Contributors to this Issue

M. CHRISTINE ANDERSON, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of History and Co-Director of the Public History Program at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio. She received a Bachelor of Arts in History from Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio, and a Masters and Doctorate in History from the Ohio State University. She has published in the Journal of Women’s History, American Catholic Studies, Ohio Valley History, and Equity and Excellence in Education.

MARY BETH FRASER CONNOLLY, Ph.D., is currently a Continuing Lecturer in History and Concurrent Enrollment Liaison for History and Political Science at Purdue University North Central. She received her Bachelors from John Carroll University, University Heights, Ohio, a Masters in Women’s History from Binghamton University, New York, and her Doctorate in U.S. History from The Catholic University of America. She is the author of Women of Faith: The Chicago Sisters of Mercy and the Evolution of a Religious Community (Fordham University Press, 2014), and the co-editor, with Jeremy Bonner and Christopher D. Denny, of Empowering the People of God: Catholic Action Before and After Vatican II (Fordham University Press, 2013).

AMELIA GALLAGHER, Ph.D., received her Doctorate from the Institute of Islamic Studies of McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Her research interests include sectarian groups and sacred places in Turkey. She has been published in Iranian Studies, the Journal of Folklore Research, and Philosophy East and West. She currently teaches in the Religious Studies Department of Niagara University.

SR. JUDITH METZ, S.C., Ph.D., is archivist/historian for The Sisters of Charity of Cincinnati. She holds an undergraduate degree from the College of Mount St. Joseph, an MA in History from Xavier University, and a Doctorate in American Catholic Studies from Union Institute and University. Besides her archival work, she teaches, lectures, researches, and writes. She is the co-editor of the four-volume Elizabeth Bayley Seton: Collected Writings, and the author of A Retreat with Elizabeth Seton: Meeting Our Grace, and The Charity of Christ Urges Us: The Sisters of Charity of Cincinnati in the Civil War.

REV. JOHN E. RYBOLT, C.M., Ph.D., completed his seminary studies at the Vincentian seminary in Perryville, Missouri, and at De Andreis Seminary in Lemont, Illinois. He received a Doctorate in biblical studies from Saint Louis University. He has taught in Vincentian seminaries in Saint Louis, Lemont, and Denver. He worked for the provincial of the Midwest Province from 1979 to 1981. He joined the board of trustees of DePaul University in 1981 and is currently a life trustee. He also served as a delegate from the Midwest Province to the international general assemblies of the Congregation in 1980, 1986, and 1998, and managed the archives of the province from 1980 to 1989. Reverend Rybolt also served as the director of the International Formation Center, a program for ongoing Vincentian education and formation in Paris, France. Currently, he is serving as a Vincentian Scholar in Residence at DePaul University. Since 1979 he has been involved in the Vincentian Studies Institute, which he headed from 1982 to 1991. His many publications have covered fields of interest in language, biblical studies, and history, particularly Vincentian history, and he has recently completed work on the multi-volume series The Vincentians: A General History of the Congregation of the Mission.

SEAN ALEXANDER SMITH, Ph.D., was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1986, and now lives in Ireland. He read European Studies at Trinity College Dublin (2004-2008), achieving First Class Honors. He then earned a Doctor of Philosophy at National University of Ireland, Galway (2008-2012), under the pioneering Texts, Contexts, Cultures Ph.D. program. His monograph has just been published in Ashgate’s Catholic Christendom (1300-1700) series as Fealty and Fidelity: The Lazarists of Bourbon France, 1660-1736 (October 2015). He is also currently working on an edited volume of essays with Alison Forrestal, Ph.D., entitled The Frontiers of Mission: Perspectives on Early Modern Missionary Catholicism. His most recent peer-reviewed article was published in French History (2013), as “Courtiers with a Conscience: The Lazarists of Versailles and Saint-Cyr, 1674-1704.” In 2014, he received a research award from the DePaul University Vincentian Studies Institute in Chicago, and is now a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at University College Dublin, where he is working on his new book project Succeeding the Jesuits: Politics, Piety and the Congregation of the Mission in Eighteenth-Century Europe.

Succeeding the Jesuits: The Congregation of the Mission

and the Colégio da Purificação in Evora[1]

By

Sean Alexander Smith, Ph.D.

The eighteenth-century is generally regarded as a time of wilting prestige for Catholic religious institutes, above all the Society of Jesus. In 1773, the universal dissolution of the Society, once one of the most visible and powerful religious bodies in the Catholic church, came at the end of European-wide repressive attacks starting in the 1750s. In 1758, the Jesuits were accused of widespread abuses and scandalous conduct in Portugal and its colonies. José I deported them from the Americas and then formally expelled them from his realm in 1759. The infamous bankruptcy of Antoine Lavalette, a French Jesuit in Martinique, prepared the ground for the enemies of the Jesuits to destroy their order in France and French overseas territories in 1762. By 1764 Louis XV had yielded to the will of his parlements and extinguished the order in the French dominions, and by the decade’s close the rulers of Spain, Naples, and Parma had similarly turned their fury against the followers of Saint Ignatius.[2]

The events that preceded these European suppressions of the Society are, of course, dramatic. Its deconstruction in the realms of eighteenth-century Europe is often related to the rise of the nation-state, the surge of enlightenment ideas, and the general decline of piety during this era. But the years that followed its disappearance are even more intriguing. Far from being the summit in Europe’s supposed slope toward greater dechristianization, the suppression in fact involved a process of re-weighting in favor of other models of priestliness. Rulers across Europe turned to other institutes to fill the gap left by the Jesuits. One institute still in fashion, and which benefited greatly from their extinction, was the Congregation of the Mission.

In the wake of the Society’s suppression, the Congregation took over a significant number of its former establishments across the world. This expropriation began in France, where the Congregation acceded to former Jesuit houses and seminaries in La Rochelle (1762), Rodez (1767), Luçon (1771), Cambrai (1772), and Albi (1774). In Italy, Lazarists entered former Jesuit colleges in Parma (1768), and Turin (1776). Among other establishments on the Italian peninsula they received the former Jesuit house in Bologna (1774), and the Congregation’s internal seminary in Rome was transferred to a former Jesuit property, the Jesuit noviciate abutting Sant’Andrea al Quirinale. In most of these jurisdictions, the Lazarists took only a fraction of the Jesuits former edifices, but in some places the harvest was richer. In the Palatinate the prince elector invited them to install Mission houses in all former Jesuit institutions — including the prestigious Jesuit college in Heidelberg. These European gifts were crowned by even more in the East. In the 1780s, upon royal order French Lazarists occupied seven former Jesuit establishments in the Levant. In 1784, former Jesuit goods in China, including the imperial mission at Peking, also were handed to the sons of Monsieur Vincent.[3] The focus of this article, though, will be the former Jesuit college at Evora in Portugal, granted to the Lazarists in 1779.

Few contemporary observers could have predicted this large-scale substitution of Jesuits by disciples of Vincent de Paul. Even a cursory glance at prevailing historical representations confirms how widely each group was set apart. The Jesuits were seen as quintessential hommes de pouvoir, whose dominance of royal confessionals across Europe fuelled widespread stereotypes of them as powerful and dangerous politicians.[4] Diderot’s Encyclopédie accused the Society of “acting as though it were destined to command the universe,” snarling that its members were “the most abject fomenters of despotism in the state.”[5] At the time of the suppression, hatred of the Jesuits’ alleged power unleashed the most extravagant claims against them. In the wake of their expulsion from the Portuguese colonies in Brazil, a colonial official there so resented the Jesuits’ former positions of power that he called them the “common enemies of the human race.”[6] The Lazarists, on the other hand, rarely attracted this kind of opprobrium in Europe or elsewhere, primarily because they were stereotypically regarded as being simple-minded, and thus inoffensive, rural parsons. As a rule, the Lazarists avoided the sort of self-publication typified in the famous Jesuit relations, and their humility probably fed images of them as men of inferior talents and intellect. For example, while Saint-Simon recognized some Lazarists as holy in his court memoirs, he repeatedly cast them as “ignorant.”[7] Likewise, during the Napoleonic era an official of the French department of the marine praised their “happy mediocrity,” but insisted that there was “nothing brilliant” about them.[8]

These caricatures had their roots in more concrete distinctions between both institutes. In a general sense, the Congregation and the Society shared similar goals. They were both missionary institutes created out of the Catholic Reform’s agenda of renewal, even if they chose differing means of executing it. Canonically approved in 1540, the Society of Jesus was founded by Ignatius of Loyola and several companions with the core objective “to help souls” through their myriad ministries.[9] Vincent de Paul founded the Congregation in 1625 at a time when the French church was in ailing condition, characterized — according to one observer — by “a lack of virtue and discipline in the clergy” and a “people, especially [those] of the countryside, [who] were not instructed, nor assisted… in [their] spiritual needs.”[10] The Congregation was thus founded to devote itself “entirely and exclusively to the salvation of the poor common people.”[11]

As missionaries, Jesuits and Lazarists engaged in activities typical of apostolic laborers in the early modern period: preaching, saying Mass, and confessing. However, beyond these general pastoral activities, both institutes imposed vows emblematic of each group. To the traditional vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience, the Society bound its members to a fourth vow of service of the pope; the Congregation imposed a vow of stability, enrolling its members in apostolic works in rural areas.[12] These vows made for differing aspirations at the heart of both bodies. The Society’s close relationship with, and availability to, the Roman pontiff prepared the way for its rapid development as a global order. By the end of the sixteenth century it had already developed manifold activities in Europe, the Middle East, America, and Northern Africa, counting 10,000 Jesuits in thirty-two provinces. In contrast, the Congregation’s original limitation to serving the poor in ‘humbler’ locations meant it remained small and generally unrecognized for a long time. In 1708, Lazarists still only numbered approximately 1,200 missionaries in nine provinces, mostly in Europe.[13] In the eighteenth century, practical and organizational differences between Jesuits and Lazarists remained appreciable. While the Encylopédie could call the Society “rich, numerous, and powerful” in 1765, for its part the Congregation had grown in influence but remained structurally small-scale. In 1789, its membership hovered just above 800 men in eleven provinces.[14]

Many former Jesuit institutions handed over to the Lazarists from the 1770s onwards were educational establishments. However, while both sets of missionaries became heavily invested in education, they earned markedly different reputations. The Society of Jesus rapidly developed an extraordinary network of colleges — largely for the education of young men in what would be considered modern-day high schools — across Europe and the world. In France, for example, the Jesuits operated thirteen colleges in 1575, having opened one every year on average since their legal recognition in 1562.[15] Jesuit colleges similarly dotted Portugal and its empire from the sixteenth century: they could be found in cities and towns from Porto to Bahía, Funchal to Olinda, the Azores to Rio de Janeiro.[16] In contrast, the weight of the Congregation of the Mission lay not in operating colleges for young men, but in managing diocesan seminaries. A trend begun in Vincent de Paul’s lifetime gradually made the Congregation a European leader in the provision of ecclesiastical education; by the French Revolution, two-thirds of French diocesan seminaries were in its hands.[17] Like many of the differences separating each institute, these vocational dissimilarities were due in part to essential points of distinction between Jesuits and Lazarists. Jesuit control of colleges historically went hand-in-hand with their cultivation of elites in urban areas.[18] For their part, Lazarist involvement in seminaries was traditionally linked to their central objective of evangelizing the rural poor, a goal closely correlated to providing good priests for them.[19]

Given these stark variances, the transfer of a significant number of Jesuit properties to the Congregation raises a host of questions. The first category of questions relates to the key area of patronage. The differing weight of each body, their connections to agents of power, and therefore their visibility and independent resources, matter enormously in assessing the Congregation’s fitness (and perceived fitness) as a replacement. What pedigree did each institute enjoy in the regions and realms where Lazarists replaced Jesuits? In particular, did the Lazarists nourish close relationships with the same monarchies that targeted the Jesuits for expulsion? What were their relations with other established authorities, like the Pope and diocesan bishops? The second group of questions is procedural in nature, focusing on the tooth-and-nail of replacement. Is there evidence of a ‘smooth handover’ and what were the Jesutis’ reactions? What were the legal terms of the handovers? What goods, buildings, monies, and lands were transferred? What happened to the Jesuits’ artistic patrimony? These last lines of enquiry will ultimately establish if the transfer of Jesuit properties enriched successors. A final set of questions will address the aftermath of replacement. Did the Lazarists engage in the same activities as the former occupants?

A new research project, begun in 2014 under the Vincentian Studies Institute and now continuing with the Irish Research Council, seeks to provide answers to these questions. Entitled Succeeding the Jesuits: piety, politics, culture and the Congregation of the Mission, this broad venture ultimately seeks to understand if the extinction of one of the greatest Catholic orders left an unfillable hole in Europe and beyond. However, the project’s first hurdle lies in a massively uneven historiography. The Society of Jesus — its foundation, expansion, and decline — continues to attract historical research matching its weight.[20] In contrast, work on Catholic institutes who represented a challenge to its dominance is surprisingly limited. Of much relevance to this project is the fact that studies on the Congregation have been largely inhibited by greater historical interest in Vincent de Paul. Consequently, the only source of information on the Congregation in Europe before 1789 is a small pool of internal histories often compiled by professed Lazarists. In general, these works share two major flaws: they are confined to that part of the Congregation’s history which is coterminous with Vincent’s lifetime or the immediate aftermath, and they remain poorly lit by context.[21] There is therefore no substantial study on the Congregation’s activities in Europe in the eighteenth century, a startling fact given its growing stature and influence throughout several kingdoms.[22]

The time is ripe for a substantial comparative study of an emerging ecclesiastical challenger to the pre- and post-suppression Jesuits. Ample attention is given to political debates, financial scandals, and prickly theological questions in the century leading to their disgrace in European territories, but the redistribution of the Society’s power among religious competitors during the suppression is a thoroughly neglected subject. The bicentennial of the Society’s restoration in 2014 has reignited interest in the expulsion and restoration period, yet little work has been done in these areas. One reason for this is that the dissolution process dispersed relevant Jesuit documents across myriad national, state, and local archives. Documents relating to the mechanics of handovers in specific dominions and cities have therefore not been adequately plundered. Historians can therefore often lean on no more than general surveys of the Jesuit aftermath, many of which only deal with the subject of successors obliquely.[23]

This case study on the Colégio da Purificação in Evora, Portugal, is the first in a limited but representative sample of former Jesuit establishments that passed to the Lazarists. Based on newly-discovered primary materials, it will address the key themes of patronage, procedure, and the aftermath of replacing the Jesuits. In order to understand these themes, a brief sketch of both the Society’s and the Congregation’s history in Portugal is necessary. This history confirms the equally important role of patrons in promoting and empowering each institute, as well as the dramatic consequences of the Jesuits’ loss of favor with its sponsors and eventually the entire regime. With the gift of one of Portugal’s great and prestigious colleges, the Lazarists subsequently benefited from the Jesuits’ downfall, but the reasons for their nomination to the Colégio, and the form of the handover, have not been fully explored. In the final analysis, we should consider if the Lazarists’ succession filled the educational and missionary gaps left by the Society of Jesus in Evora.

The Society of Jesus in Portugal

The Colégio da Purificação, an institution long a jewel of the Jesuit province of Portugal, was founded in the golden era of the Jesuits’ development. They had been in Portugal since June 1540, when Francis Xavier and Simão Rodrigues arrived there to establish the first mission. The early history of the province, and the decades that followed the new Jesuit foundation, immediately demonstrated how adept the Society would become at weaving close ties with established powers. Even before they arrived in Portugal, King John III appeared to be enamored of them, urging his ambassador in Rome to encourage as many of their institute to come and settle in his kingdom. Once established, they were soon called for an audience with the monarch, a portent of close future relations not simply with the royal family, but with other grandees. Among their fresh admirers included the two infantes, especially Dom Henrique, the future Cardinal-King, as well as the archbishop of Braga, Bartolomeu dos Martires.[24]

The new province grew exponentially with the assistance of high patrons and aristocrats, who both helped the Jesuits acquire properties and then frequented their churches as parishioners. The first deal, struck in January 1542, involved an exchange of properties gifted by the king in return for a monastery in Lisbon. The building was subsequently known as Santo Antão, and functioned as the Society’s first Portuguese college. Yet the expansion of their activities in and around the capital soon demanded other bases. In the 1550s, João III offered the Society five properties, including the large compound of São Roque, located just outside the city enclosure, to serve as a noviciate. In 1579, construction of a new site in Lisbon, a much larger facility called Santo Antão o novo, was also begun. The activities of the missionaries soon radiated outwards: the foundation stone of their college in Coimbra, the future College of Jesus, was laid in April 1547, followed by their gaining control of João III’s Royal College in the same city in 1555.[25]

Plans to establish the Jesuits in Evora, a city in Portugal’s south central Alentejo region, began in 1542, when João III sent his confessor to choose a site for a prospective college. This initial effort was brought to fruition in 1551 by Cardinal Henrique, who ordered construction of an edifice to serve as an education center for his clergy. The Jesuits’ participation in this project was advanced by circumstances, as missionaries from the Society were also operating in the Evora diocese in 1551. Cardinal Henrique had sought, and was granted, missionary teams to evangelize his vast diocese, and Jesuit missionaries soon visited most major towns in the area. Seemingly impressed with their work among the population, in June of that year Henrique interviewed two Jesuits regarding his desire to establish a Jesuit college, and on 5 October 1551 a larger delegation arrived in the city. After a pilgrimage on foot from Coimbra, Simão Rodrigues and nine companions opened the College of the Holy Spirit, approved as a university by Pope Paul IV in 1558.[26]

The establishment later transferred to the Lazarists in Evora, the Colégio da Nossa Senhora da Purificação, was conceived as a constituent college of the fledgling Jesuit university. Following on the success of colleges established by Henrique in Braga, Lisbon, and elsewhere, in February 1576 the Holy See, with the bull Altitudo Divinae Providentiae, authorized the cardinal to found one or more similar institutions that would be entrusted to the Society of Jesus exclusively. Initially designed as one of a quartet of colleges, the Colégio da Purificação was the only actually built. The first stone of the institute was laid by Henrique on 27 June 1577, and the development had the distinction of being the last building project sponsored by the cardinal before his proclamation as king of Portugal in August 1578.[27] In statutes adopted for the college and signed by the new monarch on 29 July 1579, Henrique explained that his plans for a network of colleges in Evora and throughout Portugal owed to the “great evils that follow from ignorance, lack of sound doctrine and good example from the ministers of the Church.”[28] To combat these ills he had endowed the original university of the Holy Spirit for “those who might wish to study and learn good habits, together with the humanities, for the good and salvation” of souls.[29] The foundation of the new Colégio da Purificação was tied to these original objectives, being founded “for the conservation of the University” and for the study and housing of its students.[30] As for its operators, the king appointed the Jesuits “for the experience that I have of [their] zeal and virtue…”[31]

The impressive new college, with its “two majestic cloisters,” was originally designed to accommodate fifty students, although the number was later reduced to twenty five.[32] These were, in the main, high-level ecclesiastical students from Portugal and elsewhere, usually on a pathway to doctorates in theology. Over the years their alma mater developed a reputation for producing excellent alumni. An eighteenth-century chronicler observed that the college was “the best that there is in Portugal,” training “great men of letters and doctors” who served both in dioceses and the Inquisition. Besides generations of parish clergy several prominent ecclesiastics began their careers in the college’s cloisters, including Bartolomeu do Quental, founder of the Portuguese Oratory, Frei Domingos Barata, professor at the University of Coimbra and bishop of Portalegre, and D. João do Casal, bishop of Macau. The college also became a favorite of eighteenth-century nobility, many of whom, such as the count of Unhão and the count of Avintes, sent sons destined for the church to study there.[33] According to the entry catalogue, between its founding and extinction, 626 students passed through the gates.[34]

Some considerations warrant attention from this early history of the Colégio da Purificação. The first is the great popularity of the Jesuits, both in Portugal, and in the Alentejo region, before their suppression in 1759. For over two hundred years Evora was well-cultivated Jesuit territory, and they had become highly influential personalities in the town. The Jesuit rector of the university was a pre-eminent figure, combining this office with the rectorship of two other colleges, including the Colégio da Purificação, the administration of the Royal University Hospital, and a canonry in the cathedral.[35] Compared with the Congregation of the Mission, whose members only commenced activity in the region in 1777, the Society was of much older vintage. Of course, both locally and on a national level, the Jesuits’ position hinged on the close patronage and admiration of royalty and grandees. From the founding of the Portuguese province to the eighteenth century, the support of kings and cardinals had sustained the Jesuits’ vast operation, which included the Evora compound and nineteen other colleges. However, as we shall see, support for the institute drained steadily away in the decades prior to suppression. As favor diminished for them it flowed in other directions.

Jesuit Vicissitudes and Lazarist Victories

The eighteenth century was not easy on the Society of Jesus, which found itself battered on all sides in several European kingdoms. The Jansenist controversy, which had erupted in France in the previous century and soon became a prickly question for the universal church, pitted powerful groups against the Jesuits. Parlements, ministers of state, and great numbers of learned lawyers attacked them as “perverse, destructive of all principles of religion, and even of honesty.”[36] As one Portuguese historian has pointedly summarized, the Jesuits’ militant pursuit of those who opposed the anti-Jansenist bulls, especially Unigenitus in 1713, sparked “enormous effervescence and growing animosity, which, far from calming with time, kept growing.”[37] The European media went into overdrive to attack the Jesuits — mobilizing newsprint, engravings, and pamphlets to carry anti-Jesuit venom.[38] However, fuel for the anti-Jesuit build-up came from other quarters too. Even if the French philosophes did not explicitly take sides during the suppression, ironic works as such d’Alembert’s Sur la destruction des jésuites en France viewed the Jesuits’ ruin as the final hurdle in advancing Europe’s lay Enlightenment.[39] Outside France, government campaigns in major European cities such as Vienna, Milan, and Turin challenged the Jesuit stranglehold on universities and schools, and derided the old-fashioned classical syllabi. These movements in turn reflected new political strategies, such as Josephism, that sought to severely restrict the Society’s influence with Europe’s rulers.[40]

The Jesuits’ nadir began in Portugal and its foreign dominions. Agitation first erupted in the South American colonies where heightened scrutiny of the size of their properties and endowments soon led to their indictment for “scandalous trading.”[41] Infamous works such as the state-supported propaganda piece the Relacão abreviada, accused them of a litany of crimes, including robbing and defrauding the native population, as well as flouting church and state law.[42] Then in 1757, the Jesuits’ were abruptly expelled from court, ending their roles as kingly confessors.[43] But it was the Tavora affair that ultimately sealed their fate. On the evening of 3 September 1758, an attack on King José I’s life at Quinta do Meio, near Belém outside Lisbon, triggered the final decline of the Society. On 12 January 1759, the alleged instigators, which included members of the prominent Tavora family, the duke of Aveiro, and the count of Atouguia, were convicted of the crime of regicide and sentenced to horrific deaths. More importantly, the judgement also labelled the Jesuits as “culprits of this execrable crime.”[44] In February, the prime minister Sebastião de Carvalho e Melo, the redoubtable Marquês de Pombal (1699-1782), ordered Jesuit property confiscated and inflicted harsh penalties on members of the Society. Many were sent to prison for lengthy periods. On 3 September 1759 the Crown finalized the complete expulsion of the Society from the realm, but attacks on the order did not abate. In a much-publicized case the government prosecuted the famous Jesuit missionary Gabriel Malagrida for heresy, and he was burned at the stake by order of the Inquisition in January 1761.[45]

The Crown’s wrath soon spilled onto the Jesuit community of Evora. On 8 February 1759, two sections of cavalry surrounded the university, its colleges, and the gardens. Inside were imprisoned all the Jesuits from colleges in the Alentejo and Algarve region, numbering some 70 priests. By order of the Crown these men were forbidden from communicating with the outside world. According to one historical account, a “huge crowd of people rushed to the college throwing up cries and laments” over the fate of the town’s most important religious congregation. The Jesuit community suffered arrest for seven months, until 10 September, when its members were transported in carriages to prisons in the Azeitão and Lisbon.[46] From there, they were deported to the Papal States, joined by scores of others expelled from Portugal, Brazil, and India. Of the approximately 1,698 Jesuits in the Portuguese province, over one thousand found refuge in the pontifical domains.[47]

This history is dismal, but it was not shared by all religious institutes in the eighteenth century. Indeed, if historians can speak of a narrative of decadence captured in the Jesuit fall, there are parallel narratives of success and unflagging popularity enjoyed by other groups of Catholic missionaries. In particular, the Lazarists enjoyed a remarkably different trajectory in Europe, at least until the French Revolution in 1789. Beginning in the 1660s, the appointments they gained as parish priests at some of Louis XIV’s major residences, including the châteaux of Fontainebleau and Versailles, signaled the steady rise of the erstwhile ‘priests of the countryside’ as serious competitors to established clerical interests, especially the Jesuits, in France. The Sun-King’s confidence in the heirs of Vincent de Paul, who were early on identified as less wily alternatives to the more political Society of Jesus, was soon repeated across European courts. In Rome, in 1697, the pope gifted the lucrative abbey of Saints John and Paul to the Congregation.[48] In a further show of confidence, in 1704 the grand-duke of Florence established the Lazarists in the city to replace another group of clergy out of his ‘great esteem’ for them. The Congregation’s popularity in the eternal city continued apace, and in 1705 it received the directorship of the pontifical Academy of Noble Ecclesiastics, a special seminary for the training of papal ambassadors.[49]

The Lazarists’ rise to prominence in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries prepared the way for great successes in specific European territories in the decades immediately prior to the Jesuit collapse. In Portugal, these accomplishments were in plain view, even if the Congregation’s beginnings in the kingdom were irregular. In 1712, a Lazarist based in Rome, José Gomez da Costa, obtained permission from the Holy See to travel to Portugal to set up the Congregation. However, when the king approved the Congregation’s establishment in 1714 he forbade any connection between the venture and Saint-Lazare in France. He insisted on an autonomous Portuguese community, “immediately subject to His Holiness, without dependence on any other superior.”[50] This stipulation caused serious concern among the Congregation’s central leadership. While his public letters deftly hid the conflict, their superior general’s private correspondence lamented this attempt to divide the Congregation, calling the results “true dismemberments of a well-united body.” Although this injection of nationalist sentiment into the Congregation’s organization troubled the general, it nevertheless also signaled the close interest of the Portuguese monarchy in the new Lazarist establishment.

Over the next decade, reports from Saint-Lazare drew attention to the favors showered on the new arrivals by the sovereign. In 1719, the superior general boasted that the Lisbon house “was well-desired by the king, who has honored it with his presence at the divine offices.” In 1724 he wrote that the king treated the establishment with “great bounty and a truly paternal affection.”[51] This continued when the relationship between the Portuguese Lazarists and the Congregation at large was regularized in 1737. In the early 1740s the Lazarists benefited from the largesse of João V, who gifted lands and properties to the missionaries. In 1742, the king generously endowed the Congregation with additional royal funds, and also assigned the income from two major benefices in the diocese of Porto.[52] Further demonstrations of the monarch’s abundance came in 1743 when the superior general reported that the king “ha[d] newly bought a vast allotment in order to build lodgements more proportionate to the object of his foundation.”[53]

The spike in Lazarist activities in the eighteenth century mirrored the Society of Jesus’ fecundity over two hundred years previously. The interest evinced by the monarchy soon found echoes in the episcopate, and bishops across the country demonstrated support for Vincent’s followers. In 1752 the archbishop of Braga, whom the superior general claimed nourished a “special esteem” for the Lazarists, granted them “a magnificent establishment” at Guimarães in his diocese, and in the same year the bishop of Miranda also requested Lazarist missionary teams.[54] Although Lisbon’s terrible earthquake in 1755 left their house in the capital uninhabitable and forced the missionaries to shelter in tents in their garden, their missions in the country remained popular. In 1758 the general reported that, after an invitation by the bishop, the Lazarists had performed missions in Coimbra for nearly two years with “marvelous success.”[55]

The Congregation of the Mission was in steady ascent in Portugal at the same time the Jesuits declined, yet evidence pointing to a direct rivalry between members of the two organizations remains slender. However, one of the most significant events of the century, the Tavora affair, revealed the level of trust the monarchy had invested in the Lazarists at a time when its opinion of the Jesuits was lower than ever. A rare manuscript source for the Congregation’s development in the Portuguese empire, the Memorias chronologicas da caza da Congregação da Missão de Lisboa, describes how, two days before the execution of sentences against those charged with the attempted regicide, the Lazarist superior in Lisbon was “called to the Secretariat of State where he received the instruction… to send four priests to assist some of the culprits.” The account continued:

Early on Friday morning two carriages arrived to take four of our priests to the place in Belém where the wretched were being held. Sr Abren assisted the Marchioness of Tavora,[56] having as a companion Sr Coelho. Sr Ferreira accompanied Sr Carvalho,[57] who assisted the condemned man who was burned alive. At the end of the whole execution he gave a lesson to the people, as we would do on any gallows where sentence of death was executed. Sr Carvalho did not preach off-the-cuff, because knowing a few days before that we would be invited for this ceremony, he was able to rehearse for the lesson.…[58]

The nomination of the Lazarists to provide spiritual comfort for those involved in the affair, a scandal that had acutely tainted the Society of Jesus, was ready evidence of their rising stature. Their standing with the monarchy was once again confirmed when the sovereign ordered that the two eldest sons of the recently executed count of Atouguia be educated at the Congregation’s Lisbon house, where they remained for “many years” and were rehabilitated into society.[59]

It was only after the Tavora affair and the demise of the Jesuits in 1759 that the Congregation arrived in the see of Evora, where they were summoned by the cardinal archbishop, João Cosme da Cunha, in 1777. Da Cunha had previous experience with the Lazarists when he was bishop of Leira, and he had appreciated their missions enough to encourage a team of three priests and one brother to carry out missions in his new jurisdiction, specifically the towns of Landeira, Cabrela and Montemor-o-Novo. In January 1778, a great coup for the Lazarists came when the cardinal also permitted them to preach 50 days of mission in his cathedral. And, in November of that year, the missionaries preached exercises in other churches of the city.[60] However, while this mission was an honor, a greater prize was soon in store: the Colégio da Nossa Senhora da Purificação.

The Lazarists at the Colégio da Purificação

When the Society of Jesus was dissolved from the 1750s onwards, incalculable Jesuit patrimony was seized across Europe. Rectories, churches, schools, the powerful network of colleges and universities (and much of the contents of these properties), all flowed into the treasuries of royal power. However, the long-term fate of each former Jesuit institution depended on local circumstances. In France, six former diocesan seminaries guided by the Jesuits were passed to other religious institutes, including the Lazarists. The handovers in the Italian states were somewhat mixed. In Benevento, the Jesuit college was first transformed into a barracks for Neapolitan troops, then became a school managed by the Redemptorists. Approximately ten Jesuit houses in Italy were appropriated by bishops for diocesan seminaries; others were bought by prominent aristocrats, such as the Tivoli rectory which was sold to the duke of Braschi-Onesti.[61] In Portugal, a decree established by the king in 1761 soon swept all Jesuit properties under his domain, targeting “all the [Jesuits’] temporal goods, consisting of movables (not immediately dedicated to Divine Worship), commodities of commerce, funds in land and houses, and rents of money,” and ordering that these “vacant goods be immediately incorporated into my treasury and royal house.”[62]

The royal decree did not, however, guarantee the immediate future of the Colégio da Purificação, whose closure had a devastating effect on the townspeople and the region. In the words of one nineteenth-century commentator, the suppression of the university, with its constituent colleges, had been “comparable to Lisbon’s 1755 earthquake.”[63] At the epicenter of this upheaval were the educational policies of Pombal’s government, which, while they attacked the Jesuits’ pedagogical methods for their “decadence” and “slavery to Aristotelianism,” ultimately failed to provide concrete and enduring plans for their replacement.[64] Lacking professors and adequate teaching staff, the institutes of higher education in the town — which had previously rivalled other eminent educational centers in Coimbra and Salamanca — entirely disintegrated. Subsequent attempts to fill the void proved extremely difficult. After a failed venture by former students of the Colégio to substitute for their banished Jesuit masters and continue to provide classes, the scholars were locked in the building by order of the government, only to be promptly released. Lay professors appointed by the Crown then arrived to teach in the city, first holding classes in the abandoned Colégio da Purificação, and then in the cloister of the university from 1760. However, conflicts between these men and members of regular orders also entrusted with teaching created additional problems. Members of the Third Order of Franciscans, who had been granted control of the Colégio do Espirito Santo by the king in July 1776, rejected the authority of the royal professors, who were subsequently forbidden to teach in the university’s cloisters.[65]

These wrangles unearthed the weakness of Pombaline pedagogical policies, which gave way to more forgiving measures under the reign of Maria I (1777-1816). Recognizing the continuing difficulties of ensuring higher education in the kingdom solely through secular professors, the queen invited various Congregations to assume control of former Jesuit institutions.[66] It was in this context that the Lazarists took up ownership of the dormant Colégio in 1779, albeit with the support of various local authorities. After reporting that the Evora foundation was occasioned by “our missions in this city in 1778,” the scribe of the Memorias chronologicas announced that four corporations of the city requested that the college be transferred to the Lazarists (namely the “chapter, the numerous clergy of the cathedral, the Senate with the nobility, and the town judge with his assistants”).[67] While the scribe noted the importance of these interventions, he attributed greater value to the opinion of João da Cunha, the archbishop of Evora, who “had full awareness of the fruit of the Congregation of the Mission, in the diocese of Leira.”[68] However, while past fruits may have played a part in the Lazarists’ permanent establishment, it was the penury of the present that was even more crucial. In her bull of donation (carta de doação) confirming the transfer of the college on 30 June 1779, Queen Maria lamented “the great lack that was acknowledged in the whole archdiocese of persons who embrace the vocation to serve the church in the administration of the sacraments.” This state of affairs was attributed to “not having a seminary, or house of instruction, in which all aspirants to ecclesiastical life might learn the solid doctrines and maxims of piety.” The sovereign accepted that “this need would be remedied if I deigned to permit the Congregation of the Mission of Saint Vincent de Paul to establish a residence” in the city.[69]

Despite the lengthy period of turbulence that characterized the post-Jesuit era of the Colégio, once the Lazarists were confirmed as successors the process of taking possession of the edifice was swift, even if the affidavit recording the possession (now held in Lisbon’s Torre do Tombo archive) appears amusingly intricate. Two members of the Congregation, including the new superior, Christovão José de Castro, arrived in Evora on 25 August 1779. The same day, João José da Silva, the royal official charged with administering former Jesuit goods and lands in Evora, duly showed the queen’s June bull to de Castro and his companion. The group, including three other witnesses, then entered the college chapel, where de Castro proceeded to “put his hands on each one of the three altars… opened and closed the doors, [and] place[d] his hands on the walls.” The party continued in this vein, with de Castro opening the chests and cupboards of the sacristy, then passing to the cloisters, offices and dormitories, where he opened and closed all the doors and windows. The solemnities of possession even included descending to the college’s small yard where de Castro “broke tree branches and threw [some] soil into the air.”[70]

Although they inherited the college buildings and abutting land, just how enriching the take-over was for the new occupants is difficult to establish. Indeed, in some places where the Jesuits were expelled, they had had enough time to sell off kitchen implements, linen, and other movables before departure.[71] While inventories are lacking for the Colégio da Purificação, recorded tallies for the neighboring Colégio do Espirito Santo give some clues to the kind of valuables that were left to the Jesuits’ successors. The list of ornaments included only those items strictly associated with divine worship: thirteen damask altar frontals, twelve damask bags, twelve stoles, four silk drapes and numerous other small pieces — mainly cloths, pelmets, and other minor church fittings.[72] In conformity to the king’s decree, it is unlikely that anything but these properly sacred objects survived the Crown’s expropriation. Once the possession was complete, the Lazarists needed to secure permanent financing for their new establishment. Recognizing that the “College was given without any income” for its twelve resident Lazarists, on 10 September 1783 the queen endowed the community with 6,000 cruzados in annual rents. Two years later she permitted the Lazarists to accept gifts of property and other goods from pious benefactors.[73]

After these practical details were arranged, the business of replacing the Jesuits could begin. Firstly, the documents nominating the Lazarists to the college put a premium on their capacity to restore the educational vacuum left by the Jesuits. Therefore, almost as soon as the successors took over, the college opened its doors again to support men training for the priesthood. In December 1779, the book of entrants for ecclesiastical exercises (covering the period from 1779 to 1823) recorded that one candidate entered to prepare for minor orders, two for the subdiaconate, and two for the diaconate. A steady stream of renewed activity followed. In May of 1780 the Lazarists received a group consisting of one man for tonsure, three for tonsure and minor orders, five candidates for the subdiaconate, three for the diaconate, two for the diaconate and presbyterate, and one ordinand for all sacred orders. The documents indicate that these men came from all over the diocese, including the parishes of Borbo, Estremôr, Pavia, Viana, Aviz, Evora, Monte Môr, Mourão, and Portel.[74] By 1789, ten years after possession, the Lazarists’ were hosting sizeable groups of visiting clerics, with seventeen participants taking residence in the college for spiritual exercises during the São Mateus feria in September 1789.[75]

As well as insisting on ecclesiastical education, the foundation document also provided room to invest the establishment with the Congregation’s own unique pastoral emphases. Queen Maria’s first bull acknowledged that the Congregation was established so that its members “might go out to teach the ignorant people in the way of their honorable and pious Institute.” For his part, the archbishop of Evora envisaged that the community would “observ[e] inviolably the virtuous maxims and statutes that… its holy founder prescribed.” Of Vincent de Paul’s maxims, missions to ordinary people were paramount, and the Lazarists new establishment heartily complied with them.[76] Records from the Evora district archives reveal diverse missionary activities. As early as August 1779, two Lazarists embarked on missions in the diocese.[77] In 1790, a Lazarist priest, Antonio Pereira da Silva e Azevedo, was sent from the Lisbon house to the college “in order to participate in missions and other ministries of his institute.”[78] The range of their ministries was highlighted in a pair of documents from 1792, which notes that Lazarists were commissioned to various monasteries in Estremoz and Monte-Mör as confessors.[79]

An extensive history of the Lazarists’ post-Jesuit administration of each institute is not the objective of this project. However, it is worth noting that the Lazarists’ control of the Colégio during the early nineteenth century was as turbulent as the Jesuits’ last decades before their suppression. The Lazarists’ educational and missionary activities continued in the city unabated from 1779 until the final days of July 1808, when Evora suffered a brutal invasion during the Peninsular Wars (1807-1814), a series of campaigns by Napoleon’s empire to gain control of the Iberian Peninsula. On 29, 30, and 31 July, French forces led by Louis Henri Loison (1771-1816) devastated the town, killing approximately 1,500 people and ransacking its ecclesiastical institutions, including the Colégio.[80] Soldiers entered the building through its cellar, drank the wine, and lifted the seminary’s goods, not least the many precious objects from the college chapel. The establishment’s troubles did not end there. Reconstituting the college after the French sack, the Lazarists remained until 1834, when the government of Joaquim António de Aguiar nationalized all religious possessions. Like the Jesuits before them, the Lazarists were suppressed throughout Portugal.[81]

Conclusion

The Colégio da Purificação was one of many dozens of establishments transferred to other religious institutes in the wake of the Jesuit suppression. Its importance as a single case should therefore not be exaggerated. However, this sketch of the post-suppression history of the college yields some significant conclusions, as well as themes to guide the current project’s course as further Jesuit replacements are scrutinized.

In examining the histories of the Society of Jesus and the Congregation of the Mission in Portugal, more starkly opposing fates in the eighteenth century could scarcely be imagined. On one hand, the history of the Colégio provides a fair illustration of the kind of disarray occasioned by the suppression of the Society in a specific locality. The suppression process, which involved herding scores of Jesuits into the university’s grounds, followed by their prolonged house arrest, and eventual expulsion from the realm, was a brutal affair. It was then followed by protracted wrangles over the college’s future. However, during this very era of Jesuit decline the monarchy in Portugal showered gifts and honors on rival ecclesiastical institutes, including the Congregation, a relative newcomer to Portuguese religious life.

In developing the Congregation’s Portuguese province, the acquisition of the Colégio in 1779 figured high in the stream of honors that began trickling from patrons, especially successive monarchs. However, the actual narrative of succession confirms that the process of replacing the once-dominant Jesuits was anything but triumphal for the Lazarists. For a start, the gap of twenty years between the Jesuits’ departure and the Congregation’s appointment to the college does not suggest that the monarchy had an immediate preference for an alternative religious ethos in the administration of the establishment. Indeed, it was only when desperation moved Maria I’s government to abandon the policies of Pombal that the Crown settled on the Lazarists. Prior to their installation the evidence demonstrates that the Crown did not even actively search out the Lazarists, and that instead their appointment to Evora was rooted in the esteem held for them by local authorities. These were dignitaries familiar with the missionary work recently performed by Lazarists in the area who subsequently petitioned the Crown for their nomination to the college. On the other hand, the fact that the Crown assented to the request so rapidly, and subsequently provided handsome financial rewards to the Congregation, is doubtless attributable to the central power’s close relationship with them.

However, while it is clear that both local knowledge and wider renown were elemental to the Lazarists’ succession to the Jesuits in various locations, the weight of both differed. One important area of future examination will be to investigate if the process of Jesuit dissolution in other territories repeated the features of the Evora case, which opened with guidance and planning on a national level but ended with a replacement process driven by more localized efforts. In Germany, for example, initial clues indicate that the prince palatine planned the Lazarists’ succession with far greater interest and attention than the Portuguese Crown.[82] However, if the dynamics of replacement evident at Evora were repeated elsewhere, the Lazarists’ impressive record of Jesuit succession throughout Europe might have relied more on the factor of ‘right-place-right-time’ than anything else.

Even if the Lazarists’ succession was not the result of careful strategic planning, their record in Evora indicates that it was a good choice. The Congregation had sufficiently similar institutional goals and capacities to fully replace the majority of previously Jesuit-delivered services in Evora and the surrounding area. The Lazarists’ presence answered the need for educational providers given the difficult circumstances following the Jesuit collapse, and the Congregation’s vast experience in educating the clergy of Europe recommended it highly. Yet, the foundation documents make plain that the Lazarists’ patrons did not seek carbon copies of the Jesuits. Maria I’s carta de doação recognized the needs of the ordinary people in Evora, strongly connecting the education of the clergy at the college to the edification of the local Catholic populace. This emphasis, along with the presence of groups of ordinands for spiritual retreats at the college, was in the best tradition of the Vincentian ethos. Preservation of the college’s ancient role as a seminary, and its transformation into a house of missionaries, therefore highlights the need for continuity with the Jesuits and the capacity for change at many different locations where the Lazarists replaced them. It is a persuasive reminder that the suppression was a two-step process that firstly involved the handover of physical patrimony, and then demanded the replacement of a pervasive cultural and religious ethos in Europe. Because it is premature to make conclusions based on one case, it will be for another day to determine if the transfer of Jesuit houses translated into a complete loss of Jesuit culture, or if elements of this culture survived through the agency of their successors.

The Evora narrative alone tends to support arguments that the eighteenth century, during which the most famous and powerful religious institute was targeted, was acutely severe on European Catholicism. Nevertheless, we should consider a more comparative approach, for such a perspective illustrates Catholicism’s great adaptability during the era’s extraordinary political and cultural shifts. This adaptability was firmly embodied by the religious who labored alongside the Jesuits, and whose institutes escaped the kind of attacks levelled on the increasingly unpopular Society of Jesus. Indeed, as we have seen, the Lazarists were not alone as successors to the Jesuits in Evora, as the Franciscans received the neighboring Colégio do Espirito Santo. Establishing the proportion of total former Jesuit establishments expropriated by the Lazarists, and how this compared with other religious institutes — Franciscans, Dominicans, Recollects — will thus be rewarding areas of future investigation. While for now these questions remain unanswered, the Lazarists’ history in Portugal, and their succession at Evora, surely confirms that the Jesuits’ woeful tale, while immensely important, is but one narrative in the evolving story of religious life in eighteenth-century Europe.

1 I gratefully acknowledge the support of the Vincentian Studies Institute for funding the research for this article. Thanks go to Edward R. Udovic, C.M., and John E. Rybolt, C.M., for their helpful advice, and to Mr. Bruno de Matos Esteves Ventura Casimiro for assisting with some of the Portuguese translations.

2 Antonio Ferrão, O Marques de Pombal e a Expulsão dos Jesuitas (Coimbra: 1928); D.G. Thompson, “The Lavalette Affair and the Jesuit Superiors” in French History 10:2 (1996), 206-239; Teófanes Egido, “La expulsión de los Jesuitas de España” in Historia de la Iglesia en España, Ricardo Garcia-Villos Lada, ed., vols. 1-5 (Madrid: 1979), 4:745–792.

3 Dominique Julia, “L’expansion de la Congrégation de la Mission de la mort de Vincent de Paul à la Révolution française,” in Actes du colloque international d’études vincentiennes (Roma: 1981), 401-411; Alban Haas, Die Lazaristen in der Kurpfalz. Beiträge zu ihrer Geschichte (Neustadt: 1960); Andrew Pâris McCormick, “Religion et jeux de pouvoir en Méditerranée: les lazaristes sur l’île grecque de Naxos (1780-1840),” Ph.D. diss., INALCO, 2012.

4 Joseph Bergin, “The royal confessor and his rivals in seventeenth-century France,” French History 21:2 (2007), 189; R. Bireley, The Jesuits and the Thirty Years War: Kings, Courts and Confessors (Cambridge: 2003).

5 Jaucourt, Louis, chevalier de, and Denis Diderot (ascribed by Jacques Proust). “Jesuit,” in The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d’Alembert Collaborative Translation Project, trans. by Jason T. Kuznicki (Ann Arbor: Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan Library, 2003), see: http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.did2222.0000.033 (accessed 9 October 2014). Originally published as “Jésuite,” Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (Paris: 1765), 8:512–516.

6 José Jorge Da Costa Couto, “O Colégio dos Jesuítas do Recife e o destino do seu Património (1759-1777),” Masters diss., Universidade de Lisboa, 1990. Letter of the Conde de Oeiras to the Bishop of Pernambuco, 4 November 1759.

7 “[la Congrégation] est devenue comme un ordre nouveau au détriment de l’état, qui en regorge, et de l’Eglise, ou elle ne fait que des ignorants…” in Louis de Rouvroy, duc de Saint-Simon, Memoires, Y. Coirault, ed., 8 vols. (Paris: 1987), 2:502.

8 “Les disciples de S. Vincent de Paul…ont beaucoup de solide et rien de brilliant.” Annales de la Congrégation de la Mission, 127 vols. (Paris: 1833-1963), 27:237-238. Hereinafter cited as AM.

9 John W. O’Malley, The First Jesuits (Cambridge, Mass., and London: 1994), 18.

10 “…défaut de vertu et de discipline dans le clergé…”; “…le peuple, et particulièrement celui de la campagne, n’était point instruit, ni assisté… dans ses besoins spirituels.” Louis Abelly, La vie du vénérable serviteur de Dieu, Vincent de Paul, instituteur et premier supérieur général de la Congrégation de la Mission, 3 vols. (Paris: 1664), 1:3.

11 “Foundation contract of the Congregation of the Mission,” 17 April 1625, in Vincent de Paul: Correspondence, Conferences, Documents, ed. and trans. by Jacqueline Kilar, D.C., Marie Poole, D.C., et al, 1-14 (New York: New City Press, 1985-2014), 13a:214. Hereinafter cited as CCD.

12 Vincent de Paul championed the vows’ role in the life of the Congregation and, after some disputes, they were finally approved in 1653. See Luigi Mezzadri and José Maria Román, The Vincentians, A General History of the Congregation of the Mission, trans. Robert Cummings (New York: 2009), 38-40.

13 AM, 73:683-684. The Congregation only arrived in America in the nineteenth century.

14 Ibid., 65:6.

15 A. Lynn Martin, The Jesuit Mind: The Mentality of an Elite in Early Modern France (Ithaca: 1988), 1.

16 Dauril Alden, The Making of an Enterprise, The Society of Jesus in Portugal, Its Empire, and Beyond, 1540-1750 (Stanford: 1996), 33-34.

17 Maurice A. Roche, “Saint Vincent de Paul and the formation of clerics,” Ph.D. diss., University of Freiburg, 1964; Contassot Dossier, “La Congrégation de la Mission et les Séminaires au XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles,” in Archives Congregation of the Mission, Paris.

18 Martin, The Jesuit Mind, 13-14.

19 In a 1650 letter to the bishop of Périgueux, Vincent was bold enough to claim that the “service we render to the ecclesiastical” state was “merely accessory” to the Lazarists’ missionary work, see CCD, 4:48.

20 Simon Ditchfield, “Of Missions and Models: The Jesuit Enterprise (1540-1773). Reassessed in Recent Literature,” in The Catholic Historical Review 93:2 (April 2007), 325-343. For Jesuit confessors see Birely and Bergin’s previously cited works. The Society’s leading position in global Catholicism has been recently highlighted by Liam Matthew Brockey, Journey to the East: The Jesuit Mission to China, 1579-1724 (London and Cambridge, Mass., 2007); and Luke Clossey, Salvation and Globalization in the Early Jesuit Missions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). The collection by John W. O’Malley, ed., The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540-1773, 2 vols. (Toronto; Buffalo; London, 2000-2006), offers broad perspectives on Jesuit culture, art, politics and the trajectory of the pre- and post-suppression Society. Recent region-specific studies of the suppression are abundant, see J. Caeiro, Historia da Expulsão da Companhia de Jesus da Provincia de Portugal (Lisbon, 1995); J.A. Ferrer Benimeli, Expulsion y Extinción de los Jesuitas, 1759-1773 (Mensajero, 2013); P. Shore, “The Suppression of the Society of Jesus in Bohemia,” Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu (AHSI) 65 (1996), 138-56; J. Flaga, “Le sort des Jésuites Polonais après la Suppression de l’Ordre en 1773,” Revue d’Histoire Ecclésiastique 97 (2002), 892-908; D. Beales, “Maria Theresa, Joseph II and the Suppression of the Jesuits,” in his Enlightenment and Reform in Eighteenth-Century Europe (London, 2005), 207-226.

21 In addition to Mezzadri and Román’s General History, see Stafford Poole, C.M., A History of the Congregation of the Mission (n.p, 1973); José Herrera, Historia de la Congregación de la Misión (Madrid: 1949).

22 Sean Alexander Smith, “Courtiers with a Conscience: The Lazarists of Versailles and Saint-Cyr, 1674–1704,” in French History 27:3 (2013), 351-370.

23 For a general survey, see Owen Chadwick, The Popes and European Revolution (Oxford, 1981), chap. 5. The following essays illustrate: Maurice Whitehead, “On the Road to Suppression: The Jesuits and their Expulsion from the Reductions of Paraguay,” in Jeffrey D. Burson and Jonathan Wright, eds., The Jesuit Suppression in Global Context: Causes, Events, and Consequences (Cambridge, 2015), 83-99; Christopher Storrs, “The Suppression of the Jesuits in the Savoyard State,” in Ibid., 139-160; Ronnie Po-hsia Chia, “Jesuit Survival and Restoration in China,” in Robert A. Maryks and Jonathan Wright, eds., Jesuit Survival and Restoration: A Global History, 1773-1900, Studies in the History of Christian Traditions series (Leiden, 2014), 254.

24 Alden, The Making of an Enterprise, 25-27.

25 Francisco Rodrigues, História Da Companhia De Jesus Na Assistência De Portugal, 4 vols. (Porto: Liv. Apostolado da Imprensa, 1931), 1:406.

26 Ibid., 1:578-580.

27 José Filipe Mendeiros, O Seminario de Parocos da Universidade de Evora do Real Colegio da Purificacao ao Instituto Superior de Teologia (Evora: 2002), 51.

28 “Os grandes males que se seguem pella ignorancia e falta de saam doutrina e bom exemplo dos ministros da Igreja.” See, Avelino de Jesus da Costa, Estatutos do Colegio da Purificacao, 29 July 1579 (Coimbra: 1968).

29 “…fundei o Collegio do Spiritu Sancto e Universidade da Companhia de Jesu, na dita cidade, cabeca do ditto arcebispado, pera que nella estudassem e aprendassem, juntamente com as letras, bons costumes os que quizecem estudar pera bem e salvacao de suas almas.” Ibid.

30 “…pera conservaçao da Universidade importava muito fazer hum collegio pera teologos alem do Spiritu Sancto, determine instituir e fundar junto delle o Collegio da Purificação de Nossa Senhora…” Ibid.

31 “Pella experiencia que tenho do zello e virtude dos padres da Companhia de Jesu…” Ibid., 21.

32 Antonio Franco, Evora Ilustrada, Extraido da obra do mesmo nome do P.e Manuel Fialho, Prefacio e Indices de Armando de Gusmao (Evora: 1945), 290-292.

33 Mendeiros, O Seminario de Parocos, 70.

34 Jesus da Costa, Estatutos, 15.

35 Franco, Evora Ilustrada, 238.

36 Quoted in Paul Hazard, European Thought in the Eighteenth Century from Montesquieu to Lessing, trans. by J. Lewis May (Cleveland and New York: 1963), 167.

37 “…enorme efervescencia e crescente animosidade, que, longe de se acalmarem com o tempo, foram irradiando cada vez mais.” See, Ferrão, O Marquês de Pombal, 7. See also, Dale Van Kley, The Jansenists and the Expulsion of the Jesuits from France, 1757-1765 (New Haven and London: 1975).

38 For an impressive collection of pro- and anti-Jesuit writings from this period see, Carlos Sommervogel, et al., eds., Bibliothèque de la Compagnie de Jésus, 12 vols. (Toulouse: 1911-1930).

39 Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, Sur la destruction des jésuites en France par un auteur désintéressé, new revised edition (n.p, 1767). Marc Fumaroli, “Between the Rigorist Hammer and the Desist Anvil: The Fate of the Jesuits in Eighteenth-Cenutry France,” in O’Malley, ed., The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 2:688.

40 Josephism has been widely studied, the classic being Eduard J. Winter’s Der Josefinismus und seine Geschichte, Beiträge zur Geistesgeschichte Österreichs, 1740-1848 (Brünn: 1943).

41 Chadwick, The Popes and European Revolution, 350.

42 Relaçaõ abbreviada da republica, que os religiosos jesuitas das provincias de portugal, e hespanha, estabeleceraõ nos dominios ultramarinos das duas monarquias, e da guerra, que nelles tem movido, e sustentado contra os exercitos hespanhoes e portuguezes; formada pelos registos das secretarias dos dous respectivos principaes commissarios, e plenipotenciarios; e outros documentos authenticos (Lisbon: 1757).

43 Rodrigues, Historia da Companhia, 4:448.

44 “…os taes Religiosos forão os Reos deste execrando delicto…” See, Sentenca que em 12 de Janeiro de 1759 se proferio na Junta da Inconfidencia para castigo dos Reos do barbaro, e execrando dezacato, que na noite de 3 de Setembro do anno proximo de 1758 se commetteo contra a Real Sagrada e Augustissima Pessoa de El-Rey Nosso Senhor (Lisbon: 1759). Cod. 1601, f33-46, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris (Hereafter BNP).

45 Sentença De Condenação Do Padre Jesuíta Gabriel Malagrida, Pelo Tribunal Da Inquisição, Com O Acordão Do Tribunal Da Casa Da Suplicação Datado De 20 De Setembro De 1761 (Lisbon, n.d.).

46 “Demais, enorme multidão de povo correu para o colegio soltando brados e lamentos…” See, Rodrigues, Historia da Companhia, 4:383-384.

47 Chadwick, The Popes and European Revolution, 350.

48 Recueil des principales circulaires des supérieurs généraux de la Congrégation de la Mission, 3 vols. (Paris: 1877-1880), 1:223. Hereinafter cited as RC.

49 Ibid., 1:238, 241.

50 “Immédiatement soumis à Sa Sainteté, sans dépendance d’aucun autre supérieur.” See, AM, 46:366.

51 “bien voulue du roi, qui l’a honorée de sa présence aux divins offices…’’ See, RC, 1:317; “…qui la traite avec une grande bonté et une affection vraiment paternelle.” Ibid., 332.

52 Guimarães, Apontamentos para a historia da provincia Portuguesa da Congregação da Missão, 9 vols. (Lisbon: 1959), 1:193-194.

53 “…il a nouvellement acheté un vaste emplacement pour pouvoir bâtir des logements plus proportionnés à l’objet de sa fondation.” See, RC, 1:501.

54 Ibid., 1:562.

55 Ibid., 1:589, 682.

56 Leonor Tomásia de Távora (1700-1759), third Marchioness of Távora, was among those implicated in the assassination attempt of the king.

57 The Lazarists mentioned here were Francisco de Abren e Oliveyra (1710-?), Atanasio-Domingo Coelho (1728-1796), and Manuel de Carvalho (1716-1776). The “Sr Ferreira” referred to is harder to identify: this was either João-Batista Ferreira (1732-1781), or Joaquim-José Ferreira (1728-1768).

58 “Na Quinta feira antecedente foi o nosso superior chamado a Secretaria de Estado onde recebeu a Instrução do que havia de fazer em ordem a mandar quatro Padres para assistir a alguns dos reos. Na sexta feira mx de madrugada vierao duas seges conduzir quatro sacerdotes nossos aolugar de Belem onde estavão os infelizes. Foi o Sr Abreu que assistio a Marquesa de Tavora tendo por companhero o Sr Coelho: e o Sr Ferreira acompanhou ao Sr Carvalhou que assestio ao reo queimado vivo, e no fim de toda a execução fez huma practica ao povo, conforme costumavamos em qualquer patibulo, aonde se executava sentença de morete. Não pregou o Sr Carvalhou de repente por que previndo alguns dias antes que nos convidarião para esta empreza, procurou proverse para a pratica…” See, “Memorias Chronologicas Da Caza Da Congregação Da Missão De Lisboa: Em Que Se Referem Os Sucessos Notaveis, E Extraordinarios Que Nella Tem Havido Desde A Fundação Athe Ao Presente/Escriptas Por Hum De Seus Sacerdotes, E Por Elle Offerecidas Aos Congregados Da Mesma Casa” (1759), fo. 196, BNP, Cod.12916.

59 Ibid., fos. 196-197.

60 Adelino de Ornelas, C.M., “Os Padres Vicentinos nos 400 anos do Seminario de Evora” in Congresso de Historia no IV centenario do Seminario de Evora, 2 vols. (Evora: Instituto Superior de Teologia. Seminario Maior de Evora, 1994), 2:401.

61 Chadwick, The Popes and European Revolution, 381-382.

62 “…todos os bens temporaes consistentes em moveis (Não dedicados immediatemente ao Culto Divino), em mercadorias de commercio, em fundos de terras, e casas, e em rendas de dinheiro… bens vacantes, sejão logo incorporados no Meu Fisco, e Camera real…” See, “Alvará determinando a aplicação dos bens dos Jesuítas, dado em 25 de Fevereiro de 1761,” BNP, RES 2486 (11) V.

63 Count Raczinski cited in Mendeiros, O Seminario de Parocos, 79.

64 Francisco A. Lourenco Vaz, “O Ensino em Evora na segunda metade do seculo XVIII: da extinção da Universidade ao fim do consulado pombalino,” in Congresso de Historia no IV, 1:195.

65 Mendeiros, O Seminario de Parocos, 76-80; Vaz, “O Ensino em Evora na segunda metade do seculo XVIII.”

66 Vaz, “O Ensino em Evora na segunda metade do seculo XVIII,” 207.

67 “Quatro corporações da quella Metropole requererão a S. Mag.e. para nos o dito Collegio: a saber o Cabido, os Parocos da Se que são muitos, o Senado com a Nobreza, e o Juiz do Povo com os seus adjuntos.” See, “Memorias Chronologicas,” fo. 236.

68 “Não obstante estas instâncias ou requerimentos, persuadome que muito mais valeu para o effeito dese nos conceder o Collegio pedido o Emmo Prelado Metropolitano D. João da Cunha que tinha plena noticia desde o Bispado de Leiria, do fruto da Congregação da Missão.” Ibid.

69 “…grande falta que se reconhecia em todo o Arcebispado de sogeitos que ajuntassem a vocação de servir a Igreja na Administração dos sacramentos… por não haver hum seminario, ou caza de instrução, naqual aprendam todos os aspirantes à vida clerical as solidas doutrinas, e Maximas de piedade, e exemplo… Falta que seria remediavel se Eu me dignasse conceder à Congregação da Missão de São Vicente de Paulo ter residência na cidade de Evora.” See, “Carta De Doação Que A Rainha D. Maria I Fez Do Colégio Da Purificação,” fo. 31r, Arquivo Nacional do Torre do Tombo, PT/TT/AC/L0060. Hereinafter cited as ANTT.

70 “…entrando pelle capella ou Igreja pôr as maons em cada hum dos tres altares que constituem a mesma, abriou e fechou a porta, pôr as maons pellas paredes, sollenidades pertencentes aos autoas possecorios, passando a Sacristia pratticou os mesmos auttos abrindo e fechando os caixõens e almarios… passando aos dos claustros e mais officinas que andão no pavimento da portaria pratticou o ditto Reverendo os mesmos auttos e ceremonias… e descendo aos baixos do ditto Collegio e a sua pequena cerca continuou a pôr as maons pella paredes, quebrou ramos de arvores o tirou terra ao ar…” See, “Auto de Posse que com procuração do Muitto reverendo Padre superior e mais padres consultores da Sagrada Congregação da Missão, toma o Reverendo Padres Christovao José de Castro da mesma congregação do Edificio do Real Collegio da Purificação, em conformidade da Carta de Doação que do mesmo real Collegio fez a Raynha Nossa Senhora a Ditta Congregacao,” fos. 33r and 33v, ANTT, PT/TT/AC/L0060.

71 Richard Clay, “The Expulsion of the Jesuits and the Treatment of Catholic Representational Objects during the French Revolution,” in O’Malley, The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 2:691.

72 “Relação de ornamentos do Collegio dos Jesuitas de Evora dos quaes não consa no Real Erario de applicação alguma até o dia dez de Julho de 1776.” See, Arquivo Distrital de Evora, Arm X, cod.1 n. 27. Hereinafter cited as ADE.

73 “Decrees of 10 September 1783 and of 28 July 1785,” fos. 35r-36r, ANTT, PT/TT/AC/L0060.

74 “Livro para servir aos assentos dos Exercicios dos Ordenandos e que teve principio em Dezembro de 1779 que foi o tempo em que se admittirão os primeiros depois que a Congregação tomou posse deste Collegio da Purificação de Evora,” fos. 49r and 49v, ANTT, PT/TT/AC/M026.03.

75 Ibid., fos. 62r and 62v.

76 “para que delle sayam a doutrinar os Povos ignorantes na forma do seu honravel e pio Instituto,” “Carta de Doação,” fo. 31r; “Decree of João da Cunha of 16 August 1779: ‘…observando porem inviolavelmente as virtuozas Maximas e estastutos que a dita Congregaçao prescreveo o seu Santo Fundador…’” Ibid., fo. 32r. See, ANTT, PT/TT/AC/L0060.

77 “…agora vão também dois missionarios e irão mais para e empregarem nos ministerios sobreditos do seu Instituto…” See, ADE, COD CL XIX 1-30, 22 August 1779.

78 “para se impregar nas Missõens e demais ministerios do Seo instituto…” See, ADE, COD CL XIX 1-30, 30 September 1795.

79 See, ADE, COD CL XIX 1-30, 27 June 1792, and 25 October 1792.

80 Francisco A. Lourenco Vaz, Evora lastimosa e outros textos sobre o saque de Evora pelos franceses em 1808 (Centro de Historia da Cultura, Lisbon: 2002), 191-210. See also, David Gates, The Spanish Ulcer: A History of the Peninsular War (London: 2002); and Michael Glover, The Peninsular War 1807-1814 (London: 2001).

81 Mendeiros, O Seminario de Parocos, 89-90, 99.

82 See, for example, Haas, Die Lazaristen in der Kurpfalz.

Mary’s House in Ephesus, Turkey:

Interfaith Pilgrimage in the Age of Mass Tourism

By

Amelia Gallagher, Ph.D.

Introduction[1]

This article analyzes the intersection of Vincentian history, tourism, and popular religion at Meryem Ana Evi, a Marian shrine located on the Aegean coast of Turkey. In the summer of 1891, two French Vincentian priests discovered some isolated ruins on a mountain overlooking the ancient city of Ephesus in the Ottoman province of Smyrna. Their expedition had set out to uncover the site of the Virgin Mary’s final home and claimed to have found precisely that. Over the next century Mary’s House developed into a major heritage and pilgrimage destination drawing masses of pilgrims and tourists from the Mediterranean cruise-ship circuit. The development of the site went through several distinct phases, transforming from a Vincentian (“Lazarist”) Catholic shrine with a distinctly French pedigree of devotion to become an interreligious pilgrimage destination of international importance. It drew on various groups of Christians, Muslims, and accidental tourists as part of a general itinerary of the ancient ruins of Ephesus and its environs. Today the site is well-maintained, highly organized and adept at hosting thousands of visitors daily during the peak tourist season.

Beyond the pious belief that Mary spent her final days there, as a Turkish heritage site, Mary’s House is imbued with additional meanings. These meanings include Turkish Muslims’ respect for Christianity, Islamic reverence for Mary and the relevance of Christianity, specifically Roman Catholicism, in a Muslim country. Several groups and organizations with ties to the shrine shape the meaning(s) presented to its wide range of visitors: the Izmir Catholic lay organization which is its official representative, the Capuchin friars who currently serve as its pastors, the Turkish Ministry of Tourism, the municipality of Selçuk (the district in which the house lies), as well as various international and local tourist agencies. Beyond official organizations such as these the shrine still reflects the purpose of its local visitors as a place of petition and healing. These various interpretations of the meaning of Mary’s House do not necessarily contradict one another, as it is a place emblematic of our current state of mass religious tourism, where the reasons for visiting sacred places blur between pilgrims and tourists, piety and heritage.

Discovered by the French Vincentian community based in Izmir (then Smyrna) in 1891, Mary’s House was under their stewardship until 1952 when the last Lazarist owner, Joseph Euzet, C.M., bequeathed the site to a lay Catholic organization founded by the Archbishop of Izmir, Joseph Descuffi, C.M. Church officials and historians are still unfolding the impact of the discovery of Mary’s House and its theological and pastoral implications therein. In 2011 the diocese of Kansas City, Missouri, officially opened the cause for sainthood for Sister Marie de Mandat-Grancey (d. 1915), a Daughter of Charity who is honored as the “Foundress of Mary’s house.”[2] Pious literature promoting the cause of Mandat-Grancey, as well as pronouncements from the Kansas City-St. Joseph diocese, emphasize the Muslim patronage of the shrine, not as incidental, but as a direct result of her saintly legacy.[3] Pilgrimage to Mary’s earthly dwelling has come to symbolize inter-religious peace.

Mary’s House served in this capacity as a symbol of reconciliation between the Catholic and Islamic worlds after a period of turbulent relations during the pontificate of Benedict XVI. The pope’s tour of Turkey taken shortly after the Regensburg controversy in September 2006[4] addressed these troubles. After visiting Istanbul, on 29 November, the pope went to Ephesus where he celebrated an open-air mass at the site of Mary’s House. Pleading for reconciliation in his homily, Benedict invoked Mary as a shared symbol of unity and peace:

…from here in Ephesus, a city blessed by the presence of Mary Most Holy — who we know is loved and venerated also by Muslims — let us lift up to the Lord a special prayer for peace between peoples. From this edge of the Anatolian peninsula, a natural bridge between continents, let us implore peace and reconciliation, above all for those dwelling in the Land called “Holy” and considered as such by Christians, Jews, and Muslims alike.[5]

Vatican analysts maintain that Pope Benedict’s trip to Turkey brought the Regensburg controversy to a peaceful resolution. His words at Mary’s House held particular meaning given its status as a “shared” pilgrimage site, sacred to both Christians and Muslims. If we are to believe the inhabitants of the village of Çirkince — a nearby village of Orthodox Christians since dispersed and renamed — the site has been sacred for 2,000 years. After its discovery by Vincentian missionaries in modern times it went through a partial process of “transference” from Catholicism to Islam, of the sort that fascinated Frederick Hasluck, the British archeologist-cum-anthropologist who pioneered the study of folk religious culture in Anatolia.[6] Thus, to say Mary’s House was discovered in 1891 is contested. Known locally as “Panaghia Kapalı” it was never completely lost, nor was it “discovered” in the true sense. However, neither Hasluck nor the Lazarist archeologists could have anticipated the radical trajectory of transference that continues to take place here.

I first visited Mary’s House in 1999 on a day trip, guided by Muslim friends who lived in Izmir. Over a decade later I spent longer periods of time there during the summer and fall of 2012 as part of my sabbatical research. When I returned Mary’s House I observed a startling increase of tourists on package tours (compared with the same seasonal peak a decade earlier). Accordingly, this additional issue has perhaps the most consequence for the future of Mary’s House as a place of pilgrimage: the overwhelming influx of tourists in recent years in comparison to pilgrims, whether Christian or Muslim.

The Discovery

Pious literature dedicated to Mary’s House is sure to recount the story of its discovery, as it is unusual even in the annals of the miraculous origins of Marian shrines. At the same time modern and ancient, unlike the major Marian shrines of Europe, the house was not constructed based on apparitions of Mary, but rather restored, based upon the belief in the historical Mary’s presence. Its discovery did follow the miraculous paradigm common to other Marian shrines in that the visions of a stigmatic nun, who claimed supernatural access to the details of Mary’s earthly life, led Vincentians to the site. Sensitive to the skepticism such mystical archaeology would invite, the Smyrna Lazarists, educators and intellectuals, set out to prove the ancient origin of the ruins through academic methods gleaned from the burgeoning fields of archeology and anthropology. Therefore, while the history of nineteenth-century Catholicism is often depicted as a clear battle between rationalist, progressive intellectuals and obscurantist clerics, the story behind the discovery of Mary’s House reveals that the intellectual climate was more complex within the Smyrna Lazarist community during the fin de siècle.

The establishment and restoration of Mary’s House is the most enduring accomplishment of the Ottoman Vincentians. First entering Ottoman Aleppo in 1763, the Congregation made significant gains after the dissolution of the Jesuits, as they took over many of their important Ottoman holdings. In 1784 the Vincentians took possession of the former Jesuit church of Saint Benoit in Istanbul, for example, from which they launched their educational initiatives in the Empire’s capital.[7] And although Vincentians also experienced contractions throughout the turbulent post-revolutionary decades, they managed to retain their missions in Ottoman territory in part because of their diplomatic utility on behalf of France.[8] By the time of Napoleon’s official restoration of the Congregation of the Mission in 1804 several Vincentians had settled in Smyrna, about seventy-five kilometers from the ruins of ancient Ephesus.[9] In 1845 Vincentian priests took over a secondary school (collège) there and began serving Latin Catholics, Armenians, and Orthodox of this diverse port city.[10] The Daughters of Charity first came to Smyrna in 1840 and by the last decade of the nineteenth century, when Mary’s House was discovered, they numbered sixty-seven.[11] Marie de Mandat-Grancey, who entered the Daughters of Charity in 1862, joined this community in 1886 working as a nurse in the French Naval Hospital.

Today, in the entranceway to Mary’s House, those credited with its establishment are embedded in local marble. Marie de Mandat-Gancey, D.C., Henri Jung, C.M., Eugene Poulin, C.M., as well as the two archbishops, were all members of the Smyrna Catholic community who oversaw the discovery, excavation, and preservation of the site as well as promoted its significance to Church history.[12] But the story of the discovery really begins on the adjacent wall of the vestibule where hangs a portrait of Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich (1774-1824). She, of course, lived well before the house’s 1891 discovery. It is a popular devotional portrait of the famous stigmatic in her invalid’s bed, head bound in bandages, gazing intently at a crucifix held in her wounded hands. Emmerich was an Augustinian nun who experienced a host of mystical phenomena including stigmata, long periods of inedia, and elaborate visions of the lives of Jesus and Mary. Her visions inspired the Romantic poet Clemens von Bretano to render her utterances in provincial dialect into a more standard German text, thereby popularizing them. By the time of the discovery of Mary’s House Emmerich’s visions were well-known in the Catholic world, especially among religious communities. Beatified in 2004, the influence of Emmerich’s visions is still profound in the popular imagination.[13]

The modern discovery of the site revived the ancient notion that Mary lived out her final years and died in Ephesus. While Jerusalem had long claimed Mary’s tomb, the proponents of the Ephesus theory emphasized an early-Church tradition based on the crucifixion scene of the Gospel of John in which Jesus commissions the disciple John with the care of his mother.[14] Proponents for the Ephesus theory emphasize early Church references to John among the nascent Christian community there, where several early sanctuaries were also dedicated to both the Evangelist and to Mary.[15] Emmerich’s The Life of the Blessed Virgin Mary describes a small settlement on a mountain overlooking Ephesus where Mary lived out her last years among a group of Jerusalem refugees. Emmerich described the topography of the settlement as well as the layout of Mary’s house itself. Inspired by Emmerich’s visions, sources credit Sister Marie de Mandat-Grancey with the idea that the Smyrna Lazarist community should undertake an investigation of the environs of Ephesus in order to vindicate them.

It was not the first time one of Emmerich’s enthusiasts set off to link her visions to archeology. A diocesan priest from Paris, Julien Gouyet, claimed he had first discovered the same set of ruins believed to be Mary’s house ten years earlier in 1881. It is difficult to evaluate his claim, however, as he published the account of his discovery only after visiting Ephesus for a second time in 1896 to confirm the Lazarist findings. Gouyet dedicates much of this account to verifying the corpus of visions of Emmerich, including her mystical witness of the crucifixion in Jerusalem before his discovery of the ruins. After his success Gouyet lamented Church authorities in Smyrna did not investigate his findings, and so the site remained unknown for another decade.[16]

As for the documented discovery of the site, the 1891 memoir of Eugene Poulin is the most complete account left by the Vincentian founders.[17] Poulin recalls that he was intrigued by the writings of Emmerich, which had been making the rounds among the members of the Smyrna mission. A classicist and the superior of the Lazarist collège in Smyrna, Poulin provides disclaimers throughout his memoir concerning his suspicion of “women visionaries.” Despite these misgivings, in the summer of 1891 Poulin organized an amateur team of archeologists at the insistence of Marie de Mandat-Grancey. The scenario of women championing the voice of the visionary against the militant rationalism of their male superiors is too common to dismiss as stereotyping, although it may be a matter of exaggerated skepticism in the recollection of the memoirist.

The leader of the search party was not Poulin himself, but Henri Jung, C.M., a scholar of Hebrew Scripture as well as professor of science and mathematics at the collège. Poulin takes care to describe Jung as a proud rationalist “most opposed to everything concerning mysticism, dreams, and visions.”[18] Jung nevertheless found himself at the head of a group of visionary archeologists guided by Emmerich’s terse descriptions, passages that led them to “a hill to the left of the road from Jerusalem, some three and a half hours from Ephesus.”[19] Archeology became a European obsession during the twilight years of the Ottoman Empire, as amateur archeologists along with professional teams flocked to the contracting Ottoman provinces. European excavation teams first began work in the ancient city of Ephesus in 1863. With its temple dedicated to Artemis and the library of Celsus it was established over the course of the nineteenth century as a well-preserved Roman city.[20] For this more unconventional forage into the field of archeology Benjamin Vervault, another Vincentian priest visiting from the island of Santorini, joined Jung along with three local men hired to carry supplies and serve as interpreters.

According to Poulin’s memoir from the time they set out from their residence in Smyrna it took three days for the searchers to reach their destination. The group first visited a possible site for Mary’s House located within an Orthodox monastery a few kilometers to the southeast of Ephesus, in what is now the village of Çamlık. The monks living there denied the monastery was associated with Mary’s final days and espoused the majority opinion of Orthodox churches that Mary had died in Jerusalem where her tomb remained.[21] Despite possessing “an instinctive horror concerning visions and visionaries,” Father Jung directed the search team to follow Emmerich’s visions more closely. Therefore they decided to scale the mountain directly south of Ephesus known as Bülbül Dağ (Nightingale Mountain). After hiking for several hours up the mountain’s slope they found an intriguing plateau of dispersed stone ruins — a settled area that was very old and possibly ancient. As they began to look around they noted similarities found in Emmerich’s account of Mary’s mountain homestead, with its view of Ephesus and the coastal islands from the same directions described by the visionary.[22] Poulin’s memoir, quoting the diary of Father Vervault, recorded their initial impressions of the mysterious complex and relating its topography to the features Emmerich described. This initial comparison convinced them that they had indeed discovered the spot of the Virgin Mary’s last earthly existence. As Father Vervault recorded:

M. Jung got to the top of Bulbul-Dagh. He looked. Yes it was the place. To the North-east was Ayasoulouk, the plain of Efesus, the ruins lying there of the city of Prion like a horse-shoe. To the West and South-west the sea spread out, Samos was in view with its numerous peaks, looking like islands spread out in the middle of the waves. It would be difficult to express the feelings that filled the soul of our explorer. He was so moved by what he saw.[23]

Discovery implies that something had been forgotten or lost. The ruins discovered on the afternoon of 29 July 1891 were not abandoned, however. According to the Lazarist accounts there were people all around that day working on the terraced fields of the mountain and actually pointing the search party directly to the site. Before noon the two French priests and their helpers had drained their supply of water scaling the rocky mountain slopes. They asked a group of women working in a tobacco field for water. The women directed them to a higher altitude, to a fountain “at the monastery.”[24] Two local men, Yorghi and Andreas, greeted the search party at the monastic spring. Andreas was from Çirkince, a village about a five hour hike from the fields they were tending. As Orthodox Christians the Çirkince villagers spoke a dialect of mixed Greek and Ottoman Turkish, reflected in the hybrid place-name for the “monastery,” Panaya Kapulu.

The meaning of the name the fieldworkers labeled the monastery certainly intrigued the search party. “Panaghia” (the “All Holy”) is a common honorific title for Mary in Greek. In Orthodox iconography the “Panaghia” is a distinct pose for icons of Mary in which she is facing the viewer, palms turned up, with a stylized circular image of the Christ child placed in her womb. The word kapılı could mean “with a gate” or “door.” Ottoman Turkish vocalization was not standardized, though, and alternative orthography of the term as “kapalı” conveys the meaning of something that is closed, covered, hidden, or secret.[25] This name, then, like the inhabitants of the village itself, reveals layers of long history.

In 1892 Çirkince was a village of about 4,000 Greek Orthodox Christians. The residents claimed an ancient lineage in their oral history as the remnants of the original Christian Ephesians. With the expansion of Selçuk Turkish rule to the Aegean coast in the fourteenth century[26] the remaining population migrated to the new settlement of Çirkince (“The Ugly Place”), so called for its inhospitable rocky soil. Observing a primitive altar constructed within the stone structure of the site, the Vincentians later learned that Çirkince priests celebrated mass at the “monastery” on the feast of Mary’s Dormition, 15 August of each year. The term “Dormition” (asleep, sleeping) was utilized in both the East and the West as a term for death, reflecting scriptural euphemistic usage. While in the West that day was celebrated as the Feast of the “Assumption,” rather than “Dormition,” the belief in Mary’s bodily assumption into heaven was a long-held belief in both Churches.[27]

But if it was as the Çirkince villagers claimed and they carried with them the traditions of the original Christian Ephesians, these traditions were dispersed along with the village itself after World War I. Today, one significant aspect of Mary’s House which the Turkish Ministry of Tourism promotes is that it is a place that honors religious diversity. However, the people of Çirkince are an example of the twentieth century’s failure at such a co-existence in the midst of exclusivist nationalisms. After World War I the population exchanges between Greece and Turkey affected approximately 1.5 million inhabitants of the former Ottoman Empire by requiring the “unmixing of peoples,” according to the infamous phrase. This process had profound consequences for the religious demographics of the entire Aegean region. The indigenous Anatolian Christians, such as the villagers of Çirkince, were required to relocate to Greece after the Turkish War of Independence (1919-1923). For the populations in question, Greek nationals of the “Moslem religion” and Turkish nationals of the Orthodox religion, relocation was not a return to a fabled motherland but an exile from a homeland with long oral and written histories.[28] After Muslims from Greece settled in “The Ugly Place,” the village was appropriately renamed Şirince (“The Cute Place”).[29]

And so the Greek nation-state absorbed the local traditions of Çirkince and their cults bound to the surrounding topography, along with the larger Christian population of Anatolia. In this way the population exchanges make the ethnographic work conducted by the Smyrna Lazarists even more valuable, rudimentary as it was. Informally, the investigation into local traditions surrounding Panaghia Kapalı began with information provided by fieldworkers when the search party first arrived. As investigations into the site grew more serious, Father Poulin himself drew up a set of formal interview questions for the residents of Çirkince concerning their beliefs and practices associated with the site, “designed not to inspire any inclination towards Greek fatalism.”[30]

From this ethnographic research Poulin learned that Çirkince villagers made a pilgrimage to the site every year on 15 August in commemoration of Mary’s Dormition. They claimed it to be an isolated tradition and that the village of Çirkince was the only known community, Christian or Muslim, undertaking pilgrimage to this particular sanctuary. The Vincentians in France published a short book in which a representative of Çirkince claimed that knowledge of Mary’s actual tomb on the site had been lost.[31] Yet, the representative stated the site was the place of Mary’s historical death and Assumption in relation to her sojourns in other locales close by:

Due to the pagans’ persecution, the Holy Virgin ended her stay at Kryphi-Panaghia [the “Hidden Panaghia”] then moved to the south — about an hour from there, to Kavaklı Panaghia [“Panaghia of the Poplars”]. Just as today, in that place there were lots of poplar trees. And there is celebrated the Feast of 21 November, the Presentation…

Interviewer: What do they say about Capouli-Panaghia?

That the Virgin left Kavakli-Panaghia and headed towards the west on the mount of Bulbul — The mountain of the Nightingale — at a distance of about two hours from the place of Aya Soulouk [today’s Selçuk]; and it was there — during her stay at Capouli where her Dormition took place and where it is celebrated the Feast of the 15 August.[32]

As indicated in the extract above, an apocryphal history of Mary’s life in the area was known to incorporate several other smaller shrines in their vicinity tied to Mary’s final years in Ephesus. In the same interview the representative claimed thirty-three such nearby sanctuaries.[33] While many things remain uncertain it is not unlikely that some local Christian communities nurtured a medieval Byzantine and perhaps ancient cult of the Panaghia surrounding the mountains of Ephesus, such as Bülbül. This cult was bound to the physical topography of the place extending outside the city itself — mountains, grottos, springs, and trees surrounding Ephesus. Names attached to other nearby shrines evoke an aura of subterfuge in hybrid Turkish-Greek. The two sites closest to Panaghia Kapalı were “The Hidden All-Holy” (ghizli panaghia) and “The All Holy of the Poplars” (kavaklı panaghia). The Çirkince representative maintained Christian sanctuaries of Anatolia have a long history of secrecy due to persecution.[34] According to the oral tradition he relayed of the village, Panaghia Kapalı became Mary’s final resting place where the Dormition occurred.

At the time skeptics noted that this could simply be a matter of a local Christian community making a pilgrimage to an ancient sanctuary dedicated to Mary in order to commemorate her Dormition and nothing more.[35] That they believed the site to be the actual place where the Dormition and Assumption occurred is less certain. Poulin recorded this information during an interview he conducted with the mayor of Çirkince a year after discovery of the site. But there were no direct interviews recorded with the villagers themselves, only the mayor serving as both translator and spokesman. The claim that residents of Çirkince understood and believed that Panaghia Kapalı was the site of Mary’s historical domicile and tomb cannot be conclusively determined. That this belief was recorded well after it was known that French missionaries and foreign archeologists had taken interest in the site further casts doubt on Çirkince tradition.

While the Smyrna Lazarists investigated these ruins the pioneering archeologist Frederick Hasluck, researching Anatolian sacred geography during the years 1904-1915, assessed the same area of Ephesus as preserving few points of interest:

…it is apparent that many sites of extraordinary sanctity both in ancient and in Christian times have at the present day lost all tradition of that sanctity. Ephesus, a place of the greatest religious importance during both periods, owes its remaining Christian sanctity to its proximity to Smyrna and the Greek coast-towns, and it seems never to have passed on its religious tradition to Islam.[36]

Hasluck is likely referring to the renowned Ephesian basilicas of Christian antiquity, but as far as the surrounding areas his valuation is premature. If we are to take into account the testimony of the Orthodox community Vincentians interviewed, local memory upheld the sanctity of Ephesus’ environs. Transference of Christian traditions of Ephesus to Islam occurred as well, but decades after Hasluck’s writing. However, the surviving Christian cults of Ephesus fell off the beaten trail or were deliberately hidden, so much so that the local Orthodox monastery did now know of their existence according to Vincentian sources. Elsewhere, Hasluck notes, these places of “endurance” are often local and isolated and survive outside official clerical channels (such as the Çamlık Orthodox monastic community the Smyrna Lazarists first interviewed). In keeping with Hasluck’s observations about the transference of sacred places from one religion to another this place was not one of the grand basilicas but a small-scale, hidden shrine named for its deliberate obscurity.

After the Lazarists of Smyrna became convinced they had found Mary’s House they attempted to enlist the efforts of known scholars of archeology and biblical history. Despite his professed wariness of visionaries Poulin became the primary public advocate of the authenticity of Mary’s House based on Emmerich’s visions — to the general public, and especially to skeptical elements within his own church. Attempts to enlist the support of French priest and historian Louis Duchesne regarding Panaghia Kapalı’s authenticity did not go well. In 1893, hoping to secure an ally in the renowned Duchesne, Poulin presented the evidence of Mary’s House based explicitly on Emmerich’s visions. Duchesne responded by taking direct aim at Poulin’s rationalist sensitivities, asserting, “Archeology relies on witness, not hallucinations.”[37] Perhaps this was an oblique reference to the visions of the Vincentians’ own visionary, Catherine Labouré, who claimed apparitions in 1830. She later insisted on a series of mystical “digs” at the motherhouse of the Daughters of Charity in Paris during the 1870s. After convincing her superiors that a valuable treasure would be found with which to build a new church they unearthed only a dried well similar to others scattered on the grounds.[38]

Later, as work to excavate the Ephesus site was underway, Duchesne went on to chide Poulin: “This does not mean that you will not succeed, it would not be the first apocryphal shrine established.”[39] After the initial exchange with Poulin, Duchesne reported to the Superior General of the Vincentians in Paris. In a letter dated 1892 he stated that if it were publicized that Panaghia Kapalı based its claims on the visions of Emmerich then “sarcasm will fall on the Lazarists of Smyrna.”[40] This perhaps caused some distancing: Poulin published his memoirs of the discovery under a pseudonym, and the original publication of Panaghia Cappouli, although also written by him, listed no author. Archeologists enlisted by the Lazarists to study the site concluded with a more promising note, asserting that the structure discovered in 1891 was rebuilt several times on ancient ruins. That the foundations of the House date back to the first century — a claim argued amongst archaeologists at the time — is the standard assessment of guide books published for pilgrims and tourists today. The claim maintains that Mary’s House is essentially a Byzantine cuneiform structure rebuilt several times (the last time after its discovery in 1891) on an original foundation dating back to the first century.[41]

The notion of a hidden Christian sanctuary surviving a tumultuous two millennia fit into the romantic mystique of nineteenth-century Mediterranean archeology. Cataloging the sanctuaries of late Ottoman Anatolia, conversely, Hasluck instructs us of the human-societal element fueling the enduring charisma of these ancient stones. He reins in the rampant romanticism fostered by this period’s atmosphere of feverish discovery. While Hasluck himself never addressed Panaghia Kapalı, he would likely have attributed its survival to human efforts (the annual pilgrimage and caretaking by local Christians for example) rather than an innate sanctity. And although the Smyrna Lazarists based their venture on a mystical, highly subjective source, they also sought to integrate local custom into their findings. Much like Hasluck’s methodology they believed doing so upheld their claims.

Poulin made every effort to express the extent of his and other priests’ initial doubt — all of which would be blown away by the weight of the scientific proof found in their subsequent anthropological and archeological research. Such a line of investigation may be standard today. Yet at the time serious inquiry into living religion countered the conventional wisdom of classicists and biblical scholars, who upheld the primacy of ancient texts while dismissing local phenomena as superstition. Hasluck failed to note the lingering cults based on Ephesian legend, but he had not encountered the isolated communities that claimed their guardianship. The Lazarists had not stumbled upon the ruins themselves, but rather the community that visited and valued them. And while Hasluck would reject the notion that archeology’s primary purpose is to support biblical texts, the Vincentians set out to do just this by taking a circuitous route through the visions of Emmerich. Despite working from radically different vantage points both the classical archeologist Hasluck and the Smyrna Lazarists anticipated modern anthropological methods, emphasizing the role of living human societies in the preservation of memory and sacred places.[42]

Aside from the issue of places having enduring sacred meaning the transference of a sacred place from one religious community to another also guided the work of Hasluck. Recording the transference of older Christian sanctuaries into Islam, and how these cults evolved, neither Hasluck nor the Smyrna Lazarists could have foreseen the radical social, political, and economic circumstances that not only prevented Panaghia Kapalı from falling into obscurity, but propelled it into an era of unprecedented international fame.

A Vincentian Shrine

Despite Duchesne’s predictions of sarcasm befalling the Lazarists the archbishop of Smyrna, André Timoni, who was not a Vincentian, approved of pilgrimage to the site by the close of 1892. Without any rationalist disclaimers the official report of the archbishop’s inquiry made open and full reference to the German stigmatic’s role in its discovery:

Some recent researches made according to the indications of Sister Catherine Emmerich have seriously attracted the attention of the country to a place situated near Ephesus and called Panaya Kapulu.… There we found the very well preserved ruins of an ancient house or chapel, the construction of which, according to competent archeologists, may trace its origin to the first century of our era and which… corresponds fully and entirely to those things which Catherine Emmerich said in her Revelations concerning the house of the Blessed Virgin at Ephesus.[43]

In 1895 Pope Leo XIII sent a Commission of Inquiry to investigate the claims associated with Panaghia Kapalı.[44] Pope Leo augmented the claim of Mary’s presence there by the removal of indulgences associated with the Jerusalem site of Mary’s tomb in 1896, transferring them to the new-found ruins at Ephesus. In an ecclesiastical sense the transference of Panaghia Kapalı to Roman Catholicism was initiated. In a legal sense this became true as well. Tapping into her ancestral estate, Marie Mandat-Grancey purchased the site and its surroundings in 1892. In the following years, under the authority of the Smyrna Vincentian community, renovations and excavations continued. This characterizes a distinct phase of the shrine’s history — its transference from an isolated Greek Orthodox community to Roman Catholic Vincentians.

From the 1892 Vincentian discovery until the outbreak of World War I in 1914 the new caretakers bolstered the charismatic credentials of the ruins with scientific research in anthropology and archeology. During this time the shrine was limited to a distinct audience of pilgrims — Catholics associated with Smyrna missionaries and local Christians of Çirkince. Other regional Orthodox communities did not participate in these early pilgrimages to the site.[45] In fact the Orthodox Church has never established an ecclesiastic presence there and maintains that Mary’s tomb remains in Jerusalem.[46] By 1906, when a group of over 300 Germans visited, the reputation of the shrine had grown strong enough to attract large European tours. There was also a growing stream of visiting ecclesiastical foreign dignitaries which further bolstered the site’s reputation in the Roman Catholic world.[47]

The cult of Mary as it evolved in nineteenth-century Europe also shaped the initial expectations and interpretations of Mary’s House (re)discovered in Ephesus. The “Marian Century” saw the development of both dogma and popular piety regarding Mary in the West,[48] and French Catholicism popularized some of its most iconic concepts and images. The Vincentian caretakers of Panaghia Kapalı emphasized certain topographical elements which paralleled well-known Marian shrines in France. The aesthetics of the shrine developed in a similar vein to accommodate the sensibilities of Roman Catholic pilgrims. While the site of the discovery at Ephesus was locally known through Mary’s Eastern persona as the “Panaghia,” the Smyrna Lazarists emerged from a French visionary culture steeped in iconography of the Immaculate Conception.

The notion of Mary’s exemption from Original Sin was a widespread belief held in the East and West since ancient times.[49] Not declared dogma in the West until 1854, the official pronouncement reflected popular fervor.[50] In France especially, recent Marian apparitions fueled the revival of the concept on a popular level. The famous apparitions that took place in the Pyrenean town of Lourdes in 1858 provided a significant theological and practical precedent for the Ephesian discovery. The famous visionary of Lourdes, Bernadette Soubirous, claimed the apparition identified herself not by name but as “The Immaculate Conception.”

Earlier, in 1830, an apparition of Mary visited the motherhouse of the Daughters of Charity in Paris. Catherine Labouré claimed a vision of Mary standing on the world, arms outstretched, a banner above with the words “O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee” [emphasis mine]. From this image the Daughters of Charity minted the “Miraculous Medal” which became ubiquitous throughout France and the entire Catholic world. The pose Mary strikes on the medal also reflected her persona as the “The Immaculate Conception,” mirroring Labouré’s vision, palms upturned.[51] Most art historians trace the artistic persona of the Immaculate Conception to the period after the Renaissance. Mary standing alone without child, beaming rays of light from her inverted palms, crowned and surrounded by twelve stars with the moon underfoot. This became a common paradigm for well-known artists such as Valézquez and countless imitators.[52] In artistry the Immaculate Conception is a celestial and powerful Mary, majestically alone, independent of her son. To French missionaries there was no other choice of iconography for their shrine, discovered during the midst of the Marian century.

While the villagers at Çirkince appear to have had no permanent icons installed at the site the visual depictions of Mary the Vincentians brought gave a visual anchor to the growing stream of French and Levantine Catholic pilgrims. In 1892 they placed a cast iron replica of the Mary of the Miraculous Medal pose at the top of the path leading to the ruins of the house. And like other sacred material objects, no repairs were made to the injuries she acquired in the following years. Missing for several years on two occasions, she displays her two missing hands severed at the wrists as a miracle of survival against war, brigands, exposure to the elements, and abandonment by her caretakers. Now this particular statue is inside the house on the main altar, standing as the dominant image of Our Lady of Ephesus. As the iconic image of Meryem Ana Evi, pictures, medals, and statuettes modeled after her are sold at souvenir shops both here and around Ephesus.[53]

Though unusual for the nineteenth century as a shrine established without the claim of an apparition, apparitions of Mary at Panaghia Kapalı soon followed. While in many ways the shrine was restored in a manner that reflected Western, especially French, apparition phenomena, the first Marian apparition recorded at the site was claimed by Helen, a local Orthodox daughter of the shrine’s hired caretaker. Reported in August of 1902, it was not an apparition of Mary delivering messages, instructions, and warnings to her seers, as was the dominant scenario in Europe. Rather, the Orthodox visionary reported a silent, somber, even mournful Mary draped completely in black. The apparition appeared outside the house and remained visible to the seer for only a half hour before fading into a cloud of smoke. In October of the following year a Daughter of Charity visiting the house claimed a similar apparition experience in the form of an ethereal glowing light. The shrine’s French caretakers saw the apparitions at Panaghia Kapalı as an extension of those occurring in Europe. Joseph Euzet likens the caretaker’s daughter to the humble French visionaries: “…it is the custom of the Blessed Virgin to prefer to manifest herself to the simple: Catherine Labouré of the Rue du Bac, Melanie of LaSalette, and Bernadette of Lourdes.”[54]

The series of apparition visionaries of nineteenth-century Europe especially influenced the Smyrna Daughters of Charity to place confidence in the mystical visions of Emmerich. Just as Emmerich had mystically envisioned Mary’s House, so it was miraculously discovered as a physical reality outside of Ephesus about a day’s journey from the French hospital and orphanage where the Daughters worked. The phenomenon of visionary archeology also reflects some controversial aspects of the French Marian revival. As part of her claim that Mary appeared to her with instructions, Catherine Labouré’s insistence that there was treasure buried in the Paris convent’s garden caused some historians to cite a mental imbalance.[55] Bernadette’s famous unearthing of the spring at Lourdes was also controversial. On this occasion, as instructed by “The Immaculate Conception,” Bernadette used her bare hands to uncover a spring in the grotto where the apparitions occurred. She smeared mud on her face in a dramatic display as the water seeped forth; water that has become a central feature of rites performed at this famous healing shrine.

The atmosphere created by the apparition phenomena emanating from France also generated a mystical expectation for tangible evidence of the visionary experience. The hope the Daughters of Charity placed in verifying Emmerich’s visions reflected a wider occurrence in which visionaries produced physical tokens of their experiences, such as the Miraculous Medal. In this way Bernadette’s apparitions at Lourdes also played into the significance given to the topography uncovered at Mary’s House. As in the case of the spring at Lourdes, the natural spring running under Mary’s House would become a central focus of the site because of its curative power.

However, before the spring became renowned and as further excavations continued, in 1898 archeologists uncovered the remains of a hearth under the main archway of the house. This gave further vindication to those who defended the visions of Emmerich as historically authentic.[56] Healings claimed as a result of using the ashes from the excavated hearth are recorded from the years 1901-1903.[57] Sources indicate that the Daughters of Charity were central in promoting this miraculous cure as a salve applied to the afflicted. The cures included a successful delivery after a prolonged labor (the ashes applied to the body of the mother), the curing of a gangrened arm, and an abscess. One case providing the most detail involved a Bulgarian Catholic woman who brought her son to a hospital in Ottoman Salonika in December of 1904. The Daughters rubbed the child with the hearth’s ashes for ten days. The mother also took home a supply of the ashes and after returning to the Salonika hospital in the spring of 1905 the attending doctor gave written testimony to the child’s miraculous cure.[58]

While Hasluck cautioned against simplistic theories of the mere “survivalism” of ancient cults he nevertheless remarked upon how the distant past is given meaning by the present. Reflective of the contemporary Marian revival in Europe, Mary’s House on the Aegean became a place of apparitions, intercessions, and miraculous mountain springs. This type of phenomena was not foreign to the Orthodox Christian cult of Panaghia Kapalı, but it was given a new urgency by the Vincentian caretakers and paved the way for the international fame the shrine would gain by the end of the twentieth century.

The precarious status of Panaghia Kapalı throughout World War I and the upheaval of the post-war years limited excavation and restoration of the house, and actually resulted in accelerated damage. A long ordeal establishing legal ownership of Panaghia Kapalı dragged on through the deposition of the Ottoman Sultanate, the War for Independence, the population exchanges, and the establishment of the Turkish Republic. Furthermore, the new Turkish Republic issued far-reaching secular measures requiring strict approval by the state for public religious activity. The final decision of the Turkish court granted ownership of the property back to the Vincentians under Joseph Euzet. The first post-war pilgrimage of any significance took place in 1932, after the legal battle with the Turkish government concluded. Although he did not study the transference at Panaghia Kapalı, Hasluck described similar perils faced by shrines in Anatolia:

…changes in political and religious conditions, especially change of population, of which Asia Minor has seen so much, can and do obliterate the most ancient religious traditions, and, consequently, that our pretentions to accuracy in delineating local religious history must largely depend on our knowledge of these changes. Without this knowledge, which we seldom or never have, the assumption too often made on the ground of some accidental similarity that one half-known cult had supplanted another is picturesque but unprofitable guesswork.[59]

Hasluck did not discount the possibility of ancient shrines surviving with their sanctity intact (such as Panaghia Kapalı) but given his anthropological considerations he simply noted that such places rarely survived societal upheaval. After decades of regional turmoil the survival of the Panaghia Kapalı cult was a miracle in Hasluck’s sense, in that a community preserved the sacred memory of the shrine. In order for a sacred place to endure into modern times, “favorable conditions” must be met such as endowment, organization, and a permanent population.[60] The twentieth century indeed proved tumultuous for Panaghia Kapalı, particularly because of the complete exile of the community that had guarded the shrine for nearly two millennia (according to oral tradition). And during the decades of war the shrine was in real danger of falling into dereliction, obscurity, and confiscation by the state. The Vincentians provided “favorable conditions” necessary for the survival of the site by replacing the dispersed community of caretakers. As an organization based outside Turkey the Vincentians enjoyed a degree of immunity from the revolutionary changes affecting local Anatolian populations. Nevertheless, as the drawn-out legal battle over possession of the property demonstrated, their status as owners of the site was precarious.

After transference of the shrine from the Çirkince Christians to the Smyrna Vincentians, its identity as a Roman Catholic destination of pilgrimage remained exclusive throughout World War II. But after the war, during the next phase in the shrine’s development, it became a “shared” sacred place bringing large numbers of foreign Christians and Turkish Muslims to the once-obscure mountain. The process by which this shifting identity occurred recalls another of Hasluck’s observations: “Where the population is of mixed religion, all sects tend to frequent a shrine that has acquired fame by its healing miracles.”[61]

The Second Era: A Shared Shrine

To the outside world Panaghia Kapalı remained obscure throughout the 1940s, with no public pilgrimages recorded. The year 1950 marks a new epoch for the site in several respects, especially in relationship to the local population. Regarding this, Hasluck established a truism for understanding the development of Panaghia Kapalı in the twentieth century. He observed that Muslim patronage of Christian shrines has little to do with the religious affiliation of the shrine. Nor is this patronage discouraged by:

…any cult practices theoretically repugnant to Moslems, such, e.g., as involve the use of the cross or of pictures. Practically any of the religions of Turkey may share the use of a sanctuary administered by another, if this sanctuary has a sufficient reputation for beneficent miracles, among which miracles of healing play a predominant part.[62] [Emphasis mine.]

Just as Hasluck observed a half-century earlier, the repute for healing the shrine gained among local Turkish Muslims was a major factor in its growing popularity throughout the 1950s. Although owned, funded, and administered by Roman Catholic missionaries from Europe, the fact that Mary is integral to the Islamic tradition also facilitated growth. Mary is an important figure in the Qur’an’s summation of the prophetic tradition preceding Muhammad. As the virgin mother of the messenger prophet (rusūl) Jesus, a chapter of the Qur’an is named after her.[63] The Qur’an as well as its commentary (tafsīr), and traditions (hadīth), present Mary as an exemplar of female chastity and virtue.

The Mary of Islam is not confined to Quranic scripture and official commentary, however.[64] Through informal interviews and participant observation at Meryem Ana Evi I gained insight to Mary’s significance in popular understanding among Muslims. Sometimes people’s interpretation of her significance took the form of apocryphal detail imbued upon scripture, both Christian and Islamic. For example a merchant at one of the souvenir kiosks on-site relayed a narrative that he insisted came from the Gospels (Turkish: incil). As the story went, a woman in Jerusalem was in search of a cure for her sick child. She implored Jesus to heal the child but he refused. She then went to Mary knowing that Jesus could never refuse a request from his mother, and he complied. This apocryphal story is one way Mary is understood by Muslims visiting the site: an intercessor in physical healing.

Scripture also alludes to the physical place of Mary’s House itself according to some of my Muslim informants. One Muslim pilgrim insisted that the Qur’an refers to Mary as “she who hides herself in the mountains,” but I have been unable to confirm this reference. I observed a Muslim family from the east of Turkey pause before the fountains of water as the patriarch retold the Qur’anic story of Jesus’ birth from memory. When he came to the part in which God miraculously provided Mary with sustenance during her labor, he pointed to the fountains before him saying that this was the water God had provided. Alternative or additional narratives such as these demonstrate that alongside canonical sources an Islamic folk tradition has also developed which posits Mary, like her son, as an intercessor especially called upon for physical healing. In this way the figure at the center of this shrine was not an appropriation of a popular Christian saint, which is not uncommon in Anatolia, but a local Muslim cult built on a figure already integral to Islamic scripture, commentary, and popular tradition.

In line with the principle of practicality driving the development of “shared” shrines, the construction of a modern road up the mountain to Panaghia Kapalı enabled easier access to significant numbers of local visitors. The Turkish Ministry of Tourism initiated the plan in 1948 to facilitate the pilgrimage of foreign tourists. Only about thirty people participated in the pilgrimage of 1950 which inaugurated the new road.[65] But the road made large-scale pilgrimage possible while also providing access to the local Turkish Muslim population. From this point a growing list of petitions and cures claimed by those with Turkish names entered the annals of the shrine. Correspondingly at this time, and reflective of the shifting identity of its pilgrims, the name of the site changed from Panaghia Kapalı to the Turkish, Meryem Ana Evi (“Mother Mary’s House”), as it remains today.

During the first part of the century Vincentians saw that the natural features of this site echoed other mountainous Marian shrines in Europe, such as Lourdes. As is common in these shrines natural springs create a central focus of healing rituals. Two separate springs emerged on the grounds of Panaghia Kapalı, both of which ran underneath the house itself. The spring local fieldworkers had directed French explorers to in 1891 emptied into a pool on the first terrace beneath the house. The second water source, which ran under the wing of the house identified by the caretakers as Mary’s bed chamber, was tapped in 1898 and directed onto the second terrace beneath the house. It was this source that produced the water renowned for its curative properties. As a universal element water, of course, does not confine its miraculous associations to Roman Catholicism. Use of water to elicit cures has precedent in classical religion, Byzantine Christianity, and Islam. One of the Greek Orthodox men the Vincentians first encountered at the site had specifically used the term ayasma in association with Panaghia Kapalı.[66] The word is Greek for “sacred water” and had already crossed over into Turkish, ayazma, indicating the appropriation or sharing of sacred water sources. After 1950 the water of the spring at Mary’s House became increasingly important in Turkish Muslims’ rituals of visitation.

Anecdotal evidence also survives indicating reasons why the shrine began to attract locals. Notre-Dame d’Éphèse was a journal published by the Petits Freres de Jésus who served as the pastors of Meryem Ana Evi from 1955-1963. The journal contains sporadic reports of cures and successful intercessions.[67] The pastors of the shrine were careful, though, to distinguish miraculous cures from non-miraculous intercessions. The journal reports, for example, how a Turkish family visited the shrine to recount the recovery of their son through petitions made at the house, but it emphasized that his recovery was “non-miraculous” and procured by means of an operation.[68]

For the year 1961 all of the recipients of “faveurs” were recorded as “Turkish,” including a retired colonel in the Turkish army. Eight maladies were listed: asthma, insomnia, rheumatoid arthritis, cholera, rickets, sciatica, eczema, and a “cure” (guérison) for an unspecified illness. Of the cures reported half are expressly attributed to the water but without the specific rites detailed: “from the water,” “thanks to the water,” and “by taking in the water.”[69] According to the same volume, on Sunday [22 May 1960]:

…a teacher from a local school recounted to Father Gardien that ten years ago she had come here when her baby was crippled (boiteaux). She prayed in the chapel, washed the baby with water from the sources and as a result, she attested the child has been walking normally since then.[70]

This particular narrative reveals the general pattern of Muslim ritual practice at Meryem Ana Evi: declaration of a petition (stated in the chapel), the healing rite (application with water from the source), and indication of an additional step in the procedure — return to Meryem Ana Evi in thanksgiving, likely in fulfillment of a vow (adak) to do so.

The visitation of local Muslims to the shrine grew steadily enough throughout the 1950s to attract the attention of Hayat, the Turkish subsidiary of Life magazine, in May of 1962. For the first time a national magazine publicized the specific practices associated with Mary’s House among Muslims. The multi-page spread featured people visiting specifically to use the water as a means to cure medical conditions. One large photo showed a barefoot man with pants rolled up to his knees standing at the springs (by this time channeled into four separate fountains), his cane propped up against the stone wall in a dramatic visual gesture showing that he no longer had use for it. The article quoted a registry of visitors at length: “I came from Isparta unable to walk, now I leave with that ability.” Claimed cures for stroke, paralysis, rheumatoid arthritis, and blindness were recorded in the piece.

Statistics for the shrine in the months following the Hayat feature reveal a dramatic increase in visitors and demonstrate the powerful effect of emerging mass media. After publication of the feature, Notre-Dame d’Éphèse recorded 13,751 visitors for the month of June 1962, as compared with the previous two Junes: 2,908 (for 1960), and 5,518 (for 1961).[71]

The caretakers of the shrine certainly understood the effects of the healing water. According to Notre-Dame d’Éphèse, “It is indisputable that the water source attracts more people than the main sanctuary and those who suffer from paralysis frequent the waters the most.”[72] After the article appeared in Hayat demand for the waters of Mary’s House became so great that during the summer of 1963 the head pastor, Father Allen, a Montefort priest, stated a plan to construct a “Lourdes-like” bath. To be built with funds from a private Izmir donor the planned bath would be divided into two — one for men and one for women.[73] While the baths never were constructed the precedent of Lourdes in shaping rites of healing by the spring is clear. The petitioners desired a means of full bodily submersion, as was the procedure at Lourdes. The planned segregation of the sexes at the baths, while mirroring Lourdes’ plan, also coincides with Muslim custom. Muslims’ ritual approach to the water at Meryem Ana Evi, however, uses running water, somewhat like the use of water during abtest — the ritual cleansing required before the performance of canonical prayer (namaz).

Along with the growing numbers of visitors, the 1950s also brought about significant changes in the administration of the shrine. In particular, the pastors of the shrine were no longer exclusively Vincentian. The last Vincentian archbishop of Izmir, Joseph Descuffi, C.M., created the Meryem Ana Derneği (“The Association of Mary’s House,” hereafter, the Dernek), which became the official organization managing the shrine.[74] As the Dernek also handles relations with the various ministries of the Turkish state it is set up as a “lay charitable” organization in-line with similar non-Muslim groups in the country. Located in Izmir as the organization representing Meryem Ana Evi, the Dernek has remained Roman Catholic and works closely with the Archbishop. Since 1966 the priests and religious serving at Meryem Ana Evi come from the Franciscan family, in keeping with the order’s mission of maintaining a presence in places of early Christian history. Today the Capuchin order, alongside the Sisters of Mary Immaculate, is charged with the pastoral duties of the site. For issues of management and maintenance, though, they defer to the decisions of the Dernek in Izmir. In recent decades these decisions include efforts to maintain the Christian identity of the site while accommodating an increasingly diverse body of visitors.

The identity of the shrine is an important consideration. The pastors working at Meryem Ana Evi noted the demographic shift in Notre-Dame d’Éphèse: “There can be no doubt that our sanctuary is becoming more and more popular in Turkey — the percentage of Turks rose in this month (June 1962) to 80%.”[75] Father Allen explained this phenomenon in a personal letter dated November of 1962: “The great number of Moslems who come here is for the most part, a result of the cures… They come from hundreds of kilometers away, even from the extreme eastern parts of Turkey.”[76]

Meryem Ana Evi became a shared Christian-Muslim pilgrimage destination, but one in which Muslim visitors predominated. In academic literature this phenomenon is described as appropriation (Hasluck’s “transference”). Mary’s House evolved into a place that reflects an inclusive ideal, bringing together people of different religions to honor the same figure. Moreover, the motivation behind pilgrims’ journeys goes beyond a simple honoring or veneration and extends to more urgent issues closer to their personal lives and concerns. Perhaps because of this commonality Mary’s House brings up issues of religious identity, orthodoxy, and orthopraxy among visitors of all identities as well as the pastors and the Dernek. This can be seen through the changing ways in which visitors approach rites of petition at the shrine, and in the physical space of the site and how its devotional topography continues to develop.

Visiting Meryem Ana Evi Today

Observing thousands of pilgrims and tourists completing the circuit of Meryem Ana Evi during peak tourist season in the summer months, the continuous waves of people may appear uniform in their ritual interaction with the site. This is a natural result of guides instructing large groups who have never been to Mary’s House before: “go here, stop there, take your candles here, place them there, drink this, tie that.” The guides hired by tourist agencies and cruise ships have secularized the rites for non-pilgrim tourists, increasing the routinization. They take into account the religiosity of the site as it developed over the past century, especially how these rites are performed and understood by Turkish Muslims. Although promoted as a “Heritage Site” by the Turkish Ministry of Tourism, Muslim pilgrims see Mary’s House as a sacred place of petition. They journey to her house expressly for sacred purposes, usually independently and in small familial groups. Their estimation of the charisma of Mary’s House is not unlike Christian understandings. Nevertheless, sustained attention to different groups of visitors has yielded observable distinctions between Christians and Muslims in their approaches to the rites performed.[77]

It should be noted here that in Islam terms for “pilgrimage” vary. “Pilgrimage” is often the unqualified translation for the haj (Turkish: hac) denoting the pilgrimage to Mecca, which is theoretically incumbent upon every adult Muslim. Journeys to other sacred places and for other sacred purposes, a saint’s shrine for example, fall under the category of ziyaret, which can be usefully translated to “visitation.” It is this type of pilgrimage that Muslims undertake to Meryem Ana Evi, as visitation to a place associated with a saint. The most popular places of visitation in Turkey are tomb-shrines (türbe). Places believers designate as where the saint lived or visited (makam) are also common shrines, of which Mary’s House is an example.[78]

“Saint” is also a term that needs qualification in its Islamic usage. Terms for sacred individuals, living and dead, vary throughout the Islamic world. In Turkey the honorific title hazret, “the exalted,” is often employed for historical individuals (Hazret-i Meryem, for example). Without an official system of canonization saints are often locally determined, locally venerated, and locally visited. Mary’s House is an exceptional place of ziyaret, both in its association with a Qur’anic figure and also in its popularity beyond the local vicinity. While my research encountered mainly Turkish Muslims, the pastors at Meryem Ana Evi informed me that groups from Iran and South Africa make annual pilgrimages there. These groups self-identify as Sufi mystics. Practices associated with visitation also vary according to local custom, although rites surrounding healing are especially popular in visitation to living saints. While it is impossible to generalize about saint veneration in Islam because local custom is so influential, the literature on such popular practice has proliferated in recent decades.[79]

Wider concerns over upholding normative Sunni conduct at popular visitation sites in Turkey are reflected in the policies of the Ministry of Religious Affairs (“Diyanet Işleri Başkanlığı”). But because Meryem Ana Evi legally belongs to an organization affiliated with the Catholic Church (the Dernek) the government does not involve itself as it does with Sunni Islamic sites under the direct jurisdiction of the state. As it is independent in its operation from government ministry, few regulations concerning proper conduct in piety are posted at the site. One sign in Turkish and English reads simply: “Meryem Ana is a place of worship. Appropriate dress is required.” Nonetheless, rules posted in other places of ziyaret around the country under the control of the Ministry are more extensive. And although the Ministry’s notices are not posted at Meryem Ana Evi, their content has implications for visiting Muslims because many of the pious actions associated with the place are cited by the Ministry as contrary to Islam.

Twelve specific actions are forbidden “according to the religion of Islam,” and are posted prominently in places of ziyaret throughout Turkey. The following seven practices included on the list are also associated with Meryem Ani Evi: making a vow at the site (adak); performing [animal] sacrifices on site; lighting candles; tying cloths; rubbing one’s face [in a gesture of informal prayer]; asking for help or health from the saint; and lying or sleeping within the place of visitation.[80] Let us consider these practices and their execution at Meryem Ana Evi.

It is important to understand that the institution of ziyaret itself is not the issue behind the Ministry’s directives; rather it is what is deemed as proper Islamic practice accompanying it. And while visitation to saints’ shrines and tombs is ubiquitous throughout the Muslim world, states that discourage or outlaw the practice cite the suspect Islamic precedent of visitation. Saudi Arabia would be an extreme example of this phenomenon where even visitation sites featuring the tombs of the Prophet Muhammad’s companions have been razed, or are in danger of destruction by a state claiming to uphold the integrity of a purified Islam. Turkey is unique in the Muslim world, however, in that measures against visitation were inspired by the state’s secular ideology rather than concerns about fidelity to Islamic law and practice. During the early decades of its inception the Turkish Republic outlawed and restricted ziyaret visitation to sacred figures and their tombs. Since the 1950s many places of visitation have been re-opened (albeit as museums) and in general restrictions have lessened with each passing year. The shift away from strident secularism in Turkey can be seen in the visit of the Turkish President Abdullah Gül to Meryem Ana Evi in early 2010. He and his wife reportedly partook of the water as well as lit candles in a general petition for “health, forgiveness, and goodness.”[81]

In order to explore characteristics of Muslims’ approach to Meryem Ana Evi the following overview of the site and its sequence of features is necessary. First, visitors enter the grounds from the parking lot onto a path flanked by the offices of the jandarma (security is visible and prevalent), a post-office, a restaurant connected to an outdoor café, and a souvenir kiosk. The same Turkish family has managed these entranceway amenities since the 1950s, when visitation from locals began to accelerate.[82] Following this small cluster of buildings at the entrance is an excavated impluvium, a dried cistern which some tour guides mistakenly insist served as a baptismal font in ancient times. A series of large signs in several languages follows the main promenade explaining the discovery and religious significance of the site.[83] At the top of the promenade, behind the newer statue of Mary, is a big space with benches reserved for celebrating outdoor masses. The path leads past this area directly to the iconic L-shaped house itself which facilitates the flow of large crowds by a separate entrance and exit. Within the house are three rooms through which visitors walk in sequence: a small entranceway, the main sanctuary, and Mary’s bedchamber. After exiting the house a board is found directly to the left of the exit, referred to as the “Qur’an Display.” Following the Qur’an display, sizable metal boxes of sand are displayed in which candles are lit and placed. The path then leads the crowd to an uneven stone staircase. The staircase descends past the first terrace, emptying the crowd onto the second terrace below the house overlooking the mountain valley. On this spacious terrace the water fountains and the “Wish Wall” are located. The path continues beyond these stations directing the crowds on to an ascending slope back full-circle to the amenities at the site’s entrance where the tour of Mary’s House concludes.

The Main Sanctuary

Visitors enter the main room of the house from the entrance. Placed against the far wall is the focal point, a marble altar upon which stands the original, handless “Our Lady of Ephesus” statue in the Immaculate Conception pose. A few chairs and kneelers are found at either side of the room. In addition to the resident monks and religious, often unarmed security guards are sitting in these observing visitors as well as quietly directing them to continue moving past the altar when the volume is high and the line outside long. For people visiting the site for religious purposes this area marks the commencement of a series of religious rites that continue outside the house. Before the altar the religious identity of the visitor is most clearly identified. Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christians make the sign of the cross according to their respective precept, with Orthodox Christians often blessing themselves multiple times. Some Christians kneel before the statue and altar but this is discouraged during busy times.

According to practices associated with Islamic ziyaret, for which visitation to Mary’s House would be an example, specific requests are made to the saint in the form of prayer. Muslims also offer prayer in the cave-like stone room with the altar. This type of prayer comes under the category of dua, as opposed to the daily canonical prayer (namaz). Although not as elaborate or formulaic as Islamic prayer, specific hand gestures accompany dua: arms are raised with palms turned upwards as the prayer is quietly spoken or murmured. Upon completion, the hands pass along the face from the top of the head to the chin. This is not unlike the motion of rinsing the face with water and may have its roots in ritual ablution or abtest. This type of prayer is cited by the Ministry of Religious Affairs as un-Islamic in places of ziyaret. The dua form of the prayer is generally unstructured and spontaneous, although certain invocations (such as the fatiha) are commonplace. Here, in the inner sanctum at Mary’s House, a Turkish translation of the Ave Maria is embroidered on the altar cloth. The words “Holy Mary, mother of God” are not translated precisely into Turkish though, and read, “Holy Mary, mother of the messiah (“Aziz Meryem Mesih’in Annesi”). This license in translation reflects the Islamic theological understanding of Mary as the mother of a prophet rather than the mother of God.[84]

In seeking a healing or cure ziyaret is central. Those seeking saints’ efficacious power submit petitions to the local living healers directly or by visitation to their tombs (türbe) and places associated with them (makam).[85] Turkish tour guides, in explaining the end of Mary’s life on earth to Turkish people, refer to the Assumption of Mary as the mirac or “ascent.” This terminology has specific sacred meaning to Muslims as it is also the term used for the Night Journey and Ascent of the Prophet Muhammad. While Muslims understand that this is the place of Mary’s domicile and not her tomb, the draping and position of the altar in the main room resembles the tomb room of traditional Islamic shrines common throughout Turkey.[86] Reflective of the larger Islamic taboo against iconic devotional images, Muslims do not house statues in their places of visitation (such as the statue of Mary that appears on the altar).[87] In this way the embroidered translation of the Ave Maria serves as an alternative focal point for Muslims during their time before the altar. For Muslims the altar of Meryem Ana Evi is the place both of petition and of thanks for help received. Petitioners present their requests in the form of a vow (adak) to return to the ziyaret, following a common pattern seen in other saints’ shrines and in defiance of the Ministry’s admonitions. Once the petition has been successfully granted, even if it is years later, then the pilgrim returns in fulfillment of the vow to give thanks in person. In successful petitions for fertility (the issue pastors of Meryem Ana Evi list as the most common brought to the site in recent years), ideally the petitioner returns to Meryem Ana Evi with the baby and performs a short prayer before the altar with their child.

The purpose and procedure of petition at ziyaret shrines comes under scrutiny for violating the Islamic injunction against “association” (shirk). Attributing human beings or saints with healing power and thereby associating them with the divine falls under this category, as implied by the Ministry of Religious Affair’s list of condemned practices. While this tension has been addressed by Islamic theologians and reformers over the centuries it remains true that shrines such as Mary’s House exist throughout the Muslim world as places visited specifically for the efficacious blessings of the saint, termed bereket. As I have observed both at Meryem Ana Evi and in other more intimate, local shrines, petitioners are aware of this critique and are concerned with avoiding shirk. Not unlike the distinction between “veneration” and “worship,” those visiting shrines on ziyaret emphasize that they ultimately seek favor from God. The place of request facilitates this by its association with a saintly figure.

Candles

Certain practices at Meryem Ana Evi pre-date its Vincentian discovery and the use of candles is likely one of them. While candles are provided free-of-charge in the main sanctuary before the altar, it is no longer permissible to ignite them within the house itself. Since my visit in 1999 the Dernek has moved the candle stands (in the Eastern style, slender talons propped in a sand box) to the exterior of the house. This change in the locality of rites has practical logic: with the increasing numbers of visitors lighting candles the amount of smoke had a damaging effect on the stone walls of the structure. The exterior candle stands host a brisk turnover. During peak visiting hours one or two attendants wearing large rubber gloves continuously extinguish lit candles, clearing them to make room for new waves of petitioners’ offerings.

Candle-lighting is primarily associated with Christian sacred places in the Middle-East, with limited cross-over practice among Muslims in Turkey. As an example of this delineation I saw a Turkish father directing his children away from the candle stands, explaining, “That is Christian, that is for Christians.” I also heard an American tourist ask her Turkish tour guide if he would be lighting a candle. He explained to her that “tying” was more important to Muslims, referring to the practice of binding on the “Wish Wall.” Of course, Muslims light candles as symbols of memory, petition, and thanks, especially when visiting Christian sanctuaries and other places of mixed patronage.[88] But it is a practice clearly associated foremost with Christians. As the candle attendants working at Meryem Ana Evi observe, the most prolific candle offerings are made by Eastern Christians — Armenians and Russians especially. Russian pilgrims designate the two stands on the right for the deceased and the two on the left (facing the house) for health petitions.

The Qur’an Display

Just past the exit of the house before the candle stands is a display of quotes from the Qur’an in four languages: Turkish, French, English, and German. The choice of languages suggests that the quotes are intended to inform non-Muslim visitors of Mary’s inclusion in the Qur’an, as well as to facilitate Muslims’ scriptural-directed piety. The verses are representative of the Qur’an’s Mariology, extolling her as the mother of the Messiah: “obedient,” “purified,” and “high-honored.”[89] As late as my visit in 1999, the display of Qur’anic quotations adorned the wall of the last room in the house, “Mary’s Bedchamber.” However, an official guidebook published by the Dernek reveals ambivalence about its placement inside the house, stating that quotes from the Qur’an “might seem out of place in a Christian chapel.” The publication also states that it was not the decision of the Dernek to devote space to the verses of the Qur’an in the house, but rather it was at the suggestion of a government official: “They have been placed there at the express wish of the Vali, prefect, of Izmir in 1985-86.”[90] What was perhaps a minor negotiation brings up concerns of both Christians and Muslims about identity and orthopraxy within this shared space. The subsequent placement of the Qur’an display outside has resulted in emphasizing the Christian identity of the house in its interior décor: gifts from popes, for example, are on prominent display in the apses of the main sanctuary. The fact that a local district leader requested that the Qur’an be prominently represented within the house suggests concerns regarding fidelity to Islamic scripture, especially in the practice of ziyaret to a shrine of shared identity.

Keeping trends within the Islamic world and Turkey in mind it is possible to see the references to the Qur’an inside Mary’s House as sending a message of scriptural legitimacy, countering possible accusations of polytheism (shirk) or undue Christian influence. Yet, because of the repressive secularizing measures taken by the state after the establishment of the Turkish Republic places such as Meryem Ana Evi, despite strong Christian associations, have stood as symbols for the recovery of Islam in Turkish public life. Thus, the questioning of ziyaret on grounds of dubious Islamic foundations has never taken hold in Turkey as it has in other countries (as it was the secular state that curtailed its practice). Proper intent and proper conduct has been an issue in recent years, as directives from the Ministry of Religious Affairs demonstrate.

The Fountains of the Source

Water is a universal elixir. Hasluck declared that “Turk and Christian are equally prone to mountain and spring cults,” citing the connection water has to agrarian communities, both Christian and Muslim, in late Ottoman Anatolia.[91] The miraculous spring at Lourdes served as a potent precedent for the French missionaries in the early development of Panaghia Kapalı.

The water of Meyem Ana Evi’s four fountains constantly flows. People wash themselves in it, wash their children and babies, massage it into their limbs, wheel strollers and wheelchairs up to the fountains and pour the waters over the occupant’s heads, especially on hot days. It is pure mountain spring water and safe to drink. Commemorative bottles of plastic and glass are also sold at the souvenir stands. For both practical and curative reasons people are intent on filling multiple bottles and the crowds are often clogged before the fountains. The ampullae of water filled here will be given to friends, relatives, and neighbors upon returning home.

Binding

While the use of water seems widespread if not universal in religious rites of healing, affixing materials to the site in some way is a practice that is more common to Muslim pilgrims in recent decades.[92] Referred to as “binding” by anthropologists, the practice consists of tying a strip of cloth to a convenient place in the sacred vicinity. Often tree branches are the most practical, but man-made structures can be used as receptacles for binding items. The power of this practice rests in the belief in the transference of a particular problem (infertility, a physical ailment) from the petitioner to the sacred agent associated with the shrine, who acquires the responsibility of a solution or cure. Hasluck identified the practice as a different sort of Anatolian “transference,” one in which “the suppliants’ ills [transfer from] himself to the object knotted or nailed.”[93]

Binding has taken on several forms at Meryem Ana Evi reflective of both evolving popular practice and official caretaking. A photograph from the 1962 Hayat article shows a tree next to the stone walls of the water fountains with cloths tied traditionally to its branches as dangling ribbons. Sadly, that tree did not survive. There are no other trees close enough to the shrine’s significant features and it is difficult to find a host on which to tie a material representation of petition. I observed several cloths and paper tissues stuffed into the crevices of the exterior walls of Mary’s House despite official discouragement with the construction of a “Wish Wall” for this express purpose. Before the wall, though, the practice of binding took an interesting form. All that remains is a sign left untranslated from the Turkish: (çiklet-sakiz yapıstıstırmak yasak) “It is forbidden to affix chewing gum.” This was the form binding took during my visit in 1999, with thousands of pieces of chewed gum stuck to the stones surrounding the fountains in an elaborate mosaic. Before the visit of Pope Benedict XVI in 2006 the Dernek removed the gum and installed massive iron grates. Within this controlled space tour guides encourage pilgrims to write down their “wish” and tie it to the grates. Today, the grates are packed with thousands of papers, tissues, and tags from cruise ships — any flexible material that can be tied.

The Dernek guidebook refers to the traditional form of binding as “deplorable,” a practice that “defiles the spirit of this place.”[94] While it is not surprising that binding, especially in the form of chewed wads of gum, would be a nuisance to those charged with maintaining the shrine, “tying” is also a practice officially discouraged by the Turkish Ministry of Religious Affairs as contrary to the religion of Islam. I observed the ambivalence some Muslims have about the practice of binding first-hand during my most recent visits. Turkish tour guides would reveal their disdain by repeating the theory that binding was a pre-Islamic practice carried over from an ancient pagan past. In other words, it is one of those superstitious left-overs and not a part of “real Islam.” Regarding practices such as “binding” in order to petition a cure from the saint, both Islamic and secular sensibilities converge in their condemnation of “superstition.”

Animal Sacrifice and Incubation

Two discouraged practices cited by the Ministry of Religious Affairs have a history at Mary’s House but have since become defunct. In ziyaret practice and Islam generally, animal sacrifices are central. Apart from official feast holidays (the “Feast of the Sacrifice” that concludes the haj, for example) animal sacrifices are performed in the fulfillment of a vow given as part of a supplication to a saint. The animal is prepared, killed, cooked, and its meat distributed on the grounds of the shrine itself. Large shrines often have elaborate slaughtering and cooking facilities for this sacred purpose. There is evidence that sacrifices of this type once took place at Meryem Ana Evi. According to Notre-Dame d’Éphèse, in January of 1962 an animal sacrifice was offered at the site (the journal uses the Turkish term, kurban) as thanks for the birth of a child “after six years of marriage.”[95] That this Islamic custom seems to have been discontinued here is not surprising as there are no longer facilities for this purpose.

Pastors of the shrine also recorded the practice of sleeping within the sacred vicinity, known in anthropology as “incubation.” Hasluck noted incubation associated with both Orthodox Christian and Islamic places.[96] Referred to as “sleeping” or “lying” in the shrine by the Ministry of Religious Affairs, it refers to the continuity of the practice in conjunction with ziyaret visitation. Unlike the practice of nighttime vigils, in which one desires to remain awake, incubation encourages sleep in the sacred vicinity.[97] According to the common narrative pattern the saint then appears to the slumbering suppliant in a dream and grants a cure or instructions to procure a cure. In the months following the Hayat article in June of 1962 the pastors reported that “many” visitors requested three days at the shrine, including sleeping on-site. This practice was quickly halted, however. According to Notre-Dame d’Éphèse, “We accepted the first of them, but then decided not to receive any more overnight visitors.”[98]

The history of the encounter between Islam and Christianity is also a history of the appropriation of sacred places — the Aya Sofia in Istanbul and the Grand Mosque of Cordoba are just two famous examples of complete takeover by the religious authority of conquerors. But the history of this encounter also reveals a lineage of shared sacred places, of which Meryem Ana Evi is a prominent modern example. Sacred space successfully shared was, and is, a result of a negotiated process not only among religious authorities but among the people who visit. The Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem are two cases of Christian churches with an early history of Muslim visitation, which fell away due to apprehension over the intrusion of Muslim practice. In these instances the Islamic practice of incubation was a major source of trepidation for Christian clerical authorities.

Priests’ Magic

Another controversial method of petition amongst Muslim pilgrims at Mary’s house directly involves the Catholic clerics who serve there. Muslims seeking the efficacy of Christian priests in countering certain types of spiritual oppression is an enduring practice despite mutual discomfort on the part of both Christian and Islamic authorities. Well known by the time of Hasluck’s documentation of Anatolian folk practices, “priest magic” often accompanies Christian-Muslim historical encounter, whether Orthodox, Catholic, or Armenian.[99] In Turkey this useful charisma attributed to priests is called the papas büyüsü, or the “counter-curse of the priest.” Although literally meaning “magic” this is often spoken of in terms of a counter-spell. The belief in priestly power over this apotropaic function is similar to the belief in the ubiquitous nazar borcu. These are distinctive blue and white talisman crafted in glass to resemble the circularity of the “evil” eye or nazar (“hostile gaze”). Thought to be inspired by envy they are considered powerful enough to result in physical and mental distress upon whom the nazar is cast. For this reason the talismans are often referred to as “evil eyes” in the tourist trade, even though their purpose is actually to deflect the nefarious gaze.

The enduring belief in “priest magic” brings up pastoral problems unique to Mary’s House. The priests I interviewed consistently discouraged this practice, and the Turkish caretakers of Meryem Ana Evi confirmed their difficulty with it as well. Before approaching a priest Turkish caretakers and workers at the shrine are often asked, “Does this priest do praying?” (bu papas okuyor mu?) Several meanings to this question can be implied: does the priest recite (as in a prayer); or does he incant a spell (as in magic). The caretakers often believe this question infers the second meaning, magic. The standard answer to such inquiries is along the lines of “Our priests don’t do that. They pray for everyone.” The priests see it as denigrating their role to a kind of demagogic magician — dolling out powers without distinction. One of the priests living at Mary’s House explained that when Muslims ask him for a blessing he even refrains from outward Christian gestures, such as the sign of the cross, because they are seen as a hallmark of a type of mercenary “magic.” But as pastors-to-all who visit Mary’s House the priests do pray with and for Muslims as requested, which requires a delicate balance.

Muslim visitors also approach priests and religious about conversion to Christianity. Wisely the pastors of Meryem Ana Evi often recognize this impulse among young people as a form of rebellion against parental authority and control, although the desire is quite persistent in some. They may declare divine inspiration by virtue of the fact that the idea to become Christian came to them in their dreams. Among some Protestant evangelical missionaries to the Muslim world this phenomenon is recognized as a great opportunity for conversion.[100] Yet the priests and women religious I spoke with saw this as a challenge, potentially upsetting the balance of peaceful Christian-Muslim relations they have sought to maintain.

Turkish law restricts all religious professionals from wearing clerical clothing in public. This limitation derives from secular rather than Islamic sensibilities in Turkey. Because of these restrictions Turkish visitors to Meryem Ana Evi see priests and religious in their traditional robes as a novelty. Within a half hour, during one interview I conducted with a religious dressed in the traditional blue habit of the Sisters of Mary Immaculate over ten individuals politely but insistently requested to have their picture taken with her. The interruptions were so frequent that we had to change the location of our conversation. The priests and religious who serve there are conscious of their liminal position in a country that is both officially secular yet also is witnessing a revival of shariah-centered Sunnism. As the policy is based on the French model of laїcisme, in legal terms religion is not separate from the state but rather controlled by it under the Ministry of Religious Affairs. In theory and practice non-Muslim places of worship are granted rights to manage internal affairs including their own dress code within the sacred vicinity.

Incidents of violence possibly due to religious differences (both Christian-Muslim and sectarian divides within Islam) have occurred in Turkey in the recent past. The 2010 murder of Archbishop Luigi Padovese, Capuchin Apostolic Vicar of Turkey, was a concern the priests of Mary’s House brought up. The accused was the archbishop’s personal driver, and whether religion was a motivation is unresolved. The driver’s attorneys argued for a defense of insanity, and as of my visits to Meryem Ana Evi in 2012 the case was still awaiting trial.[101] At the time, Catholics in Turkey expressed dismay over the slow pace of the prosecution. For them, this demonstrated a lack of serious intent on the part of the state to seek justice for the murdered archbishop. Despite this the priests explained to me that they generally feel safe and respected in Turkey. Local people living around Mary’s mountain, both in Selçuk and in the resort town of Kuşadası, refer to the priests of Meryem Ana Evi protectively as “our” priests.

Conclusion: Pilgrims among the Tourists

The Smyrna Lazarists discovered Mary’s House during the Marian century, a time during which visionaries produced physical evidence of Mary’s apparitional presence. The ruins on the mountain above Ephesus added to this phenomenon by extending the visionary experience to also include physical evidence of Mary’s historical presence. The Vatican’s official dogmatic definitions concerning Mary also affected Panaghia Kapalı’s development beyond the papacy’s promotion of the site over Mary’s traditional tomb in Jerusalem. The iconic symbol of Mary as Our Lady of Ephesus reflected the image of the Immaculate Conception, declared dogma in 1854. Identified as the site of her Dormition, European visions and local legend converged on the ultimate meaning of Panaghia Kapalı and anticipated the Dogma of the Assumption (1950) as well.

Despite its foundation as a Roman Catholic shrine mirroring larger trends in Roman Catholic piety, the appeal of Mary’s House extended beyond the Catholic Church, beyond Christianity, and today beyond religion. If Mary’s House had been discovered in a majority Christian country it likely would have remained an exclusively Christian site of pilgrimage. Perhaps if it had been discovered in a place far from ancient ruins, removed from the Aegean shores, it would have remained a local shrine drawing only pilgrims. As we enter into the twenty-first century we see that not only has Mary’s House come to exemplify pilgrimage in our current age of mass tourism, it has helped define it.

Throughout the twentieth century visitors to Meryem Ana Evi increased in stages. After the wars of the first part of the century concluded construction of a road leading to the site by the Turkish Ministry of Tourism in 1950 drew locals due to the curative reputation of the springs. Having caught the attention of the Turkish popular press the volume of domestic visitors leapt. During the early 1960s pastors at the shrine recorded the fact that Muslim pilgrims far outnumbered Christians. Another sharp increase in visitors came from an increase of foreign tourists generally to Turkey, especially following the conclusion of the Cyprus conflict in 1974. By the 1990s it was clear that the religious identity of visitors to Meryem Ana Evi had further evolved. It was no longer the case that Muslims outnumbered Christians or even that religious identification mattered. For the past twenty years the international cruise ship industry has aggressively developed markets on the Eastern Aegean and Mediterranean. The site of the ancient city of Ephesus is an important stop on a number of routes. In this regard the location of Meryem Ana Evi is convenient for tour planners — something which could never have been envisioned before the main road was built. In the Ephesus experience, in contrast to its barren, scorched plain, Mary’s House serves as a picturesque rest stop where it is always a few degrees cooler on the forested mountain.

The Turkish Ministry of Tourism reports well over half-a-million visitors annually to Mary’s House.[102] According to an administrator in the Selçuk branch of this Ministry, of this figure eighty percent are guided to the site during tours of Ephesus organized by the cruise lines. This does not automatically mean that a full eighty percent of the visitors to Mary’s House are “strictly” tourists of course. But it does indicate that Mary’s House was not the primary destination for their trip. According to the head pastor at the time of my fieldwork approximately seventy percent of visitors are primarily tourists. The Turkish Ministry would view this development as a success as it has supported “faith tourism.” This term applies to a type of visitor to Turkey seeking places of religious significance, as much for heritage and history as for piety. According to the Ministry’s website, “There is a myriad of important Islamic, Christian, and Jewish sites making the country an attractive destination for faith tourism.”[103] Seeking to promote places with a biblical connection a research report commissioned by the Turkish government recommended Mary’s House receive financial support in hopes of courting foreign tourists.

I initially thought that the thousands of tourists visiting Meryem Ana Evi eclipsed the “real” pilgrims and so I sought to conduct my on-site research during times when tour groups were fewer (on Sundays, for example). But after several visits it became clear that tourists become pilgrims, and that too was an important aspect of the shrine’s development to understand. In the growing field of literature exploring the interaction between religion and tourism the fluidity between tourists and pilgrims is consistently noted. Certainly pilgrims engage in “tourist” activities such as shopping and dining, but it is also clear that tourists often “slip into the role of pilgrims.”[104] At Meryem Ana Evi this slippage occurs through tourists’ participation in established rites: the lighting of candles, the consumption and use of the water, and binding materials to the “Wish Wall.” While it is impossible to understand everyone’s intention, or the belief system behind the performance of these rites, it is possible to observe interactions of non-pilgrim tour groups with these tangible, material features. Further insight into the secular evolution of these rites can be gleaned from the way in which they are presented by tour guides.

The volume of tourists to the house has added a new level of uniformity as to how rites at the shrine are executed. A brisk pace through the rites is encouraged to ensure crowd-flow and as a result they are routinized to great extent. Before entry into the house itself guides instruct their groups to “take candles” to light outside. Further on, the universality of water as a healing agent contributes to the popularity of the fountains even among secular tour groups. Although not formally enshrined a common explanation tour guides provide to their flocks regarding the significance of the three fountains is for attainment of “love, health, and money” — and so people duly line up to drink from them. This elucidation of the water’s potential appeals to non-religious tourists interested in the ‘good life.’ The act of binding has also been channeled and presented with secular cross-over appeal as a “Wish Wall” upon which wishes are written down and then affixed to the grates. But this reinterpretation of the rites for tourists is not appreciated by religious sources. According to the official guidebook of the Dernek: “It is wrong to attribute specific virtues to each of the springs (love, health, riches, or intelligence, wisdom, and success).…”[105] In addition to the “Islamization” of rites associated with the house, contested aspects of the site involve the secularization of rites. As a result of this emphasis on catering to tourists, the pastors of the house have distanced themselves from features such as the fountains or “Wish Wall.” I never witnessed the presence of priests or religious on the second tier below the house for any pastoral duty or activity.

The small entrance-room to the house itself, which contains the plaque commemorating the nineteenth-century founders, once housed many more ex-voto offerings than are displayed at present. Today, only a few crutches propped against the wall and a few pairs of baby shoes hanging from a banister make up the display of gifts given in thanks for successful petitions. At the opposite end of the house, at the exit, there is also a “Votive Box,” a glass case featuring small articles left by visitors in thanks for favors granted. These smaller items consist mainly of Roman Catholic devotional medals and other eulogiai. These two ex-voto displays are limited in space. The bulk of the material left over the decades is currently in the possession of the Dernek in Izmir. Earlier guide books would seem to indicate that displays of these types of gifts have been given less prominence over the years. This could be for practical reasons, but it also could reveal a tendency on the part of the Dernek and the pastors to deflect emphasis from the material aspect of intercessions in favor of a more sacramental-focused piety among pilgrims.

At certain times in the history of Mary’s House healing rites were encouraged and even administered by clergy and religious. The Daughters of Charity encouraged use of the hearth’s ashes as a healing salve during the early part of the twentieth century. During Bernard Deutsch’s 1959 visit he noted the enthusiasm of the pastor of the shrine, Father Joseph Bouis, regarding miraculous cures associated with the water. Bouis urged pilgrims to fill ampullae to take home.[106] Such encouragement is hard to imagine among the pastors today. The healing rites of the shrine have been relinquished in appealing to tourists for what pastors see as a higher order of meaning and purpose.

The secularization of rites among non-pilgrim visitors at Meryem Ana Evi reflects our current technological era as well. In my research to understand how different groups approach the petition regiments of the shrine I accompanied a bus filled with Turkish soldiers along with their guide. At the entrance to the shrine they were greeted by the commanding officer of the jandarma station. As a group of about fifty young soldiers in civilian clothing they did not pray in a demonstrative way inside the house, as Turkish pilgrims familiar with the rites do. They did not light any candles, although they took pictures of the candles with their cell phones. Several of them drank at the fountains, though no obvious rites were performed. At the “Wish Wall” they again took many photographs but without actually writing down or tying a request to the grates. They went so far as to pose as if tying a cloth, but they did not actually carry out the rite. Camera phones are ubiquitous, but no one carries a pen.

In interviews conducted with the workers at Meryem Ana Evi all are aware of their role in service of the tourist industry. The priests and religious are especially aware of this difficult responsibility: serving at a shrine that attracts a majority of tourists seeking anything from salvation to heritage to pleasure to healing, or simply a rest on a walking tour. The pastors at times expressed their exasperation with this role as tour guides. In Europe, as they pointed out, pilgrimage sites are primarily for pilgrims, whereas at Meryem Ana Evi pilgrims have been overwhelmed by the sheer volume of tourists. But this fact is also viewed as part of their mission, as a new kind of evangelism among people who might not otherwise encounter religious witness to a tangible salvation history.

Meryem Ana Evi continues to exist as a place of pilgrimage in defiance of simple categorization. Within the space of a century it grew from an obscure place of local pilgrimage to an international, interreligious shrine attracting popes as well as Turkish officials, in addition to the hundreds of thousands of annual visitors to the site. No fewer than five replicas of Mary’s House exist around the world.[107] Today the shrine is held up as an example of interreligious cooperation, but it is difficult to see how the shrine’s founders could have conceived of this.

At present, as religious and government authorities vested in Mary’s House strive to represent versions of sacrament-based Christianity and state-sponsored scriptural-based Islam, pilgrims and tourists alike to the shrine continue evolving folk traditions of petition that recall the visionary climate of nineteenth-century Catholic piety as well as late-Ottoman popular religion. The most recent addition to the Immaculate Conception iconography at the site is a seven-foot bronze statue of Our Lady of Ephesus on a plateau halfway up the mountain road leading to the shrine.[108] Standing next to this towering representation of Mary is a traditional binding tree — a sapling with colorful strips of cloth tied to its branches. These two elements constitute a unique visual reminder of the mystical and folk foundations of Mary’s House as a physical link to the Heavenly mother. Plans are in the works to construct an even grander statue of Our Lady of Ephesus, along the lines of Rio de Janeiro’s Christ the Redeemer.[109] How this development, along with the continued growth of visitors, both pilgrim and tourist, will affect the development of Mary’s House in the present century remains to be seen.

1 A note on foreign terminology: General Islamic terms of Arabic origin will appear transliterated according to current standards (Qur’an, shirk, and haj, for example). Terms specifically associated with Mary’s House will appear according to modern Turkish spelling (Meryem, bereket and ziyaret, for example).

2 Normally the cause for sainthood is opened in the place where the prospective saint died. Marie de Mandat-Grancey died in Izmir, but the archbishop of Izmir, Ruggero Francheschini, felt he lacked the resources to conduct a proper investigation. In 2008, Francheschini urged Bishop Robert W. Finn of Kansas City-St. Joseph, who was visiting Meryem Ana Evi, to take up the cause in his jurisdiction. Jack Smith, “Bishop Opens Sainthood Cause for French Sister,” National Catholic Reporter, 26 January 2011.

3 See Tom Gallagher, “An ‘Intercessor with Muslims,’” National Catholic Reporter, 11 December 2010.

4 Conflict erupted over a speech given at the University of Regensburg in which Benedict quoted the fourteenth-century Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Palaiologos. As the English translation of Manuel II’s quote reads: “Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” Objections to the speech across the Muslim world resulted in rioting and violence.

5 Full text of homily found here: http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/homilies/2006/documents/hf_ben-xvi_hom_20061129_ephesus_en.html

6 Collected in the posthumous Frederick W. Hasluck, Christianity and Islam under the Sultans, ed. by Margaret Hasluck (Oxford: 1929). The 2006 single volume reprint is used here.

7 Charles A. Frazee, “Vincentian Missions in the Islamic World,” Vincentian Heritage 5:1 (1984), 10.

8 Ibid., 6-11.

9 Ibid., 11.

10 This particular secondary school was taken over from the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary.

11 Frazee, “Vincentian Missions,” 19-23.

12 The two archbishops inscribed are Joseph Descuffi, C.M. (1937-1965), and André Timoni (1879-1904).

13 The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ (also mediated by von Bretano) was a significant source for the popular Mel Gibson film, The Passion of the Christ (2004).

14 “When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, ‘Woman, here is your son.’ Then he said to the disciple, ‘Here is your mother.’ And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home.” John 19:26-27.

15 Deutsch surveys the evidence in favor of Mary’s presence in Ephesus from the councils as well as the ancient basilicas. He also evaluates the modern arguments made after the discovery. Bernard F. Deutsch, Our Lady of Ephesus (Milwaukee: 1965), 51-80.

16 Julien Gouyet, Découverte dans la montagne d’Éphèse de la maison ou la trés sainte vierge est mort et fouilles a faire pour découvrir aussi le tombeau d’ou elle s’est élevée au ciel (Paris: 1898).

17 The original French version of Poulin’s memoirs are published as Journal du Rev. P. Eug. Poulin alias Gabrielovich, Smyrne-(Izmir), Turquie 1843-1928. Histoire de la découverte de la Maison de la Ste-Vierge à Meryem-Ana-Evi (près d’Ephese) (Mechelen, Belgium: 1984).

18 Quoted from the English version, P. Eugene Poulin, The Holy Virgin’s House: The True Story of Its Discovery, trans. by Ivi Richichi (Istanbul: 1999), 18.

19 For the English translation, see Sir Michael Palairet, trans., The Life of the Blessed Virgin Mary from the Visions of Ven. Anne Catherine Emmerich (Rockford: 1970), 346-47.

20 The first limited excavations were conducted by the British Museum. Since then the Austrian Archeological Institute has been the principle organization associated with the excavation of Ephesus.

21 The exception to Eastern Orthodox Churches regarding Jerusalem is the Syrian Orthodox Church, which maintains its early tradition in placing the Dormition in Ephesus.

22 Poulin, The Holy Virgin’s House, 52-53.

23 Ibid., 34. Emmerich’s description is vague, “Mary’s dwelling was on a hill to the left of the road from Jerusalem some three and a half hours from Ephesus.” Quoted from Palairet, The Life of the Blessed Virgin Mary, 347.

24 Poulin, The Holy Virgin’s House, 32.

25 The official name on the Ottoman registers for the property favors the translation as ‘door.’ “The Panaghia Monastery with Three Doors” (Panaya üç kapılı monastiri).

26 The Selçuks were a Turkic slave dynasty arising from the Islamic state practice of neutralizing conquered nomadic groups through the soldier-slave system. The Abbasids channeled Turkish tribal groups to frontier regions such as Asia Minor in this way. By the mid-fifteenth century the Ottoman dynasty had replaced the Selçuks as the foremost Islamic opposition to the Byzantines. By that time, however, the citizens of Ephesus had been in steady decline due to Barbarian invaders (third century), earthquakes (seventh century), and a receding harbor. Beleaguered Ephesians gradually migrated to the more favorable inland town of Aya Soluk (“Sacred Water,” later renamed Selçuk) and, according to local lore, to Çirkince as well.

27 Though there was some degree of debate among Catholic theologians as to whether Mary actually died a physical death before the Assumption, divided along the lines of “mortalists” and “immortalists,” many authoritative figures have referred to her death before the Assumption, such as John Paul II.

28 Renée Hirschon, “‘Unmixing Peoples’ in the Aegean Region,” in Crossing the Aegean: An Appraisal of the 1923 Compulsory Population Exchange between Greece and Turkey, ed. by Renée Hirschon (New York: 2003), 8.

29 Quite picturesque, the town has benefitted from the tourist industry’s growth surrounding Ephesus. Şirince recently saw an unexpected boom in tourist traffic during the off season. Designated as one of the places to be spared during the hyped Mayan apocalypse of 2012, many wealthy Turks and foreigners flocked to Şirince during the winter of 2011-2012 to witness the Apocalypse from a locale reputed to be exempt from New Age tribulations.

30 Poulin, The Holy Virgin’s House, 123.

31 Panaghia-Capouli ou Maison de la Sainte Vierge près d’Éphèse (Paris: 1896), 89.

32 Ibid., 88.

33 Ibid., 90.

34 The representative mentioned additional feasts associated with other nearby shrines. On the Friday after Easter the village also celebrated the Eastern feast of Theotokos, the Life-Giving Fountain at Ghizli Panaghia. Ibid., 86-88.

35 “Assomption,” Dictionnaire de la Bible (Supplément), ed. by Louis Pirot (Paris: 1928).

36 Hasluck, Christianity and Islam, 115. On Hasluck’s work in Smyrna see Giovanni Salmeri, “Frederick William Hasluck: From Cambridge to Smyrna,” in Archaeology, Anthropology and Heritage in the Balkans and Anatolia, ed. by David Shankland (Istanbul: 2010), 1:71-104.

37 Poulin, The Holy Virgin’s House, 130.

38 Stafford Poole, “Pierre Coste and Catherine Labouré: The Conflict of Historical Criticism and Popular Devotion,” Vincentian Heritage 20:2 (1999), 277.

39 Poulin, The Holy Virgin’s House, 128.

40 Ibid., 116.

41 Deutsch summarizes the arguments for the early dating of the foundation in Our Lady of Ephesus, 80-83, based on Actes du X. Congres International d’Études Byzantines (Istanbul: 1957).

42 On Hasluck’s divergence from the field, see David Shankland, “The Life and Times of F.W. Hasluck (1878-1920),” in Archaeology, Anthropology and Heritage, 1:17.

43 Cited from Deutsch, Our Lady of Ephesus, 85.

44 Poulin, The Holy Virgin’s House, 161-163.

45 Ibid., 139.

46 Today the Patriarchate of Constantinople does not have an official connection with Meryem Ana Evi, although Orthodox patronage of the shrine (especially among Russian Orthodox) is prominent. Orthodox Christian pilgrims reconcile the sanctity of the site by maintaining that Mary sojourned there temporarily. She then returned to Jerusalem where her Dormition, Resurrection, and Assumption took place at the site of the Church of the Sepulcher of Mary, which is under the jurisdiction of the Greek Orthodox Church of Jerusalem.

47 See Deutsch, Our Lady of Ephesus, 98.

48 A useful distinction of eras for Catholic historians, “The Marian Century” stretches from the announcement of the Dogma of the Immaculate Conception in 1854 until the Dogma of the Assumption in 1950.

49 Islam also absorbed this prevalent notion in the form of a well-known hadith, an authoritative statement made by the Prophet Muhammad: “Every child that is born, is touched (or stung) by Satan and this touch makes it cry, except Maryam and her son.” A.J. Wensinck, “Maryam,” The Encyclopedia of Islam, New Edition (1991), translated from al-Bukhari, Anbiya.

50 While most historians agree that the idea of the Immaculate Conception of Mary first developed in the East, its modern emphasis was exclusive to the Roman Catholic Church. According to the New Catholic Encyclopedia, among the Orthodox, “the belief gradually languished… that to the Greek orthodox theologians of the 19th century, the doctrine of Pius IX appeared as an innovation.” See Frederick Holwek, “Immaculate Conception,” New Catholic Encyclopedia.

51 Melissa R. Katz and Robert A. Orsi, Divine Mirror: The Virgin Mary in the Visual Arts (Oxford: 2001), 106. Although there is some discrepancy about whether the pose of Mary as stamped on the medal was the actual one first described by Labouré. Poole, “Pierre Coste and Catherine Labouré,” 280-81. On the presence of the image of the Immaculate Mary in Catherine’s early life, see René Laurentin, The Life of Catherine Labouré (London: 1983), 21, 33.

52 Katz and Orsi, Divine Mirror, 70.

53 The Smyrna Vincentians later installed the undamaged statue that now stands outside in the original location at the top of the path leading to the house. With the addition of a crown reminiscent of Notre-Dame-des-Victoires, this statue also recreates the Immaculate Conception’s gesture of an open embrace.

54 Joseph Euzet, Historique de la Maison de la Sainte Vierge pres d’Ephese (1891-1961) (Izmir: 1961), 79.

55 Poole, “Pierre Coste and Catherine Labouré,” 277.

56 According to the English translation: “The house was divided into two compartments by the hearth in the centre of it. The fireplace was on the floor opposite the door; it was sunk into the ground beside a wall which rose in steps on each side of it up to the ceiling.” Palairet, The Life of the Blessed Virgin Mary, 348.

57 Deutsch, Our Lady of Ephesus, 112-114.

58 Ibid., 114.

59 Hasluck, Christianity and Islam, 118.

60 Ibid., 115.

61 Ibid., 692.

62 Ibid., 68-69.

63 The nineteenth chapter, “Maryam,” is named for her but her narrative is also included in chapter three, “al-‘Imrān.”

64 For a general survey of Mary in canonical Islamic sources, see Jane I. Smith and Yvonne Y. Haddad, “The Virgin Mary in Islamic Tradition and Commentary,” The Muslim World LXXIX (1989), 161-187; Jane Dammen McAuliffe, “Chosen of All Women: Mary and Fāṭima in Qur’ānic Exegesis,” Islamochrisiana 7 (1981), 19-28.

65 The pilgrimage was led by a Swiss priest named Karl Gschwind who was living in Istanbul during World War II. Deutsch, Our Lady of Ephesus, 102.

66 Poulin, The Holy Virgin’s House, 63.

67 Notre-Dame d’Éphèse (March-April 1962), 52.

68 Ibid. (September-October 1962), 171.

69 Ibid. (March-April 1962), 52.

70 Ibid. (July-August, 1960), n.p.

71 Ibid. (September-October, 1962), 172.

72 Ibid., 173.

73 Deutsch, Our Lady of Ephesus, 118.

74 The original name of the association was Panaya Kapali Derneği. The name was changed to Meryem Ana Derneği in 1959. Incidentally, this was also the year in which the name of the mountain on which Mary’s House is located was changed from Bülbül Dağ (Nightingale Mountain) to Meryem Ana Dağ (Mother Mary’s Mountain).

75 Notre-Dame d’Éphèse (September-October, 1962), 171.

76 Quoted in Deutsch, Our Lady of Ephesus, 115.

77 The caretakers of the shrine informed me that in my fieldwork Sundays would be the best days to make these types of observations. Even during peak tourist season Sundays are a “day of rest” for tour groups organized by the cruise ships. Hence, the crowds lessened to an extent and more “real” pilgrims could be observed.

78 The term ziyaret for the visitation destination is generally used without distinction, however.

79 As a current representative collection on this topic, see Andreas Bandak and Mikkel Bille, eds., Politics of Worship in the Contemporary Middle East: Sainthood in Fragile States (Leiden: 2013).

80 Other discouraged practices listed by the Ministry but not associated with Muslim practice at Mary’s House include: entering the space on one’s knees (I have observed this practice on occasion among Orthodox Christians entering the altar room, but not among Muslims); leaving money; offering foodstuffs; affixing money or rocks to the walls; and circumambulating the space or objects within the space. I took this particular list of the Ministry’s discouraged practices from a tomb attached to a Sunni mosque in Antioch, Turkey, but the rules seem to be uniform throughout Sunni places of ziyaret across the nation.

81 Elif Demirci, “Meryem Ana’da Mum Yaktı,” Hürriyet, 28 March 2010.

82 Because the site is not practically accessible on foot, a fee is charged in the parking lot through which cars and busses enter. At this point a sign explains that revenues incurred by this fee go directly to the municipality of Selçuk. Such a disclaimer indicates ambivalence about charging entry fees to a sacred place, which many pilgrims feel should be free.

83 The title of the sign in English reads: “Historic Notes about the Shrine.” It offers a succinct list of scriptural and architectural evidence for the authenticity of the site as Mary’s last home. This brief history of its nineteenth-century discovery emphasizes the visions of Emmerich in leading the Vincentians to the site. On the opposite side of the sign’s boards are front and back images of the Miraculous Medal.

84 The Qur’an refers to Jesus as a masih or messiah, but as the “anointed one” and in a specific way stripped of divine identity.

85 The phenomenon of the visitation to the living healing saint in Turkish Islamic sects has been explored recently in Christopher Dole, Healing Secular Life: Loss and Devotion in Modern Turkey (Philadelphia: 2012).

86 On the Vincentians’ search for a tomb on the site between 1892 and 1914, see Deutsch, Our Lady of Ephesus, 87-88; Poulin, The Holy Virgin’s House, 105. While the Catholic caretakers seem not to have pursued excavating for this purpose beyond the early years of the twentieth century, the search for Mary’s tomb is still followed by the Turkish popular press.

87 Pictures and paintings of saints are more common in shrines frequented by Shi'i and Sufi-centered sects. Statues, however, appear only in Christian shrines.

88 As a secular cross-over practice lit candles are often seen at politically left-wing protests across Turkey, usually as a memorial of violence at the hands of authorities. I have also observed candles in Alawi tomb shrines in the Hatay district, however these were not lit (there was no place to hold them) but found outside the shrines as a binding material (see below) with their uncut wicks draped over tree branches.

89 The five verses from the Qur’an displayed at Meryem Ana Evi are as follows: “And We gave Jesus the son of Mary the clear signs and confirmed with him the Holy Spirit” (2:87, 253); “Mary, God has chosen thee, and purified thee, and has chosen thee above all women” (3:42); “O Mary, be obedient to thy Lord, prostrating and bowing before him” (3:45); and “Mary, God gives the good tidings of a Word from Him, whose name is Messiah, Jesus, son of Mary, high honored shall be in this world and the next, near stationed to God” (21:91).

90 Meryem Ana Evi (Izmir: Meryem Ana Evi Derneği, 1999), 68.

91 Hasluck, Christianity and Islam, 111.

92 Although Hasluck mentions the practice among Greek Orthodox, binding is an isolated phenomenon among Latin Christians.

93 Hasluck, Christianity and Islam, 262.

94 Meryem Ana Evi, 72.

95 Notre-Dame d’Éphèse (May-June, 1962), 89.

96 Hasluck, Christianity and Islam, 693-94.

97 On the types of vigil devotions in Islam, see A.J. Wensinck, “Tahadjdjud,” Encyclopaedia of Islam, First Edition (1913-1936) (Brill Online, 2016). See: http://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/encyclopaedia-of-islam-1/tahadjdjud-SIM_5609

98 Notre-Dame d’Éphèse (September-October, 1962). The practice of incubation at Panaghia Kapalı during the early part of the twentieth century is also mentioned in Deutsch, Our Lady of Ephesus, 89.

99 A current example of a similar phenomenon of priests’ “spell-breaking” is found in the Muslim attendance of mass exorcisms held by a charismatic Coptic priest in Cairo. See Omar H. Rahman, “Mass Exorcism in Cairo,” Vice (24 September 2012).

100 As an example of this, see Tom Doyle, Dreams and Visions: Is Jesus Awakening the Muslim World? (Nashville: 2012).

101 The accused was convicted of murder in January 2014 and sentenced to fifteen years in prison.

102 Statistics issued from the Ministry of Tourism divide visitors between “foreign” and “domestic.” For the year 2011, for example, Mary’s House recorded 631,389 foreign visitors and 173,784 domestic visitors. These numbers were provided by the Turkish Ministry of Tourism, Selçuk office.

103 Quoted in Michael Stausberg, Religion and Tourism: Crossroads, Destinations and Encounters (London: 2011), 41.

104 Ibid., 65.

105 Meryem Ana Evi, 72.

106 Deutsch, Our Lady of Ephesus, 126.

107 With several other replicas of Mary’s House planned, completed models are located in Vermont, Argentina, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Brazil, and the Netherlands.

108 The American Society of Ephesus commissioned the statue in 1991 to commemorate the 100-year anniversary of the discovery of Mary’s House. The American Society was founded in 1955 by Bill Quatman, a telecommunications tycoon from Ohio. This philanthropic organization has continued to provide financial assistance to the site, as well as funding various restoration projects in Ephesus. Quatman later revealed that his own mystical experiences during visits to Ephesus in the 1950s inspired his support of Mary’s House. See James C.G. Conniff, “Return to Ephesus,” Columbia 43 (1963), 21-40.

109 See: http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/large-new-statue-of-virgin-mary-statue-planned-in-selcuk-.aspx?pageID=238&nID=95537&NewsCatID=393

Sister Justina Segale, S.C.

and the Work of the Santa Maria Settlement House

By

Judith Metz, S.C., Ph.D.

Conference on the History of Women Religious, 26 June 2007

22 August 1897 — “Sister,” said Mother Mary Blanche one day, “I’ve been wondering if you and Sister Blandina could do anything for the poor Italians of the city? [W]hen I saw you both kneeling in the chapel in front of me, it occurred to me that you could do a great deal for them.”

“Well, Mother,” I said, “I have often thought of the same thing and sister and I would gladly undertake anything on their behalf.”

“Well,” said Mother, “Go, see the Most Rev. Archbishop and ask what he thinks about it.”[1]

This excerpt from the opening pages of the Santa Maria Journals goes on to relate how Sisters Justina and Blandina Segale, siblings and members of the Sisters of Charity of Cincinnati, visited Cincinnati Archbishop Henry Elder, secured his blessing and promise of financial support, and made plans to begin what was to become the “Santa Maria Italian Educational and Industrial Home.”

This approach to starting a new work was fairly routine for women religious attempting to meet the needs of their time. They, or their bishop or pastor, would encounter a needy individual or population and immediately try to respond in whatever way they could. Typically, these women encountered many obstacles in pursuing their ministries. Crucial among these was a lack of resources. In the case here of Sisters Justina and Blandina, they were given five dollars for carfare and told to ‘see what they could do.’ Another obstacle, though, was opposition, sometimes from unforeseen sources. Just a month after beginning their work, Sister Justina relates, “As soon as we spoke of securing a place and asked permission to solicit donations, the opposition began, first from members of the [Sister of Charity] Community itself who feared to involve the Community in debt, secondly from persons influential who do not see the necessity of this new work. Then other difficulties began to appear.”[2]

But these sisters were accustomed to hard times and obstacles and were prepared to take on challenges. Born in a small mountain village near Genoa, Italy, their father, Francesco Segale, was an illiterate peasant; their mother, Giovanna Casagrande, a foundling.[3] Following dreams for a better future, they immigrated to the United States in 1854 with their five young children. Settling in Cincinnati, Ohio, where they joined others from their homeland, they experienced the extreme poverty and struggle of newly arrived immigrants. While their father began with a fruit stand which eventually grew into a produce store, their mother saw to the home and the education of the children. By the time both sisters Maria Maddalena, age 20 (Sister Justina), and Maria Rosa, age 16 (Sister Blandina), joined the Sisters of Charity in 1866, they had completed their studies. After their novitiate both were sent to teach.[4] Although their early years as Sisters took them to differing locales, their close relationship endured and blossomed into the formation of a well-synchronized team during their thirty years together at Santa Maria.

Sister Justina spent her early years as a school teacher, including fifteen on frontier missions in Trinidad, Colorado, and Albuquerque, New Mexico. Already fluent in English and Italian, she learned Spanish as well. During the 1890s, while working in Lansing, Michigan, she became interested in the welfare of blind students at Michigan State University. Learning braille so she could write prayers and religious instructions for them, she championed the introduction of Catholic braille books into the university library.[5]

Meanwhile Sister Blandina, definitely the more colorful and outspoken of the two, spent more than twenty years on missions in Colorado and New Mexico. She recorded her adventures in letters and diaries which were eventually published as At the End of the Santa Fe Trail.[6] Her humorous, heartwarming, and hair-raising stories include personally tearing down and building new schools, encounters with Billy the Kid, begging trips to mining and railroad camps, and fighting for the rights of Native Americans.

The year 1897 saw these two creative and dynamic Sisters of Charity joining forces to “gladly undertake anything” on behalf of poor Italians in Cincinnati. Their experiences of facing hardships and dangers, as well as their deep spirituality and sense of mission, had prepared these women well for what they would meet in their new work. While they were Genoese (northern) Italians, the people to whom they were sent were Sicilians (southern Italians) whose dialect, manners, and customs differed greatly from their own. These newcomers were crowded into downtown tenements and struggling for survival. Many were cultural Catholics but gave little priority to religious practice in this new setting. They were willing to cooperate with anyone willing to assist them, and seeing an opportunity Methodists were engaged in a concerted effort to convert them by offering educational opportunities and social outreach. Sisters Justina and Blandina plunged into this setting with gusto.[7]

Sister Justina’s humorous, detailed, compassionate, tell-it-like-it-is recording of the day-to-day environment in which she and her co-workers carried out their work at Santa Maria reveals the motivation, scope, and meaning of the work for her. In the course of her twenty-one journals she reveals:

1. This is what we are doing;

2. This is why we are doing it;

3. We are convinced it needs to be done and we will get it done;

4. We will be persistent and tireless in getting it done.

This Is What We Are Doing

Almost a decade after the work at Santa Maria began, Sister Justina recorded a discussion about obtaining the endorsement of the Business Men’s Advisory Association. One of the gentlemen suggested there ought to be nothing of religion in the work if the public was to be asked support it. To this the intrepid nun asked, “What good could we do if the ultimate end is not to draw the soul to God?”[8] This simple response is the key to understanding the tireless efforts and multifaceted works that poured forth from the sisters, social workers, and volunteers at Santa Maria. Sister Justina saw all Italians as belonging in and to the Catholic Church, and she frequently expressed righteous indignation that some had fallen away or been lured from their rightful inheritance as possessors of the “True Faith.”

Although the sisters’ initial thrust was working with Italian school children and families, no one was outside the spectrum of their concern. Within a short time of the founding of Santa Maria they were serving young people and adults: Hungarians, Syrians, Egyptians, immigrants and the poor of every age and description.

Their first efforts revolved around education. “The one unfailing remedy to prevent our children from going to Protestant proselytizing schools is to provide better ones for them, and thus preserve the true faith among the poor,” Sister Justina wrote.[9]

After establishing a school, they engaged in what could be described as a tug-of-war with their Protestant ‘adversaries’ to keep Catholic children in the Catholic parish school. Sister Justina expressed ongoing distress at the lack of instruction or knowledge the children had about their faith. Besides teaching religion in the parish school, the sister’s Sunday School classes concentrated on preparing children for their First Holy Communion. Immediately after they reached this important milestone, the sisters initiated the boys into the “Sacred Heart Society” and the girls into the “Children of Mary Society.” “I hope we may be able to keep these children together and good Catholics by means of their monthly Holy Communion,” remarked Sister Justina.[10]

Hoping to keep the children within their sphere and to assist them in their enculturation process, the sisters set up classes in music, drawing, sewing, English, citizenship, and washing and ironing. They started an adult night school and offered Holy Communion instruction for children beyond school age at their residence. Once they were able to purchase a facility to house their work, their activities expanded even more, for instance taking in homeless young women on a temporary basis.

Recruiting for their programs, the sisters spent a great deal of time visiting tenements in downtown Cincinnati. Thus, they became acutely aware of the poverty and social problems that many of these families endured. Seeing any assistance they could offer as an extension of their work, they expanded their works in a multitude of directions. Sister Justina noted: “It is our intention to try to get places [jobs] for our school boys when they will be obliged to leave school, for being poor, the parents need the little they can gain for the support of the family.”[11] The sisters also began making regular visits to hospitals, the workhouse, the House of Refuge, the Children’s Home, and to Juvenile Court.

In recounting a visit to one home, Sister Justina was distressed to find that the entire family was attending the neighborhood Episcopal church, even though they were all baptized Catholics. Though the mother was not home at the time, Sister left with the resolve that “we shall not give up till she and her family are back in the Church.”[12] This dogged attitude toward keeping and winning Italians for the Catholic Church pervaded the sisters’ lives. On Thanksgiving Day, 1899, they unexpectedly received a statue of the Blessed Virgin. “The foot of our Blessed Mother crushes the serpent’s head,” Sister Justina observed, “May it be verified by the crushing of the heresy which the enemy is trying to implant in the hearts of the unsuspecting Italians, by the powerful aid of the ‘Santa Maria’ Help of Christians.”[13]

This Is Why We Are Doing It

As young girls Sisters Justina and Blandina had seen Sisters of Charity working among the poor, the sick, and the orphaned.[14] They were educated by these sisters, and when they became members of the community, they saw themselves as carriers of the vision of Saints Vincent de Paul and Elizabeth Seton. Sister Justina’s journals indicate an awareness of this heritage and are permeated with the founders’ spirituality.

“The Love of Christ Urges Us!”[15] was their Sister of Charity motto. St. Vincent exhorted: “If the love of God is a fire, then zeal is its flame. Let us beg God to enkindle in our hearts a desire to serve him. Let us give ourselves to him to do whatever he pleases with us.”[16] This spirit of selfless giving of time, energy, and resources is illustrated throughout Sister Justina’s recounting of her years of outreach rendered to the poor. Although recording comments such as “We gave up our community room and dormitory for school rooms,” or “this is a period of trial and discouragement,”[17] she never complained of personal inconvenience or lack of energy.

Identifying with the suffering of Christ, accepting the will of God, and trusting in Divine Providence were also characteristics of the founders that Sister Justina incorporated into her spirituality. From the outset her outlook at Santa Maria is expressed thus: “if it is His work it will succeed despite opposition — if it is not His work, we do not want it to succeed. But it is manifestly His work so we do not fear though we have nothing to begin with.” This sentiment is a clear echo of Elizabeth Seton’s prayer: “If I succeed, I bless God; if I do not succeed, I bless God, for then it will be right that I should not succeed.”[18] Notice that Sister Justina goes on to assert firmly that this is God’s work! She continues in her journal, “We found a penny on the street so that is the nucleus of the fund for the purchase of a house. I have written our motto: ‘A penny and two sisters are nothing. A penny, two sisters and God are omnipotent.’”[19]

A sampling of entries from the Santa Maria Journals offers a sense of the spirit with which the two sisters approached their work:

- “Though we have privations and mortifications to bear, we are very happy, and very earnest in trying to do our duty. We prove that God sweetens everything that is done for Him.”

- “I am afraid we will not be able to do anything there without a special miracle of God’s grace.”

- “Our dear Lord has provided so far and I am sure He will provide for the future; we will leave it to Him, but we shall continue to do our best, still remembering that without Him we can do nothing.”

- “Mother Mary Florence writes us that all the Sisters are storming Heaven with their prayers to help us in this crisis. From the events of today we feel that our prayers are being heard.”[20]

Facing with humor the hard reality of their beginnings, Sister Justina tells of “laugh[ing] till the tears ran down our cheeks” at the undisciplined conduct of the children.[21] But all was carried out in a spirit of patience and trust. In a 1913 entry Sister Justina quotes a short verse that captures her disposition:

Our days alternate

In grief and joy supernal,

But he who trusts in God

Finds peace and joy eternal.[22]

The goal of loving and serving God while assisting others motivated Sister Justina and her co-workers. “There is so much to do, and so slender means to do it,” she commented. “If our confidence were not placed in God, feeling that it is His work, and that in His own good time He will do what seems impossible, we might indeed be discouraged.”[23] But they persevered, buoyed by a sense of hope and the knowledge that they were living in the spirit of Charity exemplified by their forbearers.

We Are Convinced That It Needs To Be Done and We Will Get It Done

“Providence has been so visible in the establishment of the work that our confidence in Him is implicit,” Sister Justina asserted.[24] This assured sense that God wanted this work done was augmented for her by the convergence she sensed in seeing the wishes of her Mother Superior and the Archbishop of Cincinnati come together.

The work of Santa Maria received strong support from the Sisters of Charity, starting with the fact that the sisters were permitted to work without compensation.[25] Mother Mary Blanche Davis as well as superiors from other Sister of Charity missions regularly sent useful items to Santa Maria Sisters, and within a year of the center opening, additional sisters were missioned to expand the staff. The motherhouse sent furniture, bedding, prayer books, and other necessary materials as well as a steady stream of prayers intended for the success of their work.[26]

Besides the enthusiastic endorsement of Archbishop Henry Elder, Santa Maria received support from a number of clergy. Rev. John Mackey, rector of the Cathedral, solicited benefactors for them, while other priests offered to teach and minister in various ways to the Italian immigrants.[27] In October 1904, Sister Justina wrote: “The saintly Archbishop [Elder] has gone to his eternal rest and the Santa Maria loses its greatest friend.”[28] But Archbishop Henry Moeller, Elder’s successor, continued to funnel available resources to them.

Given this endorsement from their superiors, Sisters Justina and Blandina accepted their charge to carry on the work at Santa Maria in the most comprehensive manner possible. The need was clear and they believed in their own capabilities, but they did not plunge in without thought. From the onset they studied, planned, and consulted. Sister Justina reported meeting with a woman well-known for her connections to charitable institutions, who offered them “wise hints.”[29] They spent their summer breaks preparing for the next year and “drawing out a plan for a ‘Model Settlement’ which Mrs. Hayward requested [them] to do.”[30] In a separate instance, Sister Justina called on the Secretary of the American Federation of Catholic Societies “to ask his advice in adopting the best means to prevent proselytism among the Italians.” She also studied Italian in her spare time, explaining that working with the Italians “has, to a great extent, brought the language back to our minds, after over thirty years of disuse. The people whose children we taught are Sicilians and their dialect is very strange — almost impossible for us to understand, but now we are beginning to understand it a little.”[31]

With strong conviction, ample backing, and a creative approach, the Santa Maria Institute, the first Catholic settlement house in the country, became the premier Catholic social service center in Cincinnati. It provided a multiplicity of programs initially in the downtown area, and later in several outlying neighborhoods where immigrants had settled.[32]

We Will Be Persistent and Tireless in Getting It Done

The sisters employed several fronts in tackling their work. On the one hand they were fearless in confronting those who worked against them, particularly Protestant proselytizers. From their earliest efforts they engaged in a titanic struggle to enroll and keep Italian children in Catholic parish schools. “The Methodist Italian School has made great efforts to induce the children who have left their school to return to it,” Sister Justina reported. In fact, Methodist teachers visited the Italians, telling them the Catholic school was not recognized by the state and that the children would be arrested if they did not return to their Methodist school.[33] This competition for students continued over a period of years, but the sisters never relented in their claims to Italian children.

They also opposed Protestant ministers who recruited Italian children to attend their churches, conducting a protracted battle with a Mr. and Mrs. Castellini. “Mr. Andriolo was one of the men who let his children go [to the Protestant church], “Sister Justina reported. “We sent for him to reason with him on the wrong he was doing, he, a Catholic to send his children to learn Protestant catechism. We will have to continue to visit the people around and with God’s grace, the danger of Mr. and Mrs. Castellini’s proselytism will be lessened.”[34]

A second approach used in their work was enlisting the assistance of Catholic laity and religious congregations of women. Every congregation of Catholic sisters in the city “showed great interest” in the work and often collaborated with Santa Maria in assisting the poor. They willingly shared resources, sent donations, and opened their facilities to clients referred by the Santa Maria Sisters. This was particularly true of the Good Shepherd Sisters who worked closely with Sisters Justina and Blandina in ministering to girls entrusted to them by the courts.

The sisters also procured the support of many dedicated lay men and women, eventually forming the “Willing Worker League” to formalize their activities. The women, particularly, served on committees, taught classes, and sponsored events for children, sometimes even in their own homes. These women also accompanied sisters on their visits to hospitals and jails. In one journal entry Sister Justina reported that Miss Smith “accompanied Sister Blandina on her visits to the poor and some of the sights were pitiable, but she did not shirk the work.” In commenting on how much good these fervent ladies did on their hospital visits, Sister Justina wrote: “The influence of a refined lady is wonderful. A Sister is expected to speak of heavenly things — it is her profession you may say — but when a charming lady of the world has the good God in her heart, and she shows it by sacrificing part of her time and her pleasure in comforting the sad and the wretched and winning their souls to better things, it brings more clearly to the sufferer that God should be the first thought of all of those who are in sorrow.”[35]

Soliciting financial assistance was essential if the sisters were to sustain their ministries. They worked hard to secure a legacy left to the diocese, sought donations from organizations and private individuals, and even secured support from the Italian government. In June 1900 Sister Justina wrote to Queen Margaret of Italy requesting a donation for their fund-raiser. She told the queen, “It is our desire to have in the bazaar a department to represent Italy and to be known as ‘Queen Margaret’s Palace.’” The Queen sent five hundred lires in gold in response to Sister Justina’s appeal.[36] At the same time this intrepid sister wrote to the Italian Consul in Chicago asking his intercession in securing Italian textbooks from the Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs.[37]

Conclusion

Sisters Justina and Blandina knew no bounds. They were persistent and tireless in going about their work. They demonstrated no shyness in approaching both friend and foe, and traveled a long, frustrating road before they secured their work in acquiring a building. Their endless patience and boundless enthusiasm attracted others to join them, and enabled them to continually expand their reach. Truly their work was blessed as they relied on God and worked like Trojans!

St. Vincent urged his followers: “We must be all for God in the service of the people.”[38] These women, through their work at the Santa Maria Institute, were faithful to his exhortation. In her Journals, Sister Justina quoted a hymn dedicated to Mother Seton which exemplifies their embodiment of the Charity charism:

Hail, hail loved Mother Seton

Thy daughters sing to thee.

Hail, hail St. Vincent’s daughter

Resounds o’er land and sea.

In lonely penal prisons

In dismal convict cell,

Are seen thy faithful daughters

Of heavenly Hope to tell.

The sobbing babe deserted

The pitiful insane

The deaf-mute and the sightless

Thy daughters’ care sustains.

Wher’ere there’s human sorrow

Thy daughters hast with love

Urged by Christ-like compassion

To guide the soul above.[39]

For Sisters Justina and Blandina this passage is truly what it meant to be a Sister of Charity in the early twentieth century.

1 Santa Maria Journals, J-1, 22 August 1897, Santa Maria Institute Papers, Sisters of Charity Archives, Mount Saint Joseph, Ohio (Hereafter cited as SMI Papers).

2 J-1, 23 September 1897, Ibid.

3 Donatella Aurili Ruggiero, “Who Was Sister Blandina?” Sister Blandina Segale: History of a Departure and a Return (Edizioni Tigullio-Bacherontius, 1998), 60.

4 Ibid., 4.

5 Sister Justina Segale, Undated Obituary, Necrology File, Sisters of Charity Archives, Mount Saint Joseph, Ohio.

6 Sr. Blandina Segale, At the End of the Santa Fe Trail (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999).

7 Ruggiero, “Who Was Sister Blandina?”, 72.

8 J-2, 12 January 1907, SMI Papers.

9 J-1, 27 September 1897, Ibid.

10 J-1, 12 June 1898, Ibid.

11 J-1, 31 January 1899, Ibid.

12 J-1, 18 March 1900, Ibid.

13 J-1, 3- November 1899, Ibid.

14 Roger Fortin, Faith and Action: A History of the Catholic Archdiocese of Cincinnati, 1821-1996 (Columbus, OH: 2002), 237.

15 Cf. 2 Corinthians 5:14.

16 “Book of Common Rules,” August 1659, in Vincent de Paul: Correspondence, Conferences, Documents, ed. and trans. by Jacqueline Kilar, D.C., Marie Poole, D.C., et al, 1-14 (New York: New City Press, 1985-2014), 12:250 (Hereafter cited as CCD).

17 J-1, 16 September 1900; and J-2, 16 May 1903, SMI Papers.

18 J-1, 23 September 1897, Ibid.; Elizabeth Seton to Antonio Filicchi, 6 May 1805, in Regina Bechtle, S.C., and Judith Metz, S.C., Collected Writings of Elizabeth Bayley Seton, vols. 1-3a&b (Hyde Park, N.Y.: 2000), 1:361- 363.

19 J-1, 23 September 1897, SMI Papers.

20 J-1, 8 October 1899; J-2, 21 November 1903; J-2, 4 February 1905; J-3, 7 November 1911, Ibid.

21 J-1, 9 October 1897, Ibid.

22 J-4, 20 January 1913, Ibid.

23 J-1, 17 April 1898, Ibid.

24 J-1, 9 October 1899, Ibid.

25 J-1, 22 August 1897, Ibid.

26 J-1, 25 January 1898; 5 September 1898; 11 September 1899, Ibid.

27 J-1, 12 February 1898, Ibid.

28 J-2, 16 January 1905, Ibid.

29 J-1, 9 April 1898, Ibid.

30 J-1, 30 June 1898; and 7 July 1898, Ibid.

31 J-2, 18 May 1903; and J-1, 8 July 1898, Ibid.

32 Fortin, Faith and Action, 237.

33 J-1, 30 March 1898, SMI Papers.

34 J-2, 3 May 1903, Ibid.

35 J-1, 28 February 1899; and 30 April 1899, Ibid.

36 J-1, 2 June 1900; and 7 April 1901, Ibid.

37 J-1, 29 October 1900; and 15 January 1901, Ibid.

38 “Repetition of Prayer,” June 1658, CCD, 11:357.

39 J-3, 24 February 1910, SMI Papers.

Sister Justina Segale and Americanization:

The Making of Catholic Italian Americans

By

Mary Beth Fraser Connolly, Ph.D.

Conference on the History of Women Religious, 26 June 2007

From the beginning, the Santa Maria Institute and Sisters Justina and Blandina Segale sought to ensure the Catholic faith of Italians in Cincinnati, Ohio. In the process, the Segales engaged in the work of Americanization prevalent at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. At the Institute’s conception, the sisters conveyed their purpose:

With capabilities inferior to none, a firm determination — which judicially guided is a great factor in the formation of good character: sensitivity and light-hearted, inclined to virtue and always drawn toward the good and the beautiful: such children properly trained make true members of Church and State. Allow the same qualities to expand without the guiding hand of religion, and indifference and crime follow.[1]

For the sisters, however, the process of Americanization was not necessarily the same as the official Americanization efforts of the United States government or other social welfare reformers of the time. Justina and Blandina Segale were concerned about the condition of immigrants’ souls, as well as their ability to be loyal citizens. The two, in their minds, were inextricably linked. In 1921, Sister Justina wrote in her journal:

[T]he Santa Maria was training Italians for Americanization and as the most effective means to do so as to make them loyal, we begin by making them loyal to God, faithful to their religion, for one who is a traitor to God, cannot be relied upon to be loyal to the government.[2]

At the beginning of their mission, the sisters understood that their objective to preserve the faith of Italians served a larger purpose: it made Italians “true members of Church and State.” In 1921, Justina wrote her views on loyalty after Sister Blandina had given a speech at Cincinnati’s American House in honor of George Washington’s birthday. Speaking before the other representatives of this Americanization center, including an Italian Presbyterian minister whom Justina referred to as the “proselytizing minister,” Blandina defined and defended Santa Maria’s efforts to transform Italian immigrants into American citizens.[3]

The self-proclaimed purpose of the American House was “the union of many peoples of the country into one nation.” To achieve this immigrants had to learn the “American language,” become citizens, and recognize the “privileges America bestow[ed] upon and guarantees all residents of this country.” The American House was a “secular” institution directed by an executive board that included Christian and Jewish representatives.[4] The presence of the Italian Presbyterian minister at the celebration, however, proved to Sister Justina that their efforts to Americanize were suspect. After remarking on Sister Blandina’s speech, Justina continued:

The minister also spoke. He said he was working among the Italians, looking for those who had no religion. He did not say that they were making every effort to induce all Italians to go to their mission, invading the homes of our Catholics, inviting them, offering inducements etc. He did not mention what he said to me that he was going “to make them Protestants” also that “the Catholic Church has no religion.”[5]

Justina did not believe the words of the Presbyterian minister when he spoke at the celebration. Despite the presence of this minister among those gathered at the American House (or rather because of his presence), the sisters participated in Americanization programs which were intended to make immigrants loyal American citizens. This did not mean that the sisters shared the same perspective on Americanization as the members of the house’s executive board. Nowhere in the official statements of American House’s purpose did they speak of religion and of what Blandina referred to as “loyal[ty] to God.”[6]

Sisters Justina and Blandina were not typical of ‘Americanizers’ in 1921. The same can be said for their attitudes in 1897. The process of assimilation or Americanization was not their guiding purpose. The pages of the Santa Maria Journal are filled more with the day-to-day operation of the Institute, the preservation of the Catholic faith, and the material aid of immigrants than with the fears and concerns of American Catholics regarding an influx of foreigners. Sister Justina, the author of the journal, did not write of the importance of immigrants ridding themselves of their Italianness to embrace an American way of life. They did, however, encourage Italians to go to church, receive the Sacraments, know their faith, baptize their children, send them to Catholic schools, and to participate in good Catholic social clubs. By doing all these things Italian immigrants made lives for themselves in the United States, and their children grew up more as Americans than Italians. These children in turn would pass on the same lessons to their children, thus insuring Catholicism’s place in the Italian-American community.[7]

This pattern of immigration is not unique to Cincinnati or Italians in the United States. Scholars of immigration and Americanization have dealt extensively with the concept of assimilation and acculturation and the second-generation’s place within these ideas. Sisters Justina and Blandina Segale, however, are something different, or at the very least something new, to the field and the classroom. Justina’s diaries provide an opportunity to illustrate a different side of Americanization: one where the Americanizers are Catholic, women religious, and would-be “Americanized” immigrants who were pulled toward their own Italianness. Justina and Blandina throughout the course of their direction of Santa Maria grew to envision an American identity through an Italian and Catholic lens.[8]

This understanding of Americanness allows for multiple ethnic identities within one civic identity. It conjures ideas of cultural pluralism or, as John Higham has articulated it, a cosmopolitan nationalism, where diversity of ethnic interests and origins coexist. In the United States religious belief, or more specifically an adherence to a particular religious denomination, must be incorporated into any understanding of an American identity. While a civic Americanism is political and without specific theological doctrines, the United States has in part based its cultural identity on a belief in God and religious freedom. American Protestantism dominated American identity throughout the nineteenth century until it was challenged by the influx of Roman and Orthodox Catholics and Reformed and Orthodox Jews. The American Catholic Church specifically pushed this civic identity by claiming for itself and its communicants a place within American political tradition, whilst striving to assimilate its diverse immigrant Church into one American Church.[9]

Sisters Justina and Blandina articulated an Americanness that stood between two assimilationist positions: American Protestant and Catholic identities. They, like many other American women religious, used education and entertainment to inculcate an American Catholic identity. They understood the importance of a proper education that balanced devotion to the Faith with citizenship. In so doing, they joined other urban social welfare reformers who worked with immigrants to mold them into productive American citizens.[10]

In the case of the Santa Maria Institute and the Segale sisters the goal is evident in their emphasis on education, the creation of social clubs, providing entertainment for children, and a myriad of other efforts benefitting Italian immigrants. The successes they had occurred because culturally they met the Italian community somewhere between American and Italian nationalism. By the end of her life, Sister Justina Segale was singing the praises of Benito Mussolini, who rescued the Pope from his imprisonment in the Vatican and returned Catholicism to its rightful place of respect within Italy. While many Italians living in the United States echoed this praise of Mussolini, American Catholics, deeply concerned with the condition of the Holy Father, joined them in their admiration of the Fascist leader of Italy.[11] The Santa Maria Institute grew and expanded alongside this immigrant community. By the 1920s many Italians of Cincinnati, particularly those loyal to Santa Maria, found a balance between the two cultures and nations. Education offered at Santa Maria and area parochial schools contributed to them finding this equilibrium.

In the first three decades of the twentieth century Santa Maria developed and expanded numerous social clubs for children and adults. The purpose, of course, was to offer an alternative to secular or Protestant offerings that the sisters believed would lead Italians away from Catholicism. By April of 1917 the Santa Maria Institute had its own Boy Scout troop that drew thirty-two members initially. A second troop of fifteen boys, however, developed in May of 1917 under the direction of Joseph Nardini, an Italian. According to Justina’s account of the establishment of this second troop, the first group of Boy Scouts consisted of boys of various nationalities. While Justina suggested Nardini’s troop not limit their admissions, they wanted only Italians. Nardini’s Boy Scouts rejected a multi-ethnic organization that would, in theory, promote an American identity versus an Italian one.

This account of the Italian Boy Scout Troop is an interesting example of how Justina Segale’s journal might illustrate a larger point of Americanization. The Boy Scouts, arguably an organization dedicated to American patriotism, was being used as a means of preserving Italianness. Santa Maria, by providing space to a group such as this, rejected a “melting pot” understanding of an American identity in favor of preserving Italian identity. That Sister Justina suggested other nationalities join the second troop, though, indicates she believed in Americanization. Yet, she praised the boys of Nardini’s troop for establishing the group. It would promote “the uplift of the Italian youth” and would prevent these boys, if only fifteen of them, from joining Protestant organizations.[12]

Another troop developed at the Walnut Hills Santa Maria Welfare Center in 1919 after the subject of the Boy Scouts was raised at a mothers’ club.[13] Sister Justina believed that the Scouts offered young boys “useful, healthful and pleasant occupation, and high ideas, lofty principles calculated to make a brave honorable man out of every boy who takes the scout training.” More than this, it protected boys from Protestant evangelizers and fostered devotion to the Catholic Church. In 1920, Nardini’s Boy Scouts joined sixty other boys from Santa Maria clubs to receive Holy Communion. The scouts wore their uniforms and accompanied Nardini at Mass. Here, as with the girls’ organizations, the Sisters of Charity’s main purpose was to create moral social activities while promoting devotion to Catholicism. Young men and women who received the sacraments and studied their Catholic faith assumed American Catholic identities, even as they maintained elements of their Italian identity.[14]

On the surface, here the Boy Scouts do not appear to be an instrument of Americanization but rather a tool to preserve the Catholic faith. While deeper analysis indicates they were indeed agents of Americanization, the sisters took more direct measures to usher Italians into American life and prepare them for citizenship. By the start of World War I, the sisters had to deal with a new breed of “Americanizers”: non-sectarian institutions or Christian organizations like the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), and the American House operated by the Americanization Executive Committee sponsored by Cincinnati’s Chamber of Commerce. These new institutions posed a threat to Italian Catholics because, in Justina’s mind, they often mixed Protestantism with citizenship. If these centers contributed to the destruction of Italians’ Catholic faith (conversion to a Protestant denomination, or simply ceasing religious observance) then the sisters’ would have failed in their primary mission to make immigrants responsible citizens. Simply put, if Italians lost their faith they became “traitor[s] to God,” and could not “be relied upon to be loyal to the government.”[15]

A look at Americanization and citizenship efforts in Cincinnati at the time reveals various programs whose main purpose was controlling the immigrant population, promoting American patriotism, and preventing radicalism from developing in the city. In most cases, Cincinnati Americanizers put public pressure upon resident aliens to become citizens. Many did not resort to out-right force, although once the United States entered the war the pressure intensified as newspapers asked what immigrants had done to become American. Specifically they wanted to know what Italians and other groups were doing to support the war effort and, in the case of young men, to join the US Army. Before 1917 Americanizers still hoped to persuade rather than coerce. In 1915 a new “Citizenship School” developed from a Night School offered at Sherman School on West Eighth Street and was housed in the YMCA. This operation was developed by the same Americanization Executive Committee that directed the American House located on the west side of Cincinnati at Central Avenue and Bank Street. The citizenship school stemmed from the failure of many immigrants to pass the examination required to gain naturalization papers.[16]

By 1917 the situation in Cincinnati had changed, particularly for those immigrants considered “enemy aliens:” Germans, Hungarians, Austrians, and Bulgarians. These enemy aliens were prohibited from living within a half-mile of a “military fort, station, camp or factory munitions.” Those living in these areas, such as people residing in Carthage near the Pollack plant, had to move by June 1 of that year or be subject to arrest. This along with increasing measures pressuring Germans and others to become citizens and swear loyalty to the United States contributed to an atmosphere of heightened patriotism and concern over the state of immigrants in the city. In March of 1917 an article appeared in the Cincinnati Enquirer stating that immigrants working for the American Tool Works Company who had not yet sought American citizenship were forcefully encouraged to do so by their employers. The company even gave permission to file necessary paperwork during business hours. Accordingly, twenty-five of the thirty-one non-resident employees complied with the request.[17]

Pressure on Germans, Austrians, and Hungarians increased elsewhere as well. Germans were warned that “evil acts” as enemy aliens would result in “stern reprisals.” German teachers in public schools who were not yet naturalized and who reportedly had no declared intention of doing so were pressured to resign in April 1917; those who did not were later fired in September. Immigrants throughout the city faced growing calls to become citizens. The papers were full of notices and articles that ranged from friendly reminders to “stern” pronouncements. A minister from Columbia Baptist Church, P.L. Vernon, reminded readers that the “Importance of Citizenship must be Impressed Upon Aliens.” In another article, Germans were told that they would be shown “toleration” if they declared their intent to become citizens. Even reports intended to celebrate immigrants who filed papers contributed to this overwhelming pressure to comply with Americanization policies.[18]

Italians and other immigrants, meanwhile, were criticized for their alleged reluctance to join the army. Non-residents were chastised in the press for claiming exemptions from military service. An editorial in the Commercial Tribune argued that, to be fair, immigrants must be drafted alongside U.S. citizens. If immigrant men had remained in their countries their governments would have called them to duty. Some immigrant men, however, were exempted from military service if they were nondeclarants (aliens who had not filed citizenship papers), diplomats, or if they were “enemy aliens.” Compulsory conscription was a consequence of citizenship regardless of nation, particularly in times of war. Italians were singled out as “dodg[ing] war service” because, according to the Draft Board, many had lived in Cincinnati for five to ten years without filing citizenship papers. Consequently, efforts were made to compel them and other immigrants to enter the service. Situated next to these columns condemning Italians, Greeks, and others for not fulfilling their duties were “Rolls of Honor,” listing men who had volunteered to serve their country. The names were conspicuously not Italian nor Eastern and Southern European.[19]

By 1918 notices and articles in the newspapers became increasingly strident as the war continued and the threat of radicalism surged. In February 1918, an article in the Enquirer detailed the “nationwide dragnet… to locate enemy aliens who through ignorance of the law, or malicious intent, fail[ed] to make report of their property holdings.”[20] To combat these attacks on their character and their sense of duty to America, some immigrants, including Italians, responded publicly by embracing Americanization. In 1917 a group of Italians, Germans, Turks, and others established a club at their former Citizenship School, Sherman School, called the Eiler Citizenship Club. Despite coming from nations at war with each other (only Italians were not enemy aliens), the new group, a product of the Executive Committee’s citizenship school, had united and proved their worthiness to become citizens. They proved their loyalty to their new homeland, the United States. Others joined the ranks of published names of naturalized citizens or those who filed papers. By 1920, 34% of the Italians sampled for this study were naturalized residents, a significant increase from 1910 wherein only 16.4% had become citizens.[21]

The climate of Americanization caused many within the public school system, the Chamber of Commerce, and others concerned with the situation of immigration to push for increased education to speed the assimilation process. A League for the Americanization of Foreigners consisting of the superintendent of schools, Randall J. Condon, James N. Gamble of Proctor and Gamble and a financial supporter of the Elizabeth Gamble Deaconess Home, and others, called for “prominent businessmen, accompanied by interpreters, to visit the shops and factories where immigrants [were] employed and persuade them to enroll as members of the classes in citizenship… opened in the public night schools.” The goal behind this league was to Americanize immigrants and “convert them into useful citizens” who spoke English.[22]

These kinds of Americanizers caused Sister Justina and Sister Blandina to worry about the souls of Italians. The American House established in 1918 was also suspect, despite the sisters’ participation in its mission. It was at this American House that Sister Blandina reportedly told the crowd of social workers gathered that “one who is a traitor to God, cannot be relied upon to be loyal to the government.”[23]

By 1918 the climate of Americanization and the creation of leagues and houses promoting it had pushed the sisters to enter into the public dialogue concerning immigrants’ loyalties, particularly those of Italians. In January 1919, U.S. agents from Washington, D.C., proposed creating an Italian-Americanization center and offered the operation of it to the Sisters of the Santa Maria Institute. Once again Sister Justina’s journals provide new insight into the Americanization process. The first mention of this Americanization center did not inspire Sister Justina to preach Americanization or rejoice at the opportunity presented to Santa Maria. Rather, she approached it like any other new opportunity for her welfare center, as one that would enable the Sisters of Charity to save Italian souls. Sister Justina contextualized the government’s Americanization effort, commenting in her diary: “If the work succeeds, after the Government gives up the work of Americanization, we can continue it as Italian Mission work.” This entry in the journal is part of a lengthy passage with news of the sisters’ work and their plans for future welfare activity. Americanization was just one of many tools. This does not mean that Justina and Blandina Segale did not recognize the importance of adapting to life in the United States; it was just that preserving the faith took precedence.[24]

In the 1920s the official component to Americanization slightly altered the tone of Santa Maria, but not extensively. The sisters did speak of “Americanizing” immigrants, where they had not done so before in their work. Americanization work continued to bring the sisters into contact with representatives from the American House on Bank Street and Central Avenue. Talk of immigration restrictions tangled efforts on Santa Maria’s part to promote citizenship. When the Johnson Immigration Bill passed in 1924, Sister Justina wrote that “[i]t will work great damage to the Italians. It seems to have been framed on purpose to exclude them especially. And an Italian discovered America and gave it to the world!”[25] However, despite this, the overwhelming amount of material recorded in the diary dealt with building up the two welfare centers in Walnut Hills and Fairmount, not to mention the events of the Santa Maria Institute on West Eighth Street. The journal illustrates that Americanization was just one of many activities the sisters engaged in to help immigrants.

Yet the goals of Americanization were continually present in their work. The Americanization Center opened in 1920 and operated into the late 1920s. By 1925 the center was offering night classes for men and young boys as well as “Americanization Classes” intended to prepare Italians for citizenship.[26] Meanwhile, Santa Maria continued to provide material and spiritual aid to Italians, as well as clubs and other entertainments. Furthermore, the 1920s ushered in a new period of pride in the Segales’ Italian heritage. In the early years of Santa Maria, Sister Justina wrote to the Italian monarchy for financial support and periodically the Institute would receive a letter of gratitude in return. During this period a growing number of representatives from the Italian government visited the United States, and stopped to see the Santa Maria Institute. Sister Justina grew increasingly pleased with the arrival of these representatives, and also appreciative of Premier Benito Mussolini.[27]

The Mussolini regime, from Sister Justina’s perspective, appeared to bring only good things for Santa Maria, Italians, and the Catholic Church in Italy (including the Pope). As a series of Italian nationalists began visiting in the 1920s, they brought the blessings of Mussolini and potential financial support. Then, in January 1925, an Italian Willing Worker, Arrigo Gasperini, was appointed the Italian Consul in Kansas City. Gasperini was a teacher at Santa Maria and his wife directed the Girls’ Club. Justina believed that Mussolini named Gasperini Consul because he had served Italy as a soldier in WWI. Furthermore, Justina also thought that his appointment indicated Mussolini’s interest in Italian religious matters and the preservation of the Catholic faith among Italians at home and abroad. Gasperini had been a valuable volunteer at the Institute, as had his wife. Sister Justina remarked with pride that when Gasperini went to visit his new post, he first traveled to the Italian church to speak with the pastor. Sister Justina wrote: “It is noticeable the influence the Mussolini Government exerts over its subjects concerning religion. Previous to Premier Mussolini’s coming into power, religious matters were ignored; now religious subjects take the first place as they deserve.”[28]

This growing pride in Italian identity went hand-in-hand with efforts to Americanize Italians. The Americanization Center continued at the new Santa Maria location on Thirteenth and Republic. It was known as the Alessandro Manzoni club, and it organized a celebration of Italian Constitution Day and the Silver Jubilee of the Coronation of King Victor III in July 1925. The gala provided musical entertainment and took place at the Cincinnati Zoological Gardens; it featured an Italian speaker from New York City, Pasquale Biasi, editor of Il Corriere d’America. Nowhere did the mixture of Italian and American loyalty manifest itself more plainly than in the pages of Veritas, the journal of the Santa Maria Institute. First published in February 1926, the journal was the culmination of all Sister Justina’s efforts to create a reputable Italian-American newspaper to combat the anti-Catholic ones circulating in the city.[29]

When Sisters Justina and Blandina, with the help of other Sisters of Charity and laity, built the Santa Maria Institute and went about the business of saving Italians’ souls, they constructed an Italian American understanding of a good American Catholic. The sisters, concerned with saving Italians’ Catholic faith, created a complete social and educational environment in the form of an Italian Home that provided space for Italians to find a place in American civic life. The sisters initially looked down upon the Italian immigrants (particularly Southern Italian immigrants) they hoped to “save.” Over the course of their work, Blandina and Justina shed some of their condescension and expressed pride in those whom they served. They spoke more towards the end of their lives of their association with Santa Maria and of their pride in being Italian. This may have been a means of persuading Italian immigrants to trust them and of securing these immigrants’ Catholic faith. While this was a part of that story, it is also possible that these Italian-born Sisters of Charity had always felt pride in their heritage. Working closely with Italians, seeing their struggles within the United States to maintain culture, language, and traditions while navigating the new American society, led Sisters Blandina and Justina to articulate a new Catholic identity that was both Italian and American.

I have spent the last ten years of my life with the Segale sisters. I poured through Sister Justina’s diaries for my dissertation. After conducting a research project on Italian immigrants in a city that is known for its German and Irish immigrants, I came to the conclusion that Justina Segale’s diaries were not only the best resource for the history of Santa Maria, social work, and women’s history, but one of the few extensive resources documenting Italian immigrants in Cincinnati. After combing libraries and archives for personal papers, Italian organizations’ documents, and records pertaining to Italian immigrants, of the few I found none compared to the depth and breadth that Sister Justina Segale’s diaries offer.

Justina Segale’s diaries are unique in that they run from 1897 to just before her death in 1929 (with lulls during the summer months). They represent the voice of the Americanizer, the social worker, and the Italian immigrant, as well as the Catholic woman religious. The journals, accompanied with supporting secondary literature, thereby provide a fresh perspective and an excellent teaching tool in the classroom.

1 Santa Maria Italian Educational and Industrial Institute, First Annual Report (Cincinnati: Santa Maria Institute, 1898), 1.

2 Justina Segale, J-8, 1920-1922, 24 February 1921, Santa Maria Institute Papers, Sisters of Charity Archives, Mount Saint Joseph, Ohio (Hereafter cited as SMI Papers). Sister Justina’s journal included eleven volumes labeled as J-1 through J-11. The Santa Maria Papers also includes another series of journals entitled M-1 through M-11. This second set of journals consist of accounts of the Santa Maria Institute written by Sister Justina, but they also include other notes and newspaper clippings not exclusively in Sister Justina’s hand.

3 The “proselytzing minister” at this point was Reverend Scapelleti. Ibid.

4 The American House, “Souvenir Program of Americanization Meeting Celebrating ‘Patriot’s Day,’” 19 April 1918. See also The American House, “The American House: Cincinnati’s Hospitality House for Foreign-Born Americans,” 1921, CHS.

5 Justina Segale, J-8, 1920-1922, 24 February 1921, SMI Papers.

6 Ibid.

7 For a definition of a Catholic relevant to this period, see Gerald Shaughnessy, Has the Immigrant Kept the Faith? A Study of Immigration and Catholic Growth in the United States, 1790-1920 (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1925), 215-6. Shaughnessy attempts to determine how many Catholics were in the United States by 1920, and in so doing defines various criteria of what determines a Catholic. This was how Sister Justina and Sister Blandina defined a good American Catholic.

8 For Justina and Blandina Americanization for Italians could not occur without Roman Catholicism. One could be both American and Catholic and retain elements of their Italian heritage. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), 6-7; Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 4-5, 126; and for acculturation or accommodation, see Timothy J. Meagher, Inventing Irish America: Generation, Class, and Ethnic Identity in a New England City, 1880-1928 (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), 11.

9 John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925 (New York: Antheneum, 1963), 20-1; Dorothy Dohen, Nationalism and American Catholicism (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1967), 3-7. American Catholics claimed a place in American history by identifying “great Catholics” who participated in the origin of the United States, namely Christopher Columbus and Charles Carroll. See Jay P. Dolan, The American Catholic Experience: A History from Colonial Times to the Present (Garden City, N.Y.: Images Books, 1985), 96-7.

10 Higham, Strangers in the Land, 235-237, passim; Carol K. Coburn and Martha Smith, Spirited Lives: How Nuns Shaped Catholic Culture and American Life, 1836-1920 (North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 136.

11 Peter D’Agostino, Rome in America: Transnational Catholic Ideology from the Risorgimento to Fascism (North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 158-93, passim.

12 Justina Segale, J-5, 1916-1918, 11 April 1917, and 25 May 1917, SMI Papers.

13 The Santa Maria Welfare Center in Walnut Hills became the Kenton Street Welfare Center.

14 Justina Segale, J-7, 1918-1920, 3 December 1919, SMI Papers.

15 This quote is an excerpt from Sister Blandina’s speech at the American House in 1921. A discussion of this speech opens the chapter. See, J-8, 1920-1922, 24 February 1921, Ibid.

16 “Seventy-five Men Will Receive Diplomas at First Graduations of Unique ‘Citizenship School,’” The Cincinnati Times-Star, 11 June 1915.

17 “Fealty to Uncle Sam Pledge by Seventy Aliens Who Seek American Citizenship,” The Cincinnati Enquirer, 21 March 1917; “Restriction Upon Enemies: To Affect Several Thousand Residents of Cincinnati,” The Cincinnati Enquirer, 19 April 1917; “Aliens Must Move Out of Barred Districts by June 9 or be Arrested,” The Commercial Tribune, 31 May 1917; and “Tool Company’s Aliens Directed to Become Citizens Under ‘Intimidation’ ‘Tis Said,” The Cincinnati Enquirer, 29 March 1917.

18 “German Teachers to Quit,” The Cincinnati Enquirer, 1 April 1917; “Toleration to Be Shown Aliens Who Declare Their Intention to Become citizens,” The Cincinnati Enquirer, 5 April 1917; “Evil Acts of Alien Enemies In Cincinnati Are to Find Stern Reprisals,” The Cincinnati Enquirer, 20 April 1917; “Importance of Citizenship Must be Impressed Upon Aliens Says Rev. P.L. Vernon,” The Cincinnati Enquirer, 30 April 1917; and “Teachers Lose Jobs,” The Cincinnati Enquirer, 27 June 1917.

19 “Draft the Alien,” The Commercial Tribune, 3 July 1917; “Italians Dodge War Service,” The Cincinnati Enquirer, 25 September 1917; Christopher M. Sterba, Good Americans: Italian and Jewish Immigrants During the First World War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 56-8; and “Aliens Not to Be Exempted,” The Cincinnati Enquirer, 26 September 1917.

20 “Excuses Will Not be Accepted for Failure to Report Holdings of Enemy Property. Loyal Citizens Called on to Aid in Uncovering Violators of the Law,” The Cincinnati Enquirer, 15 February 1918.

21 “Newly Made Citizens Show their Loyalty by Formation of Club,” The Commercial Tribune, 3 July 1917; and Bureau of the Census, Fourteenth Census of the United States, 1920: Population. The percentages on naturalized citizens came from three databases based upon the 1900, 1910, and 1920 Census. The samples consist of: 1,858 (1900); 3,695 (1910); and 5,379 (1920) Italians, Italian Americans, and their families.

22 “Remolding of Foreign Residents into Lovers of Cincinnati Is Planned by League,” The Cincinnati Enquirer, 21 September 1917.

23 Justina Segale, J-8, 1920-1922, 24 February 1921, SMI Papers; and “Americanization House is Turned Over to Foreigners,” The Commercial Tribune, 29 November 1918.

24 Justina Segale, J-7, 1917-1918, 9 January 1919, SMI Papers.

25 J-10, 1922-1925, 22 April 1924, Ibid.

26 See J-11, 1925-1929, Ibid.

27 See J-11, 1925-1929, Ibid.

28 J-10, 15 April 1923, 22 May 1923, Ibid. Sister Justina writes of a Mrs. Pallottelli who claimed to be an intimate friend of Mussolini in 1924. She promised to bring word of Santa Maria back to the Italian Premier. See, J-10, 9 January 1924; J-10, 13 August 1923, and 25 January 1924, Ibid.

29 For the celebration of Italian Constitution Day and King Victor III’s jubilee, see Justina Segale, J-11, 1925-1929, 24 July 1925 and 27 July 1925, Ibid. Il Corriere dell’Ohio was the paper that first appeared in the early 1900s in Cincinnati. Justina believed it to be anti-Catholic. Only one issue of the paper has surfaced from 1913. At various times in the paper’s history it was operated by Protestant Italians and those without religious affiliation. The copy from 1913 is too brief to determine the extent of its possible anti-Catholic position (it is not a complete issue). The last mention of the paper in Justina’s diary indicates that she approved of this editor as he seemed more agreeable to Catholicism. Michael Di Girolamo and another man attempted to purchase it to establish an Italian paper. J-3, 1909-1912, 7 November 1909; and J-8, 1920-1922, 11 April 1922, Ibid.

Sister Justina Segale and the New Woman:

Tradition and Change in the Progressive Era

By

M. Christine Anderson, Ph.D.

Conference on the History of Women Religious, 26 June 2007

This paper is part of a collaborative effort with Judith Metz, S.C, and Mary Beth Fraser Connolly examining the pedagogical potential of the journal of Justina Segale, S.C.; a manuscript which documents the first thirty years of the Santa Maria Institute. This social settlement was founded by Sister Justina and her biological sister, Blandina Segale, both members of the Cincinnati Sisters of Charity. Sister Justina’s journal is an especially appealing text for undergraduate students because it was written in an engaging style that nevertheless illustrates the complex integration of gender, class, ethnicity, and religion in the early twentieth century. For our purposes, we will focus on the applicability of Sister Justina’s writing in teaching about women’s changing roles, using examples from the journal to illustrate its possible uses as a teaching tool.

In both the United States history survey and in courses in American women’s history, the early twentieth century is identified as the era of the “new woman” as well as the Progressive Era. The terms are, of course, interrelated, reflecting the increasing number of college-educated women, many of whom entered the newly feminized professions of teaching, nursing, and social work. The new woman claimed greater social freedom and independence and an enhanced voice in social policy based upon her expertise in social services and her growing political role. Sister Justina Segale’s journal offers a distinctive perspective on the trends underlying the so-called new woman, as well as their relation to the longer trajectory of American women’s history. By focusing on Sister Justina and the Santa Maria Institute as we examine the changing status of women in the early twentieth century, American Catholic women’s experiences move from the margins of the historical explanation to the center, and students are encouraged to engage the complexity of women’s roles.

The opening of new careers for women in the Progressive Era is often portrayed as a dramatic change from nineteenth-century female domesticity. Yet Catholic women religious had filled these feminized professions far earlier and were the most prominent, though not the only, women who founded social service institutions in the nineteenth century. This background to Santa Maria’s founding reveals for students the conditions that enabled Catholic women religious to lead the way in the creation of American schools, hospitals, and orphan asylums. Catholic religious communities provided education, organization, and female role models that enabled women religious to succeed when governments lacked the will or resources to care for the poor, who were so often immigrant Catholics. Secular women in the early twentieth-century settlement movement stressed the novelty of their efforts, crafting a new role for themselves that was compatible with their emerging freedom from domesticity.[1] The impetus behind the Santa Maria Institute lay in the traditional roles of Catholic women religious rather than the intellectual and organizational approaches of Progressivism. Nevertheless, the sisters did find ways to succeed in the Progressive milieu. Perhaps professionalization was an easier transition for members of Catholic women’s communities than for laywomen because their orders already offered them formal education, supervision, and role models in these occupations. Thus Justina’s journal exposes both comparisons and contrasts, inviting a more complex view of social provision and reform.

Since the 1830s, immigrant Catholics had relied on institutions built and staffed by women religious. American nuns, including Blandina and Justina, were often personally familiar with the problems of immigrant life because they too were immigrants.[2] The Segale family arrived in Cincinnati in 1854 from Cicagna, a northern Italian town near Genoa, where Sigrnorino Segale had been a land-owning farmer. Maria Maddalena Segale (Sister Justina) was seven and Rosa Segale (Sister Blandina) was three when their family moved to the congested basin of Cincinnati. Their father, Sigrnorino Segale, became a fruit peddler; his daughters assisted in the family business when they were not attending schools operated by the Sisters of Notre Dame, the Sisters of Mercy, and the Sisters of Charity. The women of these orders offered the two young women an education and a model of religious vocation. They entered the novitiate of the Sisters of Charity of Cincinnati in 1866, when Justina was almost twenty and Blandina was sixteen years old. The sisters worked separately in their community’s schools in the Southwest until the 1890s, when they returned to Cincinnati.

Both had earned teaching certificates and were experienced in the classroom and administration. Their primary aim in starting Santa Maria was to save Italian Catholics from Protestant proselytizers, from “falling away” from their faith. From the beginning, they conceived of Santa Maria in religious terms. Sister Justina’s journals show that, although the sisters experimented with organizational cooperation with local Progressive agencies, they emphasized the institute’s religious identity. Their first project was to establish first communion classes for Italian children, and their paramount concern in any interaction with their immigrant neighbors was always their religious welfare. Marriage, baptism, and last rites were as important as material aid to the poor. Because of their experience Justina and Blandina succeeded in quickly and smoothly establishing a successful, permanent social service agency with ambitious and wide-ranging programs despite the fact that they had little funding.

This was a different trajectory than that of secular women in social service, and it had different consequences. For a generation of young laywomen who had recently gained access to higher education but who lacked the direct political power of suffrage until 1920, settlement work was a central avenue to activism. Despite their often democratic aims, native-born, middle-class, and generally Protestant settlement-women perceived their immigrant neighbors, poor and frequently Catholic or Jewish, with slightly condescending reformist zeal. The most famous settlement leader, Jane Addams, tried as valiantly as any middle-class American to overcome the intellectual baggage of her class and ethnic privilege. In her famous essay on the “Subjective Necessity of the Settlement,” for example, Addams described the costs of social and economic isolation on college-educated young people in moving terms:

You may remember the forlorn feeling which occasionally seizes you when you arrive early in the morning a stranger in a great city. The stream of laboring people goes past you as you gaze through the plate-glass window of your hotel. You see hard-working men lifting great burdens; you hear the driving and jostling of huge carts. Your heart sinks with a sudden sense of futility. The door opens behind you and you turn to the man who brings you in your breakfast with a quick sense of human fellowship.… You turn helplessly to the waiter. You feel that it would be almost grotesque to claim from him the sympathy you crave. Civilization has placed you far apart, but you resent your position with a sudden sense of snobbery.[3]

Historian Louise Knight has shown Addams’ effort to challenge the paternalistic implications of the “ethic of benevolence” that characterized the philanthropy of her race and class. According to Knight, in her essay on the 1894 Pullman Strike, entitled “The Modern Lear,” Addams advanced an ‘ethic of justice:’ “The thrust of the essay was to explain that the workers owed Pullman no gratitude at all; he owed them justice.”[4] Yet, in spite of Addams’ struggle to jettison the moral and social standards with which she had been raised, she accepted the cultural superiority of the wealthy and native born, those who had “the social tact and training, the large houses, and the traditions and custom of hospitality,” in her hope to share these benefits with the urban poor.[5]

In describing efforts to overcome social differences Addams’ Twenty Years at Hull House sometimes seems clinical, while Sister Justina’s ethnographic style focuses on individuals. Both accounts attempt to convey the urban immigrant experience to those unfamiliar with it. In Justina’s case the result is a series of narratives that enthusiastically embrace the rich diversity of the city’s population. As religious, she and Blandina are authorities on spiritual matters; in the daily life of their Italian community they are simply participant-observers. For example, in the fall of 1913 Santa Maria received a trunk filled with clothing for the poor that caused what Sister Justina called a “comical incident.” Sister Blandina emptied the trunk and began to distribute its contents to the needy. “In the meantime,” Justina reported, “a poor, homeless penniless woman who had been received a few days previously was taken to the trunk room to see if… anything in the trunk could be of use to her. When she entered the room, she exclaimed in distress, ‘Who has been at my trunk!’” Sister Blandina was dumbfounded. “She had ransacked the trunk which had just been received and the woman claims it as hers!” As it turned out, the donated trunk had been left in the yard, “whilst the poor woman’s trunk had been overhauled, the contents parceled out to give away and she herself invited to help herself to what was her own, the pitiable remnant of what she once possessed.” Sister Justina assured her readers that “the whole matter was too comical for anyone to take offense.”[6] Whether or not that is completely true, the story is noteworthy in that it documents a personal interaction between individuals rather than a sociological analysis of their social positions.

Sister Justina’s journal also illustrates how these Sisters of Charity responded to new conditions produced by the rise of social scientific authority and more complex social welfare bureaucracies. It depicts Catholic women’s agency at the same time that it offers evidence with which to critique the potentially negative consequences of these changes: nativism, elitism, and rigid bureaucratic structures. Sister Justina conveys her awareness that as Italians and Catholics she and Sister Blandina, like the recent immigrants they served, could be judged according to ethnic and religious stereotypes. This did not dampen her enthusiasm for the excitement of urban life, as when she began her entry for 18 May 1923: “Truth [is] stranger than Fiction.” What follows is the story she unraveled for a reporter from the Cincinnati Post during the era of prohibition. Professor Di Girolamo, who taught Americanization classes at the settlement, borrowed their automobile in order to bring back a jug of communion wine for the chapel from Mr. Cimaglia. When he returned the professor left the wine, a bundle of clothing donated by Mrs. Cimaglia, and his class records in the auto in the garage. The car was then stolen and abandoned. The Post planned to report that the police had found it with the:

…names of many Italian men and women, a jug of wine and men’s and women’s clothes strewn around indicat[ing] that a party had had a joy ride. The auto belongs to the Santa Maria Institute. It appears that these prominent Italian citizens are implicated in this nocturnal ride.

The professor was arrested and later released. Sister Justina noted what “a strange thing [it] is that such a commotion is made over a jug of wine which so innocently found itself in trouble, and not a word about the stolen auto or the thief who stole it.”[7] While Jane Addams could, and to her credit did, examine both benevolence and justice, for the Italian sisters justice for the people they served was also justice for themselves and their reputations. The status-difference at the root of benevolence was, at least partly, absent in their relationship to their own neighborhood.

The Sisters of Charity who founded Santa Maria were, however, very similar to the “new woman” in their creativity and innovation. They adapted their religious and organizational traditions to professionalization and bureaucratization. By the 1920s the Santa Maria Institute resembled successful nonsectarian social settlements. It included buildings in three locations offering boys’, girls’, and mothers’ clubs, instruction in English for young men, a residence for girls and young women, and a day nursery. Sisters Justina and Blandina established cooperative relationships with many of the social welfare organizations characteristic of Progressive urban reform: the Juvenile Court, the Council of Social Agencies, and the National Council of Catholic Charities. They even began to call their institute a “settlement” in order to gain public support and funds from the Community Chest. Yet, they also rejected some of the methods and values of the new “scientific charity” represented by the Community Chest (as Judith Metz, S.C., explains in her paper).

Sister Justina’s journal challenges assumptions about poor immigrants, about women in general, and women religious in particular. The sisters’ previous experiences with teaching and social provision also prepared them to efficiently use new technologies such as the telephone and automobile in their work. Annual reports and Justina’s journals record that Santa Maria had a telephone at least by 1903. Although sisters continued to conduct visits on foot, they and their staff were connected to a bureaucratic network of agencies by phone. Justina and Blandina also joined other members of their order in adopting automobile transportation; Santa Maria purchased a Ford for $1,050 in January of 1920. “Sister Blandina and Miss Crotty, our Field Agent, will learn how to operate it,” Sister Justina reported. “With an auto we shall be able to do social work which would otherwise be left undone.”[8] The image of a seventy-year-old nun learning to drive a Model T challenges a number of age, gender, and religious stereotypes, in ways that suggest why the sisters’ acceptance of modern technology and methods strikes some as surprising. For the sisters, however, these new methods were not incompatible at all. In fact, their traditional expertise poised them to take advantage of Progressive organizational networks, professional standards, and greater religious toleration, as well as the technology of the industrial age.

Rather than an impersonal documentation of working conditions, Sister Justina’s narrative also contains many anecdotes concerning immigrant life, including many about young women that highlight their individuality and their choices. For example, when four girls from the neighborhood were moved from Santa Maria’s home for girls to St. Joseph’s Orphanage, they ran away, returning to Santa Maria “a sad, woe-begone group… exhausted, dirty and hungry.… The sight of the trembling little culprits in their sad plight would move a heart of stone, let alone the hearts of the Sisters who loved them.” They were fed, bathed, and tucked into warm beds, and did not receive “their merited lecture” until after breakfast the next day. “I gave each a one a pretty bag containing two balls of crochet cotton, two center pieces and a crochet needle,” Justina said, “and they were smiling and happy[,] ready to go back when they found there was no alternative. A Sister went with them to the Orphanage. ‘Now, you’ll be good, won’t you?’ asked one of the Sisters. They all smiled and said, ‘Yes,’ except the youngest [their ‘promoter and leader’], and she smiled too but shook her head, ‘no.’”[9] Rather than diagnostic explanations offered in juvenile court records, or the professional notes of social caseworkers, Sister Justina acknowledged and celebrated young women’s independence — even when it resulted in broken rules.

As they cultivated independence in girls and women who received aid from Santa Maria, Sisters Justina and Blandina stressed education and autonomous, even moral, choices. Adolescent residents of Santa Maria’s home for girls received a Catholic high school education and the opportunity to attend the Sisters of Charity’s Mount Saint Joseph College. For some working-class immigrant girls this was an avenue to the same professional occupations that were opening to their middle-class contemporaries. For others, the commercialized leisure activities of the city held more allure. In 1924, three older girls snuck out “when everybody was asleep” and “did not return until near midnight,” probably attending a “ball” or dance hall. Although Justina recognized that the discipline imposed by the home was “a great struggle” for some of the residents, in this case the rules were strictly enforced and the girls were expelled from the home. Friends reported seeing them at work and at church, and Sister Justina seemed satisfied that they “are well instructed and we believe they can take care of themselves, work and support themselves.”[10]

Having grown up in an immigrant community the sisters were familiar with the conditions of working-class life. They were aware that women’s inability to earn or control their wages made them vulnerable to domestic violence and to prostitution. Several times battered wives obtained shelter at Santa Maria. The sisters did not condone divorce, but they also did not force a Greek woman to return to her husband even when “he was willing to make peace with her.”[11] They collected support for a woman whose husband spent his earnings on drink and helped an Italian woman return to Italy rather than continue living with a violent spouse.[12] In order to fulfill her mission as a member of a religious community, Sister Justina had to manage money and act as a professional teacher and social worker — although that term was not applied to her work until later in her career. She was sympathetic to the difficulties facing women who lacked such occupational and financial skills. Unlike so-called new women struggling against domestic ideals in order to achieve personal independence, Sister Justina did not imagine that wage-earning and domesticity were in opposition. Instead she encouraged women to obtain skills and independence as resources to supplement or even replace domesticity when necessary.

A key difficulty in teaching history is how to explain concepts such as women’s shifting roles without oversimplifying the changes taking place. One of the greatest strengths of Sister Justina’s journal as a teaching tool is that it is clear, humorous, and contains many specific examples and anecdotes without sacrificing the complexity of urban women’s roles in the early twentieth century. The introduction of the automobile to Santa Maria’s work, for instance, prompts students to question women’s use of new technologies, how they imagine the aging process for women, and how this might impact our understanding of their adaptability. Sister Justina’s accounts of Professor Di Girolamo and the stolen automobile, and of Sister Blandina and the poor woman’s trunk, encourage examination of ethnic and class relations in the Progressive Era. Central to the significance of the journal as a text for college history courses is that it continually returns to the spiritual impetus of the sisters’ work, and that it opens for its readers the often unfamiliar methods and routines of social provision by Catholic women religious.

1 For example, Jane Addams, who published her account of the establishment of Hull House retrospectively, noted that the Little Sisters of the Poor had earlier operated an old age home in the same building. By mentioning the sisters in the list with other past occupants of the building, Addams implicitly stresses contrast rather than comparison with her own efforts. Jane Addams, “First Days at Hull-House,” Twenty Years at Hull-House with Autobiographical Notes (New York: MacMillan, 1910): 92. See also: The Urban Experience in Chicago: Hull House and its Neighborhoods, 1889-1963, at http://hullhouse.uic.edu/hull/urbanexp/contents.htm

2 Suellen Hoy, “The Journey Out: The Recruitment and Emigration of Irish Religious Women to the United States, 1812-1914,” Journal of Women’s History 6 (Winter/Spring 1995), 65, 83-84. See also: Joseph G. Mannard, “‘A Kind of Noah’s Arc’: The Vocations of Women Religious in the Archdiocese of Baltimore, 1790-1860”; and Florence Deacon, “‘I said I wouldn’t be a woman, but wanted to be a sister’: Vocation Stories of Nineteenth-Century Women Religious,” Papers presented at the Conference on the History of Women Religious, June 1998. For biographical information on the sisters see Mariana Annette Romano, “Constructing the American Catholic: Sister Justina’s Veritas and Cincinnati’s Italian Problem” (M.A. thesis, Sarah Lawrence College, 1996), 1-5; “1897-1922: Silver Jubilee of the Santa Maria Institute,” Box 1, Santa Maria Institute Papers, Sisters of Charity Archives, Mount Saint Joseph, Ohio (Hereafter cited as SMI Papers); and Catholic Telegraph, 29 September 1950.

3 Jane Addams, “The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements,” Philanthropy and Social Progress (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & Co., 1893): 10-11. Cited in The Urban Experience in Chicago: Hull House and its Neighborhoods, 1889-1963, see: http://hullhouse.uic.edu/hull/urbanexp/main.cgi?file=new/show_doc_search.ptt&doc=853

4 Louise W. Knight, “Biography’s Window on Social Change: Benevolence and Justice in Jane Addams’s ‘A Modern Lear,’” Journal of Women’s History 9 (Spring 1997), 118.

5 Addams, “Subjective Necessity,” 4.

6 Justina Segale, J-4, 13 November 1913, SMI Papers.

7 J-10, 18 May 1923, Ibid.

8 J-7, 14 January 1920, Ibid.

9 J-7, 17 July 1919, Ibid.

10 J-10, 28 October 1924, 166, and 22 October 1924, 164, Ibid.

11 J-4, 8 July 1914, 114, Ibid.

12 J-7, 11 March 1915, 153; J-5, 3 July 1916, 40-41, both in Ibid.

Pictures from the Past:

Châtillon-sur-Chalaronne[1]

By

John E. Rybolt, C.M., Ph.D.

The town of Châtillon dates from 1273, but the area was inhabited for centuries before. The name Châtillon, meaning “little castle,” refers to the one built on the Roman site called pagus dumbarum. The remains of the fourteenth-century castle are still visible on the hill above the town. The name of the town in Vincent’s day was Châtillon-les-Dombes, that is, the Châtillon at the Dombes, the Dombes being the small ponds left in the region after the glacial period. Most of these ponds lie south and east of the town. The name of the town today means “Châtillon on the Chalaronne,” referring to the small river flowing through the town north to the Saône River. The town numbers about 4000 inhabitants, twice the size it was in his time.

Before the town existed there were two parishes in the region, Fleurieux to the west and Buénans to the east. These gradually lost their importance as Châtillon grew. Although Vincent was pastor of Buénans and Châtillon, which depended on Buénans, and was also prior of Fleurieux, he lived in the “newer” town. The distinction between his two churches had little meaning. The Buénans church disappeared in the eighteenth century, and that of Fleurieux at the time of the Revolution. In Vincent’s time in Châtillon, formerly part of Bresse, and French only since 1601, its inhabitants mainly spoke Bressan, a franco-provençal dialect that their pastor had to learn.

The chronology of Vincent’s few months in Châtillon is spelled out below. All authors agree that his motives for leaving the Gondi household to come here are unclear, but they point to Madame de Gondi as one of the reasons. It seems very likely that rich, beautiful, powerful, pious, and emotionally needy as she was, Marguerite came to occupy too much of Vincent’s time and emotional energy. In addition, he and his two employers were practically of the same age. He wrote, however: “I used to hold it as a maxim to consider the General in God and God in him, and to obey him as God, and his late wife as the Virgin.”[2] He also noted that one of the qualities that a chaplain in a noble house should have is that “he should be very chaste.”[3] In this dangerous emotional and spiritual mix, the 36-year old priest undoubtedly had to break free to make his own way. He was still nominally the pastor of Clichy, but he undertook to become the pastor of Châtillon as well. Why he came to Châtillon and not somewhere else is probably a question of circumstance: the town needed a pastor and Vincent was available. The intermediary for getting this information to him was very likely the Oratorian François Bourgoing, who had preceded Vincent at Clichy.

In Châtillon, Vincent founded the Confraternity of Charity. This, the first of his major works, began as a response to a pressing need. He later recounted for the Daughters of Charity what happened here, but the accounts differ in several details. Abelly, his first biographer, adding some details, made the resulting account less clear but more coherent. In any case, Vincent found it necessary to organize the response of the ladies of the parish to similar needs in the future. Besides the confraternity, he also did much good in strengthening priestly life, religious instruction, the proper celebration of the sacraments and generally gave good example of a Christian life.

Important Vincentian sites in Châtillon

The church of Saint André

This building dates from the fifteenth century but succeeds one or more earlier churches dating from 1272. It is colorful, with its brick facade, clock, rose window, and red tile roof, and it is exceptionally high for a church in this region. A curious octagonal tower (from 1736) encloses the bells.

Inside it is in Flamboyant Gothic style, but the furnishings (such as the main altar, statues, and organ, represent later styles, after Vincent’s time. On either side of the sanctuary and the nave are fourteen chapels, a surprisingly large number, built and decorated by the rich families of the area or by various guilds. Some of these chapels now have other uses, but their existence points to the large number of clergy at various times associated with this church. These were responsible for celebrating weekly or monthly masses for specific intentions, and they lived from the endowments of these chapels. In Vincent’s day, about five of these priests lived in Châtillon.

The stained-glass windows in the sanctuary were done in 1890-1892 to commemorate the foundation, in Châtillon, of the first Confraternity of Charity. Other windows recall Vincent’s career.

During a renovation of the church undertaken in 1966, some coats-of-arms were brought to light that had not been completely effaced at the time of the Revolution. These show the date 1615, that is, before Vincent’s brief pastorate, and designate the La Chassaigne and Bachet de Mizériac families. Collet, Vincent’s second biographer, identified Madame de La Chassaigne as the one who urged him to speak about the needs of the sick poor in his homily. She was one of the first members of the Confraternity of Charity in Châtillon, and her family castle can be seen between Châtillon and the nearby town of Neuville-Les-Dames. The present castle, however, dates only from the nineteenth century.

In a space under the roof above the nave, accessible through a stairway opening in the body of the church, is an area used in times past by the many prêtres sociétaires. These were the priests whose principal responsibility was to celebrate the canonical hours in church with the pastor, and to say mass occasionally for the departed in one or other of the fourteen side chapels. Mentioned as early as 1433, these clergy were forbidden to exercise certain pastoral ministries — those belonged to the official pastor — and they consequently passed their time in some idleness. They used to meet in the upper area, probably for companionship. The windows of this area, however, can be seen from outside the church, on the market side, particularly at night. Tongues wagged in the town, and it was widely, though probably incorrectly, assumed that the priests were engaged in immoral or at least idle pursuits in their upper meeting room, commonly called the Kingdom.

One open question is the use of the rite of Lyons in Châtillon. For centuries, the primatial see of Lyons had its own distinctive usages of the Roman Rite. Whether Vincent followed this usage is unknown. He never referred to it. An old inventory of one of the chapels, however, lists liturgical items proper to this rite, leading to the conclusion that it had been followed here.

The Market

This seventeenth-century market adjoining the parish church is built mainly of wood. The previous market burned in the town fire of 1670 that also destroyed most of the houses. Its vast roof rests on 32 pillars made from trunks of individual oak trees from a nearby forest. Old houses surround the marketplace.

The Former Hospital, with its Antique Pharmacy

A hospital (more correctly, a hospice for impoverished pilgrims and beggars) existed here from before 1273. It was restored in 1432, was nearly in ruins in 1614, and was completely rebuilt in 1727. The main stairway is noteworthy. Materials for the rebuilding, including the church bell, were taken from the old church of Buénans, among other places.

Either in the (previous) chapel of this hospital, or in another one, the Chapelle des Pénitents (located just behind the hospital and taken down in 1900), the first Confraternity of Charity was founded on 8 December 1617. Its original membership, in August, consisted of nine women but grew to thirteen by the date of its December founding. Jean Beynier was appointed the treasurer. Besides Vincent, three priests attended, all inhabitants of Châtillon and attached to the parish church. The present chapel was opened in 1732. Inside is a painting of Blessed Vincent de Paul, also dating from 1732. Although not a wonderful work, it testifies to the veneration for him in the town. Above the main altar is another painting of Vincent bringing the eucharist to a person sick in bed. This rare depiction may have been taken from one of the many copies of the “Lord of Charity,” a canvas prepared for the Confraternities of Charity during his lifetime.

The antique pharmacy is maintained as a reminder of how old pharmacies worked. A triptych, painted in 1527, is also on view. It represents, among other things, the burial of Christ, and it was probably in the church in Vincent’s day.

A large seated statue of the saint, dating from 1855, is located in the Place St. Vincent de Paul in front of the hospital. The statue, a gift of the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul, bears several inscriptions: “Good people of Châtillon: wherever I go, you will always be present to me before God.” “Saint Vincent de Paul, pastor of Châtillon in 1617.” “Erected 29 September 185[5]”. Inscriptions on the statue itself mention that it was designed by E. Cabuchet in 1854, and poured by the foundry of Eck and Durand in 1855. It was erected with solemn ceremonies 27-29 September 1856. (A statue of the same design, dated 1827, is found in the church of Saint Sulpice in Paris.) Behind this square is the former Ursuline convent, founded here in 1639.

The Home of Vincent de Paul

By the side of the marketplace stands the house where Vincent lived. This was originally two houses, now joined into one. That on the right was used by the pastor and the sociétaires, and that on the left belonged to Jean Beynier, Vincent’s host. The priests’ residence had been leased to a layman, but Vincent was able to get it back. The effective date of this seems to have been 11 November 1617, about a month before he left. His room in Beynier’s house has been enlarged and turned into the chapel for the Daughters of Charity. They bought the house and the old adjoining presbytery in 1878 at the urging of the bishop and local pastor. The staircase and certain doors date from Vincent’s time. In the chapel are shown facsimiles of the original rule of the Confraternity, signed by him in 1617, and other documents. The large painting on the back wall, completed in 1883, furnished the subject for the main stained glass window in the parish church, depicting the foundation of the Confraternity of Charity. A large painting of the traditional subject of Vincent and the foundlings in the snow, a gift from Napoleon III in 1868, was moved from the church and is now located in the sisters’ home. The original of this painting, completed by Nicolas-André Monsiau (1754-1837) about 1817, popularized the pre-revolutionary statue by Stouf and is the source of the common images of Vincent and the children in the snow.

The Castle

Only the walls and small gates remain of the old brick and stone castle, dating from the 1270s in its earliest part. Its prominent location above the town looking down onto the valleys of the Relevant and the Chalaronne point to the strategic importance of the town in ages past. Formerly attached to Savoy, this area became part of France in 1601. The castle had been destroyed definitively on 10 May 1595 in the battles leading to this change of government.

Below the castle is an interesting restored building, formerly the old salt stores. It had been a part of the ancient village clustered around the foot of the castle before its charter as a town in 1273.

The Villars Gate

This ancient gate leads out of the town toward the east and leads to the city of Villars. Traces of the mechanism for the old drawbridge are visible. The present gate is the best-preserved piece of military architecture in this region.

The Bridges

Five small bridges and one covered passageway span the Chalaronne. These have been beautifully decorated with flowers in recent summers, and small boats filled with flowers have also been placed in the stream. Châtillon’s energies earned it the highest awards in a Europe-wide contest for floral decoration. One new bridge, on the Avenue Clément Desormes, is called the Buénans bridge, inasmuch as it leads to that old settlement.

Only a few houses remain in Buénans, the main town where Vincent had been appointed pastor. In his day, the main parish was Saint Martin of Buénans, and its chapel was the Châtillon church. A small plaque on highway D2 recalls Vincent’s pastorate, but nothing remains of the church. Its stones were removed in the eighteenth century for other uses. A small farm is confidently pointed out as the residence of their saintly pastor, but no evidence for this exists apart from local tradition. He may have lived here before taking possession of the pastor’s house in Châtillon, 11 November 1617. The town of Buénans has ceased to exist.

Environs

Outside of Châtillon, on D17 to the south, is Maladières. In the Middle Ages this was a hospice for lepers, cared for by the Fleurieux parish. It is believed that it was at this small farm that the poor people lived whose sad condition was reported to him. His response and that of his parishioners led to the Confraternity of Charity, an organization that still exists in the parish. The present house dates only from the nineteenth century.

Some distance to the east is Pérouges, named by Celtic refugees from the Romans, homesick for their native Perugia in Italy. In the nineteenth century the use of home looms declined, the former weavers’ houses were unsuitable for farm workers, and then the railroads bypassed Pérouges, set on a hill above Meximieux. Consequently, the population of Pérouges departed, and the town was left as it had been in medieval times. Its rough cobblestone streets and open spaces offered authentic locations for the film Monsieur Vincent, for one of the many Three Musketeers films, and for others. The Place du Tilleul and the Rue des Rondes in particular are worth visiting. Because of its medieval appearance, the town has decided against allowing many modern elements, such as electric lights and wires, on the fronts of buildings. The parish church of Sainte Marie Madeleine was built at the beginning of the fifteenth century and contains several fine examples of religious sculpture. Despite its museum-like character, Pérouges numbers about 900 people.

Count Balthazar de Rougemont was one of Vincent’s notable successes in Châtillon. This aggressive duelist was converted to religion, lived a very pious life, and sold his Rougemont property for the sake of the poor. He had a castle at Chandée, north of Vandeins, now a town of 1000 people. Vincent visited him there, where the nobleman recounted the dramatic story of his act of detachment when he smashed his sword against a rock. The ancient castle no longer exists.

East of Vandeins is Bourg-en-Bresse, an important city of some 40,000. The Congregation of the Mission had a house here from 1701 to 1791. Its purpose was originally to give retreats for clergy and laity, as well as missions. The founder of the house, a diocesan priest, had been touched by the original inspiration of Vincent, and he sought to bring the advantages of that charism to his region. The house concentrated, in fact, on missions.

Southeast of Châtillon is Ars-sur-Formans, the renowned pastorate of Jean Baptiste Marie Vianney (1786-1859), known familiarly as the Curé of Ars. His parish church and residence have been preserved. Although Vincent had nothing to do with Ars, he is venerated here, and Vianney kept engravings of his fellow pastor in his home, where they remain. Today, Ars, like Lourdes, lives off pilgrimages. It has a population of about 900.

Vincent de Paul in Châtillon: Chronology

1614

- 5-7 May: Pastoral visit by the archbishop of Lyons, who finds the church in good repair, and the priests’ residences as well, although the hospital was in poor condition. There are some 900 parishioners at this time.

1616

- 18 October: The archbishop of Lyons writes to Pierre de Bérulle, suggesting that Châtillon be given to the Oratorians. Bérulle, their founder, must have suggested Jean Lourdelot, who became pastor 7 January 1617.

1617

- 19 April: Lourdelot resigns his pastorate of Saint Martin of Buénans and its dependency, Saint André of Châtillon. He does not resign the parish to anyone in particular, but leaves the space blank in the document for inserting the name of his successor later.

- 26 May: Inventory of the furnishings of the chapel of the Ladies of the Holy Rosary, perhaps the nucleus of the Confraternity of Charity. The furnishings of this chapel in the Châtillon church were abundant and in good condition.

- May-June: The canon-counts of Lyons, temporal lords of Châtillon, again ask the Oratorians to propose a successor. Bérulle suggests Vincent.

- July: Vincent visits Lyons, asking for information on Châtillon.

- 29 July: Vincent de Paul, “a priest, bachelor in theology, of the diocese of Dax,” is named pastor. He remains pastor of Clichy.

- 1 August: Vincent de Paul, “priest and bachelor in holy and sacred theology, of the diocese of Dax,” takes possession on a Tuesday afternoon of Buénans and Châtillon, in the company of two priests associated with the parish, Jean Besson and Pierre Genoud.

- August: The town council agrees to pay Vincent and the sociétaires a regular salary.

- 16 August: Louis Giraud (or Girard, his spelling), doctor in theology, joins Vincent as his assistant. On the same day, Vincent signs the baptismal register as “curé” for the first time.

- 20 August: Exhortation at Sunday mass in favor of the sick at Maladières. [Probable date]

- 23 August: Charter meeting of the Confraternity of Charity.

- September: Monsieur de Gondi writes his wife with the news of Vincent’s intention not to return to their household.

- October: Monsieur Du Fresne, secretary of Monsieur de Gondi and a friend of Vincent’s, comes to ask him to return to Paris. Vincent then goes to Lyons to consult with Monsieur Jean Bence, superior of the Oratorians, as to whether he should leave Châtillon.

- 13 October: Monsieur de Gondi receives a letter from Vincent, written in Lyons, announcing a brief trip to Paris to help him discern his future.

- 24 November: The archbishop of Lyons approves the rules of the Confraternity of Charity (a name taken in imitation of the hospital of Charity in Rome).

- 3 December: Vincent celebrates his last baptism in his parish. (He celebrated only four baptisms during this period; his associate, Girard, did the majority of them.)

- 8 December: Formal establishment of the Confraternity, consisting of twelve noble or bourgeois women, one servant. Election of officers, done in the presence of three priests: Jean Besson, Jean Benonier, and Hugues Rey, sociétaires of the church in Châtillon.

- 12 December: Revision of the rules. Signed: “V. Depaul, curé.” Four more members join.

- 15 December: Vincent gives to Charlotte de Brie, the treasurer, an account book still in existence. It records the first meeting of the Confraternity.

- 18 December: Vincent leaves the parish to return to Paris.

- 23 December: Vincent reaches Paris, after about five months in Châtillon.

1618

- 5 January: Second meeting of the Confraternity of Charity in Châtillon.

- 31 January: Vincent formally resigns as pastor of Châtillon.

- 18 July: Louis Giraud, Vincent’s associate, succeeds him as pastor of Buénans and Châtillon.

1 The following is an edited excerpt from Rev. John E. Rybolt’s In the Footsteps of Vincent de Paul: A Guide to Vincentian France (Chicago: DePaul University Vincentian Studies Institute, 2007), 450 pp. Part historical overview, part travel guide, the book offers an examination of sites throughout France, both major and minor, related to the Vincentian Family. The book is available for purchase online at: https://setonshrine.org/product/in-the-footsteps-of-vincent-de-paul-a-guide-to-vincentian-france/ ; or inquire by phone at 301-447-7122.

2 Letter 244, “To Robert de Sergis, in Roye,” 29 September 1636, in Vincent de Paul: Correspondence, Conferences, Documents, ed. and trans. by Jacqueline Kilar, D.C., Marie Poole, D.C., et al, 1-14 (New York: New City Press, 1985-2014), 1:344. See: http://via.library.depaul.edu/vincentian_ebooks/25/ Hereafter cited as CCD.

3 Conference 14, “Ministry of Chaplain in the Service of a Nobleman,” CCD, 11:20. See: http://via.library.depaul.edu/vincentian_ebooks/37/

NEWSNOTES

NEWS

In Memoriam: Rev. John S. Sledziona, C.M., Former Long-Time Member of the Vincentian Studies Institute

The Vincentian Studies Institute is deeply saddened by the news of the death of Rev. John Sledziona, C.M., the fourth Provincial of the New England Province, and the first President of the National Conference of Visitors of the USA. John died suddenly on 31 March 2016, at the age of 73, with 53 years of vocation and 45 years of priesthood. Fr. Sledziona served on the board of the Vincentian Studies Institute for many years and his many contributions to our publications and programs were invaluable. We will be forever grateful to him for helping to guide the Institute forward, and he will be deeply missed by all who were fortunate enough to consider him a colleague and friend.

From the Diocese of Manchester, N.H.: “On March 31, 2016, the Rev. John S. Sledziona, C.M., was called to his rest and to the glory of the Resurrection promised by the Lord. He was 73 years old.

Fr. Sledziona was born on December 23, 1942, in Derby, Connecticut. He entered the Congregation of the Mission, better known as the Vincentian order, on June 12, 1962, at Saint Vincent Seminary in Germantown, Pennsylvania, later studying at Saint Joseph College in Princeton, New Jersey. After completing his Master of Theology degree (M.Th.) at Mary Immaculate Seminary in Northampton, Pennsylvania, he was ordained a priest on May 30, 1970, by the Most Rev. Joseph McShea, Bishop of Allentown, Pennsylvania.

Fr. Sledziona was assigned to Saint John Kanty Prep in Erie, Pennsylvania, as a teacher of religion and English. During that time, he completed his studies for his Master of English at Edinboro State University, Edinboro, Pennsylvania, graduating in 1973, and served in campus ministry at Alliance College, Cambridge Springs, Pennsylvania.

In June, 1980, Fr. Sledziona was sent to teach at Bishop Brady High School in Concord, where he was named principal two years later. In 1987, Fr. Sledziona was named pastor of Saint Peter Parish in Concord and Dean of the Capital Deanery. He left those posts to serve the Vincentians as their Provincial Superior in 1996.

In 2006 he returned to the Diocese of Manchester as Director of Clergy Formation; he was reappointed to that position in 2010. Fr. Sledziona was appointed Cabinet Secretary for Ordained Ministry and Liturgical Worship in January of 2013 and was appointed Director of the Office of Deacon Formation, Director of the Office of Seminary Formation, and Co-Director of Vocations in January of 2015, serving in those positions until his death.

Fr. Sledziona served as President of the Vincentians’ National Conference of Visitors of the United States from 2002 to 2005, and as a Trustee of Niagara University in Lewiston, New York, from 2006 to 2013. He also served three terms on the Presbyteral Council of the Diocese of Manchester and was often found serving in parish ministry on weekends wherever the need arose. He most recently resided at St. Patrick Parish, Pelham.

On Monday, April 4, 2016, Fr. Sledziona lay in in state from 9:30 a.m. until 10:45 a.m. at St. Patrick Parish, 12 Main Street, Pelham, NH 03076-3724. The Most Rev. Peter A. Libasci, Bishop of Manchester, then presided at a Memorial Mass at 11:00 a.m. The Funeral Mass took place Tuesday, April 5, 2016, at St. Michael Church, Derby, Connecticut. Committal was at St. Michael Cemetery in Derby, Connecticut.”

In Memoriam: Ellin M. Kelly, Ph.D.

With great sadness we learned of the death in late February of Dr. Ellin Kelly, a former Daughter of Charity, Affiliate, Seton scholar, author, and Professor Emerita in the English Department of the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences of DePaul University (1969-1992). In retirement, Ellin was a faithful volunteer in the DePaul University Archives and Special Collections department bringing the precision of a scholar to her accessioning work. She most generously endowed a British Literature Award for students.

Originally, from Grand Forks, North Dakota, Ellin’s life illustrates her remarkable strength of spirit, generosity towards others, and deep religious faith permeated with Vincentian Heritage and devotion to Elizabeth Seton. A zealous promotor of the Seton legacy, Ellin had a life-long passion for learning and teaching.

Recognized for her scholarship on Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton, Dr. Kelly received the Seton Legacy Award in 2009. Ellin’s work was widely published; among her many contributions she served as a manuscript editor for the Seton Writings Project, and was the author of numerous articles and books including: Elizabeth Seton’s Two Bibles (1977); Numerous Choirs: A Chronicle of Elizabeth Bayley Seton and Her Spiritual Daughters, Vols. 1 & 2 (1981;1996); and “Elizabeth Bayley Seton’s Commonplace Book of Poetry: Archives, St. Joseph Provincial House, Rare Book 31” (Vincentian Heritage: 2009, see: Commonplace Book).

The Vincentian Family owes Ellin Kelly a debt of gratitude for her many good works, her fine scholarship, her words, and her friendship. May she rest in peace.

Lost Letter of Vincent de Paul Found

Edward R. Uodvic, C.M., writes: “A previously lost autographed letter of Saint Vincent de Paul has surfaced. The letter is dated Paris, 12 January 1642, and was addressed to Michel Dupuis, in Saint Mihiel. The letter is #563 in Coste. According to Coste the original autograph letter was at the house of the Daughters of Charity, 12 rue des Greffes in Nimes. When Volume 2 of the English translation was in preparation the editors could no longer identify the location of the letter. Recently, as the provinces of the Daughters of Charity in France underwent a consolidation, the Visitatrix of France South delivered the re-discovered letter to Sr. Kathleen Appler, the superioress general of the Daughters. It is now safely housed in the archives at rue du Bac.”

New Date for the Feast of Louise de Marillac: May 9th

Sr. Kathleen Appler, D.C., announced: “Some time ago, the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments asked the Congregation of the Mission to review the Vincentian liturgical calendar in order to bring it in line with new norms. …We were asked to reconsider the date of the feast of Saint Louise de Marillac because we celebrate it on March 15, therefore during Lent, and it is preferable not to celebrate solemnities during that liturgical season.

Together, Fr. Gregory, Superior General, and his Council, the General Council of the Company, and I sought a more appropriate date. We chose May 9, the anniversary of the beatification of Saint Louise, as the date of her canonization also falls during Lent.

On December 14, 2015, Fr. Shijo [Kanjirathamkunnel, C.M.], presented the request for this change to the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, which approved it by decree on January 4, 2016. The celebration of the feast of Saint Louise de Marillac remains a solemnity and from now on will be celebrated each year on May 9.”

“Frédéric Ozanam: A Life in Letters” now digitized

Via Sapientiae, the institutional online repository for DePaul University’s John T. Richardson Library, has completed the digitization of Joseph Dirvin’s Frédéric Ozanam: A Life in Letters. This volume, originally published in 1986, was digitized at the request of the National Council of the Saint Vincent de Paul Society in the U.S. which is the copyright holder. Click here to access: http://via.library.depaul.edu/ozanam_law/

Upcoming Conference on the 150th Anniversary of the Death of Bishop John Timon, C.M., First Bishop of Buffalo, New York

The year 2017 marks the 150th anniversary of the death of John Timon, C.M., the founding bishop of the Diocese of Buffalo. Among the various ways the diocese wishes to mark the occasion is to have a panel dedicated to Timon’s legacy at the 2017 meeting of the American Catholic Historical Association. Several speakers have agreed to participate, including John E. Rybolt, C.M., who will present “Timon the Vincentian,” and a local scholar who will present on Timon in Texas. The conference is being held in Denver, from January 5-8, 2017. For further information contact: Dennis A. Castillo, Ph.D., Professor of Church History, Christ the King Seminary, 711 Knox Road, East Aurora, NY 14052-0607. Phone: 716-652-8900. Email: dcastillo@cks.edu

Online Exhibition on the Lazarists at the Irish College Paris

Sean Alexander Smith’s 2014 exhibition, now online, contains interesting digitized documents regarding the Lazarists’ lengthy administration of the college during a war-torn era. See: Lazarists at the Irish College

PUBLICATIONS

NOTABLE BOOKS

Silvia Marina Arrom, Volunteering for a Cause: Gender, Faith, and Charity in Mexico from the Reform to the Revolution (New Mexico: University of New Mexico Press, 2016), 296 pp. ISBN: 978-0826341884. Paperback available at: Amazon.com ; Kindle edition at: Amazon Kindle edition

From Amazon: “This thoughtful study challenges a number of widespread assumptions about the role of Catholicism in Mexican history by examining two related Catholic charities: the male Society of St. Vincent de Paul and the Ladies of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul. With thousands of volunteers, these lay groups not only survived the liberal reforms of the mid-nineteenth century but thrived, offering educational, medical, and other services to hundreds of thousands of poor people.

Arrom stresses the prominence of women among the volunteers, showing the many ways that Catholicism promoted Mexican modernization rather than being an obstacle to it. Moreover, by reinserting religion into public life, these organizations defied the secularizing policies of the Mexican government. By comparing the male and female organizations collectively, the work shows that the relationship between gender, faith, and charity was much more complicated than is usually believed, with devout men and women supporting the Catholic project in complementary ways.”

Françoise Hildesheimer and Dénes Harai, Dictionnaire Richelieu (Paris: Honore Champion, 2015), 400 pp. ISBN: 978-2745328663. Available: Amazon.fr

From the publisher: “‘Premier ministre de Louis XIII’ et “fondateur de l’Académie française”: tels sont les titres associés à la figure d’Armand Jean du Plessis (1585-1642), cardinal-duc de Richelieu, sur les plaques de rue qui affichent son nom au coeur de Paris. Ce ne sont que les plus connus d’un grand nombre de titres acquis ou attribués à ce célèbre homme d’État et d’Église dont la vie, l’histoire et la légende se composent de mille et une facettes. Ce Dictionnaire invite le lecteur à les découvrir ou à les redécouvrir autrement à travers cent vingt notices rédigées par cinquante-sept spécialistes du Cardinal et de son époque. Replacé dans son contexte français, européen et, parfois même, mondial, chaque sujet abordé renvoie à plusieurs autres dont la lecture – complémentaire ou indépendante de celle d’une biographie de Richelieu – permettra à tout un chacun d’aborder, selon ses besoins et envies, la réflexion et l’action de celui qui avait largement contribué à l’avènement du Grand Siècle.”

Betty Ann McNeil, D.C., ed., Balm of Hope: Charity Afire Impels Daughters of Charity Civil War Nurses, Mary Denis Maher, C.S.A., Foreword; Janet Leigh Bucklew, Introduction (Chicago: DePaul University Vincentian Studies Institute, 2015), 558 pp., annotated, 50 historic images, 6 maps and tables, appendix, glossary, and index. ISBN: 978-1-936696-08-6. Available at: Seton Shrine Gift Shop

From promotional flyer: “Sister McNeil’s discovery of 500 pages of handwritten memoirs by Daughters of Charity Civil War nurses led her into a multi-year project to transcribe, annotate, index, and publish Balm of Hope: Charity Afire Impels Daughters of Charity Civil War Nurses. This compendium includes: 1. Notes of the Sisters’ Services in Military Hospitals; 2. Civil War Recollections and Accounts; and 3. Correspondence. The texts invite readers to listen to courageous women reminisce in their own words about nursing amid the ravages of war.”

George Wunderlich, Executive Director, National Museum of Civil War Medicine, writes, “When the American Civil War broke out in April of 1861, no one could have predicted the staggering loss of life or the tidal wave of sick and wounded that would flood the newly organized hospitals. The armies turned to the civilian sector to help provide nurses to tend to the patients and Catholic religious congregations quickly answered the call with many of the only professionally trained nurses on the continent. The Daughters of Charity answered this call establishing nursing staffs in hospitals on both sides as well as tending the wounded directly on the battlefield! Their contributions are little discussed today, yet their service saved countless lives and established a nursing tradition that continues to save lives in our current century. This work finally provides many unpublished accounts that will bring this important work to the public eye. A must read for anyone interested in the Civil War, nursing history and humanitarian relief.”

Mixtel Olabuénaga, C.M., Historia Abierta de la Congregacion de la Mision en España (1704-2000) [Salamanca: Editorial CEME, 2015), 690 pp. ISBN: 978-84-7349-154-9. Available: Editorial CEME

From the web site: “Este libro que se pone en manos de los lectores es la historia de unas personas, de unos sacerdotes y laicos, de unos misioneros, discípulos de Vicente de Paúl, que durante tres siglos, dieciocho, diecinueve y veinte, se entregaron con valentía, con generosidad, con enormes sacrificios, con derramamiento incluso de sangre, a la tarea de expandir el evangelio de Cristo. La congregación fue expulsada de la patria, fue excluida de la propiedad, fue negada su existencia, fue perseguida, como otras congregaciones, en los siglos diecinueve y veinte, pero siempre, después de esos avatares difíciles, vuelve a resurgir con nuevo brío y lozanía. Su rasgo más distintivo, al decir de un historiador, fue “la austeridad de vida, la observancia y el fervor espiritual.”

Una de las epopeyas más gloriosas de la Congregación de la Misión española fue su expansión misionera por el mundo. Se inició en 1844 en México, en 1847 en Cuba, en Filipinas en 1862, en Puerto Rico en 1873, Estados Unidos en 1909, Honduras en 1910, Perú en 1914, en la India en 1921, Venezuela en 1931, Madagascar en 1965, Mozambique en 1991. Indiscutiblemente que tenemos que estar orgullosos de nuestra historia, pero ese pasado glorioso debiera ayudar a la Congregación actual a resituarse en una sociedad distinta con valentía y creatividad, como lo hicieron nuestros antecesores.”

Seán Alexander Smith, Ph.D., Fealty and Fidelity: The Lazarists of Bourbon France, 1660-1736 (Routledge, 2015), 240 pp. ISBN: 978-1472444783. Hardcover available at: Amazon.com ; Kindle edition at: Amazon Kindle edition

Promotional write-up: “The career of the French saint Vincent de Paul has attracted the attention of hundreds of authors since his death in 1660, but the fate of his legacy — entrusted to the body of priests called the Congregation of the Mission (Lazarists) — remains vastly neglected. De Paul spent a lifetime working for the reform of the clergy and the evangelization of the rural poor. After his death, his ethos was universally lauded as one of the most important elements in the regeneration of the French church, but what happened to this ethos after he died? This book provides a thorough examination of the major activities of de Paul’s immediate followers. It begins by analyzing the unique model of religious life designed by de Paul — a model created in contradistinction to more worldly clerical institutes, above all the Society of Jesus. Before he died, de Paul made very clear that fidelity to this model demanded that his disciples avoid the corridors of power. However, this book follows the subsequent departures from this command to demonstrate that the Congregation became one of the most powerful orders in France. The book includes a study of the termination of the little-known Madagascar mission, which was closed in 1671. This mission, replete with colonial scandal and mismanagement, revealed the terrible pressures on de Paul’s followers in the decade after his demise. The end of the mission occasioned the first major reassessment of the Congregation’s goals as a missionary institute, and involved abandoning some of the goals the founder had nourished. The rest of the book reveals how the Lazarists recovered from the setbacks of Madagascar, famously becoming parish priests of Louis XIV at Versailles in 1672. From then on, fealty to Louis XIV gradually trumped fidelity to de Paul. The book also investigates the darker side of the Congregation’s novel alliance with the monarch, by examining its treatment of Huguenot prisoners at Marseille later in the century, and its involvement with the slave trade in the Indian Ocean. This study is a wide-ranging investigation of the Lazarists’ activities in the French Empire, ultimately concluding that they eclipsed the Society of Jesus. Finally, it contributes new information to the literature on Louis XIV’s prickly relationship with religious agents that will surprise historians working in this area.”

Italo Zedde, C.M., San Vincenzo De Paoli: Uomo Della Parola di Dio (Editrice Velar, 2015), 140 pp. ISBN: 978-88-6671-105-6. Available: Velar.it

From the book jacket: “Nessuno ignora che San Vincenzo de Paoli sia il Santo della Carita. A lui si devono diverse fondazioni ancora fiorenti: le Associazioni di Carita (gli attuali Gruppi di Volontariato Vincenziano) e le Figlie della Carita, ma San Vincenzo e anche ben noto come rinnovatore dei Seminari per la formazione del Clero, come animatore delle Missioni interne ed estere, e come fondatore di una Congregazione di Missionari chiamata proprio “Congregazione della Missione.” Queste fondazioni ci dicono lo staorinario impulso che egli ricevette dalla meditazione e contemplazione della Parola di Dio dall’esempio di Gesu descritto nei Vangeli.

Questo pagine si propongono di illustrare le spirito con cui San Vincenzo ha intrapreso tali opere, partendo dalla Parola di Dio. Papa Fancesco menzionandolo esplicitamenta less Lettera a tutti i consacrati (21 novembre 2014) afferma: “I nostri Fondatori e Fondatrici hanno sentito in se la compassione che prendeva Gesu quando vedeva le folle come peccore sbandate senza pastore. Come Gesu, mosso da questa compassione, ha donato la sua parola, ha sanato gli ammalati, ha dato il pane da mangiare, ha offerto la sua stessa vita…” cosi dovranno essere i suoi discepoli, in questo anno della Vita Consacrata, seguendo San Vincenzo nel continuo riferimento all Parola di Dio come unica ragione della evangelizzazione dei poveri.”

VIDEOS OF INTEREST

- To watch Carol Harrison, Ph.D., professor of History at the University of South Carolina, deliver the spring 2015 DeAndreis-Rosati Memorial Archives lecture, titled: Romantic Catholics: Frédéric and Amélie Ozanam, Marriage, and the Catholic Social Vocation, see: http://vhrn-depaul.ning.com/profiles/blogs/drma-spring-lecture-2015

- To watch Betty Ann McNeil, D.C., Vincentian scholar-in-residence at DePaul University, deliver the fall 2015 DeAndreis-Rosati Memorial Archives lecture based upon the subject of her book, Balm of Hope: Charity Afire Impels Daughters of Charity Civil War Nurses, see: http://vhrn-depaul.ning.com/profiles/blogs/drma-fall-quarter-lecutre-balm-of-hope

- To watch Thérèse Peeters, researcher and scholar on the correspondence of seventeenth-century Vincentian missionaries along the Barbary Coast, deliver the winter 2016 DeAndreis-Rosati Memorial Archives lecture, titled: Trust and the Mission: The Vincentians in North Africa, 1645-1689, see: http://vhrn-depaul.ning.com/profiles/blogs/lecture-the-role-of-trust-in-the-vincentian-missions-in-north-afr

- To watch Peggy O’Neill, S.C., a long-time peace activist who has worked in El Salvador for the past 30 years where she currently serves as the founder of El Centro Arte Para la Paz, deliver the 2016 Louise de Marillac lecture, titled: Energized by the Fire of Charity, see: http://vhrn-depaul.ning.com/profiles/blogs/louise-de-marillac-lecture-energized-by-the-fire-of-charity

Vincentian Heritage is the journal of the Vincentian Studies Institute of the United States. Founded in 1979 the Institute is dedicated to promoting a living interest in the historical and spiritual heritage of Saint Vincent de Paul (1581-660) and Saint Louise de Marillac (1591-1660), the patrons of the wide-ranging Vincentian Family including the Congregation of the Mission, the Daughters of Charity, the Ladies of Charity, the Sisters of Charity, the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, and a number of other congregations, communities, and lay movements who share a common dedication to serving those in need.

Vincentian Heritage welcomes manuscripts, poetry, and other expressions of Vincentian themes that meet the publication criteria. All articles should relate directly to topics of Vincentian interest, be researched and documented in a scholarly fashion, and directed toward Vincentian oriented groups in the reading public and the Vincentian family. Ordinarily, articles should not exceed thirty typewritten pages and should be submitted twelve months prior to anticipated publication.

All manuscripts and editorial correspondence should be addressed to:

Mr. Nathaniel Michaud

Director of Publications

DePaul University Vincentian Studies Institute

Office of Mission & Values

Suite 850F

55 East Jackson Blvd.

Chicago, IL 60604

nmichaud@depaul.edu

Unless otherwise specified, all published articles are copyrighted by DePaul University. Quotations from such material beyond fair use as defined in Sections 107-108 of the United States Copyright law require permission of the Director of Publications of the Vincentian Studies Institute

© Copyright 2016 DePaul University Vincentian Studies Institute

ISSN 0277 – 2205

Vincentian Heritage is published bi-annually by DePaul University, Chicago, Illinois, under the direction of the Office of Mission and Values and assisted by an Editorial Board whose members include the following:

Rev. Edward R. Udovic, C.M., Ph.D.

Senior Executive for University Mission

DePaul University, Chicago, Illinois

Rev. John E. Rybolt, C.M., Ph.D.

Vincentian Scholar-in-Residence

Office of Mission and Values

DePaul University, Chicago, Illinois

Sr. Betty Ann McNeil, D.C.

Vincentian Scholar-in-Residence

Office of Mission and Values

DePaul University, Chicago, Illinois

Alison Forrestal, Ph.D.

History, School of Humanities

NUI Galway, Galway

Ireland

Sr. Regina Bechtle, S.C.

Sisters of Charity, New York

Bronx, New York

Simone Zurawski, Ph.D.

Associate Professor

Department of Art and Art History

College of Liberal Arts & Sciences

DePaul University, Chicago, Illinois

Scott P. Kelley, Ph.D.

Assistant Vice-President for Vincentian Scholarship

Office of Mission and Values

DePaul University, Chicago, Illinois

Nathaniel Michaud

Director of Publications

Vincentian Studies Institute

DePaul University, Chicago, Illinois

The Institute can be found online at http://vsi.depaul.edu/

Subscriptions are now provided gratis for all interested parties. Future editions of Vincentian Heritage will be available for download to your IPad, Kindle, tablet, or computer. From this point forward, to receive the book free-of-charge, please contact us at nmichaud@depaul.edu and provide your preferred email address. When future editions are published you will receive an email including links to download the new full color, fully illustrated e-volume.

Table of Contents

cover

title-page

Contributors-this-Issue

Succeeding-the-Jesuits

Sister-Justina-Segale,-S.C.-and-the-Work-of-the-Santa-Maria-Settlement-House

Sister-Justina-Segale-and-Americanization--The-Making-of-Catholic-Italian-Americans

Sister-Justina-Segale-and-the-New-Woman--Tradition-and-Change-in-the-Progressive-Era

Newsnotes

Copyright

Editorial-Board