This chapter assesses the persistence of material culture in modern Marian devotion, in tandem with historical and technological developments in the mass media and mass culture more generally. Despite the virtualization of Marian phenomena, iconography, and devotional practice through media such as the internet, the sensuous materiality of objects such as statues, relics, and the rosary still offer important ways for the faithful to experience Mary collectively and phenomenologically. Key to understanding the efficacy of both material and virtual or technological forms of Marian devotion is an appreciation of these forms’ capacity to mediate communication to, and for many believers, the very presence of, the Virgin Mary (de la Cruz 2009, 2015).
Mary’s own mediatic capacity is as much scripturally as structurally based. In the famous New Testament scene of the Wedding at Cana (John 2:1–12), Mary intervenes on behalf of the celebrants, who have run out of wine for their guests. She goes to Jesus and says to him simply, ‘They have no wine’, to which he replies brusquely, ‘Woman, how does your concern affect me? My hour has not yet come.’ Ignoring him as one might ignore a petulant child, Mary goes directly to the servers, instructing them to do what Jesus says. No sooner has Jesus rebuked her than he tells the servants to fill six stone water jars with water, which he then turns into wine. Although Biblical scholars cite this as a significant moment for being the first miracle Jesus performs, for many Catholics its meaningfulness lies in Mary’s role as intercessor (Hengel 1987), a go-between for those in need of Jesus’ aid. ‘To Jesus, through Mary’ (Texier 2012) is a phrase commonly spoken by Mary’s devotees, expressing not only her positionality but also her proximity to those who supplicate her for assistance.
Mary’s importance as intercessor is not the only factor that lends her the particular quality of closeness for her contemporary believers, however, as Marian doctrine attributes to her a singular physicality generative of notions of presence. The Assumption, which was declared as dogma in Munificentissimus Deus by Pope Pius XII in 1950, posits that Mary was taken up—literally assumed, body and soul—into heaven after her death. Theologically speaking this is related to Mary’s Immaculate Conception, that is, her own having been conceived without sin so as to bear her son, and there is active debate as to the nature of her death or ‘dormition’ (Warner 1983 [1976]; Shoemaker 2002). But the wider implication of the Assumption for thinking about Mary’s material presence is that of her unique corporeality, bestowed on her by special favour from God.
Whether or not this longstanding Church tradition of Mary’s Assumption (which predates Pius XII’s declaration of its dogma by centuries) is directly related to the worldwide prevalence of her apparitions is not clear. Yet it remains an incontrovertible fact that her appearances, far surpassing in number and kind those of all other saints and even Jesus himself, are the most frequently reported by Catholics. Indeed, modern Catholics’ devotion to Mary is marked by the recent history of her appearances to the faithful throughout the world, from Lourdes (France) to Kibeho (Rwanda) and beyond; put another way, Marian apparitions comprise one primary feature of Catholic modernity (Turner and Turner 1978; Kselman 1983; Zimdars-Swartz 1992; Blackbourn 1993; Christian 1996; Harris 2000; Vásquez and Marquardt 2000; Wright-Rios 2009; de la Cruz 2015; Maunder 2016).
Building on her intercessory power and corporeal integrity, apparitions of Mary—her presence, occasionally manifest here on earth—are the sine qua non of modern Catholic material culture. In what follows, I draw from both the broad history of modern apparitions and my own ethnographic fieldwork with apparition communities in the Philippines as a lens through which to consider the conjunction of mass and materially mediated images and sacred objects in contemporary Marian devotion. The mechanical, analogue, and digital ages have enabled the proliferation of news and stories about Mary’s appearances, as the increasing ease of travel has decreased the time and effort required for pilgrimage to sacred sites. Yet for all of these industrial developments, the sensory dimensions of Mary’s perceived presence still privilege external tactile, visual, and olfactory capacities over internal attitudes and habits of faith.
We see this privileging of the exterior senses at the outset of the modern ‘Age of Mary’ (Turner and Turner 1978: 208), a period thus called among Catholic circles for its notable efflorescence of Marian phenomena and devotion. The apparition of Mary to Catherine Labouré in Paris in 1830 marks the beginning of this era, and also provides an excellent introduction to modern Catholic material culture. Central to Mary’s messages to Labouré was the directive to strike a medal modelled after her unique mode of appearance: ‘as if in an oval picture … standing on a globe … her hands covered, as it were, with diamonds, whence emanated luminous rays falling upon the earth’ (Aladel 1880: 55). The Miraculous Medal, as the devotion and object came to be called, enjoyed an astounding propagation throughout the nineteenth century: by the time of Labouré’s death in 1876, an estimated one billion medals had been produced and circulated (Laurentin 2006: 97). Clearly, the age of mechanical reproduction was most propitious to the flourishing of Marian material culture. The sheer volume of religious objects that could be produced in a short amount of time allowed a particular devotion to spread rapidly and ubiquitously.
There is no more ubiquitous practice, however, than the Marian devotion nonpareil: the Rosary. Indeed, its history, in contrast to the burgeoning of apparitions in modernity, provides an excellent example of continuity and change over centuries of Catholic material culture. The origins of the Rosary as a single strand of beads used to assist with counting prayers are vague at best, and by some accounts controverted. The use of prayer beads has been observed in many religions other than Christianity, such as Islam, Buddhism, and among some Hindu traditions (it is in Brahmanic India that such usage is believed to have originated). It is also reasonable to assume that across these traditions, beads came into use as a counting device, or place-holder, for repetitive recitation. Exactly when the usage of beads for prayer entered into Christendom, and how and when those beads took the form of the Rosary as it is known and practised today are matters of some dispute (Thurston 1901; Warner 1983; Carroll 1987; Winston-Allen 1997; Miller 2002; de la Rosa 2005; Mitchell 2009).
Of all of the orders that comprise monastic Catholicism, the Dominican order maintains the strongest identification with Rosary devotion. Indeed, as legend would have it, the formal structure and method of Rosary prayer owes its origin to a vision of the Virgin beheld by the founder of the order, St Dominic himself, at the beginning of the thirteenth century. By many accounts, Dominic the Inquisitor was so horrified by the sinful occupation of Toulouse by neo-Manichaean heretics that he prayed fervently for days, weeping in penance that he hoped might appease a wrathful God. His prayers were heard and answered by the Blessed Mother herself, who delivered the circular chain, instructing that Dominic preach her Psalter of 150 salutations (the Ave Maria or ‘Hail Mary’), wielding it as a weapon against heresy and sin. Henceforth Dominic dedicated his pastoral life to propagating the devotion with great success.
‘Apocryphal’, ‘imaginative’, and ‘invented’ are a few of the terms modern historians have used to describe this legend. The true development of Rosary prayer, according to many religious studies scholars, owes much more to a combination of cultural diffusion and ecclesiastical sanction than to mystical encounters (Thurston 1901; Warner 1983; Winston 1993). Still, even the mythological attribution of the physical object of the Rosary to an apparition of Mary is worth noting. In addition to the empirical existence of prayer beads among several religious traditions, there is archaeological evidence that as early as the eleventh century beads were used by Christians for the counting of prayers (a habit likely, and most ironically, picked up from Muslim adversaries during the Crusades). There are numerous manuscripts, furthermore, dating from before the birth of St Dominic that make reference to the familiar practice of reciting a hundred and fifty Aves in succession. The narrative function of the Rosary in chronicling the Life of Christ emerges contemporaneously with the apparition legend of St Dominic (Winston 1993: 623–4), but it is not until the vernacular publication of Unser Lieben Frauwen Psalter (Our Beloved Lady’s Psalter) in the fifteenth century that the Rosary takes on a distinctly visual dimension in its meditation on the mysteries of Christ (Thurston 1901: 624–5). Simple pictures depicting the events in Christ’s life appeared in this small volume, which was popular enough to prompt eight editions printed in the years between its publication in 1489 and the end of that century (Winston 1993: 630).
This convergence of the visual, the narrative, and the tactile in Rosary prayer would find its modern, twentieth-century rendition in the worldwide propagation of the Marian devotion by the Family Rosary Crusade (FRC), a US-based organization established in the 1950s. Part of broader global Catholic anti-communist efforts, the FRC spread throughout Catholic countries, organizing enormous ‘Rosary rallies’ and spearheading the manufacture and distribution of millions of Rosaries. Among these large scale endeavours was the impressive misión popular (Popular Mission), which brought screenings of their own, mass mediated version of the Unser Lieben Frauwen Psalter via The Life of Christ, an epic film series depicting the Rosary’s fifteen mysteries. In contrast to the Miraculous Medal in the 1830s—and indeed, the Rosary object itself—the Popular Mission offered a two-dimensional, cinematic vision of Mary, which was projected on any available surface, be it a movie house screen or even a bed sheet (Gribble 2005). Taking full advantage of radio, film, and television for the promotion and circulation of Marian devotion, the FRC helped usher in a new era of religious mass media that would see these popular tools become indispensable to evangelization, regardless of denomination.
Yet the production of Catholic mass media would only supplement, rather than supplant, existing ways of engaging Mary through material artifacts such as Rosary beads, sculpted images, and relics. Taken from my own research in the Philippine Catholic context, the case described in the next section demonstrates the sometimes confounding effects that can occur when material signs of Mary circulate within or alongside mass mediated forms.
In the late 1940s in Lipa, a small city located about eighty kilometres south-west of Manila, showers of rose petals fell on the ground outside of a Carmelite convent where a young Filipina novice claimed to have visions of the Virgin Mary. A collective miracle, in the sense that a number of people witnessed these showers in their original occurrence, it did not become a public miracle until mainstream, Manila-based newspapers started reporting on it in November 1948.1 Thereafter a mimetic relationship was forged between the circulation of news about the petals and the proliferation of petals themselves. As is often seen in modern apparition events where ‘copycat’ phenomena quickly follow (see Christian 1996), reports of showering petals outside of Lipa emerged soon after the press began featuring the alleged miracles. Petals were seen falling not only outside of the convent, but also in a nearby garden, in a local wet market, in a classroom, and even in Manila (Manila Times 1949b, 1949d, 1949f). As much as the news about the petals incited broader conversations about the meaning of the reported visions and miracles (most notably, attributing to them an anticommunist message akin to that interpreted at Fátima—Manila Times 1949a), it incited further materializations of Mary’s perceived presence, as witnesses began seeing, touching, and even smelling, rose petals throughout the Philippines.
Following the logic of sympathetic magic common to many religious images and objects in popular Catholicism, several Lipa petals were believed to possess healing power, drawn out and exercised by placing a petal on the body of the ill or infirm, or by drinking water that had been infused with a petal (Manila Times 1949c). In one case, a man from New York claimed that, after receiving a petal from his daughter’s physician friend in the Philippines, his longstanding heart ailment disappeared (Manila Times 1949e). A doctor in Baltimore attested to the healing power of the Lipa petals when he borrowed a petal from a Filipino priest and cured a young patient of his with pneumonia and pleurisy (Manila Times 1949c). One Lipa petal travelled as far as Spain, thanks to a Dominican friar residing in the Philippines who sent it to the small village of Vadillo de la Guareña, to his brother, who then passed it on to his wife. The señora applied the petal to a painful wound that had been oozing pus for several weeks; within days the wound had closed and manifested a scab that took the shape of a cross (ABC 1949). These cases come to us, of course, because widely circulating newspapers (The Manila Times and the Spanish conservative daily ABC, respectively) have featured them.
Thus, on the one hand, in these phenomena we see the materiality of the petals take precedence over any other aspect of the broader apparition event at Lipa—indeed, in the reportage of these cases there is little to no mention of the visions of Mary! The petals heal because of the belief that their power inheres in the material object itself, which can be applied tactilely, its power transferred directly through the skin. On the other hand, in this context, where the singularity of a healing petal meets the reproducibility operative in the mass media—or, to put it more explicitly, where religious mediation meets technological mediation—a certain hybrid may be produced that draws from both logics of sympathetic magic and mechanical proliferation.
Indeed, with the case of the healing petal of Vadillo we see precisely this combination. According to a lengthy feature published in Santo Rosario, a popular monthly published by the Dominican University of Santo Tomás in Manila, a Spanish couple organized a number of expositions of the miraculous petal throughout the region, touring it as one might a saint’s relic, and relying on newspaper articles and radio interviews to inform the general public of the petal’s arrival to their town (Santo Rosario 1949a: 41). Here the petal’s singularity is maintained, its rarity valuable and celebrated. But the peripatetic life of the petal did not stop there, for the couple then spread the wondrous petal’s power by bringing thousands of prayer cards (known as estampas) into contact with the petal and distributing them. These estampas reportedly cured scores of ailing individuals, from paralytics to children with skin disorders and more (Santo Rosario 1949b: 42).
The petals of Lipa offer an excellent example of modern Catholic material culture because of how they both instantiate traditional models of sacred tangibility and utilize modern instruments of the mass media. We see this not only in the role of the press in generating publicity about the alleged miracles, which in turn incites other petal events worldwide, but also in how the reproducibility operative to the mass media affords the expansion of some petals’ healing power into other material forms. This capacity for reproducing material objects deemed miraculous need not be limited to artefacts related to Mary; however, her paragon status among Catholicism’s intercessory figures makes this association more likely. Furthermore, insofar as visions of Mary have played an important part in the persistence, and even renewal, of supernaturalism in Catholic modernity, attendant articles like the Lipa petals have provided the faithful with tangible traces of her reported appearances. In this particular case, material artefacts made even more tangible and widespread previous phenomena that were limited in occurrence and geographical location: according to some accounts, rose petals had also made an appearance at the famous apparition of Fátima, in 1917 (McGlynn 2017: 43–5). Indeed, the showers of rose petals in Lipa suggests there is another important link to be made between Mary, her appearances, and modern material culture: believed to bear an indexical relationship to the reported visions of Mary at the convent of Lipa, these petals served to distribute, expand, and disseminate the materialized form of the miracle to a broader public.
The modern material culture of Mary is thus necessarily a public culture, not because objects or articles are always exhibited in public spaces, but because they appear, circulate, and are collected, bought, evaluated, discussed, and sometimes indeed displayed in the public sphere. In countries like the Philippines, where devotion to Mary is strong among the majority Catholic population, Marian objects and images are ubiquitous features of the visual landscape. From dashboard ornaments on the culturally iconic jeepneys (a common form of public transportation), to billboards reminding citizens to ‘Pray the Rosary’ to the patron images that preside over hundreds of parishes around the country, Mary is literally everywhere you turn.
Moreover, recent years have seen instances wherein the material culture of Mary has ‘crossed over’ into mainstream, non-Catholic, popular culture, as happened when a woman in Florida, USA took a bite of her grilled cheese toast and saw what she perceived to be an image of Mary burnt into the bread. Not only was this event broadcast across the channels of ‘Weird News’ for some time, reaching its peak of coverage when the artefact fetched $28,000 USD at auction (NBC News, 23 November 2004), it also spurred the manufacture of novelty items such as the ‘Holy Toast’ toast stamper (see mcphee.com!) and similar appliances that could replicate the iconographic effect. Popular culture is mass culture, and mass culture sometimes produces kitsch; religious kitsch, in particular, results from the mass reproduction and commodification of recognizable signifiers of a given religious tradition (McIntyre 2014). Because Mary is among the most recognizable signifiers of Catholicism, and Church doctrine does not prohibit the production and display of Mary’s image, it is not surprising that she enjoys wide circulation in mainstream culture in myriad—and sometimes heterodox, even amusing—forms.
Although this example of the cheese toast seems particularly suited to a kitsch sensibility of white America, the proliferation of Marian material culture is not limited to national boundaries or ethnic identities; rather, it follows diasporic and immigrant populations throughout the world, spreading wherever these communities live and settle. The iconography of Our Lady of Guadalupe and religious articles such as votive candles, statues, pendants, and clothing that bear the famous chromatic image of the Virgin as she legendarily appeared on the tilma of Juan Diego offer the most familiar example of this material diffusion (Rodriguez 1994; Brading 2002; Odem 2004; Nabhan-Warren 2005; Castañeda-Liles 2018). And indeed, the Guadalupana (as she is affectionately known) is arguably the most recognizable image of Mary in all of the Americas, notwithstanding the fact that she is also the renowned symbol of the Mexican nation (Wolf 1958; Poole 2017). Cases like the following illustrate the distinct modernity of the material culture of Mary as tied to her apparitions (even if the apparitions were first reported centuries ago), and its importance as cultural envoy within and across national borders.
In April of 1997, The Seattle Times reported that the Virgin Mary, in the figure of Our Lady of Guadalupe, was believed to be appearing on the back of a highway sign in Sunnyside, Washington State (The Seattle Times 1997). A local police officer was the first to witness the miraculous appearance late one afternoon, and by midnight of that day, the highway patrol had closed down an entire portion of state route 241. Hundreds of people had spilled out onto the four-lane road, stopping traffic in all directions. Although the local Department of Transportation explained the appearance away as simply a common effect of anti-oxidant coating, for several days the sighting prompted other reports of apparition sightings on the backs of highway signs in the area (spokesman.com, 9 April 1997). Here again we see a relationship between appearances of Mary and material culture, this time in the marvellously precise juncture of divine intervention and the most banal of modern artefacts, under the shared rubric of the ‘sign’.
Although short lived, the phenomenon of Mary on the highway signs in eastern Washington state betokened socio-economic and political features specific to their local context, at the same time that it resonated with other contemporary apparition events of a transnational nature. Sunnyside is a small town deep in the Yakima Valley, a region largely absent from popular geographical knowledge of the Pacific Northwest, a place as forgotten as the thousands of Mexican migrants who work the land there and throughout the central part of the state. Even if momentarily, the apparitions served to bring this community, largely invisible to the cosmopolitan port city of Seattle, into stark relief. This sudden visibility held the potential to stir perennial tensions while introducing new considerations of public space and aspects of legality into the on-going negotiations between law enforcement and the migrant workers of this region. Like the rose petals of Lipa, the distinctly public nature of these material sightings meant the potential for the phenomenon to get out of control; in Sunnyside, however, the stakes of such a proliferation of these sacred signs were much higher, with the very functioning of the highway and safety of its drivers at issue.
At the same time, regular observers of Marian apparitions, especially in the United States, will readily note similarities between the Sunnyside sightings and those reported in Clearwater, Florida in 1996, when a customer of the Seminole Finance Corporation claimed to make out the outline of the Virgin Mary on the building’s façade (Vásquez and Marquardt 2000). In both Sunnyside and Clearwater, the reported apparitions were most visited by Mexican migrants, and assumed to resemble Our Lady of Guadalupe. Both apparitions materialized on physical emblems of quintessential modernity: the highway sign, and a glass panelled building (housing a finance franchise, no less). In short, both demonstrated the transnational dimension of many contemporary modern apparitions and their expression as material phenomena, that is, as phenomena that draw as much attention to the material surfaces on which they appear as to what they are taken to signify.
One of the notable features of the Clearwater apparitions was the role of the internet in both promoting tourism to the site and allowing those unable or unwilling to travel to the United States to perform a kind of ‘virtual’ pilgrimage to what over time had become a sizeable shrine. This raises the question of religious deterritorialization and its effects on material culture. Until the age of the internet, apparitions of Mary had been culturally and phenomenologically tied to physical place, as indicated by so many titles given to her, which bear the names of the villages, towns, or cities where she was reported to have appeared (Christian 1981). In this previous model of apparitions, Mary appears and literally graces a place or community with her presence. So, to conclude, what shall become of the material culture of Mary, now that Catholic believers the world over can petition the Blessed Mother, visit her shrines, and even pray the rosary, with just a swipe, a point, and a click?
The ministry of Emma de Guzman, a Filipino visionary based in Ontario, illustrates the symbiotic relationship of material and virtual or mass mediated Catholic cultures. Born in poverty in a Philippine province, de Guzman moved to North America in the 1980s to be a live-in nanny. While on pilgrimage to the Basilica of the National Shrine of Our Lady of Fátima in New York State, she had her first mystical experience, consisting of visions of Jesus, Mary, and Padre Pio, the famous Italian stigmatic. This originary moment alone deserves comment, for it would seem that the physical shrine—sixteen acres on which sit not only the Basilica but several smaller chapels and an ‘Avenue of the Saints’ entry lined with ‘over 130 life-size marble and bronze statues represent[ing] Saints from every race and walk of life’ (Buffalo Diocese)—was instrumental in inspiring de Guzman’s visions and messages. One such message came to de Guzman shortly after her visit to the Basilica, wherein Mary told her that she would bestow on Emma’s home altar, ‘something that will accompany her prayer journey from house to house’ (La Pieta International website 1). A few weeks later, Emma’s spiritual companion, another Filipino woman named Sol Gaviola, came across an icon of the Pietà at a garage sale. As if that discovery were not confirmation enough of de Guzman’s calling, one month later Emma reported that Jesus himself had appeared to her under a tree, with the message: ‘My Father gave the name La Pieta to your group because you see My sufferings and My Beloved Mother’s sufferings together. Through that icon, My people will open their eyes to see, and open their ears to listen. This mission will spread around the world’ (La Pieta International website 1).
Material Catholic culture in the form of icons, shrines, altars, and images were the springboard for Emma de Guzman’s ministry, which took its very name from the famous sculpted rendition of Mary cradling her dead son. But it is arguably Emma’s online presence and that of her ministry that widely promoted her mission. Up until recently, there were two main websites where seekers could learn more about Emma de Guzman and La Pieta International: the organization’s official website (http://www.lapietainternational.com) and the Mother of Joy House of Prayer (http://www.motherofjoy.com, now defunct).2 As recently as 2015, visitors to the latter website, which represented a chapter of La Pieta founded in upstate New York, could not only obtain extensive information about de Guzman and her ministry but also send electronic prayer requests by clicking on a mail icon. Both websites acted as promotional clearinghouses and virtual calendars, announcing La Pieta’s upcoming events. More importantly, they functioned as their own self-contained and self-constituted archives, with pages of supporting documents, testimonies, messages from Mary, and galleries of photographs, all serving to attest to the veracity of Emma’s visions and miraculous phenomena. The online photo galleries provided particularly compelling evidence of Emma’s many ‘gifts’, further promoting, as Paolo Apolito has described, both the ‘diffusion’ and ‘ingenuity’ of devotional motifs that have burgeoned in the digital age (Apolito 2005: 23).
Interestingly, however, and in some contrast to the flatness of the technological medium through which information and testimonies about Emma spread, in the first decade or so of her ministry, the mystical phenomena de Guzman experienced were intensely, and often gorily, corporeal: stigmata, bleeding hosts that she claimed were from the Angel of the Eucharist, roses that emerged from her chest, oil that oozed from her body, and escarchas (glitter) that trailed her (La Pieta International website 2). As time went on, however, these material, outward manifestations of de Guzman’s having been elected by God evolved into the internalized power to heal. Emma’s ministry then took on a more peripatetic quality, as she travelled at the invitation of different chapters of La Pieta to their associated parishes and communities to hold healing and prayer sessions, often after Masses (La Pieta International website 2).
It would be easy to interpret this transformation of Emma’s gifts as a reformist process of purification (see Keane 2006; Engelke 2007): the replacement of material signs of holiness by an internal state of power through piety. But this would be misguided, as de Guzman’s healing practice requires the materialization of her power through one crucial technique: touch. Emma ‘lays hands’ on those who seek her therapeutic intercession, performing a method common to the charismatic Catholic tradition. She herself becomes a material medium, or as she refers to it, ‘an instrument of God’ (La Pieta International website 3).
The healing ministry of Emma de Guzman demonstrates that although Marian devotion and phenomena may be influenced, and even altered, by digital and virtual technologies, by no means have their material dimensions abated. So long as people believe in the presence of the Blessed Mother on Earth (Orsi 2016), the tactile mode of perception will prevail as one of the primary ways in which devotees venerate her and experience that presence. Images, relics, rosaries, petals, votive candles, the walls and walkways of pilgrimage shrines, as well as anything that a devotee might have placed in contact with a blessed object, such as a handkerchief, a prayer card, a bottle of water: the efficacy of these objects, and the agency accorded them to act on the world (Morgan 2018), is predicated on the capacity of individuals to touch—to physically feel—them, in conjunction with imagining what each object might signify. Emma de Guzman’s healing power takes this logic one step even further, in transforming her own body into a material locus and conduit for God’s grace. When examining Mary and material culture, therefore, it is worthwhile recognizing that the tangible mediation of holy presence belongs not only to Marian devotional objects but to Marian devotional subjects as well.