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    A Saint of Our Own

    How the Quest for a Holy Hero Helped Catholics Become American

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    Author(s)
    Cummings, Kathleen Sprows
    Language
    English
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    Abstract
    What drove U.S. Catholics in their arduous quest, full of twists and turns over more than a century, to win an American saint? The absence of American names in the canon of the saints had left many of the faithful feeling spiritually unmoored. But while canonization may be fundamentally about holiness, it is never only about holiness, reveals Kathleen Sprows Cummings in this panoramic, passionate chronicle of American sanctity. Catholics had another reason for petitioning the Vatican to acknowledge an American holy hero. A home-grown saint would serve as a mediator between heaven and earth, yes, but also between Catholicism and American culture. Throughout much of U.S. history, the making of a saint was also about the ways in which the members of a minority religious group defined, defended, and celebrated their identities as Americans. Their fascinatingly diverse causes for canonization—from Kateri Tekakwitha and Elizabeth Ann Seton to many others that are failed, forgotten, or still under way—represented evolving national values as Catholics made themselves at home. Cummings's vision of American sanctity shows just how much Catholics had at stake in cultivating devotion to men and women perched at the nexus of holiness and American history—until they finally felt little need to prove that they belonged.
    URI
    https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/76550
    Keywords
    Catholic Church; American Catholicism; Vatican; Catholics in the United States; the canonization process; beatification; Rome; how to make a saint; North American Martyrs; Elizabeth Ann Seton; Kateri Tekakwitha; John Neumann; Frances Cabrini; Rose Philippine Duchesne; Katharine Drexel; Junipero Serra; saints; missionaries; religious; nuns; priests; Catholic women; Catholic immigrants; Sisters of Charity
    DOI
    10.5149/9781469649498_Cummings
    ISBN
    9798890851567, 9781469649474, 9781469649481, 9781469665535, 9798890851567, 9781469649498
    Publisher
    University of North Carolina Press
    Publisher website
    https://uncpress.org/
    Publication date and place
    Chapel Hill, 2019
    Grantor
    • National Endowment for the Humanities - [...]
    Imprint
    The University of North Carolina Press
    Pages
    336
    Rights
    https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
    • Imported or submitted locally

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    License

    • If not noted otherwise all contents are available under Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

    Credits

    • logo EU
    • This project received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 683680, 810640, 871069 and 964352.

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