American Patroness: Marian Shrines and the Making of U.S. Catholicism

This is a collection of twelve essays united under the thesis that Catholic shrines to the Blessed Virgin Mary in the United States reveal the complexity, as well as the “dynamic malleability,” of the church in this country. Given that Catholics from Poland have been part of this local church en masse for at least 170 years, their input is also mentioned. For example, Ohio's National Shrine of Our Lady of Consolation, which originated with Roman Catholics from Germany, became a Midwestern Slavic pilgrimage site in the early twentieth century. Polish American Roman Catholics from the Buffalo area, among others, had a hand in establishing Niagara Fall's National Shrine Basilica of Our Lady of Fatima. And a street-side Marian shrine—a Marian painting placed along an underpass beneath Interstate 90 in Chicago—is also claimed to be a point of attraction for Windy City Catholics of Latino and Polish descent.The primary Polish American interest in the book, however, is Terry Rey's chapter on Doylestown, Pennsylvania's National Shrine of Our Lady of Częstochowa. Rey is professor of religion at Temple University, focusing on African and African diasporic religions. Doylestown attracted his attention because, for years, Haitian communities have also made its Black Madonna a pilgrimage site.Rey provides brief overviews of Our Lady of Częstochowa, her place in Catholicism and history in Poland, as well as of Polish Catholics in the United States. His primary focus is evident in chapter's section headers: “Creolizing Mary in Pennsylvania,” and the “Racial and Devotional Diversity at the Shrine.” He notes that Our Lady of Częstochowa was known in Haiti. She was brought by Polish freedom fighters who in the aftermath of the Partitions of 1792 and 1795 initially went to France to throw in their lot with the revolutionaries, and later, Napoleon, in the hopes of fighting for Polish freedom. When the French dispatched them to Hispaniola to put down the Haitian Revolution, they instead joined the local revolution and eventually settled there. Rey admits there is no Haitian Jasna Góra, but the Haitian diaspora in the eastern United States and Canada has adopted Doylestown as a Haitian religious center.In discussing “devotional diversity,” it is clear from Rey's descriptions that two streams of Haitian religion practice coexist: a Roman Catholic one, and a syncretistic one mixed with vodou elements. Speaking of existing in tandem, that is also how he sees the Polish and Haitian (non)interaction at the Shrine and somewhat infers that the Haitians have been relegated to secondary status, for example by being left in the original “barn” chapel rather than the expansive upper shrine church. He salutes Miami Archbishop Thomas Wenski who, in offering Mass there in 2019, consciously included both communities.Given his scholarly interests, Rey's Haitian focus is hardly surprising, but it does not do justice to the Polish dimension of Doylestown, which is sometimes inadequately treated. For one, readers might infer that—like many urban parishes where another ethnicity has replaced the original founders—Doylestown's Polish character is vestigial. It is not. In fact, I would argue that it is more important than ever, given local bishops’ destruction of ethnic parishes, in the name of “renewal,” through consolidations and closings. Doylestown is a pilgrimage shrine for Polonia, too. Rey overlooks the annual August Polonian walking pilgrimage to Doylestown, an imitation of such treks to Jasna Góra in Poland, launched decades ago by the late Rev. Ignacy Kuziemski from Ss. Peter and Paul Church in Great Meadows, New Jersey. Unlike parishes, usually under diocesan priests’ care, the Pauline Fathers are primarily a Polish order. As in dioceses where bishops who might otherwise put ethnic parishes on the chopping block have the option of entrusting them to a religious order's care (such as the Polish Redemptorists in New Jersey), a nexus which sustains the original ethnic mission. Also unmentioned is the key role Polonia's postwar emigracja polityczna played in Doylestown: pace Rey, the cemetery is more the resting place of Polish World War II veterans than Vietnam soldiers. Likewise omitted is how Doylestown—Częstochowa amerykańska—symbolically served in the middle of the Cold War as a free world equivalent for Częstochowa polska. Pope Paul VI might have been barred from going to Jasna Góra, but Lyndon Baines Johnson, as President of the United States, did show up for the Doylestown dedication in the middle of the 1966 Millennium. In sum, the author's focus keeps with his interests, but does not tell the whole current story of Doylestown, including how it addresses Polish pastoral needs today.