Abstract
Speaking for myself-a historian of American Catholicism who spent several years as a reporter covering American religion, who was not raised Catholic, but who has a deep and abiding respect for Catholicism and attended a Catholic college (the same one, in fact, where Orsi's mother, Ann, worked; I remember her forceful and often-times hilarious "presence" in the Campus Ministry office quite well and was moved by his discussion in this book of her illness and doubt)-I feel uncomfortable whenever I encounter the "real presence," be it in an interview or in the archives. "2 I failed to engage what it would have meant to colonial American Catholics to have Christ be so physically present in their lives-such that the person of Christ could actually be described as sitting in the spot where a piece of bread had been placed-even as I pointed to that very spot, i.e., the monstrance, as an element of material culture that helped Catholics sustain their religious identity during a period in Maryland's history when it was rather difficult to be Catholic. Without abundant history, nuns who were obsessed with the teaching of cursive handwriting become educational tyrants; religious textbooks that stressed the violence and gore of martyrdom become the tools of sadists; and book-burnings like the one that administrators at a Catholic school in Binghamton, New York, arranged in 1948 become spectacular examples of Catholicism's inherently ignorant, autocratic, and un-American qualities-which is, make no mistake, precisely why Time magazine featured the burning in its "Manners and Morals" section, along with a photograph of the event (153). Once we understand the physical power of images and words, however- once we accept that for "peoples of the presence," the printed word "makes visible, in ink and graphite on paper, supernatural realities in the mind and heart"-the full meaning and import of handwriting lessons and PG-13 textbooks (if you'll permit me the liberty of being a bit anachronistic) and comic-book bonfires become more clear (149,136).