The Death and Afterlife of the North American Martyrs

The Death and Afterlife of the North American Martyrs
Author: Emma Anderson
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 411
Release: 2013-11-18
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0674727177

In the 1640s--a decade of epidemic and warfare across colonial North America--eight Jesuit missionaries met their deaths at the hands of native antagonists. With their collective canonization in 1930, these men, known to the devout as the North American martyrs, would become the continent's first official Catholic saints. In The Death and Afterlife of the North American Martyrs, Emma Anderson untangles the complexities of these seminal acts of violence and their ever-changing legacy across the centuries. While exploring how Jesuit missionaries perceived their terrifying final hours, the work also seeks to comprehend the motivations of the those who confronted them from the other side of the axe, musket, or caldron of boiling water, and to illuminate the experiences of those native Catholics who, though they died alongside their missionary mentors, have yet to receive comparable recognition as martyrs by the Catholic Church. In tracing the creation and evolution of the cult of the martyrs across the centuries, Anderson reveals the ways in which both believers and detractors have honored and preserved the memory of the martyrs in this "afterlife," and how their powerful story has been continually reinterpreted in the collective imagination over the centuries. As rival shrines rose to honor the martyrs on either side of the U.S.-Canadian border, these figures would both unite and deeply divide natives and non-natives, francophones and anglophones, Protestants and Catholics, Canadians and Americans, forging a legacy as controversial as it has been enduring.

Be Opened! The Catholic Church and Deaf Culture

Be Opened! The Catholic Church and Deaf Culture
Author: Lana Portolano
Publisher: Catholic University of America Press
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2020-12-09
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0813233399

Be Opened! The Catholic Church and Deaf Culture offers readers a people’s history of deafness and sign language in the Catholic Church. Paying ample attention to the vocation stories of deaf priests and pastoral workers, Portolano traces the transformation of the Deaf Catholic community from passive recipients of mercy to an active language minority making contributions in today’s globally diverse church. Background chapters familiarize readers with early misunderstandings about deaf people in the church and in broader society, along with social and religious issues facing deaf people throughout history. A series of connected narratives demonstrate the strong Catholic foundations of deaf education in sign language, including sixteenth-century monastic schools for deaf children and nineteenth-century French education in sign language as a missionary endeavor. The author explains how nineteenth-century schools for deaf children, especially those founded by orders of religious sisters, established small communities of Deaf Catholics around the globe. A series of portraits illustrates the work of pioneering missionaries in several different countries—“apostles to the Deaf”—who helped to establish and develop deaf culture in these communities through adult religious education and the sacraments in sign language. In several chapters focused on the twentieth century, the author describes key events that sparked a modern transformation in Deaf Catholic culture. As linguists began to recognize sign languages as true human languages, deaf people borrowed the practices of Civil Rights activists to gain equality both as citizens and as members of the church. At the same time, deaf people drew inspiration and cultural validation from key documents of Vatican II, and leadership of the Deaf Catholic community began to come from the deaf community rather than to it through missionaries. Many challenges remain, but this book clearly presents Deaf Catholic culture as an important and highly visible embodiment of Catholic heritage.

Jesuits in the North American Colonies and the United States

Jesuits in the North American Colonies and the United States
Author: Catherine O'Donnell
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 118
Release: 2020-04-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004433171

From Eusebio Kino to Daniel Berrigan, and from colonial New England to contemporary Seattle, Jesuits have built and disrupted institutions in ways that have fundamentally shaped the Catholic Church and American society. As Catherine O’Donnell demonstrates, Jesuits in French, Spanish, and British colonies were both evangelists and agents of empire. John Carroll envisioned an American church integrated with Protestant neighbors during the early years of the republic; nineteenth-century Jesuits, many of them immigrants, rejected Carroll’s ethos and created a distinct Catholic infrastructure of schools, colleges, and allegiances. The twentieth century involved Jesuits first in American war efforts and papal critiques of modernity, and then (in accord with the leadership of John Courtney Murray and Pedro Arrupe) in a rethinking of their relationship to modernity, to other faiths, and to earthly injustice. O’Donnell’s narrative concludes with a brief discussion of Jesuits’ declining numbers, as well as their response to their slaveholding past and involvement in clerical sexual abuse.

Founding Father

Founding Father
Author: Michael F. Lombardo
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 375
Release: 2017-03-27
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9004304525

In Founding Father, Michael F. Lombardo provides the first critical biography of John J. Wynne, S.J. (1859-1948). One of the most prominent American Catholic intellectuals of the early twentieth century, Wynne was founding editor of the Catholic Encyclopedia (1907) and the Jesuit periodical America (1909), and served as vice-postulator for the canonization causes of the first American saints (the Jesuit Martyrs of North America) and Kateri Tekakwitha. Lombardo uses theological inculturation to explore the ways in which Wynne used his publications to negotiate American Catholic citizenship during the Progressive Era. He concludes that Wynne’s legacy was part of a flowering of early-twentieth century American Catholic intellectual thought that made him a key forerunner to the mid-century Catholic Revival.

Continental Ambitions

Continental Ambitions
Author: Kevin Starr
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Total Pages: 1213
Release: 2016-10-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 1681497360

Kevin Starr has achieved a fast-paced evocation of three Roman Catholic civilizations Spain, France, and Recusant England as they explored, evangelized, and settled the North American continent. This book represents the first time this story has been told in one volume. Showing the same narrative verve of Starr's award-winning Americans and the California Dream series, this riveting but sometimes painful history should reach a wide readership. Starr begins this work with the exploration and temporary settlement of North America by recently Christianized Scandinavians. He continues with the destruction of Caribbean peoples by New Spain, the struggle against this tragedy by the great Dominican Bartolom矤e Las Casas, the Jesuit and Franciscan exploration and settlement of the Spanish Borderlands (Florida, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Baja, and Alta California), and the strengths and weaknesses of the mission system. He then turns his attention to New France with its highly developed Catholic and Counter-Reformational cultures of Quebec and Montreal, its encounters with Native American peoples, and its advance southward to New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico. The volume ends with the founding of Maryland as a proprietary colony for Roman Catholic Recusants and Anglicans alike, the rise of Philadelphia and southern Pennsylvania as centers of Catholic life, the Suppression of the Jesuits in 1773, and the return of John Carroll to Maryland the following year. Starr dramatizes the representative personalities and events that illustrate the triumphs and the tragedies, the achievements and the failures, of each of these societies in their explorations, treatment of Native Americans, and translations of religious and social value to new and challenging environments. His history is notable for its honesty and its synoptic success in comparing and contrasting three disparate civilizations, albeit each of them Catholic, with three similar and differing approaches to expansion in the New World.

American Catholics

American Catholics
Author: Leslie Woodcock Tentler
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 417
Release: 2020-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0300219644

A sweeping history of American Catholicism from the arrival of the first Spanish missionaries to the present "Tentler does justice to James Joyce's quip that Catholicism means 'here comes everybody.' This is the story of everybody--lay people, sisters, priests--who was part of the church in the United States, a story insightfully analyzed and admirably told. A definitive synthesis." --James M. O'Toole, author of The Faithful This comprehensive survey of Catholic history in what became the United States spans nearly five hundred years, from the arrival of the first Spanish missionaries to the present. Distinguished historian Leslie Tentler explores lay religious practice and the impact of clergy on Catholic life and culture as she seeks to answer the question, What did it mean to be a "good Catholic" at particular times and in particular places? In its focus on Catholics' participation in American politics and Catholic intellectual life, this book includes in-depth discussions of Catholics, race, and the Civil War; Catholics and public life in the twentieth century; and Catholic education and intellectual life. Shedding light on topics of recent interest such as the role of Catholic women in parish and community life, Catholic reproductive ethics regarding birth control, and the Catholic church sex-abuse crisis, this engaging history provides an up-to-date account of the history of American Catholicism.

The Possession of Barbe Hallay

The Possession of Barbe Hallay
Author: Mairi Cowan
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2022-10-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0228014999

When strange signs appeared in the sky over Québec during the autumn of 1660, people began to worry about evil forces in their midst. They feared that witches and magicians had arrived in the colony, and a teenaged servant named Barbe Hallay started to act as if she were possessed. The community tried to make sense of what was happening, and why. Priests and nuns performed rituals to drive the demons away, while the bishop and the governor argued about how to investigate their suspicions of witchcraft. A local miller named Daniel Vuil, accused of using his knowledge of the dark arts to torment Hallay, was imprisoned and then executed. Stories of the demonic infestation circulated through the small settlement on the St Lawrence River for several years. In The Possession of Barbe Hallay Mairi Cowan revisits these stories to understand the everyday experiences and deep anxieties of people in New France. Her findings offer insight into beliefs about demonology and witchcraft, the limits of acceptable adolescent behaviour, the dissonance between a Catholic colony in theory and the church’s wavering influence in practice, the contested authority accorded to women as healers, and the insecurities of the colonial project. As the people living through the events knew at the time, and as this study reveals, New France was in a precarious position. The Possession of Barbe Hallay is both a fascinating account of a case of demonic possession and an accessible introduction to social and religious history in early modern North America.

The Imperial Church

The Imperial Church
Author: Katherine D. Moran
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2020-05-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1501748831

Through a fascinating discussion of religion's role in the rhetoric of American civilizing empire, The Imperial Church undertakes an exploration of how Catholic mission histories served as a useful reference for Americans narrating US settler colonialism on the North American continent and seeking to extend military, political, and cultural power around the world. Katherine D. Moran traces historical celebrations of Catholic missionary histories in the upper Midwest, Southern California, and the US colonial Philippines to demonstrate the improbable centrality of the Catholic missions to ostensibly Protestant imperial endeavors. Moran shows that, as the United States built its continental and global dominion and an empire of production and commerce in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Protestant and Catholic Americans began to celebrate Catholic imperial pasts. She demonstrates that American Protestants joined their Catholic compatriots in speaking with admiration about historical Catholic missionaries: the Jesuit Jacques Marquette in the Midwest, the Franciscan Junípero Serra in Southern California, and the Spanish friars in the Philippines. Comparing them favorably to the Puritans, Pilgrims, and the American Revolutionary generation, commemorators drew these missionaries into a cross-confessional pantheon of US national and imperial founding fathers. In the process, they cast Catholic missionaries as gentle and effective agents of conquest, uplift, and economic growth, arguing that they could serve as both origins and models for an American civilizing empire. The Imperial Church connects Catholic history and the history of US empire by demonstrating that the religious dimensions of American imperial rhetoric have been as cross-confessional as the imperial nation itself.

Old English Lives of Saints

Old English Lives of Saints
Author: Aelfric
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2019
Genre: Christian literature, English (Old)
ISBN: 9780674241299

Old English Lives of Saints, a series composed in the 990s by the Benedictine monk Aelfric, portrays an array of saints--including virgin martyrs, kings, soldiers, and bishops--whose examples modeled courageous faith, self-sacrifice, and individual and collective resistance at a turbulent time when England was under severe Viking attack.

Black Saint of the Americas

Black Saint of the Americas
Author: Celia Cussen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2014-10-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107729424

In May 1962, as the struggle for civil rights heated up in the United States and leaders of the Catholic Church prepared to meet for Vatican Council II, Pope John XXIII named the first black saint of the Americas, the Peruvian Martín de Porres (1579–1639), and designated him the patron of racial justice. The son of a Spanish father and a former slavewoman from Panamá, Martín served a lifetime as the barber and nurse at the great Dominican monastery in Lima. This book draws on visual representations of Martín and the testimony of his contemporaries to produce the first biography of this pious and industrious black man from the cosmopolitan capital of the Viceroyalty of Peru. The book vividly chronicles the evolving interpretations of his legend and his miracles, and traces the centuries-long campaign to formally proclaim Martín de Porres a hero of universal Catholicism.