This article surveys scholarly contributions to the study of Catholic devotional practice in the Americas, tracing how historical, sociological, and ethnographic studies have examined the relationship between devotion, gender, and embodiment. Scholars have explored how the saints have been brought to bear on the conditions of daily life including immigration and migration, suffering, and social change. Women's devotion has been at the center of studies of gender and lived religion, as scholars explore the creative and tensile ways, women's religious practice has exceeded the institutional authority and architectural boundaries of the church. This essay ends with a provocation about how the study of men and masculinities can challenge the portrayal of devotion as an exclusively feminine domain and complicate the binary of (male) clerical authorities/women that pervades studies of religious practice and materiality.
Each year the Shrine Church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, celebrates its annual Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel and San Paolino di Nola. The crowning event is the Dance of the Giglio, a devotional spectacle of strength and struggle in which men lift a four-ton, seventy-foot tower through the streets. This ethnographic study delves into this masculine world of devotion and the religious lives of lay Catholic men. It explores contemporary men’s devotion to the saints and the Catholic parish as an enduring venue for the pursuit of manhood and masculinity amid gentrification and neighborhood change in New York City. It explores the way laymen imagine themselves and their labor as high stakes, the very work of keeping their parish alive. In this Brooklyn church men, money, and devotion are intertwined. In the backstage spaces of the parish men enact their devotion through craft, manual labor, and fundraising. A rich exploration of embodiment and material religion, this book examines how men come to be part of religious community through material culture: costumes, clothing, objects, and tattoos. It argues that devotion is as much about skills, the body, and relationships between men as it is about belief.
This chapter takes readers on processions through Williamsburg, focusing on a trio of ritual spaces in feast geography: the Questua, the Line of the March, and the parish’s shrine. It explores the hierarchy of masculinities within this Catholic community and how those are performed in how men navigate neighborhood space. Manhood, masculinity, and male authority are contingent on props, stuff, clothing, and setting but are also institutionally granted and achieved in the eyes of other men. Men aspire to and achieve manhood through lifelong involvement with the feast. This chapter examines how life stage matters to ideals of manhood and masculinity and how fatherhood represents the promise of new generations dedicated to the feast and parish. It argues that heterosexuality is central to the community’s vision of a thriving feast and examines the marginalization and excision of gay men from that vision.
This chapter is about how fundraising is a devotional practice. Dollars and cents are not secondary to Catholic devotion but are intertwined with intergenerational bonds between men, loyalties to the church, and ideas about survival and community longevity. Counting, collecting, and soliciting money is religious work. Discourses of life and death sacralize money and valorize men’s labor as productive and vital. Keeping the parish alive then becomes a masculine duty. This chapter takes readers backstage in the money room at the feast and through embodied ethnography explores how parishioners are trained in money work. Following the labor of one man, it explores how money work is a calling and how it binds feast organizers to the parish and implicates them in the labor of sustaining the church. This chapter unpacks men’s organizational labor and constructions of “productivity” and “dedication” to consider how they embody masculinities through working for the church.
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