Michael P. Carroll

This is an excellent summary of the most recent literature on the subject (especially of studies in Italian); and it is also a superb compendium of specific religious practices and of scholarly approaches to them.

Michael P. Carroll argues that the academic study of religion in the United States continues to be shaped by a "Protestant imagination" that has warped our perception of the American religious experience and its written history and analysis. In this provocative study, Carroll explores a number of historiographical puzzles that emerge from the American Catholic story as it has been understood through the Protestant tradition. Reexamining the experience of Catholicism among Irish immigrants, Italian Americans, Acadians and Cajuns, and Hispanics, Carroll debunks the myths that have informed much of this history. Shedding new light on lived religion in America, Carroll moves an entire academic field in new, exciting directions and challenges his fellow scholars to open their minds and eyes to develop fresh interpretations of American religious history.

The Penitente brotherhood of New Mexico soared in popularity during the early nineteenth century. Local chapters of the brotherhood, always exclusively male, met in specially constructed buildings (called moradas) to conduct their business and engaged in a variety of religious rituals, including flagellation. The traditional view, still very much accepted, is that Penitente spirituality was a continuation of pietistic practices brought to the New World from Spain by Franciscan missionaries in the sixteenth century. In this book sociologist of religion Michael Carroll argues that the movement in factdeveloped much later. There is in fact little evidence that Hispanos in pre-1770 New Mexico were particularly religious, and indeed the usual hallmarks of popular Catholicism -such as apparitions, cults organized around miraculous images, or pilgrimage-are noticeable by their absence. Carroll traces the rise of the Penitentes to social changes, including the Bourbon reforms, that undermined patriarchal authority and thereby threatened a system that was central to the social organization of late colonial New Mexico. Once established, the Penitentes came to incorporate a number of organizational elements not found in traditional confraternities. As a result, Carroll concludes, Penitente membership facilitated the "rise of the modern" in New Mexico and-however unintentionally-made it that much easier, after the territory's annexation by the United States, for the Anglo legal system to dispossess Hispanos of their land.

Tracing devotion to Mary to psychological and historical processes that began in the fifth century, Michael Carroll answers intriguing questions: What explains the many reports of Marian apparitions over the centuries? Why is Mary both "Virgin" and "Mother" simultaneously? Why has the Marian cult always been stronger in certain geographical areas than in others? The first half of the book presents a psychoanalytic explanation for the most salient facts about the Marian cult and the second addresses the question of Marian apparitions.

Michael Carroll is the first to bring psychoanalytic theory to bear on a range of Catholic cults and devotions, including the Rosary, the Angelus, the Stations of the Cross, the Blood Miracles of Naples, the Stigmata, the Forty Hours, the Brown Scapular, and the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Carroll assembles a great deal of historical information that until now has been widely scattered in obscure publications. He suggests why such devotions are absent from the Protestant tradition and argues for a new and more subtle appreciation of the role that Italian Catholicism played in shaping Catholicism generally.