Between Heaven and Earth

The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them

Robert A. Orsi

• Editorial: Princeton University Press
• Año: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781400849659
• Categoría: Theology & Religion
• Categoría: Christian Denominations

Between Heaven and Earth explores the relationships men, women, and children have formed with the Virgin Mary and the saints in twentieth-century American Catholic history, and reflects, more broadly, on how people live in the company of sacred figures and how these relationships shape the ties between people on earth. In this boldly argued and beautifully written book, Robert Orsi also considers how scholars of religion occupy the ground in between belief and analysis, faith and scholarship.
Orsi infuses his analysis with an autobiographical voice steeped in his own Italian-American Catholic background--from the devotion of his uncle Sal, who had cerebral palsy, to a "crippled saint, " Margaret of Castello; to the bond of his Tuscan grandmother with Saint Gemma Galgani.
Religion exists not as a medium of making meanings, Orsi maintains, but as a network of relationships between heaven and earth involving people of all ages as well as the many sacred figures they hold dear. Orsi argues that modern academic theorizing about religion has long sanctioned dubious distinctions between "good" or "real" religious expression on the one hand and "bad" or "bogus" religion on the other, which marginalize these everyday relationships with sacred figures.
This book is a brilliant critical inquiry into the lives that people make, for better or worse, between heaven and earth, and into the ways scholars of religion could better study of these worlds.

Chapter One

“MILDRED, IS IT FUN TO BE A CRIPPLE?” THE CULTURE OF SUFFERING IN MID-TWENTIETH CENTURY AMERICAN CATHOLICISM

A shut-in should let people know he is the same as other people and not from another planet.

Sal Cavallaro, “A Shut-in’s Day”

To be a handicap does not mean that you are sick or mentally retarded. A handicap can have a full, healthy, happy life, just like their fellow human beings. There is no need for them to be put or live in the back room.

Sal Cavallaro, “Who Is Handicapped[?]”

ON THE FIRST SATURDAY of every month in the 1960s my uncle Sally, who has cerebral palsy, used to go to a different parish in New York City or its suburbs for Mass and devotions in honor of Our Lady of Fatima and then afterwards to a Communion breakfast sponsored by that month’s host church. These special outings for “shutins” and “cripples”¹ were organized by the Blue Army of Mary, an association of men and women dedicated to spreading the messages of apocalyptic anti-Communism and personal repentance delivered by Mary at Fatima in 1917.² My uncle would be waiting for my father and me in the hallway of his mother’s apartment, dressed in a jacket and tie and smoking cigarettes in a long, imitation tortoiseshell holder that my grandmother fitted between the knotted fingers of his left hand. He smoked by holding his forearm stiff on the green leatherette armrest of his wheelchair, then bending his torso forward and bringing his legs up until his lips reached the burning cigarette. He was always afraid that my father wouldn’t show up, and as his anxiety mounted, my uncle clenched again and again over his cigarettes so that by the time we got there—always early—the foyer was dense with smoke.

We laid Sally down on his back on the front seat of the car. My grandmother, in an uncharacteristic moment of hope and trust, had taken my uncle as a boy to a mysterious doctor on the Lower East Side who said he could make him walk. Instead, he had locked Sally’s legs at the knees, sticking straight out in front of him, fusing him into a ninety-degree angle, and then had vanished. Sally reached back, hooked his right wrist into the steering wheel, and pulled himself in while we pushed. When he was in the car up to his legs, my father leaned in over him and drew him up. He angled my uncle’s stiff limbs under the dashboard and wedged them in.

My father went around the car and dropped in the other side. He looked over at his brother-in-law, the two of them sweating and panting. “Okay?” he asked. My uncle nodded back.

We drove to a designated meeting place, usually another church’s parking lot, where members of the Blue Army, wearing sky-blue armbands printed with an image of the Virgin of Fatima and the legend “Legion of Mary,” helped us pull my uncle out of the car. Other cripples were arriving. The members of the Blue Army knew who wanted to sit next to each other, and they wheeled my uncle’s friends over to him, locking them in place beside him. He greeted them solemnly, not saying very much. From here a big yellow school bus would take the cripples out to the church; we’d follow in the car. My uncle was anxious to get going.

The wheelers teased him in loud voices whenever they brought a woman over. “Here’s your girlfriend!” they shouted. “I saw her talking to So-and-So yesterday! Aren’t you jealous?! You’re gonna lose this beautiful girl! Come on, Sal, wake up.” They pounded my uncle on the back. “Don’t you know a good thing when you got it?” Their voices and gestures were exaggerated, as if they were speaking to someone who couldn’t understand their language.

The women rolled their heads back and laughed with bright, moaning sounds, while their mothers fussed at their open mouths with little embroidered handkerchiefs, dabbing at saliva. “Calm down, calm down,” they admonished their daughters, “don’t get so excited.”

My uncle laughed too, but he always looked over at me and shook his head.

There was a statue of San Rocco on a side altar of the Franciscan church of my childhood. The saint’s body was covered with open, purple sores; tending to the bodies of plague victims, he had been infected himself. A small dog licked the open sores on his hands. The Franciscans told us that Saint Francis kissed a leper’s sores. Once he drank the water he had just used to bathe a leper.

One woman, a regular of the First Saturday outings, came on a stretcher covered with clean sheets in pale, pastel colors; her body was immobile. She twisted her eyes up and looked out at us through a mirror fixed to the side of the stretcher, while her mother tugged at her dress to make sure it stayed down around her thin ankles.

These were special people, God’s children, chosen by him for a special destiny. Innocent victims, cheerful sufferers, God’s most beloved—this was the litany of the handicapped on these First Saturdays. Finding themselves in front of an unusual congregation, priests were moved to say from the pulpit at mass that the prayers of cripples were more powerful than anyone else’s because God listened most attentively to these, his special children. Nuns circulated among the cripples, touching their limbs kindly and reverently, telling them how blessed they were, and how wonderful. To be standing these mornings in a parking lot or church basement was to be on ground made holy by the presence of beds and wheelchairs and twisted bodies.

At breakfast, the mothers of the cripples hovered over them. They held plastic straws, bent in the middle like my uncle, while their children drank coffee or juice; they cut Danishes into bite-sized pieces; they cleaned up spills. Volunteers from the parish and members of the Blue Army brought out plates of eggs and sausage.

“You have such a big appetite this morning!”

“Can you eat all that? God bless you!”

“If I ate like you I’d be even fatter than I am!”

But why had God done this to his most beloved children? What kind of love was this? What kind of God?

When he was done with his coffee, my uncle cupped himself around his cigarette.

Physical distress of all sorts, from conditions like cerebral palsy to the unexpected agonies of accidents and illness, was understood by American Catholics in the middle years of the last century as an individual’s main opportunity for spiritual growth.³ Pain purged and disciplined the ego, stripping it of pride and self-love; it disclosed the emptiness of the world. Without it, human beings remained pagans; in physical distress, they might find their way back to the Church, and to sanctity. “Suffering makes saints,” one hospital chaplain told his congregation of sick people, “of many who in health were indifferent to the practices of their holy religion.”⁴ Pain was a ladder to heaven. The saints were unhappy unless they were in physical distress of some sort. Catholic nurses were encouraged to watch for opportunities on their rounds to help lapsed Catholics renew their faith and even to convert non-Catholics in the promising circumstances of physical distress.⁵

Pain was always the thoughtful prescription of the Divine Physician. The cancer afflicting Thomas Dooley, the handsome young doctor and missionary to Southeast Asia in the 1950s who completely captured American Catholic hearts, was celebrated in Catholic popular culture as a grace, a mark of divine favor. Dooley himself wrote, “God has been good to me. He has given me the most hideous, painful cancer at an extremely young age.”⁶ So central was pain to the American Catholic ethos that devotional writers sometimes went as far as to equate it with life itself—“The good days are a respite,” declared a laywoman writing in a devotional magazine in 1950, “granted to us so that we can endure the bad days.”⁷

Catholics thrilled to describe the body in pain. Devotional prose was generally overwrought, but on this subject it exceeded itself. There was an excess of a certain kind of sensuous detail in Catholic accounts of pain and suffering, a delicious lingering over and savoring of other people’s pain. A dying man is presented in a story in a 1937 issue of the devotional magazine Ave Maria as having “lain [for twenty-one years] on the broad of his back, suffering from arthritis … his hands and fingers so distorted that he could not raise them more than an inch … his teeth set … so physically handicapped that in summer he could not brush away a fly or mosquito from his face because of his condition.” It was never enough in this aesthetic to say simply “cancer,” stark as that word is. Instead, it had to be the “cancer that is all pain.”⁸ Wounds always “throbbed,” suffering was always “untold,” pain invariably took its victims to the very limits of endurance.

The body-in-pain was thrilling. Flushed, feverish, and beautiful—“The sick room is rather a unique beauty shop,” one priest mused, where “pain has worked more wonders than cosmetics”⁹—it awaited its lover. A woman visiting a Catholic hospital in 1929 came upon a little Protestant girl who was dying and reported:

He has set His mark upon her. Somehow you guess; those frail little shoulders are shaped for a cross, those eyes are amber chalices deep enough for pain, that grave little courteous heart is big enough to hold Him! He will yet be her tremendous lover, drawing her gently into His white embrace, bestowing on her the sparkling, priceless pledge of His love—suffering.¹⁰

Pain had the character of a sacrament, offering the sufferer a uniquely immediate and intimate experience of Jesus’ presence.¹¹ Walking amid the “couches of pain” laid out for the sunset service at Lourdes, an American visitor suddenly sensed that “he is here now…. Almost I can hear him speak,—almost I can reach out and touch his garment.” Another writer reported that she knew “a very holy nun who is herself one of God’s chosen ones” (meaning that she is afflicted with the most severe pain), “and one day she said something to me that I have never forgotten. She said, ‘Sometimes God’s hand seems to rest so heavily upon our shoulder, and we try to squirm away, and we cry, Oh, let me be! And then we begin to realize how tender as well as how heavy is His hand, and we want it there.’ ”¹²

This was a darkly erotic aesthetic of pain, one expression of the wider romanticism of American Catholicism in this period.¹³ But for all this culture’s fascination with physical distress, the sensual pleasure it took in feverish descriptions of suffering, it was also deeply resentful and suspicious of sick persons. A nasty edge of retribution and revenge is evident in these accounts. In one priest’s typical cautionary tale of pain, “a young woman of Dallas, Texas, a scandal to her friends for having given up her faith because it interfered with her sinful life, was severely burned in an explosion. Before her death, through the grace of God, she returned to the Church.”¹⁴ According to a nursing sister, writing in the leading American Catholic journal for hospital professionals, Hospital Progress, in 1952: “Physical disability wears off the veneer of sophistication and forces the acceptance of reality. It is difficult for a patient imprisoned for weeks in a traction apparatus to live in a state of illusion.”¹⁵ Pain gives people their comeuppance. It serves as chastisement and judgment.

The Catholic tradition was ambivalent about the moral status of the sick. Despite constant injunctions to the contrary, a persistent identification was made between sickness and sin—not only sin in general or Original Sin, but the specific sinfulness of the person in pain—and the suspicion of all physical suffering as merited was never completely absent from devotional culture.¹⁶ “You may complain and moan about a single toothache,” Father Boniface Buckley chided the readers of Sign in 1945, but be “woefully forgetful of the fact that this particular pain may be due in justice for some sin of that very day.”¹⁷ God always has a reason for sending pain. Theology’s restraint is evident here in Father Buckley’s use of the conditional. More commonly, devotional writers threw such cautions to the winds in order to score some moral points with pain. Learn to take your pain the way a man takes his hangover, another priest scolded, and admit that “you asked for it.”¹⁸

The association between physical sickness and moral corruption was reinforced throughout American Catholic popular literature by the persistent use of metaphors of illness to describe threats to the social fabric and sources of political and moral decay. As the editor of Ave Maria put it, aphoristically, in 1932, “Error is due to thought germs,” against which only mental and moral hygiene is an effective prophylactic.¹⁹ Another writer even suggested that to visit the sick was to “stand by the bedside of our soul-sick world.”²⁰ The persistent metaphorical use of leprosy to excoriate various moral dangers was so egregious in the Catholic press that missionaries among sufferers of Hansen’s disease regularly complained of the effect this usage was having on the people in their care.²¹ This was not an unusual rhetorical device, of course, but it achieved its own peculiar, disorienting resonance in Catholic devotionalism, where images of the body-in-pain were used to suggest both the depths of corruption and the highest reaches of spiritual glory. In the case of the leper, the two discrepant usages converged: the leper was at once physically—and morally—scrofulous and (potentially) sacred.²²

As American Catholics interpreted an ancient tradition in their contemporary circumstances, the idea that sickness was punishment for something the sufferer had done took deeper hold. The more sentimental view of sickness as the training ground for saintliness was commonly reserved for people with genetic or birth trauma conditions, such as Sal and his friends. Their suffering, at least, could not be attributed to any moral failure since they were born this way. The innocence of people born with disabilities made them central to the elaboration of the gothic romance of suffering; because they were “innocent,” unalloyed spiritual pleasure could be taken in the brokenness of their bodies. There was a cult of the “shut-in” among American Catholics in the middle years of the twentieth century, a fascination with “cripples” and a desire to be in some relation to them, which was thought to carry spiritual advantages. In the summer of 1939, Catholic Women’s World, one of the most modern and upbeat of the Catholic magazines, set up a pen-pal system so that readers going away on vacation could write to shut-ins about their trips. The project was so popular that “many readers have written to us requesting that we put them in touch not only with one, but as many as three or four shutins.”²³ There were a number of organizations dedicated to harnessing the spiritual power of shut-ins and putting it to work for the rest of the church, such as the Catholic Union of the Sick in America (CUSA), which formed small cells of isolated handicapped persons who communicated through a round-robin letter and whose assignment was to direct their petitions, more powerful by virtue of their pain, toward some specific social good.²⁴ The spiritual pleasure taken by the volunteers on the First Saturdays in their proximity to the handicapped was a reflection of this cult as well.

But the mistrust of the sick, the suspicion that their physical distress was the manifestation of a moral failing, lurked just below the surface of even the fantasy of the holy cripple. The eleventh-century “cripple” Hermann, who composed the Marian hymn “Salve Regina,” is described in one article as having been “pleasant, friendly, always laughing, never criticizing, so that everybody loved him.” Concluding, “What a record for a cripple!” the ...