We often think about Catholic spaces as those linked to institutional sites that support formal ritual: churches, convents, shrines. This panel disrupts expectations by examining Catholicism in the action-oriented practices of hunting and farming, dancing, exercising, and waging war. In so doing, we reexamine the emergence of new sites of sanctification and political contestation. Papers on this panel: Reconsider how natural environs are made more Catholic by nineteenth-century indigenous practices of hunting and farming; reconfigure the dance club as a site wherein the queer dead contest Catholic political theology; posit the gym as a site wherein masculinist Catholic norms are shaped by weight-lifting; and, remap the war-torn European front by examining how American Catholics' purchasing of "Mass kits" put them "at the front" in a different kind of imagined community.
Through the lens of two Indigenous-Catholic holy sites in the North American West, this paper focuses on changing lifeways, contested spaces, and religious power. The first site, Lac Ste. Anne, is located in the land currently-known as Alberta, Canada. It is a lake known for its healing water. The second site, el Santuario de Chimayó, is located in the land currently-known as New Mexico, United States. It is a church renown for healing dirt.
Examining these two case studies brings into focus the role nineteenth-century Catholicism played in establishing new social conditions and reshaping the physical environment at Indigenous holy places in the North American West. French and Spanish missionaries and colonists disrupted Indigenous lifeways: bison hunting at Lac Ste. Anne and farming at el Santuario de Chimayó. These Catholic missionaries and colonists used religious, linguistic, social, economic, and military power to Catholicize the landscape and local Indigenous Peoples.
This paper looks at the politics of mourning on the part of religious and political leaders in the aftermath of anti-LGBTQ hate crimes and shootings, and how Catholic religious leaders' reluctant mourning of queer death but refusal to support queer livelihood are a reflection of recent changes in the rhetoric of Catholic moral theology on sexuality. Faced with this reality in which queer death "matters" more than queer life (but barely so), queer theology and practical politics, I argue, must embrace the agential and sexual presence of the dead as a form of counter-remembering against those forms of commemoration that effectively neuters/desexualizes the queer dead. This paper, drawing from hauntological theology and queer theory, explores the beginning of this queer political theology, where the queer dead continues to desire and dance among us.
Over the last twenty years, fitness culture has gained prominence in American Catholic male culture. Whereas bodybuilding and fitness culture was once considered a purely secular (and even sinfully vain) concern, today, body builders lead major Catholic organizations and Catholic self-help programs recommend weightlifting to their male audiences. In this paper, I examine the relationship between physical exercise and asceticism in contemporary masculine Catholic culture by analyzing interviews, blog posts, and publications from the Catholic organizations Word on Fire and Exodus 90. Specifically, I argue that these organizations draw on ascetic discourse to adapt fitness culture to Catholic norms of masculinity. This turn to asceticism serves to stabilize normative contradictions within fitness culture discourse, while simultaneously opening up Catholic fitness masculinity to new avenues of immanent critique.
This paper examines the supply of portable Mass kits to priests in the U.S. military during World War I, analyzing the intersection of civilians, soldiers, and religion through the literal business of devotional objects. Through study of surviving Mass kits, commission letters, receipts, and transaction documents, it argues that the materiality of devotion was a bustling economy that relied on a network of artisans and suppliers, as well as advertisement and marketing strategies to appeal to the "consumer": the Catholic public who purchased items for priests abroad.