Abstract
Margaret Reilly (1884-1937), who would be known as Sister Mary of the Crown of Thorns or simply Sister Thorn, joined the Religious of the Good Shepherd (RGS) in 1921. During her years at Mount Saint Florence, a rather remote convent in the Hudson River Valley, she experienced visions and demonic attacks, she received revelations from Jesus and Mary, and the wounds of the Passion (stigmata) appeared on her hands, feet, and side. The young American nun thus became part of a long tradition of Catholic stigmatics who were understood to be participating in the suffering of Christ.
In a richly detailed study Paula M. Kane uses the life of Sister Thorn as a window for examining the devotional lives of American Catholics, especially in the two decades after the First World War. In the decade of prosperity immediately following the war, Kane characterizes American Catholics as caught between a desire to achieve economic success by assimilating into American culture and the fear of actually doing so, and she argues that their conflicting emotions were aptly expressed in the metaphors of engulfment, immolation, and annihilation that were associated with Sister Thorn's experiences. And indeed for a period of time, some American Catholic officials found her useful for helping immigrant Catholics appropriate a transnational Catholic identity. But later in the century, Kane believes, the Catholic appetite for the passion mysticism of the pious sister was on the wane.
As she traces the gradual transformation of Margaret Reilly from a young Irish-American girl to a bleeding nun and potential saint, Kane carefully builds a picture of American Catholic devotional life as it was actually being lived in these years, both at home and in the convent. In “Cor Jesu Regnabit” (Chapter 5), for example, she examines the devotional economy of convent sisters by focusing on the small badges of the Sacred Heart that Sister Thorn made and sent to family, friends, and finally anyone who requested them. More than four thousand of these badges had reportedly been distributed when the archbishop of New York, apparently troubled by reports of healings attributed to the badges, asked that they be recalled and ordered Sister Thorn to stop making them. However, by situating these events in the context of the production, sharing, and even selling of many different items by convent sisters over the course of many centuries, Kane shows how such artifacts of material culture have long been important for establishing bonds among ordinary Catholics, for sustaining their devotional lives, and for instilling in them a sense of a universal church that transcends national boundaries.
Especially fascinating is Kane's discussion of Sister Thorn's champions (Chapter 3). Here the author explores the lives and peculiar interconnections of the persons who were drawn to the bleeding nun, some of whom became her ardent supporters. New York Catholics initially learned about Sister Thorn and her extraordinary experiences through a kind of “spiritual chain letter” (p.101) distributed by Father Bertrand Barry, who had arranged to see her in connection with a spiritual retreat that he was to lead at Mount Saint Florence. Word of Sister Thorn even reached one of the foremost authorities of that time on mystical phenomena, the British Jesuit Herbert Thurston, who heard about her from a prominent New York physician who had examined her but who believed that her experiences were simply manifestations of hysteria. Meanwhile, the superior of the Mount Saint Florence convent, Mother Raymond, was beginning to compile a record of Sister Thorn's experiences, aided by Sister Carmelita and Brother Lucas Etlin, both of them Benedictines from Clyde, Missouri. While the supporters of Sister Thorn were not particularly numerous, they constituted a thinly-spread network that spanned various parts of the country and bridged religious orders, bestowing on her, at least for some years, something of the status of a national celebrity.
Why, then, did Sister Thorn not rise to the ranks of Catholic sainthood? Kane notes that she was not martyred, nor did she leave anything resembling a spiritual autobiography, and she speculates that her spiritual virtues were probably not seen by Catholic authorities as sufficiently exceptional. But more important, she says, is the fact that the passive suffering of Sister Thorn no longer appealed to mid-twentieth American Catholics who began embracing a more energetic and active view of suffering. The plethora of details in Kane's study and the complexity of the narrative sometimes make it difficult to keep in mind the basic chronology of events. But the richness of the depiction of American Catholic devotional life in the interwar years makes Sister Thorn and Catholic Mysticism in Modern America essential reading for students of American Catholic devotionalism, its roots, and its changing nature as it moves into the twenty-first century.