Constructing Catholic Propriety on North Eighth Street
Constructing Catholic Propriety on North Eighth Street
This chapter examines how Italian Americans negotiate a diversifying Church and urban landscape and contend with sharing their saint with Haitian and Haitian American devotees of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. While the feast is a site where Catholics of different races and ethnicities share devotional space, it is also a site of intra-Catholic boundary making. Devotional celebrations are sites of religious evaluation, racializing, and territoriality, where onlookers judge who is and who is not acting as a “good Catholic” and whose devotional affinities verge on “superstition.” Public performances of devotion are where people judge, construct, and enact Catholic propriety. Through everyday talk and boundary-making practices, Italian American Catholics construct ideas of “good” American Catholic practice and label the practices of ethnic and racial others as admirable yet foreign and excessive, echoing the very same discourses that placed their ancestors outside the bounds of “good” Catholic practice.
Keywords: Catholic practice, diversifying Church, devotion, Our Lady of Mount Carmel, boundary making, races, ethnicities, Italian American, Haitian American
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