On March 1, Kathleen Cummings, professor of American Studies and History at the University of Notre Dame, hosted a talk entitled “Monumental Questions: Catholicism, Gender, and the American Public Landscape.” The talk was listed as part of the “Dean’s Colloquium” series and was hosted in Devlin Hall 101.
After being introduced by the Dean of the Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences Fr. Gregory Kalscheur, S.J., Professor Cummings introduced the topic of that evening’s talk. She described an issue she had recently come to realize at her own university, and across the United States as a whole: the lack of memorialized female figures.
“Canonizing someone is akin to building a monument to them,” she stated early on in the talk. Monuments, she went on to argue, offer insights into what kinds of characteristics, skills, and traits a society values. Therefore, by observing the figures we depict for statues, we should be able to determine what a society values.
According to Professor Cummings, when the Catholic Church canonizes someone it is recognizing that he entered heaven “upon the moment of death.” This claim, however, is an oversimplification of the Church’s teaching that a saint is in heaven when they are canonized, not necessarily immediately after their death.
She also went on to claim that only saints could be “publicly venerated.” This is also an oversimplification of the Church’s position. The Code of Canon Law states, “It is permitted to reverence through public veneration only those servants of God whom the authority of the Church has recorded in the list of the saints or the blessed” (Cann. 1187) [emphasis added].
Cummings then transitioned and began to describe specifically the recognition of female saints in the Catholic Church. She pointed out that when she asked students at Boston College if they knew that Newton Campus used to be a women’s college run by the Sisters of the Sacred Heart, they said that they did not. Fr. Kalscheur did interject, however, that there is a plaque on Newton Campus that acknowledges its history.
She did praise Boston College for recognizing the female influence on the Church by having a building named after Philippine Duchesne and an institute named after Thea Bowman. These examples, however, were overshadowed both at Boston College and her own university of Notre Dame by the numerous dorms, institutes, and colleges named after male clerics and saints.
She spent the rest of the talk arguing that monuments in particular are ways that we tell our history. To Cummings, monuments are “statement[s] of power and presence in public.” According to her, it is indicative of at least subconscious bias that there are so few prominently represented women.
To add to her point, she cited the National Monument Audit which shows significant disproportionality between monuments of men and women in public. Among the top 50 represented in the nation, the first male saint is the fifth most depicted, St. Francis of Assisi, whereas the first female saint is Joan of Arc at number 18. She did concede, however, that the list does not properly take Our Lady into account because almost all of her depictions in America are on private church property.
For the last part of her address, she discussed the desire for all-American saints for people to rally behind. Two of her proposals were Elizabeth Ann Seton and St. Catherine Drexel. She went on to explain in depth, however, how Drexel has in recent years been seen as problematic because she might not have been “visionary enough,” following allegations of racial discrimination in the religious order she founded.
Cummings ended the address on an optimistic note. After describing efforts to promote black and female saints in the United States, she believes that in time, Americans will come to have saints of their own to commemorate.
James Pritchett is a Sophomore studying History and Classics with a deep affinity for his native land, the Golden State. Despite being the most recent lover of Catholicism on the Torch staff, he is the C101 editor and his main interests consist of reading Dostoyevsky, playing devil’s advocate, and correcting people on niche theological heresies.
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