Spanish American Saints and the Rhetoric of Identity, 1600-1810

Spanish American Saints and the Rhetoric of Identity, 1600-1810
Author: Ronald Jay Morgan
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2002-03
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9780816521401

"Ronald Morgan examines the collective function of the saint's Life from 1600 to the end of the colonial period, arguing that this literary form served not only to prove the protagonist's sanctity and move the faithful to veneration but also to reinforce sentiments of group pride and solidarity. When criollos praised americano saints, he explains, they also called attention to their own virtues and achievements."--BOOK JACKET.

Saints of the Americas

Saints of the Americas
Author: Arturo J. Pérez-Rodríguez
Publisher: Loyola Press
Total Pages: 315
Release: 2009-05-20
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0829430717

The strength and vigor of the Catholic Church are nowhere more visible than in North and South America, where hundreds of millions of people claim the Catholic faith. Saints of the Americas features thirty heroes of this New World faith, with representatives from fifteen countries in South America, Central America, North America, and the Caribbean. Through "conversations" between the authors and the saints, readers will be inspired by the stories of Catherine Drezel and Elizabeth Ann Seton, who built schools and hospitals in the United States; martyr Óscar Romero from El Salvador; Venezuelan physician and healer José Gregorio Hernández; Peruvian Rose of Lima, the first saint of the Americas; and others. The faith and perseverance of these martyrs and monks, laypeople and clergy, mystics and activists will encourage people today to make a lasting difference in the world.

American Catholic

American Catholic
Author: Charles Morris
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 529
Release: 2011-08-24
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0307797910

"A cracking good story with a wonderful cast of rogues, ruffians and some remarkably holy and sensible people." --Los Angeles Times Book Review Before the potato famine ravaged Ireland in the 1840s, the Roman Catholic Church was barely a thread in the American cloth. Twenty years later, New York City was home to more Irish Catholics than Dublin. Today, the United States boasts some sixty million members of the Catholic Church, which has become one of this country's most influential cultural forces. In American Catholic: The Saints and Sinners Who Built America's Most Powerful Church, Charles R. Morris recounts the rich story of the rise of the Catholic Church in America, bringing to life the personalities that transformed an urban Irish subculture into a dominant presence nationwide. Here are the stories of rogues and ruffians, heroes and martyrs--from Dorothy Day, a convert from Greenwich Village Marxism who opened shelters for thousands, to Cardinal William O'Connell, who ran the Church in Boston from a Renaissance palazzo, complete with golf course. Morris also reveals the Church's continuing struggle to come to terms with secular, pluralist America and the theological, sexual, authority, and gender issues that keep tearing it apart. As comprehensive as it is provocative, American Catholic is a tour de force, a fascinating cultural history that will engage and inform both Catholics and non-Catholics alike. "The best one-volume history of the last hundred years of American Catholicism that it has ever been my pleasure to read. What's appealing in this remarkable book is its delicate sense of balance and its soundly grounded judgments." --Andrew Greeley

Holy Friends

Holy Friends
Author: Diana M. Amadeo
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2005
Genre: Christian biography
ISBN: 9780819833846

This beautifully illustrated hardcover book gives biographies of thirty beloved saints and blesseds of the Americas. Includes glossary and index.

A Saint of Our Own

A Saint of Our Own
Author: Kathleen Sprows Cummings
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 333
Release: 2019-02-27
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1469649489

What drove U.S. Catholics in their arduous quest, full of twists and turns over more than a century, to win an American saint? The absence of American names in the canon of the saints had left many of the faithful feeling spiritually unmoored. But while canonization may be fundamentally about holiness, it is never only about holiness, reveals Kathleen Sprows Cummings in this panoramic, passionate chronicle of American sanctity. Catholics had another reason for petitioning the Vatican to acknowledge an American holy hero. A home-grown saint would serve as a mediator between heaven and earth, yes, but also between Catholicism and American culture. Throughout much of U.S. history, the making of a saint was also about the ways in which the members of a minority religious group defined, defended, and celebrated their identities as Americans. Their fascinatingly diverse causes for canonization—from Kateri Tekakwitha and Elizabeth Ann Seton to many others that are failed, forgotten, or still under way—represented evolving national values as Catholics made themselves at home. Cummings's vision of American sanctity shows just how much Catholics had at stake in cultivating devotion to men and women perched at the nexus of holiness and American history—until they finally felt little need to prove that they belonged.

Elizabeth Seton

Elizabeth Seton
Author: Catherine O'Donnell
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 750
Release: 2018-09-15
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1501726021

From socialite to saint, it was an extraordinary journey for Seton, one gracefully chronicled in Catherine O'Donnell's richly textured new biography.... A remarkable biography of a remarkable woman.― Wall Street Journal In 1975, two centuries after her birth, Pope Paul VI canonized Elizabeth Ann Seton, making her the first saint to be a native-born citizen of the United States in the Roman Catholic Church. Seton came of age in Manhattan as the city and her family struggled to rebuild themselves after the Revolution, explored both contemporary philosophy and Christianity, converted to Catholicism from her native Episcopalian faith, and built the St. Joseph’s Academy and Free School in Emmitsburg, Maryland. Hers was an exemplary early American life of struggle, ambition, questioning, and faith, and in this flowing biography, Catherine O’Donnell has given Seton her due. O’Donnell places Seton squarely in the context of the dynamic and risky years of the American and French Revolutions and their aftermath. Just as Seton’s dramatic life was studded with hardship, achievement, and grief so were the social, economic, political, and religious scenes of the Early American Republic in which she lived. O’Donnell provides the reader with a strong sense of this remarkable woman’s intelligence and compassion as she withstood her husband’s financial failures and untimely death, undertook a slow conversion to Catholicism, and struggled to reconcile her single-minded faith with her respect for others’ different choices. The fruit of her labors were the creation of a spirituality that embraced human connections as well as divine love and the American Sisters of Charity, part of an enduring global community with a specific apostolate for teaching. The trove of correspondence, journals, reflections, and community records that O’Donnell weaves together throughout Elizabeth Seton provides deep insight into her life and her world. Each source enriches our understanding of women’s friendships and choices, illuminates the relationships within the often-opaque world of early religious communities, and upends conventional wisdom about the ways Americans of different faiths competed and collaborated during the nation’s earliest years. Through her close and sympathetic reading of Seton’s letters and journals, O’Donnell reveals Seton the person and shows us how, with both pride and humility, she came to understand her own importance as Mother Seton in the years before her death in 1821.

St. Francis of America

St. Francis of America
Author: Patricia Appelbaum
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 287
Release: 2015-07-28
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1469623757

How did a thirteenth-century Italian friar become one of the best-loved saints in America? Around the nation today, St. Francis of Assisi is embraced as the patron saint of animals, beneficently presiding over hundreds of Blessing of the Animals services on October 4, St. Francis's Catholic feast day. Not only Catholics, however, but Protestants and other Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, and nonreligious Americans commonly name him as one of their favorite spiritual figures. Drawing on a dazzling array of art, music, drama, film, hymns, and prayers, Patricia Appelbaum explains what happened to make St. Francis so familiar and meaningful to so many Americans. Appelbaum traces popular depictions and interpretations of St. Francis from the time when non-Catholic Americans "discovered" him in the nineteenth century to the present. From poet to activist, 1960s hippie to twenty-first-century messenger to Islam, St. Francis has been envisioned in ways that might have surprised the saint himself. Exploring how each vision of St. Francis has been shaped by its own era, Appelbaum reveals how St. Francis has played a sometimes countercultural but always aspirational role in American culture. St. Francis's American story also displays the zest with which Americans borrow, lend, and share elements of their religious lives in everyday practice.

Saints of North America

Saints of North America
Author: Vincent J. O'Malley
Publisher: Our Sunday Visitor Publishing
Total Pages: 544
Release: 2004
Genre: Christian saints
ISBN: 9781931709521

Learn more about these "local" men and women - and children -- whose examples of holiness prove that personal sanctity is possible right here, right now. The only collection of its kind, each entry includes: a fascinating biographythe places with which the person is associatedhis or her particular ministry, spirituality, and accomplishments the location of a national shrine or headquarters established by those devoted to the saint Help your faith come alive as you discover more about your "neighbors" who lived the Faith heroically

American Saint

American Saint
Author: Joan Barthel
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 386
Release: 2014-03-04
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1250037158

“A fascinating biography” of Elizabeth Seton, who shocked high society by converting to Catholicism—a faith that was illegal in New York when she was born (Booklist). In this riveting biography of the first American saint, Joan Barthel tells the mesmerizing story of a woman whose life encompassed wealth and poverty, passion and sorrow, love and loss. Elizabeth was born into a prominent New York City family in 1774—when Catholicism was illegal and priests in the city were arrested, and sometimes hanged. Her father was the chief health officer for the Port of New York, and she lived down the block from Alexander Hamilton. She danced at George Washington’s sixty-fifth Birthday Ball in cream slippers, monogrammed. When Elizabeth and her husband sailed to Italy in a doomed attempt to cure his tuberculosis, she and her family were quarantined in a damp dungeon. And when, after she was widowed, Elizabeth became a Catholic, she was so scorned that people talked of burning down her house. American Saint is the inspiring story of a brave woman who forged the way for other women who followed and who made a name for herself in a world entirely ruled by men. Founder of the Sisters of Charity, she resisted male clerical control of her religious order—and she also started America’s first Catholic school, laying the foundation of an educational system that would help countless children thrive in a new nation. “Compelling . . . an exquisite story of Seton’s inspiring life. . . . Readers interested in Catholic history and U.S. history should not overlook this important biography.” —Publishers Weekly “Barthel is a fine and insightful observer of this larger-than-life woman who was so far ahead two hundred years ago that we’re still catching up with her.” —Gloria Steinem Includes a foreword by Maya Angelou