Marian Devotionalism Ibero-Mediterranean Polity

The Evolution of Marian Devotionalism within Christianity and the Ibero-Mediterranean Polity Author(s): Anthony M.
Stevens-Arroyo Source: Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Vol. 37, No. 1 (Mar., 1998), pp. 50-73 Published by: Wiley on behalf of Society for the Scientific Study of Religion Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1388029 . Accessed: 10/09/2013 21:00
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The Evolution of Marian Devotionalism within Christianity and the Ibero-Mediterranean Polity
t ANTHONYM. STEVENS-ARROYO
This article offers a sociohistoricaldescriptionof the evolution of Mariandevotionafter the sixteenthcenturyrift in Christianitythat generatedtoday'sCatholicismand Protestantism.Theanalysis departsfrom
the premise that there were two reformations, each responding to separate socioeconomic conditions. In order
to analyze the evolutionof Marian devotion,I utilize what I call "materialtheology'in orderto measure the mediationof formal theologyand popular religion.I show that the printedprayers, books,pictures,statues, to the and medalsproducedto accompanyMarian devotionalso projectedspecificnotions that corresponded lbero-Mediterranean polity of the sixteenth through the first half of the eighteenth century. Utilizing the notion of a 'baroquementalitgthe ethos of the age is exploredfor examplesof how theologyand popular culture intersected.I emphasizethat Mariandevotionbroughtuniversalismto Catholicism,whichcontrasts with the Eurocentrismof Protestantismat the time. The use of Maryas a symbolof universalCatholicbelief was matchedwith an emphasis uponher appearanceand/or miracles in specificlocations,especially those in the colonies at the outer reachesof the lbero-Mediterranean polity. Although this baroquementalite was supersededby other trends within Catholicismtowardthe nineteenthcentury,I concludethat new terminology less dependenton conceptsderivedfrom Weber and Durkheimmay be requiredto understandCatholicism of this period and the Marian devotionwhich animated it.
INTRODUCTION
For at least five hundred years, theology has entered the realm of popular Catholicism through sodalities, confraternities, and other voluntary associations for the Catholic laity. The members of such groups are taught some theology and rules of piety by their sponsors in the clergy, religious orders, and congregations.1 But even Catholics who never join such groups encounter the popularized theology of devotions while seeking the sacraments, humanitarian services at hospitals, and Catholic education in schools. The institutions and people providing such services often distribute material objects of devotion like books, medals, statues, and holy pictures to reinforce their spiritual ministry. As demonstrated in recent and valuable work on the materiality of religion (e.g., Taves 1986; McDannell 1995), the material items of devotion become symbols of religious conviction. For instance, Catholics sometimes claim that a picture or statue received at a time of crisis shapes their personal faith. While the process includes major elements of popular religiosity in the production and diffusion of devotional paraphernalia, ecclesiastical guidance is also present, channeling the flood of religious fervor into an acceptable course. This reciprocal relationship between popular religiosity and clerical approval is the backbone of 'devotionalism," taken here to represent the blending of popular piety with theological orthodoxy.It is a special feature of devotionalism within Catholicism that it is not limited to individuals but also has a strong communal componentthat grounds social and cultural identities (Diaz-Stevens 1995).
t AnthonyM. Stevens-Arroyo i8 president of the Programfor the Analysis of Religion among Latinas/os, PARAL,and also Professorof PuertoRican Studies at BrooklynCollege,CUNY,Brooklyn,NY 11210.
Email: stevens3@belkztlantic.net. 0 Journal for the Scientific Studly of Religion, 1998, 37(1): 50-73
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The Blessed Virgin Mary has frequently been the focus of this complex process involving both individuals and whole communities. Devotionalism engages client petition, intercession with God, and thanksgiving for favors received, all within carefully defined and ecclesiastically approved parameters. But why does Catholicism celebrate Marian devotionalism? Theology has its reasons, of course, but one can also find scientific explanations that vary from the sentimentally insightful (Greeley 1977) to the narrowlypsychological(Carroll 1986). The sociohistorical interpretation I offer here is intended to supplement rather than contradict the contributions from other approaches. Admittedly, because Marian devotionalism has been created by a dynamic interplay of popular religion, theologicalbelief, ecclesiastical interests and cultural expression, it is dificult to study. Current academic convention assigns analysis of the constituent parts of the devotional process to different disciplines: for example, popular religion is studied by anthropology,while doctrine is analyzed by theology. I propose here to join social science and theology in a cross-disciplinary methodology.I think this can be done by considering devotionalism as "materialtheology."I construct this approach on the premise that the paraphemalia of devotions mediate contact between formal theology and popular religiosity, thus creating devotionalism, which is and has been an instrument of religious education in matters of belief. Using measures of frequency and distribution for religious articles affords an empirical verification for the importance of any theological statement because every devotion is a popularized expression of some theological truth: lex orandi, lex credendi. Material theology measures dogma in social science terms if one applies the following premise: The importanceof a theologicalstatement can be measured by the extent of its reproductionin material religion. I have used "theological statement" rather than "faith"or "Christianity,"because theology is a human product, much as philosophy, art, and literature. It proceeds from the literate segments of society, expressing elite control of social institutions, but is itself influenced and limited by popular faith and culture, social and political forces. In my methodological premise, "theologicalstatement"correspondsto the sociohistoricalnotion of "system," while "social and material religion"includes 1) forms of religious art, 2) organizations, and 3) devotional practices (popularreligion).2 In this article, I will examine Marian devotionalism as a sort of test run for this methodologyof material theology. Even with the limitation imposed by data from secondary sources and from studies not entirely focused by my approach, I hope to suggest that there is value to this perspective, especially in the study of Catholicism. Christian Devotion to Mary Derived from a scriptural base in the Gospels and enhanced by orthodox beliefs articulated during the christological heresies of the fourth century, Mary's role as eEOTOKO [Mother of God] was a characteristic of Mediterranean Christianity. Some have viewed Marian devotionalism merely as a vehicle wherein Christianity assimilated the feminine aspects of divinity that were parts of preconversionreligious systems (Benko 1993; Hamington 1995: 11-15 passim). But if that is part of the genesis of Marian devotionalism, it does not exhaust the vitality of this aspect of Christian experience. I would call attention to the ways in which Mary's intercessory role evolved by mirroring aspects of the social structure. In feudal Western Europe, for instance, she was invoked under the title "Our Lady," as mediator between Christ (as King) and the believer (as vassal). After nearly a millennium and a half, the special role of Mary was so deeply rooted in European Christianity that Luther, Calvin, Henry VIII of England in the sixteenth century (and Wesley in the eighteenth) did not deny the doctrine of the Virgin Birth. One scholar suggests that Henrs daughter, Elizabeth I, adopted the ttle of "VirginQueen"because it resonated with popular devotion and widened her own popularity (Hackett 1995). But
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despite common Christian roots, the Protestant and Catholic devotional practices took different paths during the sixteenth century, with Catholicism expanding Marian devotionalism and much of Protestantism abandoning most of Christianity's thousand-year old Marian legacy. I share the premise that after Luther, Christianity underwent two reformations, one Protestant and the other Catholic, each adapting the Christian religion to changing social conditions (Delumeau 1971/1977: 1, 228 ff.). In order to sustain this sociohistorical perspective, religion needs to be viewed in the context of the interaction or 'affinity' of theology and social forces. Much as Weber and Troeltsch studied Protestantism as a reflection of ethos in Western Capitalist countries, these affinities within the Catholic Reformationcan best be understoodby analysis of the Mediterraneanpolity, beginning with Philip II of Spain (1556-1598) and ending with the ascension of Charles III in 1759. In this essay, I shall trace the route of Catholic Marian devotionalism by summarizing several representative studies of Catholicism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, using them like case studies to establish a general pattern that follows Delumeau, and in some cases, improves upon his sociohistoricalapproachto the study of religion.3 The Questionof Polity Braudel's classic study (1949/1973) demonstrated that the Mediterraneanpolity in the era of Philip II of Spain was different from the Northern European context in which the Protestant Reformation developed. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Spain was the center of an empire extending from Flanders in the north to Italy and the Mediterraneanon the south and across the Atlantic to America, Mexico, Peru, and as far as the Philippines, Japan, China, and India. Under the Hapsburgs, the Spanish state became a sort of confederacy of ethnic republics linked together, among other things, by imperial might, access to transatlantic wealth and identification with Catholicism (Lynch 1984; Rodriguez-Salgado1988). The republics allowed ethnic groups4to speak native languages, observe traditional customs in civic and legal maters such as inheritance, and establish local cabildos that selected sheriffs and mayors. The Catalan language, for instance, enjoyed popular use in Catalonia as did Nahuatl in Mexico, Flemish in the Low Countries, and Italian in Naples. Castilian (not Latin) was the lingua franca, but of elites, not of the people (Kamen 1993: 371-72). In some cases, the republics preserved their status as kingdoms (or principalities) separate from Castile, although dynastic succession gave the same monarch dominionover disparate lands. Spain as a multicultural, multilingual empire of autonomous ethnic regions is a historical reality that conflicts with the stereotype of 'fortress Spain,"whererigid conservatism stifled creativity (Kamen 1993: 434; see Eliot 1970: 230, 246). Indeed, as the contemporary vitality of its ethnic autonomous states demonstrates, Spain is more than one nationality, language, or culture. Pertinent to the topic of this analysis, religious expression within the republics was often colored with a nationalist tint. It is not suprising, for instance, that the vigor of the seventeenth century Catholicism in today's Belgium allowed it not only to outlast Spanish rule there but also to shape the identity of a new nation (Tracy 1985). OurLady of Guadalupe The Mexican devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe is an important example of a religious expression that acquired a nationalist hue as it developed within the IberoMediterranean polity. Using the historical outline provided by Father Stafford Poole, CM (1995), I rehearse here the major events surrounding Our Lady of Gudalupe in order to trace how a devotion became devotionalism and a form of material theology. It should be stated that Our Lady of Guadalupe is a title that derives from a shrine in Extremadura,
EVOLUTION OF MARIAN DEVOTIONALISM
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Spain. The Mexican devotion began in 1555, when Archbishop Alonso de Montufar of Mexico City built a hermitage (ermita), or local shrine to Mary, on a hill called Tepeyac outside the city, appointing a diocesan priest as chaplain (Poole 1995: 59, 224). A year later, in a sermon on September 6, 1556, the archbishop interpreted the popularity of the shrine and rumors of miraculous cures as signs of success for the Catholic faith in Mexico. Two days after the archbishop's sermon, Francisco de Bustamante, a Franciscan Friar, respondedto the claims of the archbishop:
Bustamante mentionedor touchedon the followingpoints:(1) the devotion'at the chapel. . . to which they have given the name Guadalupe'was prejudicialto the Indians because they believed that the image itself worked miracles, contraryto what the missionary friars had been teaching them, and because many were disappointedwhen it did not; (2) the devotionwas new and lacked a basis . . . this apparentlywas a reply to Mont(ifar'sattempt to put Guadalupein the mainstreamof Marian devotion;(3) if the devotioncontinued, he would no longer preach to the Indians because the devotionwould undo everything he preached;(4) the money donated to the chapel would be better used for the poor and sick, for no one knew what was presently done with the donations;(5) the so-called miracles should be investigated to see if they were real or not; (6) the individualwho invented the devotionor propagatedfalse miracles should be given one hundred lashes and whoevercontinued to propagateit, two hundred;(7) he appealed to the civil authoritiesto put a stop to this; (8) he accused the archbishopof encouragingthe devotion and said that the archbishopwas mistaken in thinking that the Indians had no devotionto the Virgin, since many consideredher a goddess; (9) he claimedthe image was paintedby an Indian(Poole 1995: 60).
In a response intended to rebut the attacks of Bustamante, the Archbishoporderedan investigation, carefully selecting witnesses to verify that the ermita had attracted devotees. Over the next 10 years, Montiifarcontinued to subsidize the shrine, even after the cathedral chapter denounced the costs in a 1561 letter to the Spanish king (Poole 1995: 59). In 1566, shortly after holding the Second Mexican Provincial Council, the Archbishop led a procession to Tepeyac, enthroning a silver and copper replica of the Extremaduran Our Lady of Guadalupe that had been donated by Juan de Villaseca. At about the same time, the painting already there was retouched to make it resemble the Immaculate Conception (Poole 1995: 205). In 1573, the year after Montufar'sdeath, the first indulgences were granted to Catholics who visited the shrine. Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagun published negative comments on the superstitions at Tepeyac as an appendix to his Historia generalin 1577, complaining that the use of the Nahuatl "Tonantzineas a translation for the Spanish "Nuestra Sefiora" mistakenly identified Mary with the goddesses of Aztec religion. But during almost a quarter century, from the establishment of the shrine until the granting of the jubilee indulgences, writes Poole, there is no mention of any vision of Mary, nor of a miraculous origin to the image painted on the tilma that had become more popular among the devotees than the silver statue of the ExtremaduranMadonna (Poole 1995: 187 ff.)5 The seventeenth century started with slow changes in the devotion, but an apparent widening of its popularity. A copy of the image on a tilma was painted on canvas by Baltasar de Echave Orio in 1606 and an engraving by Samuel Stradanus in 1615 was printed for public sale to raise money. But dramatic change came in 1648, when the crioll6 priest, Miguel Sanchez, published an account of the origins of the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe at Tepeyac that included an exegesis of Revelation 12 and a point-by-point explanation that this biblical reference described an apparition of Mary to the Indian Juan Diego. Sanchez wrote that the image on the tilma was the result of a miracle. Confessing that there were no written documents for these events, he nonetheless dated them beginning on December 12, 1,531,when the Franciscan Juan de Zum4raga was bishop. Sanchez' book uses the baroque style to compare Mexico City to the island of Patmos, where John the Evangelist was supposed to have composed the Book of Revelation. Claiming evidence based on 'the providential curiosity of the elderly"(cited in Poole 1995: 102), he concluded with a description of important miracles performed through the intercession of the Mexican Guadalupe. A year later, Luis Laso de la Vega, the criollo vicar of the hermitage of
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Guadalupe, published in Nahuatl a six-part compendium,covering much of the same materials as in Sanchez' 1648 book written in Spanish, but emphasizing that the devotion came from the Indians rather than from the criollos. The style and fluency of the Nahuatl is uneven throughout Laso de la Vega's book, giving credibility to the supposition that it was not written by him, but assembled from previous writings by native Nahuatl speakers (Poole 1995: 111-13 passim). The most important section of his book was the second part, called the Nican mopohua from its opening words, 'Here is recounted."It offers extensive dialogue between Juan Diego and the Virgin, often with rhetorical flourishes and a sophisticated play on the meaning of Nahuatl words. At least one nineteenth century scholar believed that it was a cult drama or auto sacramental that had been composed by Christianized Indian students at the Franciscan school of Tlateloco (Joaquin Garcfa Icazbalceta as cited by Poole 1995: 222), which Laso de la Vega adapted for his publication. Although no substantiating documentation has been found to tie the text to the school at Tlateloco, the auto sacramental origin remains a plausible alternative to the belief that the account is a direct transcriptionof dialog between Mary and Juan Diego. The popularity of the devotion can be seen by a dramatic increase within a decade of chapels and churches named after the Guadalupe of Mexico, not the Virgin of Extremadura (Poole 1995: 127 ff.). The crucial role of the painting and its reproductionby mass printings has already been noted. These are measures of material theology. Accordingto the premise established earlier, this increase in the paraphernaliaof devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe is a measure of an important theological investment by church authorities. In fact, during a second archdiocesaninquiry in March 1666, the popularity of the Guadalupe devotion was not in question as a century before;instead, the officials examined the miraculous character of the apparition. Taking testimony from aged Indians who stated they had heard of the visions from their parents, the commission concluded that the vision and miracles were authentic, as SAnchezhad claimed, and the archdiocesan chapter sent the first request to Rome asking permission to celebrate the feast officially and compose a proper office for the breviary. At this point, the cult at the shrine has acquired the theological and educational characteristics that make it part of devotionalism. The question to be posed is : 'What were the reasons for the different reactions?"In 1556, much in the spirit of the Reformerswho attacked nonscriptural apparitions and miracles, it was denounced by the Franciscan Bustamante; but after 1606 the devotion of Tepeyac hill acquired most of its miraculous attributes. Examination of this reversal of direction in the treatment of the cult requires review of how the Council of Trent provideda signal influence upon Catholic reform at that time, fostering devotionalism, not only in Mexico but throughout the Catholic world. The Council of Trent The Council of Trent has grown larger in legend that it was in life, and many of the achievements ascribed to Trent in ecclesiastical reform and theological development were actually interpretations created after the council. Delumeau, for instance, denigrates claims about Trent's grandeur by stressing how few bishops actually attended - in some sessions, as few as 25- and stresses how oppositionto some aspects of reform occasionedlong delays by rulers such as Philip II of Spain in accepting Tridentine decrees (Delumeau 1971/1977: 4-9). Because pre-Reformation Christianity had periodically undergone groundswells of reform, the view that the council was motivated solely by fear of Protestantism should be discarded (Reinhard 1989). Nor did the expectation of reunification dominate the sessions. Although Luther once had appealed to an ecumenical council to arbitrate between his theology and that of the Pope, he had cut his ties to Catholicism well before the opening of the Council of Trent in 1545. There was considerably more impact on Trent from Desidernus
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Erasmus in Rotterdam, who remained faithful to Catholicism (Batillon 1966: 770 if.). And although sometimes contested as too much like Protestantism, Erasmian reforms played a significant role in the Catholic Reformation. Trent's emphasis for reform, it may be said, was not upon dogmatic statements or condemnations of Protestant doctrines. These were necessary, of course, but the greater need was for curtailment of corruptionand for education in the faith. Marian devotionalism is as much a product of Tridentine educational reforms as of Catholic piety. The conciliar decree on the intercession of the saints provides an example. Trent was not ready to capitulate to the Protestant doctrine that such intercession was inherently wrong, even if the council members recognized that many devotions had invited magic and superstition into religious practice. Accordingly, the council decree required that the faithful be instructed that all the saints were subordinate to Christ.7 The theology behind this pronouncement was not very elaborate since the decree came in the twenty-fifth session, which lasted just two days in December of 1563 before the council'sclose. But the decree was nonetheless far reaching because the cult of the saints pruned away the wildest of beliefs and practices that Protestants ridiculed, resulting in a more vigorous Catholic devotionalism intended to "delightand teach" (Sanchez Lora 1988: 381, 403). Moreover,saints with questionable historical credentials were often supplanted by Mary, who was biblically attested. In this case, theological decrees had impact on devotional life. Trent had decided that this and other reforms could be summed up in a catechism that would connect theological definitions to the Catholic populace. But who was to conduct the grand plan of Catholic Reformation?Throughoutprevious ages, religious orders had fostered reform through movements that renewed evangelical piety, like layers of fresh paint on an old table. This was a path open to Trent because with Luther and the 50 years after him, new reform-mindedmovements multiplied, particularly in Italy. For the most part, the results were not new monastic or mendicant orders dependent on the feudal system of wealth for support, but organizations of "clerks regular," that is, priests adhering to a strictly disciplinedlife of devotion, or religious women who no longer interpreted the cloister as a prohibitionon apostolic work with the people. These new religious organizations fit the emerging urban society, mirroring a drift away from the feudal economy (Maravall 1975/1986: 138 ff.). The Theatines (1524), the Barnabites (1530), and the Jesuits (1540) followed this model. Women had a counterpart in orders like the Ursulines (1535), the Visitation nuns (1610), and the Daughters of Charity (1633) that served the urban population. Even the mendicant orders had new reform movements such as the Augustinian Recollects (1588), the Capuchin Franciscans (1528) and the Discalced Carmelites (1562). Although such orders were indispensable to the reform, Trent placed greater emphasis upon the diocese. Each local bishop was expected to eliminate financial abuses, end clerical misbehavior, establish educational and pious institutions, and live a life of exemplary virtue himself. It was a ground-up approach that was administratively feasible through control over the appointment of qualified bishops. Moreover,unlike the strategy that depended on religious orders, episcopal reform attacked the existing abuses directly rather than only adding an alternative form of commitment. But because the episcopal approach depended upon a strong papacy to stand up to Caesaropapism and recalcitrant bishops, the Tridentine reforms faced a precarious future; The papacy itself was in need of radical reform, and merely increasing its power over the bishops was a path fraught with danger, as Catholicism soon learned. The 79-year-old Gian Pietro Carafa, upon becoming Paul IV in 1555, increased the nepotism of the Vatican while simultaneously using the Inquisition against local prelates and creating the Index of ForbiddenBooks. His four-year pontificate came close to making disobedience synonymous with heresy (Fenlon 1972). But Catholicism has survived popes who cite the authority of
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councils to implement policies of their personal preference that contradict the decrees, and one should not equate Tridentine reform with the policies of Paul IV alone. Trent's most lasting contribution was to reform the liturgy and the sacraments (Kamen 1993: 431 ff.). Baptism had to be performedin church and carefully recorded;mass was not to be celebrated in a home; sermons were to be preached at every Sunday mass; confessionals were required to safeguard the confidentiality of the sacrament; and, in Tametsi - the most revolutionary decree - marriages had to be performed in a church before a priest for validity, something that went against more than a thousand years of Christian practice wherein the simple promise of spouses sufficed for matrimony (Kamen 1993: 275-85). Like most institutional reform movements, Trent's effects came in ebbs and flows rather than in lock-step advance. Overall, the Council of Trent contributed a style or spirit to reforms that were to take at least a hundred years to percolate down to the grass roots. For purposes of this essay, this spirit can be summarized as 1) Humanism, that is, an effort to include psychological, cultural, or historical reasons to justify the faith, which - while not as "scientitic" as the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century - was an approachthat improved upon scholasticism's a priori reasoning or Protestant fundamentalism; 2) education, especially in clerical training in seminaries; 3) evolutionary view of reform, which preferred slow, gradual steps to radical attack on existing institutions and practices; and 4) universalism, emphasizing the worldwide scope of Catholicism. These four traits animated Catholic reform within the sixteenth and seventeenth century Ibero-Mediterraneanpolity, often juxtaposing Erasmian sobriety and effusive devotionalism. Thus, both the reaction (Erasmian Franciscanism) of Friar Bustamante in Mexico in 1555 against the "excesses' of the Mexican devotion at Guadalupe and the devotion itself (popular religion) fell within the spirit of Tridentine Catholic reform. The Council of Trent strove to reconcile the type of change preached by Fray Bustamante, who questioned the devotion, with the renovation of piety from Archbishop Montutfarwho encouraged it. The decrees of Trent, as distinguished from post-conciliar interpretations, generally skirted controversialquestions. I believe that because individuals and factions at Trent had to find majoritarian support for the final wording of the documents, intentionality can be attributed to the sessions of the Council. To put the matter in sociological terms familiar to those who have read Crozier and Friedberg (Vasquez and Olabarri 1995: 367), the process of decision making was driven by a rationality of a constructed reality. The speeches and proceedings of the Council give us a description of how Trent's participants understood each other's positions. I surmise that the ambiguity of Trent's decrees was intentional since such a course helped preserve Catholic unity and left the door open for a possible reconciliation with some Protestants. Ambiguity, however, also laid foundations for subsequent conflicts over interpretation in which both sides claimed Trent as guide. Trent's declaration on tradition and scripture, for instance, repeated the lesson learned from the christological and Trinitarian controversies of the fourth and fifth centuries when language borrowedfrom philosophy was needed to explain the scriptural passages. This had been invoked in addressing the teachings of Wycliff, which bore resemblance to those of Luther, and Trent reaffirmed the utility of including such nonbiblical definitions as a source of faith.8 But Trent's decree was not what the First Vatican Council described as the "two sources"theory, in which the practice of popular Christianity was on a par with the Bible (Dulles 1969: 49-51; Houdon 1992: 196 n19). The "two-sources" theory gained ascendency after the council, partly because it was advanced by theologians such as Melchior Cano, St. Peter Canisius, and St. Robert Bellarmine, whose importance can be measured by the extensive diffusion of their works. Those who faithfully repeated Trent's less innovative formulation were drowned out by the better published scholars (cf. Espin 1995: 18 nl2), and "TwoSources"eventually was regarded as Trndentinein origin.
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The original council draft, it is true, had stated that revelation was contained "partly in scripture and partly in unwritten traditions," but this text was withdrawn so that the Latin words "partim... partim" were eliminated from the final decree. Trent's 1546 decree in the fourth session stated that the source of faith was in scripture and also in the traditiones (in the plural) - "things handed down" - from "approvedholy fathers and councils, the judgment and consensus of the Church."9Rejecting the advice of some members who essentially agreed with Luther (Houdon 1992: 47), the majority of the council members feared that a decress that seemed to echo the Protestant emphasis upon scripture would prove confusing. However, the council added that traditiones were subject to scrutiny as to whether they were made "underthe inspiration of the Holy Spirit."With this qualification, Trent put limits on the appeal to previous church declarations, so that not every decree competedwith scriptural authority. Only the traditiones connected to dogma (quae ad fidem pertinent)merited respect equal to that of the gospel (Jedin 1957/1961:2:62-67).10 (consuetudines)was applied during the conciliar The notion of traditions as "customs" discussions when a distinction was made between those describedabove as coming from the and those inspiration of the Holy Spirit and which, on that account, were "irreformable" because they were transmitted through cultural and situational facthat were "reformable" tors (polygamy,for instance). The traditiones addressed in the 1546 decree were "theological formulations with wide acceptance,"while the contemporarysense of tradition as "common practice"fits the category of "reformabletraditions."But although Trent viewed customs as different from theological pronouncements, the theological potential of the reformabletraditions was clearly a consideration. An example of how the Tridentine capacity to infuse customs with the theological importance of devotionalism can be seen in the reform of indulgences. Cardinal Cervini (later Pope Marcellus II) had read Luther's complaints against the abuses of indulgences and concluded that the principal motivation for the misguided of indulgences lay with the drawn-out pilgrimages and corporalpenances imposed "buying" upon the forgiven (Houdon 1992: 60-61). The old system forced penitents to take time away from family and business for two or three years in order to fulfill the penance: "buying"an indulgence was a more convenient alternative. By substituting devotional prayers to Mary and the saints for these arduous penances, indulgences ceased to be a marketable commodity. Who would buy an indulgence worth 30 days of fasting, if merely reciting a prayer would obtain the same amount of merit? Moreover,application as satisfaction for the souls in Purgatory made indulgences something of a spiritual work of mercy and an expression of Catholic piety that Protestantism did not embrace. While ostensibly reforming only the decidedly nonbiblical custom of indulgences, Trent simultaneously reconstructed the Sacrament of Penance in Christian life. Like the Protestant Reformation,Trent moved away from the buying and selling of indulgences - an objectionableform of material theology but unique to Catholicism was the shift toward devotionalism around sacramental confession that lasted at least until the II Vatican Council. The Baroqueand Post-TridentineCatholicism The sack of Rome by the troops of Charles V in 1527 in retaliation for Pope Clement VII siding with France allowed for an unprecedented reconstruction of the city during the rest of the sixteenth century. Fifty-four churches were built or rebuilt by the time the century's most glorious achievement, the cupola of St. Peter's, was finished in 1593 (Delumeau 1971/1977: 29-30). The style used in this marvelous rebirth made Rome the artistic capital in the nineteenth century by Jacob Burkhardt of Europe, and was given the name "baroque" (Braudel 1949/1973: 827-29). But if we use Vovelle's notion of mentalitg as the dialectical relationship between the objective conditions of people's lives and the way in which they can be applied to material religion and its agencies as well as to a describe it, "baroque"
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grand artistic style. The contemporary Spanish historians Jose Antonio Maravall (1975/1986) and Jose Sanchez Lora (1988) have contributedto the corpusof works that view the baroque mentalitM as a explanatory factor in Spanish history. The baroque, they tell us, produced a conservative social culture which arose amid a series of calamitous crises (Maravall 1975/1986: 20-26 passim). The snowballing economicdisasters concominantwith the disintegration of Spanish hegemony forced an introspective look at interior, spiritual values. Because they were less susceptible to economic vagaries, virture and values were consideredmore important than transient, material manifestations of power and prosperity. But the baroque was also the world's first mass culture, accordingto Maravall (1975/1986: 14-15; 42 passim). The sponsored communication of symbols among the classes characterized this epoch within the Ibero-Mediterraneanpolity. There was frequent repetition of Seneca's rediocritas, understood as "the intermediate class" (Maravall 1975/1986: 31) in describing the arbiters of virtue's restoration. The convergence of these factors, built a "structure" for social and institutional responses during the age among elites and the poor both in urban and rural circumstances(Maravall 1975/1986:62-74). Contributions to scholarship on the Ibero-Mediterraneanexperiences over the past two decades have produced a corpus of studies that diverge from some of the premises central to the theories and methods of Durkheim and Weber. For instance, in contrast with the Weberian premise that liberal rationality is a path to bourgeois modernization as seen in the Protestant experience, Maravall supposes that the integration of emotion and rationality during the baroque was an acceptableformula for social power. The Ibero-Mediterranean polity acquired techniques of manipulating public culture by enriching rationality with good measures of tradition and sentiment (Maravall 1975/1986: 58-60). In sum, during the baroque the bourgeoisie of a conservative Catholicism had a route to modernization other than the rationality of liberal Protestantism. Certainly, if scholars of U.S. religion voice the need for new paradigms that better correspondto the American experience (Warner 1997), it should not be far-fetched to suppose that analysis of the baroque Catholic reality merits attention. The Ibero-Mediterranean experience, and consequently the Latin American and Latino experiences, often employ institutions and religion in ways that challenge the preconceptions developed to explain a different reality. Thus, for instance, one of the most popular saints of devotionalism during the baroque period was St. Catherine of Siena. Illiterate and a member of the Dominican third order (which means she was not cannonically a "nun"),Catherine's mysticism had hastened the return of the papacy to Rome after its sojourn in Avignon. Here was a woman whose miraculous visions and charismatic leadership served to strengthen the papacy. For those who understand literally Weber's opposition of rationality to charismatic leadership and of bureaucracyto mysticism (Weber 1949: 361 passim), St. Catherine and the baroque represent an anomaly. But for a worldview that sees rationality crowned in importance when it is linked to emotion, the phenomenon of a female mystic restoring the respectability of a patriarchal bureaucracy is normal. In essence, baroque Catholicism did not place rational and charismatic religious leaders in a dichotomous system in which one can exercise only one or the other but never both at the same time. The era affirmed 'practical mysticism"in such a way that St. Catherine, an illiterate woman who had to dictate all of her letters to a scribe, has been declared a 'Doctor of the Church." This was far from the only paradox of the baroque. Sanchez Lora (1988) shows how the baroque praise of the church'sgreatest mystics actually reduced the number of women visionaries. In contrast to the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries, where female seers and holy women recounting their revelations seemed to be everywhere, the era witnessed the reduction in the number of such mystics and of their convents. On the one hand, the centralization of ecclesiastical resources within dioceses dried up funds for independent
EVOLUTION OF MARIANDEVOTIONALISM
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convents, on the other, the celebration in popular devotional publications of the wondrous visions of the greatest women mystics, made more local and less dramatic visionaries seem less important. It's hard to see the light from a 40-watt bulb in the glare of a bright spotlight. Thus, the popular diffusion of the visions of a few great mystics during the baroque paradoxicallyreduced the number of mystics in popular Catholicism. The explanation of how the baroque as art form discloses a culture and mentalito has been masterfully accomplishedby Maravall. I present here only a brief outline of his exposition. If the art of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries depicted humankind as passive before nature and God, he argues, the Italian Renaissance recast humankind as dominant over nature and in control of the encounter with God. The baroque did not retreat from the Renaissance realism that expressed human control of nature, but it added to painting and sculpture a gilded effulgence and adornment of symbolism to reaffirm the majesty of the sacred. The rapturous gaze, the half-openedlips, the poised and perfectly formedgestures of the personages in religious baroque art expressed the contact between human and divine. Yes, the Renaissance was right to affirm that humanity was in control of itself and of nature, but the baroque insisted that contact with the sacred caused a loss of control because it suspended the human being in ecstasy. The baroque effort to represent the sacred by the heights of emotion eventually made it an object of ridicule and a vehicle of kitsch in the twentieth century, but it fit the Catholicism of the time that accepted the Renaissance by spiritualizing it. Tridentine reform and the baroquewere born together and cannot be fully understood in isolation from each other. Gonzalez de Cellorigo viewed his age as 'a republic of enchanted people who lived outside the natural order"(cited in Sanchez Lora 1992: 258) There was a need to assert one's will over external reality because ordinarysenses could not penetrate to the spiritual meaning of reality. If the people of the baroque knew that it was impossible simply to repeat the past, they still believed that they could restore the inner, moral virtues upon which a unified Christendomhad been based. Public confidencein social institutions was at a low ebb and the baroque resurrected institutions of the Middle Ages, animating the old order with spiritualized emotion. Approximatingchivalric norms, a pera virtue essential for imposing sonal, inner conviction to live with rectitude became "honor," upon an unresponsive world the heroic qualities cultivated within one's soul (Sanchez Lora 1988: 133-37). Honor was the civic force that could transform the objectively sinful world into an expression of subjectively experienced faith. The gaunt figure of Cervantes's don Quixote de la Mancha spoke to this tendency in literature, Calderonde la Barca's 'La Vida Es Suefo" in theater, and Descartes' intuitive cogito, ergo sum in philosophy. Baroque emphasis upon subjective feeling as the core of reality had direct repercussions in religion. In spite of considerable reasons for skepticism, the baroque was an epoch of belief. The Reformation had failed to eliminate the Catholic faith, but because virtually every objective religious symbol was under attack - the mass, statues, papacy, scripture, clerical celibacy, convent life - the subjective validation of faith had become crucial (Maravall 1975/1986: 19-26 passim). The spiritual was miraculous, magical, and mystical, manifesting itself outwardly in dramatic outbursts of ecstasy which merged the material with the divine. Bernini's famous representation of St. Teresa at the moment of spiritual marriage offers a woman in almost sensual rapture; the sacred is affirmed only in the juxtaposition of an angel, surroundedby golden rays coming from heaven. But there were other less dramatic examples of how subjectivity permeated baroque spirituality. The 200-year-old Imitatio Christi was popular throughout the age: its interiority addressed a contemporaryneed and its reputation as a classic work of a happier epoch of Christian experience enhanced its appeal. The practitioners of baroque piety sought holiness through emulation of the saints of the past, especially by reliving its contact with the miraculous. If ecstasy and visions, suffering and pain, fainting spells and light-headedness
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did not come to the suppliant by prayer alone, then these could be induced by rigorous fasting, long hours of meditation, self-inflicted scourging, and the like. Theologians placed such piety in the Purgative way, distinguishing it from the Unitive way. But subjective religion at every stage tended toward the miraculous and ecstatic. St. Teresa of Avila, the leading mystic of her time, warned against a tendency to adopt practices that damaged one's health in the pursuit of ecstasy, although in an ironic way, the authenticity of Teresa's mysticism ran counter to the tendencies of her imitators (Sanchez Lora 1988: 223-24 n57; Maravall 1975/1986: 11). Most pious women given to harsh physical penances were far from charlatans, even if the criteria of our age might consider them to have been exaggerated in the exercise of piety. One example is the Dominican circle around St. Rose of Lima that produced admirable examples of Catholic sanctity during the baroque, although characterized by severe self-imposed penances. When visions were reported, it was often in a discourse made familiar during earlier centuries. William Christian (1981) has shown the transfer of the narrative form for older eleventh century visions to those of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries: an apparition to a simple, poor believer; the skepticism of authority; the request for a 'sign"; the miraculous legitimation of the vision; and, the building of a Marian shrine (see Poole 1995: 28-30; Zimdars-Swartz1991; 5-12). The baroque, however, shifted the general focus of the Middle Ages on the parade of miraculous favors experienced by clients coming to the shrines in order to emphasize the miraculous events at the origin of the devotions (Kamen 1993: 132-36, 155-56). A popular dimension to baroque spirituality is reflected by the gozos (goigs in The gozos Catalan), a prayer form that cannot be simply translated into English as "joys." were baroque outbursts of religious feeling, in styles that mixed poetry with prayer. They could be sung, added to prayers like the rosary, recited from memory, composed by the famous, or improvisedby peasants. Often they were poetic paraphrases of scriptural verses, embellishing litanies. They were composedin honor of Christ, his holy cross, the eucharist, the saints, and of course, for Mary. I offer below (with my own prose translation) some verses of a gozo, loosely based on the Salve Regina, in honor of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel, the partronness of sailors and fishermen (Canino Salgado 1974: 51-53).
Dios te salve, Pura Virgen del Carmelo, Reina, Madre, en quien el verbo del Padre tom6 natural origen. De misericordia fuente de clemencia ameno huerto, y de lOJcarmelitas Puerto y Estrella resplandeciente. De este. valle del destierro, en que al presente vivimos con lgrima. te pedinos nos saques libres del yerro. Oh Clemente y cierto efugio, oh Piado y cierta guia, oh Duke Virgen Marta, de Carmelitas refugio, Ruega por nos a Jesl, de se promesa benigna. has que aparezcamos dignas por mdritos de su Crux. Godgreets you, Pure Virgin of Cannel, Queen, Mother in whom the Wordof the Father took human beginnings. Fountainof mercy Pleasing gardenof clemency and for Carmelites, port and resplendent star. Fromthis valley of exile in which we now live we beg you with tears to snatch us fromerror.
Omercifuland sure effulgence Ofaithful and certain guide Otender Virgin Mary
refuge of Carmelites.
Pray to Jesus for us;
and for his compassionatepromises make us emerge worthy throughthe merits of His cross.
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The reference to "Carmelitas" is not to the vowed members of that strict religious order, but to all those who wore the brown scapular and by that practice had become members of the Carmelite Third Order for lay persons. The invocation of 'Port" and 'Star" reinforce the maritime relevance of this devotion, particularly since another title of Mary is "Maris Stella" or "MorningStar," and a commonway of celebrating this feast on July 16 is to set adrift the statue within a boat adorned with flower garlands. But the simplicity of the composition, its resonance with an indulgenced prayer and its use of easily understood symbols is crowned with a doctrinal verity in the closing refrain. The closing lines carry the christological corrective for devotionalism insisted upon by Trent. This short excerpt, with its pedestrian rhymes and images, demonstrates the popular character of the gozos, which kept most of them from achieving any appearance of high art. But, in echo of Maravall's premise that the baroque was an era of mass culture, Kamen makes the following observation about not only the gozos but all the devotional literature of the period:
Counter-Reformation literature in Catalonia had no creative or artistic impulse: it was directed to what it saw as a greater glory, the saving of souls for God.In the process, however,it helped to keep alive the language of the people and conservedfor Catalans a religious individualityand identity which otherwise may have been swamped by the cultural imperialism of Castile. The Counter-Reformation contributed to the preservation of the indigenous languge because it shied away from literary brilliance and elite culture, areas in which it could not compete with Castilians, and concentratedon direct communicationwith the people throughthe media of the spoken wordand populartracts (Kamen 1993:415).
What Kamen says of Catalonia was true also in Latin America and the Philippines. In fact, the gozo used here was collected in Puerto Rico during the 1970s (Canino Salgado 1974: 5-8 passim). Because of a dramatically increased ability to publish books for popular coinsumption, the gozos became a materially measurable mainstay of Catholic devotion. As subjective flights of faith, the gozos could reimage connections between devotion and history that satisfied a thirst for the miraculous. And because the gozos were frequently printed underneath engraved reproductionsof statues or paintings, they simultaneously diffused devotions such as that of the Mexican Guadalupe. Often awarded an indulgence for pious recitation, the public generally attributed to these poetic prayers spiritual enrichment and, sometimes, miraculous effects. Henry Kamen indicates that in Catalonia they might have been even more effective in educating the populace to new religious values than the lithographs in Lutheran Germany (1993: 140, 171 n287). The gozos could also be preached. They were incorporatedinto sermons because they alluded to scriptural themes, their poetic language delighted the public, and they afforded graphic explanation of a statue or painting in the church. Moreover,since Trent had obliged every priest to preach, even though many did not have adequate preparation to do so, sermons that successfully incorporated the gozos were often printed as an aid for a local priest's Sunday sermon. In the case of the Mexican Guadalupe, sermons repeated concepts central to the gozos, regularly celebrating the apparition and glorifying the image as miraculous. Poole has identified 76 sueltos, or leaflet sermons, published in Mexico from 1651 to 1699 (151), most of which identified Guadalupe with the Immaculate Conception and the genealogy of Mary (155). During the baroque epoch, the gozos became a singularly important means of connecting Tridentine reforms, theology, preaching, and popular Catholic practice. Kamen (1993: 434) says that the different spirit breathed by the baroque age into preexisting devotions is discerned most clearly by examining these gozos. They are perhaps the most telling of the measurable components of material theology in Marian devotion within baroque Catholicism. Unfortunately, most of the studies of the gozos seem to focus on their cultural importance rather than as in Kamen's study on their social functions. In other words, we know that these specimens of material theology were present
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throughout the Catholic world from the baroque down to the present day, but we do not have a clear and precise measure of their diffusion or use. Nonetheless, it may be said that even without complete quantitive measures, the general information is sufficient to categorically state that the gozos were instruments for mediating popular religiosity with theological orthodoxyfound among Catholics . As devotionalism, they can be consideredmaterial theology that was coloredby the principal tendencies of Trent. The four traits of Trent that affect the analysis of Marian devotionalism were summarized above as: humanism, education, evolutionary reform, and universalism. In an admittedly truncated form, I think it relevant to reexamine each of these sometimes contradictory trends for their effect upon devotionalism. The humanism of the council'sreforms facilitated a literate reemination of Catholic devotions in order to reshape religious practice by new norms of reasonableness. One side of this tendency had its optimum expression with the enormous project undertaken by the Bollandists in 1643 to publish critical editions of the earliest lives of each saint in the calendar. It became a way to reform the cult of the saints by eliminating preposterous miracles and glaring historical inconsistencies, but at the same time preserve the Catholic tradition of honoring exemplary men and women of the church. Alongside this sober humanism was the opposing impulse toward the miraculous. In a genre exemplified in the Flos Sanctorum, baroque hagiography producedlives of the saints for popular consumption. These were not biographies searching for historical events, but instead celebrated evidence of the supernatural destiny of God's heroes. Rather than trace the impact of social forces and events upon persons, these "Lives' affirmed the power of the holy individual to transforn society. In the opaque syllogistic form that may have given the baroque its name (Braudel 1949/1973: 827 n381), writers approachedthe sacred under this logic: Saints tell the truth. This saint had a vision. Therefore,this vision is not a lie. Baroque hagiographytook license with historical events to re-create anecdotes, replete with imagined dialogue, to affirm what was already known about sanctity. The saint's personality was determined by the core of inner spirituality. Much as Shakespeare in England felt free to explore in drama the psyches of the Prince of Denmark or the Plantagenet kings, Catholic humanist scholarship used drama to heighten the exemplar quality of the lives of the saints. These popular accounts were very different from the critical historical work of the Bollandists, although both coexisted during the baroque period. Catholicism was showered with the popular biographies and there is ample evidence that more copies of these accounts were sold than of the Bollandists' works (Delumeau 1971/1977: 42, see 228; Kamen 1993: 413-15; and Sanchez Lora 1988: 62ff.). On the basis of material theology, one can assert that within baroque Catholicism, the hagiography of the Flos Sanctorum became the more prominent tendency. The difference between humanism in art and in religion was not always clear. Trent had prohibited celebrating miracle plays or sacred dramas in churches, but this encouraged the multiplication of these auto sacramentales outside the church buildings as a baroque art form with the popularity of theater (Stnchez Lora 1988: 249 n119; Maravall 1975/1986: 9397). The Jesuits insisted that drama and theater be part of the curriculumin their schools, using these as a vehicle for teaching religion and history. The twentieth century Catholic inheritors of this tradition dramatize the Nativity and Christ's Passion in barrios as different as the South Bronx and the Philippines in popular religiosity (Dfaz-Stevens 1990). Richard Flores (1995: 77-97) has shown that the Spanish verses of the "Pastorela"currently performedin San Antonio, Texas use baroque poetic schemes. And although the autos were excluded, baroque theatrics did find a place in the church. Preachers used props such as skulls and catafalques to represent approachingdeath, whips were used for self-scourgingto elicit repentance from the public, and crowns of thorns to evoke pity (Kamen 1993: 361). Meditation books, including the KSpiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola, took up interior-
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ity where the Imitatio Christi had left off. The Ignatian compositionof place, however, was used not only to transport the person into the eternal, but to imagine the sacred as operative in the present day. Thus, for instance, in composing a vision of hell for those making the Exercises, one Jesuit preacher used descriptions of the Thirty Years'War (Sanchez Lora 1988: 243-44). In this climate, a dramatic, anachronistic rendering of the dialog between the MexicanVirgin of Guadalupe and Juan Diego, would not constitute a falsification of historical events, but a "docudrama" to educate the public about evidence for Mary's concern for the contemporary. Trent had stressed education in its reforms, and the establishment of the Gregorianum (1555) and Angelicum (1580) universities in Rome aided mightily in this effort. These universities were organized around colleges for the many nationes of the Catholic world (Caraman 1981). Each of the ethnicities sent their best and brightest to Rome, but while the training cultivated a sense of loyalty to Rome, it also preserved national differences. Graduates returned to their countries usually as professors in seminaries, where they adapted the Roman ideals of reform to local circumstances. Contact with Rome was often a measure of Catholic educational achievement, especially where not threatened with competing intellectual trends. Thus, for instance, the baroque as artistic style (and probably as a mentalitOas well) endured in Poland, Austria and Hungary long after it had been eclipsed in Italy and France (Braudel 1949/1973:829). In the Americas, the diffusion of high quality Catholic education meant that Mexico City and Lima were not backwater in comparison with peninsular universities like Salamanca. In fact, with scholars like Carios Siguenza y G6ngora, Eusebio Kino and the incomparable Sor Juana In6s de la Cruz, Mexico in the 1660s might be compared to Stanford and Berkeley during the 1960s, when they represented intellectual stimulus to those who viewed East Coast, Ivy League academic life as too stultifying. In some ways, the criollos had a more enviable intellectual melieu than European intellectuals, as the dispersion of Jesuit criollos after the suppression of the Society (1773) demonstrated when some European intellectual circles enthusiastically received American themes as offering philosophical substance for political alternatives to Enlightened Despotism (Blanke 1986). In reviewing the effect of Trent on Catalonia, Henry Kamen stresses the ability of the "machineryof Trent"to alter the content and function of local devotions, often leaving their form intact (xii; 430-35 passim). Trent's road to reform through a moderate evolution rather than through a radical revolution preserved and enriched popular religiosity. Every reformable tradition had some worth that could be celebrated. One example is the way baroque reformers treated the Spanish practice of excommunicating locusts. While Protestant Reformers (or Friar Bustamante) might have ridiculed this custom as superstitious, the spirit of Trent sought to develop the repulsion of insects into a more educated expression of Catholic belief. Thus, the official prayers composedto excommunicatethe locusts - a questionable theological act - also offered instruction to the faithful, suggesting that sinful habits should be expelled along with the pests - a most desirable goal (Sfinchez Lora 1988: 317 n24). Educationin the faith was central to Trent's reforms. Intense in the Americas, the effort was energetic in rural parts of Spain, prompting the Jesuits to use the term "the Indies' to describe Catalonia because, they said, it required as much missionary attention as overseas (Kamen 1993: 378). Reverence for an individual's subjectivity came to the fore in moral theology. Delumeau (1971/1977: 42, see 228), Kamen (1993: 413), and Sanchez Lora (1988: 62ff.) produce lists of theological books, showing the popularity of volumes on moral theology during the baroque. Along with the confesionarios meant to guide confessors, these texts clearly impacted upon the awareness of sin in popular Catholicism but through the prism of baroque honor. For instance, the civil code permitted a man or, in prescient anticipation of our century, a woman to kill a spouse found in flagrante delicto. But the moral theologians
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of the baroque argued that although legally permissible and excusable because of the emotions provoked,such an avenging murder would not be honorable since it would condemn the adulterers to sure damnation. Post-Tridentine moral theology required the aggrieved spouse to provide the offenders with the opportunity for confession before seeking revenge (Sanchez Lora 1988: 62ff.: see also, Hamlet, III.iii). Such texts exemplify how the baroque morality examined the structure of society's rules and emphasized that compliancerequired inner conviction, what Jesuit theologian Francisco Suarez called "active obedience" (Maravall 1975/1986:63-65). Concern with unity of a far-flung Catholicism was addressed through the Vatican Congregationde Propaganda Fide. Ponderous when forming policy (for example, the case of the Chinese rites was first presented in 1645 and was not finally adjudicated until 1704), the congregationgave a hearing to local interests, even if not all final decisions went in that direction. In the process of forming policy, the congregation collected ethnological descriptions on the world's cultures, lending a universal character to Catholicism's deliberations. Presented with problems for global evangelization that Protestantism did not generally share in the seventeenth century,11Catholicism developed new Christian responses to native religions, stressing native clergy and seminaries while gingerly sidestepping Europeanimperial interference (Pizzorusso 1995). Marian devotion became a unique vehicle for establishing a post-Tridentine Catholicism, and while contested by Protestants in Europe, in the Americas it found a garden in which to flower. In most cases, the American or Philippine Madonna was a virtual reproductionof a European Madonna (Lefaye 1974/1976: 224-30), but the local devotions emphasized that the appearance of the Virgin in the colonies connectedcolonial Catholicism with Europe. The same universal function was exercised by other baroque devotions: the Infant of Prague and, above all, the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The christologicalfocus of these devotions provide evidence that the theological subordination of Marian devotions in Tridentine theology had an impact on popular piety. Moreover, the council had insisted on devices such as a crucifix over every main altar to insure that popular piety did not stray from theologicalorthdoxy as to Christ's central importance to all piety. Nonetheless, Marian devotionalism was more widely diffused than that of any of the saints and her most popular invocation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries proved to be that of the Immaculate Conception. The Immaculate Conception HonoringMary because she was conceived without sin was a prime example of how a cult could be transformed into devotionalism by an infusion of a high theological purpose. The Immaculate Conceptionwas not just a devotion: for its adepts, it was also a dogma;not a reformabletradition, but an irreformableone. Unlike the rosary,12which was made up of biblical prayers, or the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe which was a symbol of heavenly concern for the contemporary, the Immaculate Conception was above all a theological statement. It was contested within Christianity long before the Reformation. St. Thomas Aquinas argued, as had St. Bernard before him, that if Mary did not suffer from Original Sin, then she would have to be considered a species different from the rest of humanity (sui generis). More importantly, if Mary were always sinless, then she would not have needed redemption by Christ. Franciscans such as Ram6n Llull and Duns Scotus argued in favor of the Immaculate Conception, however, persuaded that the classification sui generis constituted an honor the chivalric Christ would gladly bestow upon his mother. The concept of a divinity compelled by standards of honor derived from feudal society animated the insistence that if the Immaculate Conceptionwas a possibility, then Christ would necessarily be honor-bound to bestow this privilege upon his mother. The thorny question of how Mary
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could be redeemed before Christ had been born was resolved in the Franciscan school by stating that salvation could be conferred in anticipation of Christ's death on the cross, a form of the theological doctrine of predestination that later was pursued with vigor by Calvin. The Council of Basel (1431) had declared the Immaculate Conception a dogma, but because the statement came in a session that lacked a valid quorum, the proclamationwas not considered definitive. Despite support from the Jesuits during the Council of Trent, the Franciscans were unsuccessful in having a new Marian dogma declared, probablybecause it would have made the Protestant versus Catholic split even greater. Trent's cautious ambiguity about the Immaculate Conception, however, only served to stimulate subsequent debates (Stratton 1994: 68-69). In an effort to impose church unity, Pius V in 1570 threatened "ipso facto deprivation' for any cleric-making public, that is, popular affirmation of either side of the argument about the ImmaculateConception. If it had only been a theological argument, the Immaculate Conception might have faded away. But the devotees of the Immaculate Conception rose to the challenge of postTridentine theology and elaborated scriptural bases for their piety: mulier amicta sole, the woman of Revelation 12; tota pulchra, Song of Songs (4:7, 12-15; 6:10); and speculum sine macula, Wisdom (7:26). These biblical verses were translated into a symbolic language appropriateto painting and sculpture. Angel faces, roses, sun, and moon were added to representations of Mary to allude to the scriptural passages. These symbols were understood among all social classes in the polity that was at once Spanish and Catholic (Maravall 1975/1986: 58, 130-40). In France, the seventeenth-century popular preacher, St. Louis Grignon de Monfortwas to add Marian verses to popular songs (Delumeau 1971/1977: 19192). With the addition of such popular staples the Immaculate Conceptionand also the doctrine of the Assumption became major components of Marian devotionalism throughout the Catholic world. A striking example of this convergence of the popular religious imagination and theological discourse came in 1595 when excavation in Spain of an early Christian tomb unearthed leaden plates with inscriptions in Latin and Arabic. Because popular imagination ascribed the writings on these libros plaimbeosto St. James the Apostle, an inscription in one that "Marywas not touched by the first sin" was interpreted as apostolic testimony to dogma of the Immaculate Conception (Stratton 1994: 68-69). With Spanish public clamor growing, Philip III petitioned Pope Paul V in 1616 to declare the Immaculate Conception a dogma, a declaration which would have enhanced the king's reputation for piety. However, animosities between Spain and France had so poisoned the political climate that the pope could not accede to one monarch's request without antagonizing his rival and the papal decree Regis Pacifici once again imposed silence on the matter. But three years and three commissions later, the Spanish monarch struck medals with an image of the Blessed Mother and the inscription "Concebidasin pecado original" ("Conceivedwithout original sin") for populardistribution. The Vatican preparedto censure the issuance of these medals. But in defense of the devotion of the Spanish monarch, an Irish Franciscan, Luke Wadding, argued that although the pope had prohibitedspeaking about the Immaculate Conception, he had not forbidden artistic representation of it. Moreover, said Wadding, visual images were no less important to the common believer than words because symbols communicate true knowledge of sacred matters (cited in Stratton 1994: 84-86). This episode exemplifies how, during the baroque, religious symbols within Catholicism came to be viewed as distinct from text, but equally important to belief. Symbol and text, it might be said, paralleled the relationship of tradition and scripture during the baroque. Kamen comments:
On balancethe Catholicpreferencewas for attractingpeople to the public liturgy, where the oral interest of the sermon and the sensual appeal of music and the altar tended to make the world of the book superfluous. Indeed it may be arged that one grat advantage of the Churh in the pot-Reforation >nrod was that it continued to control all the cultural images that predominatedin late mediaeval society and
66
JOURNALFORTHE SCIENTIFIC STUDYOF RELIGION thereforedid not need to invent new forms:traditionalsymbols such as the relic of a saint or the Christmas crib were (as they were termed in fifteenth-centuryEngland)'booksof the commonman', and served perfectly to communicatethe message (Kamen 1993:416).
Formal theology entered into the seventeenth-century debate on the Immaculate Conception when the Spanish Jesuit, Francisco Suarez, enunciated the principle that customs, that is, reformabletraditions, could so grow in popularity that they would acquire the status of irreformabletraditiones pertaining to faith.13This mode of thinking opened the door for a "campaign" to extend the devotion among Catholics so as to make the Immaculate Conceptioninto a universal dogma, much as today political campaigns in the United States are organized to lobby Congress. This effort did not displace already established local Marian devotions in Castile and Catalonia, but it contriubted to the increase of Marian piety. Popular manifestations of the Immaculate Conception in paintings, medals, and prints (ldminas) were freely distributed among the populace with funds provided from the elites who saw it their pious duty to promotethe devotion as dogma. A seventeenth-century Protestant by the name of John Patrick, saw the ability of piety to overwhelm theology: "Thoughthe pretended Infallible Chair has not thought fit as yet to determine the Controversie about the Immaculate Conception, . . . which has no relation at all to Piety, but to Craft and Cunning, lest the breach about it in their own Church be made wider, yet however it has given them leave to pray that, which it dare not command them to believe as an Article of Faith"(cited in Stratton 1994: 38 n13). The production of articles of material theology for the Immaculate Conception increased after 1616, offering evidence that Catholics availed themselves of the "leave to pray" even if it were not yet a command to believe. Spanish patronage for pictures of the Immaculate Conception generated a century of paintings such as those by Rubens, Velazquez, Zubaran, Valdes Leal, Cano and Murillo, most of which found their way into popular reproduction. In all of these seventeenth-century paintings, the image of the Immaculate Conceptionstands upon the crescent moon, suspended in heaven and attended by angels. Mary of the Immaculate Conceptionstands without a veil or a crown:her head is uncovered and her hair hangs loose, even uncombed. It was an artistic rendition of the dogma that was to remain relatively fixed in Spain (Stratton 1994: 104-22). Two centuries later in 1856, a French critic commented on one of Murillo's baroque Inmaculadas in the Louvre with terms that might be used today: "Forourselves we can see nothing in the famous picture ... but a much too real figure, disorderly in dress and hair, around which whirl a crowd of little naked infants, whose merry attitudes and games by no means harmonize with the solemnity of the august mystery which the artist wished to represent" (cited in Stratton 1994: 106 n70). However, the popular appeal of the baroque Immaculate Conceptionlasted longer than its unfashionableness in the artistic world, possibly because like other enduring sacral images, it touches elemental religious feelings. The wild hair, uncoveredwithout domesticizing veil or ennobling crown, conforms to the image of the "wild woman,"the "Amazon" in archetypal theory (Hall 1980: 82-85; 109-10, 117; Stevens-Arroyo1995). Successfully embracingsuch primal images, the "machineryof Trent" welded together theology and popular Catholicism, Spanish imperial interests and culture, rationality and emotion. The success of the baroque was not permanent, however. When the devotions of the Miraculous Medal and Lourdes were developed in post-Napoleonic France, a different and more domesticated Mary was iconized. Marian devotion under French hegemony was no longer tied to local religion and a regional ethnicity, but to Ultramontanism; it had no lag time to invent a legend, but was put under immediate scientific scrutiny; and it emphasized Mary's message rather than simply celebrating her glories (Zimdars-Swartz 1991: 66-67 passim). After the declaration in 1854 of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, however, the Spanish Inmaculadas of the baroque became the
67
icons for the effort to make into dogma belief in the Assumption of Mary, body and soul into heaven, culminating in 1950 with the declarationby Pope Pius XII. The Marian Path to Global Christianity Particularization and universalization were the ebb and the tide in the sea of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Catholicism. Local devotionalism was the vehicle for particularity, because as described by William Christian (1981), these devotions bestowed importance upon towns that sponsored them. In the Americas, the criollos turned Marian devotions to the same function, often declaring the local Madonna patroness of their ethnicity, much as the Aragonese held Our Lady of Pilar as theirs. But Trent had emphasized the need to link all devotion to the bible, and the established devotion to the Immaculate Conceptionbecame the most popular path, especially in the Americas. This linkage enabled Spaniards to describe the colonies as a stage upon which a European faith danced; one Spanish preacher fatuously claimed that the Mexican Guadalupe had first appeared in Spain (Poole 1995: 157). But for the criollos in America, linkage of their local devotion with European Madonna'sbestowed the grandeur of a world religion upon colonial Catholicism. The "Americanization" of Extremadura'sOur Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico is not a solitary phenomenon:Andalusia's Our Lady of Candelaria becomes patroness of the Canary Islands (Stevens-Arroyo 1993), Castile's Our Lady of Charity is named patroness of Cuba (Arrom 1971) and Catalonia's Our Lady of Montserrat becomes the "black Madonna" of HorIiigueros, Puerto Rico (Parrilla 1990: 11-14; Gutierrez de Arroyo 1960). Our more skeptical age may view the affinity for Marian devotion in newly evangelized countries as syncretism with native goddess worship (Benko 1993) or as resistance to imperialism (Benavides 1995). In fact, even during the baroque, Bernardino Sahaguincomplained of how easily Marian devotion could disguise continuing belief in native religions. But his Erasmian caution was drowned in a sea of pious preference for the miraculous. Baroque New Mexicoprovides a striking example of how the mentality of the time explained evangelical successes. Maria de Jesus de Agreda, a respected Spanish mystic and member of the ConceptionistPoor Clares, wrote a letter to Franciscan missionaries in 1631 explaining that in her visions, she had preached to the Indians of New Mexico. The New World Franciscans promptly found natives to testify that indeed they had heard "a Lady in Blue" speaking in Spanish to them (Weber 1992: 99-100), thus confirming that mysticism bound together the disparate territories of Catholicism. When (under considerable pressure) the nun recanted her visions, some assumed that because the "Ladyin Blue"was not Sor Maria, she must have been the Blessed Mother. This launched speculation about wh:ichnative symbols might have origins in a miraculous pre-conquest contact with Christianity. Based upon Origen's citation of the lost Acts of Thomas that the apostle had traveled to India, a 1639 text stated that St. Thomas the Apostle had appeared in Brazil. Not to be outdone, Carlos Siguenza y Gongoralinked the Aztec legend of the return of Queztalcoatl to a visit by St. Thomas to Mexico, (Lefaye 1974/1976: 180-206). Subsequently, seventeenth-century Catholic missiologists began to analyze native religions for beliefs compatible with Catholicism or for symbols that resembled Christian images, suspecting that these had resulted fromAmerican contact with ancient, even apostolic, Christian preaching. In contrast to how Protestantism was centered in Europe at that time, Catholicism was expansively global. The conversion of Native Americans, Africans, and Asians was viewed as a way of filling up the places left in the church by the defection of European Protestants, a notion that occasionally took on millenarian implications (Phalen 1970; Lafaye 1974/1976). Theologians reasoned that Catholicism allowed people in different climates to react differently to the same religious stimuli, something Maravall calls "psychologicalparticularization"(Maravall 1975/1986: 67 n46 citing Sua.rez de Figueroa).
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Moreover,devotion to the American apparitions was popular not only in the colonies, but also in Spain. For instance, the Peruvian Our Lady of Copacabanahad gozos recited in her name in Catalonia as early as 1690 (Kamen 1993: 146). Organic Traditionin Society and Religion The emphasis in this article upon the religious forces that controlledmaterial theology is not intended to minimize the simultaneous influences from social factors. Kamen notes that the relative prosperity of the age through the infusion of American silver into the economy made it possible for the local Catalan parishes to purchase new statues in the baroque style and add them to their church. From 1546 to 1683, the single main altar in the church of Santa Maria de Mediona was augmented by six lateral altars with statues dedicated to Mary and the saints and nearby St. Quinti added seven (Kamen 1993: 20-23). Dellumeau provides a similar analysis for eighteenth-century France (Delumeau 1971/1977: 147, fig. 1). Similarly, the relatively high level of literacy in New Castile (45%) - higher than in Protestant Germany- provideda popular market for published materials, such as the lives of the saints (Kamen 1993: 347). One must factor in the strong work ethic in parts of Spain that impelled large numbers of people towards self-improvement (Kamen 1993: 200-202). Migrants to America often intensified their practice of religion as a means of higher social status in what has been called "horizontalsocial mobility"(Maravall 1975/1986:36-37; 11023). It is difficult to imagine the Tridentine reforms having an impact on material theology independent of these concomitantsocioeconomicinfluences. Crucial to the development of Marian devotions within Catholicism was a homology between legal and religious conceptualization of tradition. Suarez' monumental treatise on the rights of nations, De Legibus, summarized a century of struggle to reconcile the exigencies of a global Spanish Empire with evangelization of peoples living outside of Europe (Stevens-Arroyo 1996; Maravall 1975/1986: 74-75). Suarez stated that conversion to Christianity conferredrights as an ethnic republic or natio. Inclusion within the Spanish empire guaranteed these rights, so that Christianity brought benefits to a converted people. Once Christians, their rights could not be taken away by the ruler. Moreover,in his thinking, the unwritten traditions of nations have more validity than written treaties signed by rulers, in contradiction with the divine right of kings upheld by James of England. Suarez said local traditions have been validated by the collective will of the people and, unlike written laws, which are frozen in time, the traditions of nations grow and change as they are practiced, affordingthem an origin different from positive law. To gain legitimacy as ruler of disparate peoples, the king must uphold the local traditions which organically form individuals into a natio. At the height of Hapsburg power, Spanish law maintained that without majoritarian consensus the king could not change a tradition by decree:and royal violation of local tradition gave legitimate grounds for rebellion. Because of its radical political implications, SuArez'teaching may be the overriding reason for the suppression of the Society of Jesus in the middle of the eighteenth century (Furlong 1965). In sum, both in theology and politics, the baroquebestowed the force of law on tradition, symbols, emotional appeals and communitarian sentiment. Rationality was not absent from this social equation, but neither was it enthroned. Because baroque legal formulations of tradition were inextricably woven with religious conceptions, both grew simultaneously (Maravall 1975/1986: 19-26). Curiously, although the protection of cultural and religious traditions had a recognizable potential for rebellion against imperial authority, the practice of local traditions was seldom challenged by central authority in Castile. The records of the Spanish Inquisition provide a highly accurate measure of repression because the Inquisition was charged with ferreting out religious beliefs dangerous to church and state. Yet studies have shown that both in Spain
EVOLUTION OF MARIAN DEVO`IONALISM
69
(Kamen 1985) and in America (Hampe-Martinez 1996) the Inquisition underwent slackened, not increased, activity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The effort of Carlos III after 1759 to subordinate the ethnic republics to a centralized monarchy is when traditions, both legal and religious, came under attack. In the attempt of the Bourbonic Reforms to privatize religion, processions and local devotions were circumscribed. Intended to undermine the nationalities of such regions as Catalonia and Galicia in favor of a single concept as "Spaniard," (Cahill 1996: 70-72), the Bourbonsalso attacked the use of languages other than Castilian. The Iberian countryside was targeted because that was the heartland of the ethnic identities. Not incidentally, Jansenism and its rejection of baroque exuberance was part of the package imported from France. Sober Jansenistic worship and quasi-Calvinist rejection of "superstition"appearedin nineteenth century Spanish Catholicism (Delumeau 1971/1977: 121) as did French conceptions of absolutism and rationalism. Urban centers in the Americas, where the criollos vastly outnumbered peninsular Spaniards, became a battleground after 1760, when the Enlightened Despotism of the Bourbon dynasty revoked local privileges that had been enjoyed under the Hapsburgs. It might be suggested here that the monarchy'sincursion into local religious autonomy was as much a political event as its overt policies of centralization. The devotionalism developed under the Hapsburgs had a markedly local and ethnic characterthat characterizedthe longstanding recognition of the rights of each of the empire's nationes. Analysis of the popular support for independence ought to include the role of baroque theology in preparing the populace to see political revolt as a moral necessity. Although these wars came in the eighteenth century, they reflected the tendencies of baroque devotionalism because Latin America's Tridentine Catholicism had not been displaced in the Latin American countryside. Neither was popular Catholicism substantially altered by Jansenism or anti-Jansenist Ultramontanism within the church or by Positivism and anti-clericalism in civil society. Thus, Latin American Catholicism, and its expression in Latino religion in the United States today, reflect the baroque Catholicism of the ethnic republics of the Ibero-Mediterranean polity. The backbone of Latino popular Catholicism is fleshed out by rosaries, holy
cards, gozos, passion plays, pastorelas, and devotional prayers in an artistic style that
appeals to the emotions. These are so clearly traceable to the era of the baroque and Trent, that opinion to the contrary(Espfn 1995) is implausible.
CONCLUSIONS
While I have only been able to point to a few proofsfrom the corpus of historical works on Catholicism of the period, I believe that there is enough evidence here to discount the opinion that Marian devotionalism is merely a relic of "medieval" Christianity. Using material theology as a measure, I consider Marian devotionalism to be a product of baroque Catholicism. While Protestantism took a path of reform that divorceddevotion to and belief in Mary's role in salvation, Catholicism re-imaged Marian devotions as a bridge to the polity under the global expression of Christianity, resonating with the Ibero-Mediterranean Hapsburgs. In this polity, tradition was an organic force that expressed a regional identity, preserved local legal custom and language while resisting subordination to a centralized national state. Religious tradition still plays this role in much of Latin American and Latino popular Catholicism today. The evolution of a Mexican devotion of Our Lady of Guadalupe offers examples in material theology of many of these baroque characteristics, eventually reinforcing a criollo identity and a Mexican nationalism. In light of this research, I would submit that some categories of contemporary social scientific study of religion could be reviewed. For instance, the concepts of the profane and the sacred derived from Durkheim are of questionable use for analyzing popular
70
Catholicism dating from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Cahill 1996: 72-75). Max Webers univocal use of rationality as a secularizing factor, his disdain for tradition (Shils 1981: 9 ff.), and dismissal of the baroque Catholicism as merely the "workof Jesuit probablism"(cited in Maravall 1975/1986: 59 n8) blocks an unbiased understanding of the modernizing functions of tradition within the Ibero-Mediterranean polity. It is not so much that Durkheim and Weber are "wrong," but that their categories have diminished applicability in the study of Catholicism, especially in the Americas. One recent and provocative critique asserts that Weber's emphasis upon rationality conforms to a "Liberal Protestant metanarrative"and can be said to describe "the management of the Christian ethos" in the Anglo-European polity rather than to analyze Christianity itself (Milbank 1990: 92-93). If there is merit to this view, then this article has developed an explanation for one of the ways that Catholicism "managed" the Christian ethos in the distinctive milieu of the IberoMediterranean polity. In sum, much as "sect" and "church"have been superseded by in explaining the United States' experience, new terminology may be useful "denomination" to capture the significant transformation of Christianity represented by IberoMediterranean Catholicism. Moreover,if the twenty-first century ushers in a more a global polity, we may better understand Christianity in our own time by paying more attention to the baroque Catholic multi-lingual, multicultural global expression that contrasted with the Eurocentrism of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Reform Protestantism, the Enlightenment of eighteenth-century Europe and Manifest Destiny of nineteenth- and twentiethcentury United States Evangelicals.
NOTES 1 Not all popular religion was connectedto theology in this way and indeed some of the cofradfasa especially those that had begun in the fourteenthand fifteenth centuries, could 'hire and fire"chaplains at will without reference to theology or piety. But the reformsof the sixteenth century attempted to substitute the autonomous cofradiaswith more controlledpious organizations. 2 David Cahill (1996) providesa critical review of the advantages and limitations in Annaliste history and the study of mentalite and places them in the frameworkof popularreligion. These are also my sources, and, for the most part, I try to use them criticallyas suggested by Cahill. 3 For instance, in the original 1971 French edition, Delumeau opined that European religion before the sixteenth centurywas not Christian,a theory decisively refuted by the time the bookwas translated into English. See Bossy's Introductionto the 1977 English edition. 4 The Latin term was natio, from which come the cognates 'nation"and'nationality,"but the meaning was closer to the current use of "ethnicity" because the reference was to a group of people with identifiable social characteristics, rather than to a politicalinstitution. The nationes were more developedthan the gentes, because while societies without writing were entitled to rights under the lex gentium, only when the people lived in organized societies could they belong to a natio. 6 Poole reports that the silver and copperstatue was melted down at the end of the seventeenth century to make candelabrabecause by then, 'it had been supersededby the present image' (216). 6 For those not familiar with this term, it is not the same as the French cognate often used in English, 'Creole.' The Ibero-American is not of mixedblood(mestizo), but a white person,i.e., of Europeandescent, born crioUo in America. 7 ,I]nprimis de Sanctorum intercessione, invocatione, Reliquiarium honore, legitimo magnum usu, fideles diligenter instruant, docentes eos, Sanctos, una cum Christo regnantes, orationes suas pro hominibus Deo offerre; bonumatque utie esse suppliciterecwinvocare;ob beneficiaimpetrandaa Deo per fiJiumejus Jesum Christum... ad eorumorationes,opemauxiliumqueconfugere. 8 These conciliar and synodal decrees were 'unwritten," because they were 'promulgated."For a detailed explanation of this important reliance on the spoken word as a form of law, see Sophia Menache(1990). Note as well that this thinkdng was part of the baroqueage. As late as 1773, when the Society of Jesus was suppressed, the Jesuits
71
continued to functionin Russia since the monarchthere, Catherine, did not allow the decreeto be promulgated(even by the pope).Without promulgationin a specificregion, the decreehad no validity. Thus, though it had been "written" also, the Tridentine decree on marriagewas not promulgatedin England until the time of Queen Victoria, a technicality which might have allowed Catholicsin England up until the nineteenth century to marryby a secret exchange of vows between lovers as in Romeoand Juliet. 9 [H]anc ueritatemet disciplinamcontineriin libris scriptis et sine scriptotraditionibus,quae ab ipsius Christi ore ab apostolis acceptae, aut ab ipsis apostolis Spiritu sancto dictante quasi per manus traditae ad nos usque patrum exempla secuta, omnes libros tam veteris quam novi testamenti, cum utriusque prevenerunt,orthodoxorum unus Deus sit auctor, nec non traditiones ipsas, tum ad fidem, tum ad mores pertinentes, tamquam vel oretenus a Christo, vel a Spiritu sancto dictatas et continua successione in ecciesia catholica conservatas,pari pietatis affectu ac reverentiasuscipit et veneratur. 10 The obeervationswere made by the Jesuit, Claude LeJay, speaking in proxyof the CardinalArchbishopof Augsburg, Otto von Walburg Truchsess. I am indebted to Dr. Jaime R. Vidal of the Pontifical Seminary of the Josephinum for this valuable historical information. Jedin (1957/1961: 2:62 nl) conjectures that the treatise De Actawas written by LeJay. traditionibusin volumexii of the council's 11 There are notable exceptions to this general trend, and Anglicans stood in contrast with sixteenth- and (Blanke 1986). It was not until the Great Awakenseventeenth-centurydisdain in Calvinistcircles towards"savages" ings in the eighteenth century that the ReformedChurchbegan to consideritself more than a Europeanorganization. The Church of England sponsored in the early eighteenth century a Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts adopting views towards non-Europeans suggested in the 1684 book, Sacred Theoryof the Earth by Thomas Burnet. Clearly modeledon the Vatican's PropagandaFide, the Anglicaninstitution was much more limited than the Roman agency and focused on ministry to slaves in America (Thompson1951). Lutherans were limited in missionary contacts with Americannatives, especially after the collapse of the Swedish colonies in the New World, although the GermanFree Churches,especially the Moravians,had a strong missionaryimpulse. But when compared with the institutional supportand key roles played by PropagandaFide and the missionaryorderswithin Catholicism during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the effort of the Protestant and Reformedchurches for missionary activities amongnon-Europeansis shallow and late in developing. 12 The rosaryin its present formof 15 mysteries, had been designedin the fifteenth century by the Dominican friar, Alain de la Roche (d. 1475), who disguised his own role in creating the prayer by alleging that it had been invented by St. Dominicin the twelfth century. Pope Sixtus IV approvedthe rosary in 1479 (Stratton 1994: 124), but worldwidedevotionwas stimulated by the victoryat Lepanto,October7, 1571. During the baroque,the rosarybecame the Marian prayer par excellence,recited at births and wakes, in church and at home, virtually omnipresent within Catholicism. 13 Potest igitur hic Ecclesiae sensus [de Conceptione Imrnaculata]ita crescere,ut tandempossit Ecclesia absolute et simpliciterremdefinire(In III part. D. Thomae,quaest. XXVII,art. II, disp. III, sect. VI).
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The Evolution of Marian Devotionalism within Christianity and the Ibero-Mediterranean Polity Author(s): Anthony M.

EVOLUTION OF MARLAN DEVOTIONALISM

STUDYOF RELIGION JOURNALFORTHESCIENTIFIC

EVOLUTION OF MARIAN DEVOTIONALISM

JOURNALFORTHE SCIENTIFIC STUDYOF RELIGION

EVOLUTION OF MARLAN DEVOTIONALISM

STUDYOF RELIGION JOURNALFORTHE SCIENTIFIC

EVOLUTION OF MARIAN DEVOTIONALISM

JOURNALFORTHE SCIENTIFIC STUDYOF RELIGION

JOURNALFORTHE SCIENTIFIC STUDYOF RELIGION

JOURNALFORTHE SCIENTIFIC STUDYOF RELIGION

EVOLUTION OF MARIAN DEVOTIONALISM

JOURNALFORTHE SCIENTIFIC STUDYOF RELIGION

EVOLUTION OF MARLAN DEVOTIONALISM

EVOLUTION OF MARIAN DEVOTIONALISM

STUDYOF RELIGION JOURNALFORTHE SCIENTIFIC

EVOLUTION OF MARIAN DEVO`IONALISM

JOURNALFORTHE SCIENTIFIC STUDYOF RELIGION

Universidadde Puerto Rico.

the biblical and the Oriental,1551-1962. New York:Paulist Press.

JOURNALFORTHE SCIENTIFIC STUDYOF RELIGION

EVOLUTION OF MARIAN DEVOTIONALISM

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