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Chapter One examines several texts produced or published by Spanish friars that narrate the origins of some of the most significant apparitions of the Virgin Mary in the colonial Philippines. Often serving as the preface to novenas (a nine day cycle of prayers), these apparition tales reach a zenith of mass production in chapbook form in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. They make history out of popular lore and render complete accounts with only incomplete archival records. These apparition tales are also, at times, violent narratives of exclusion of those communities that posed the greatest threat to Spanish authority. But insofar as these tales are usually written in the local vernaculars and attuned to the specificities of place, they invite one to read against the grain of their colonial authors’ agendas. These texts represent the worldview whereby the sacred was highly localized, particular, and believed immanent to material forms.

This chapter considers Muslim attendance at a Marian sanctuary in Algeria, Our Lady of Africa in Algiers, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. It examines the sanctuary's relationship to a changing political environment. It analyzes how the political background frames the context for the choreography of daily life at this Catholic site, paying attention to the complexity of the interplay between different forces and interests in the colonial and, later, postcolonial state. Moreover, it takes the issue of proselytism into account as a key factor in order to understand the political context and the symbolic repercussions of Muslim attendance at a Christian sanctuary. It shows that Muslim people (and also some Jews) rapidly adopted the supernatural resources offered by the semiotics of the new sanctuary as a part of the repertoire of an eclectic devotional practice that seemed more attentive to the efficacy of the shrine than to its religious affiliation.

This chapter offers a feminist reading of two Irish cases that raise important ethical and legal concerns:  the unnecessary peripartum hysterectomies at Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital Drogheda and the tragic death of Savita Halappanavar in October 2012. Key to this feminist analysis is a desire to understand the mechanisms by which the voices and concerns of the women at the centre of these cases were ignored, marginalised and trivialised. The chapter addresses the cultural dis-ease with women’s bodies and reproductive autonomy and the excess of epistemic and moral authority vested in doctors and religious leaders and the correlated lack of authority invested in women patients and midwives.

This chapter explores Barbet Schroeder’s violent and romantic Spanish-language Colombian drama Our Lady of the Assassins (2000). The film, based on the 1994 novel by Fernando Vallejo, tells the story of the love affair between a disillusioned middle-aged writer and a teenage gang member. Their relationship plays out against a backdrop of violence and tension in Medellín, Colombia. Schroeder’s approach to the subject stresses the normality of the relationship and the ordinariness of the violence. The result is a film that embraces a non-judgmental take on a type of relationship that movies are not accustomed to portraying. I argue that Schroeder’s work is akin to Emmanuel Levinas’s positioning of ethics as ‘first philosophy’, namely, that we are ethical before we are anything else. I draw in particular on Levinas scholar Adriaan T. Peperzak’s work to explore the implications of this, relating it to Schroeder’s film style in Our Lady of the Assassins.

The author demonstrates how the Mexican Catholic imagination is not fixed but is always evolving as women experience life and as their Catholic faith and devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe grows deeper. It is argued that the women’s Catholic devotion is fluid and moves and is shaped by their lived experience. They come in contact with the sacred through touch, the smell of fresh flowers, the taste of special foods, the holy images at home, all reminding them that they are not alone but in communion with saints. As a result, as the women mature, the way they relate to La Virgen de Guadalupe becomes more holistic and complex.

In the year 1519 a caravel bound for these islands left the city and harbor of Santa María de la Antigua del Darién, which is in Tierra Firme on the Gulf of Urabá in the jurisdiction of Castilla del Oro. Crossing this gulf it ran into a large storm which blew it toward Fernandina Island. Each time that the people on board found themselves sucked under the waves and almost sunk, the Mother of God pulled them up from beneath the water. Two women called the Taviras and other persons traveling in this caravel, but from these women especially, according to what was reported, there were many tears and from the others as well. In that caravel was traveling a mendicant coming from Tierra Firme with the alms collected for Our Lady of Guadalupe.

This chapter focuses on the formal declaration of public sanctuary at La Placita Church by Fr. Olivares. In step with the national sanctuary movement in the country, Fr. Olivares believed that after four years of assisting the refugees the time had come to announce public sanctuary. La Placita would be a safe space for refugees against immigration officials who regarded them as “illegal aliens.” On December 12, 1985-the feast day of Our Lady of Guadalupe-and in a formal Mass, Fr. Olivares declared La Placita a public sanctuary. This chapter also deals with the tense relationship of Fr. Olivares with Archbishop Roger Mahony over sanctuary.

This chapter is about the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe and its ability to serve as a beacon to Mexican immigrants in New York City, as well as its circulation. The chapter focuses in part on la misión guadalupana, the practice of carrying an image of Our Lady of Guadalupe from home to home, one of the most common practices among comités guadalupanos around the city. La misión is frequently one of the activities least known to outsiders but most important for the members of the comités, not only for marking members and potential members as part of the community but also a means by which the group makes claims over a specific local territory.

This chapter centers on a single week of exuberant religious celebrations at Notre Dame, which concentrates on the Feast of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, Haiti's patron saint. These celebrations are certainly among the most significant forms of Haitian religious life in North America. If the Haitian presence at the feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel in New York represents the largest annual religious gathering of Haitians in North America, then the week-long celebrations each June at Notre Dame represents the largest originally Haitian—one that takes place at a venue created by Haitians—religious event in the Haitian diaspora. Of the three sides of the Haitian religious triangle of forces, Catholicism has in many ways enjoyed the smoothest transition in its migration to and settlement in America.

Zambia (population 10.7 million) is a landlocked country in Southern Africa that covers an area of 5, 664 km². Palliative care is provided by six organizations delivering a total of twenty services. A feature of Zambian palliative care services is the prominence of the inpatient unit. The chapter describes the Mother of Mercy Hospice, Jon Hospice, Ranchhod House, Our Lady's Hospice, Martin Hospice, and Cicetekelo Hospice (Ndola Hospice). In particular, their reimbursement and funding for services, opioid availability and consumption, palliative care coverage, education and training, and palliative care workforce capacity are summarized. The national and professional organizations include Catholic Archdiocese of Lusaka and Zambian Palliative Care Association. Moreover, it addresses the history and development of hospice-palliative care in Zambia.

Chicana feminist interpretations of Our Lady of Guadalupe tend to depart from traditional representations and have caused controversy. This chapter examines the responses of three different groups of women of different ages and backgrounds to some of these feminist artistic representations of Our Lady of Guadalupe in order to explore how the women articulate feminism and how their own definitions relate to their understanding of this sacred figure. The chapter analyzes how Las Damas, Las Madres, and Las Mujeres’ understanding of La Virgen informs their responses, revealing much about their understanding of feminism and the workings of lived religion in their Mexican Catholic imagination.

This chapter recounts the founding of the two comités guadalupanos that were the focus of the research and the umbrella organization that links them, the Asociación Tepeyac. It focuses on three kinds of activities that two certain parishes engage in, not only for the ways they illustrate different modes of mobilization and institutional contexts, but also for the way they illuminate the experiences of Mexican immigrants in New York City more generally. The first is Saint John Parish's Comité Guadalupano, presided over by Father John Kenny, whose benevolent and cheerful but hands-off approach differed from the relationship the Comité of Our Lady of Rosary Parish had with its pastor. Additionally, there seems to be more emphasis within the latter parish relative to other churches on forging a generic Catholic identity, devoid of vernacular religiosities.

This chapter focuses on “the sisters,” members of women's religious communities (“nuns,” strictly speaking, were members of cloistered communities; most U.S. sisters pursued active vocations outside monastic settings). These “women religious” were surely the most conspicuous signs of Catholic presence in the Unites States from the Civil War era through the 1960s. Members of women's religious communities taught millions of parochial school students; others provided social services to immigrants and the poor. The Sisters of Our Lady of Christian Doctrine—among dozens of communities responding to the needs of immigrants—adapted the settlement house tradition founded by secular reformers with whom they shared many concerns with one fundamental difference: a sacramental worldview inspiriting apostolic work for personal rebirth and social renewal.

This chapter examines the rise of a panethnic identity among Latin Americans in San Francisco from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. Detailing some of the more pressing qualities of daily life for this population, it explores the ways Latin Americans adapted to their transnational condition and confronted the challenges of racially restrictive norms. These forces fueled the creation of the Spanish-language “national parish” of Our Lady of Guadalupe as a defense and an affirmative expression of a panethnic vision of community. The city's heterogeneous Latin American-descent population found in Guadalupe Church a space to forge a situational form of latinidad, a shared Latino identity.

This chapter considers two high profile Irish inquiries: the Lourdes Hospital Inquiry on the Neary case and the Health Information and Quality Authority (HIQA) Report on University Hospital Galway and the care of Savita Halappanavar from an organisational ethics perspective. The chapter outlines the significance of systemic factors in both cases and draws on literature from organisational clinical ethics and business ethics to provide a framework for thinking about the wider ethical responsibilities of healthcare organisations. It outlines how organisational structures are directly implicated in the facilitation of ethical actions by members of the organisation.

This chapter explores a Cuban-American ecclesiology informed by the faith expressions of this particular community. It explores the primacy and theological function of popular religion within Latino/a theology and analyses Cuban and Cuban-American popular religious practices, emphasizing two particular expressions: devotion to Our Lady of Charity and to Saint Lazarus. It also describes the key features of a Cuban-American ecclesiology and discusses its contribution to the broader church.

In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century New Spain, criollos – Spaniards born in the New World – would shape stories about Madonnas of the conquest in order to express criollo patriotism, the sense that New Spain was as worthy as Spain. Marian images connected to the conquest, such as Los Remedios in Mexico City and La Conquistadora in Puebla, became prized objects over which various communities contended. As criollos elaborated a serviceable vision of history through their Virgins of the conquest, these Madonnas acquired a distinctively colonial identity that embraced the indigenous world. Indigenous actors were granted increasing space in these legends, taking on the role of witness to Mary’s love for all of New Spain’s inhabitants. In the seventeenth century, new legends about other Marian images, such Our Lady of Guadalaupe in Mexico City, would create Madonnas truly indigenous to New Spain, but stories about the Virgins of the conquest would remain important.