Saint Patrick sits on Station Island, a small rocky islet set within the waters of the lake. The site became well known in the early Middle Ages as the place of Saint Patrick’s delving of a cave that led to purgatory, allowing the sinner to experience a glimpse of the torments of hell while still in this life. The island then attracted pilgrims from all over Europe and became embedded into the Catholic literary and spiritual imagination. After the Protestant Ascendency and the Plantation of Ulster began in the seventeenth century, the place became a site of tension and narrative clashes between differing visions of rural place, each with its own spectrum of affect, emotions and ideals. This essay unpacks the resonances of Lough Derg as a site of sectarian narrative by 1) situating the discussion within a distinctly rural context; 2) adding the unique properties of spiritual waterscape to the discussion; and 3) discussing the Irish sectarian narratives and identities arising from the lake and its purgatorial isle. It focuses on a case study of Protestant and establishment accounts of the lake during the nineteenth century, depicting them as internally diverse as well as part of a larger ecology of sectarian contestations. It explores waterscape and its role in influencing community responses to and shaping of place, the manner in which sectarian responses to space are internally diverse, and the manner in which Catholic and Protestant narratives of place have intertwined to shape the lake in the twenty-first century.

Linden Bicket, George Mackay Brown and the Scottish Catholic Imagination

Linden Bicket, <i>George Mackay Brown and the Scottish Catholic Imagination</i>

Andrew Bolton, Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination

Andrew Bolton, <i>Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination</i>

Flooded Catholicism

Abstract In 2016 a massive rain storm flooded over 75,000 structures throughout Louisiana, contributing to the deaths of thirteen people and transforming the lives of thousands of victims. A representative of the Red Cross described the event as “the worst [natural disaster] to hit the United States since Superstorm Sandy.” Prayer during times of disaster is something to be expected. By listening to Catholics talk about praying and flooding in Louisiana, one can witness the breakdown of the Catholic Church’s theological and devotional prescriptions for prayer. The multivalence and diversity of prayer is on display in the lives and memories of those who flooded, challenging the notion that there is some kind of distinctly Catholic imagination that equips Catholics with the wherewithal to navigate the natural and supernatural tumult of something like a flood.

Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination, An Exhibition at the Met Fifth Avenue and The Met Cloisters

A visual and aural experience, the popular and grand exhibit of Heavenly Bodies envelopes its participants in sensory information at every turn. Encouraging a significant investment of time by atte...

Emma McClendon. Review of "Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination" by Andrew Bolton.

Emma McClendon. Review of "Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination" by Andrew Bolton.