I have been re-hashing some of my lecture notes from my class on the Reformation last semester lately. Here are five things I learned, in no particular order of importance.

1) Theology in the Catholic Church was incredibly diverse and tolerant before the Council of Trent… for in house disputes Before Trent, the Catholic Church’s theology was incredibly diverse. As a moderately educated protestant, I had always assumed/heard that the Catholic Church always had a strict, uniform theology and that was one of the things that Luther was rebelling against. Hardly the case. Luther got most of his theology from other Catholics; as a matter of fact, one of Luther’s most trusted mentors was a Catholic through and through. The Augustinian Order maintained a very similar theology as Luther did, but they never made the dispute a public matter. The Catholic Church was a watershed of differing theologies. There were constant, fierce debates on major theological issues. All of the theological differences were, of course, in house disputes, much like the Calvinism/Arminianism debates of today. As long as these disputes were kept “in house” then there were no charges of heresy. It was only when a disputed theological position was taken to the uneducated people, whom were not able to deal with the nuanced arguments and therefore were susceptible to being snatched away by the devil, was a person and idea considered heretical. Trent changed all of this. The council decided that one of the things to blame for what happened in the 1500’s was the lack of enforced unified doctrine. So they corrected this flaw in their system. Some people call Trent the end of “Catholic Reform,” the universalization of doctrine and practice ending the methods of traditional Catholic reform.

2) Man is born in filth, lives in filth, and dies in filth. Actually, filth is too much of a euphemization, properly stated, filthh should be sh!t. While I hesitate to use that more accurate word because I am afraid some will bypass the content and only glare at the cultural taboo, I include it because that is the closest word we have to how they characterized it. As crude as this sounds, there was a weird preoccupation with fecal matter, to euphemize the term even further. It was the predominate metaphor for the human condition. Sanitation systems were non-existent compared to today’s standards. Humans lived in filth. They used this term and the ideas connected with it to describe the human condition. Just about every writer, Luther, Erasmus, etc used this term constantly.

3) Human behavior, for Luther, could not be improved Luther thought that humans were so morally corrupted by the “sh!t of sin” that they could never become clean in the world. Justification was another matter, but when it came to morally lived lives, it was impossible. There was absolutely no possibility for an improvement of human behavior for Luther. As such, there should be no onus on the person, church, and governments to mold human behavior. Just keep the peace. This was a sticking issue with some of the other reformers, such as the hard-line Zwingli and Calvin. they believed that holiness could be successfully pursued… at least it should be. Hence, churches and governments should make people to live sinlessly.

4) For Luther, the only thing worse than a Catholic was a literalist Luther, along with Augustine, thought that biblical literalism was one of the worst ways to interpret the Bible, especially the Old Testament. I don’t know their views on Israel’s history, but I do know that both of them thought that only the foolish thought that Genesis should be taken literally. This goes for the six day creation and perhaps the flood, but I am unsure on that last point. What is funny, is that it is often the literalists that hold up Luther and Augustine as heroes of the faith even though these heroes would berate them for certain cherished positions. This is not a polemic against literalists, after all I am half of one, but more of a lesson on how divergent people can be in their views of scripture and still be Christians.

5) The Catholic Church before and during the Reformation was full of preaching One of the polemics that the Reformers leveled against the Catholic Church was its lack of preaching in the vernacular. They were so successful in this polemic that for centuries it was assumed to be true by the “winners” of the Reformation struggle, the West, the Protestants. It was only until recently that scholarship realized that this charge was polemical. Ironically, it was one of the after-effects of Trent that allowed for this discovery. With the standardization of doctrine after Trent came censures. The effect of this was the redaction of thousands of documents, including sermons. When the Vatican opened some of its vaults 10-20 years ago, they invited scholars to help categorize and index their contents. The scholars found thousands of redacted sermons that were given by Catholic priests leading up to and throughout the Reformation period. Contrary to popular conception, the Catholic parish priests, not just Bishops, were vigorously preaching in the vernacular. The Mass may have been in Latin and incomprehensible to the laity, but the sermon after the Mass was given in German, French, and Spanish. For the priesthood, it did not really matter what language the Mass was given in, for it was a ritual between the priests and God on behalf of the laity.

The Madonna of 115^th Street was not at all what I was expecting. When I first heard about the book during the first class period, I expected a long and detailed analysis of the rituals that took place during the festa, perhaps accompanied with small excursions into the Italian Harlem’s culture. What I got was quite the opposite; long and detailed analysis of the Italian Harlem’s culture and the domus, with many small excursions into the festa. Despite this distance from my expectations, I feel that I am more intimately acquainted with the setting and practice of the Madonna of 155^th Street.

I also appreciated his explanation of terms in the introduction of the book, especially his discussion of power and the meaning of “popular religion.” Sometimes there is a feeling that popular religion is the opposite of established religion; merely a rebellion against the establishment consisting of rejected practices. Here, a much more agreeable definition was used, where the emphasis was on a synthesis of the established religion and the religious values of the people at large. More importantly, it was a dialectic between the people and the culture, a way to protest and resolve tensions. Orsi drew this out in his analysis of the domus and the festa.

I am sure that several fellow students will ask why any of this really matters, or how this wonderful exposition of the domus and the Madonna of the Italian Harlem, which does not really exist anymore, is nothing but a historical curiosity. Orsi wrestled with this several times throughout his introduction(s) and his work. He deems it necessary to connect to work to the larger whole of American history, least it be striped of meaning. How particularistic is this work? Is it representational American Christianity? Can one apply notions of the domus to and religiosity to members of the Disciples of Christ? Not really. Can one narrow the application to other Catholics? Orsi goes to great length to show the differences between Catholic groups, across class lines, such as the established clergy and the laity; and ethnic/economic lines, such as the established Irish Catholics and the poorer Italian Catholics. In light of this, is the work reduced to merely a study of a particular group in a particular place in (a) particular time(s)? I do not think it is, and I think that Orsi pointed this out in several places. He described the linkage of these immigrants and their story of the conflicts within their society is instructive in viewing the history of immigrant groups. One can see parallels between the internal and external views of immigrants of the early 1900’s and today, despite differences in geographic origin. Looking at the book through a broader historical context, one not only obtains a better view of the people studied, but an addition is made to the understanding of the development of the United States. As such, there is a “so what” in this story.