The Holy Land of Saints the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem and the Life Story of St. Marie Alphonsine (original) (raw)
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Political Hagiographies: Sainthood, Ethnocentrism, and the Fallacies of Identity
Louvain Studies 42, 2019
Ethno-nationalist narratives of identity often combine political, reli-giocultural and sociosexual fictions of the past. This essay considers two contemporary examples of hagiography to explore how this form of religious narrativity is deployed in the quest for narratives of national or ethnic identity as well as ideas of saintly life. Deploying a postcolonial critique of ethno-national fictions, the paper compares selected aspects of the public discourse around national patron saints: St. Olav Nor-way and St. Vladimir in Ukraine and Russia. In particular, the paper looks at the way the saint's lives are retold to provide a narrative of both identity and relation-ality to other ethnic and religious communities. As a reconstructive approach to historic Christian figures, this essay seeks to contribute strategies to 'provincialize Europe' and decolonize European political theologies by proposing forms of identity construction that resist the use of collective intergenerational memory for authoritarian purposes. In this way, critical white identity constructions aim to counter the deployment of populist narratives towards a resolute construction of non-authoritarian Christian narratives of sainthood and identity.
Religious orders and congregations are being caught up by their own history. For the Netherlands, this has been the case since the spring of 2010, when Dutch media began to report on numerous cases of sexual abuse of minors committed by representatives of the Dutch Roman Catholic Church. Not a trace of this all occurs in recent general historiographies on the church or religion in the Netherlands, while such violations are but scantily considered in the historiography of religious communities. This raises the question of how this could be. In answering that question, we will analyze the perspectives that have guided and continue to guide historical research into religious communities. This particular field has been commanded in the past two decades by the religious themselves as well as by academically formed professional historians. To a large extent it has evolved beyond the reach of scholarly debate, due to the academic lack of interest for such institutions. First tendencies in historical research and their effect on narrative changes in the historiography of the religious are considered. Second the commemorative activities of religious communities are taken into account that reveal their self-understanding, a societal and churchly repositioning from the late 1960’s that channeled the religious’ new narratives on the past. We concentrate on the role of such narratives in processes of (revised) self-historicizing where new narratives began to dominate the actual past. A case study of the Dutch Dominicans elucidates to what extent their repositioning from the latter half of the 1960’s relied on a form of self-historicizing that involved reinventing, as it were, themselves, their own identity, and their vocation. The notion of self-historicizing implies the selective process of appropriating certain aspects from the past, while excluding others. With the religious this took shape through processes of resourcement that enabled them to recreate their so-called ‘authentic’ identity and vocation by foregrounding a ‘desired legacy’ primarily expressing who they wished to be. It is the contention of the authors that this caused them to lose perspective of their actual history, including the ‘undesired legacy’ that could pose quite a challenge to the more positive self-images. Historians should thus be wary of defining legacy in terms of what the religious themselves view as ‘desired.’ Alternative views offered by others who have had experiences with the religious in different capacities should also be considered. This calls for a new narrative of religious communities, designed to add depth to the formerly introvert perspective on one’s own community, one’s own institution and its specific idiosyncrasies, by means of memories and experiences of those whom the religious directly interacted with in daily life and work.
Contested Narratives of Storied Places – The Holy Lands
Religion and Society: Advances in Research 5, pp. 106-27., 2014
The articles on the Holy Lands provide a wide range of perspectives on the production, practice, and representation of sacred space, as expressions of knowledge and power. The experience of space of the pilgrim and the politically committed tourist is characterized by desire, distance, impermanence, contestation, entextualization, and the entwinement of the spiritual and the material. The wealth of historical Christian and Western narratives/images of the Holy Land, the short duration of pilgrimage, the encounter with otherness, the entextualization of sites, and the semiotic nature of tourism all open a gap between the perceptions of pilgrims and those of ‘natives’. Although the intertwining of symbolic condensation, legitimation and power make these Holy Land sites extremely volatile, many pilgrimages sidestep confrontation with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as inimical to the spirit of pilgrimage.The comparative view of the practices of contemporary Holy Land pilgrims demonstrates how communitas and conflict, openness and isolation are constantly being negotiated.
Today we tend to accept the statements of medieval pilgrims without many problems; they describe the place where saint John celebrated the first Mass, where the Magi’s star appeared, where the cock crowed three times. All elements that, at least in Christian Europe, are familiar to everyone from a very young age. Indeed, each detail regarding holy places is the fruit of a centuries-long path, and is neither linear nor unambiguous: for example the Magi’s number, identities, religion, and even the duration of their journey, along with many other aspects regarding these figures and their role in the Gospel of Mark, and thus in Christianity, represent a complicated historiographical problem. Medieval pilgrims do not distinguish between canonical Gospels, Apocrypha, and legends. After five hundred years, at times it is impossible to recover the source of a given miracle regarding Christ or the Virgin. This does not mean, however, that it is useless to try; even partial and uncertain results can tell us a great deal. We have testimony to the fact that some pilgrims were learned and had rather precise ideas about holy places, and that they studied the sacred texts and their commentaries. But very often the legends and miracles that pilgrims write about are not in the Bible or in the writings of the Church fathers. As well as information for pilgrims and directions for the places that they ought to have visited (which we will come back to later), miracles and legends always depended on the choices that somebody made. This paper aims to show that even events considered out of history (and nature), as miracles, depend on cultural – sometimes political – factors related to Christian life in Holy Land.
In this paper I explore how two rival Christian communities in the Holy Land employed the discourse of space to articulate the self-presentation of their group, to construct the identity of their religious opponents and to conceptualize the boundaries that separated them. Scholarship has explored how individual texts of both communities asserted physical or symbolic ownership of the Christian sacred sites in the Holy Land to enhance their status. My project shifts the focus to a broader spatial rhetoric as a means of crafting religious identities in the conflict between the Miaphysites and the Chalcedonians. In particular, this paper examines how the concepts of sacred space, engagement with the preexisting religious landscape of the Holy Land, and patterns of spatial interactions between the members of the community and sacred spaces were used as a polemical strategy.
175th Anniversary of the Re-establishment of the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem
The International Journal of Levant Studies, 2021
Jerusalem was always considered by Christians, Orthodox and Catholics alike, as being a terrestrial framework of the mysteries of redemption. This paper examines the story of the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem starting from its early age (1099-1847) to the Latin Patriarchate of present times consisting of six Vicariates.