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This chapter provides an overview of festivities (fiestas) in early modern Manila, arguing that musical practice provided a focal point of interface between differing cultures, races, and religions. It explores the ways in which different communities in Manila expressed collective identities through music, and contends that although some degree of temporary social liberation was embodied in these performances, fiestas essentially reinforced rigid hierarchies of class and race within colonial society. The chapter surveys musical performances in festivities for royal occasions, celebrations honoring the entries of important personages to the city (including a Sultan of Sulu, 'Azīm ud‐Dīn I), observances of beatifications and canonizations, and seasonal and votive festivities. Finally, it considers the question of whether fiestas in early modern Manila promoted racial integration or racial segregation.

The first part of the chapter gives a brief account of the bloody fratricidal war fought in Croatia and Bosnia‐Herzegovina in 1991–5, which resulted from ethnic nationalistic revolutions aimed at destroying the multiethnic federation of Yugoslavia founded by the communists, and establishing independent homogeneous states. Further wars would continue in 1998 (between the Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo) and in 2001 (between Albanians and Macedonians in Macedonia). The main part of the chapter discusses religion and nationalism in these successor states – Islam and Muslim nationalism in Bosnia‐Herzegovina, Catholicism (the Madonna of Medjugorje) and Croatian nationalism in Bosnia‐Herzegovina and Croatia, and the Orthodox Church in Serbia (and Kosovo), Macedonia, and Montenegro. The remaining two sections of the chapter discuss saint making in Croatia in the late 1990s, and the role of religious organizations in the international peace process.

John Henry Newman is without a doubt one of the founding Doctors of the Church. The Roman Catholic Church however, would not declare him as such unless he had first been canonised as a saint. This conclusion would come to fruition in 1991, when Pope John Paul II declared Newman to be “Venerable” or a figure to be venerated for the “heroic virtues” that he displayed in his life. This formal papal recognition followed the completion in 1986 of a thorough study of his life and writings conducted by a historical commission established by the diocese in which he lived and worked following his founding of the Birmingham Oratory. The formal recognition by the Pope of Newman as “Venerable” still required divine confirmation of beatification in order for him to reach the next rung in the ladder to sainthood.

This chapter engages with responses to the beatification in 1886 of a number of English Catholics executed during the Reformation era, as a means of exploring their significance to Catholic culture and to Protestant-Catholic relations. It examines the reporting of the beatifications in the Press, as well as pamphlet publications and architecture, especially the imposing Our Lady and the English Martyrs’ Church in Cambridge. All were used to express, and to create, pride in the martyr ‘heritage’ of the English Catholic Church. This was so important because although the individuals promoting the martyrs’ cause were mainly clerical, scholarly, and often convert Catholics, they sought to embed devotion among a Catholic population that was mostly lay, socially comprehensive, and in large part ethnically Irish. Controversy surrounding the English Catholic martyrs also draws attention to tensions within Catholicism, between Ultramontanism and a self-consciously ‘English’ Catholicism: the martyrs were canonised as exemplars of loyalty to papal authority, yet they enabled English Catholics to celebrate saints of their own ‘native soil’. More broadly speaking, as we shall see, the martyrs were magnets for those concerned with the theological and ecclesiological questions of the late nineteenth century. They enabled Catholics, at least, to reclaim England’s past from dominant Protestant narratives.

This chapter traces saint-seeking from 1884 to 1925, providing short biographies of the early U.S. nominees for sainthood, most of whom were European missionaries to North America in the colonial and early national period. It argues that these prospective saints served as double symbols, proving to Rome that holiness had flourished on American soil and demonstrating to Protestant Americans that Catholics could be loyal U.S. citizens. This chapter highlights the connections between hagiography and historiography in the work of prominent church leaders like James Cardinal Gibbons and John Gilmary Shea, provides short biographies of the Jesuit Martyrs and other early nominees for sainthood, explains key terms such as postulator, and outlines the procedures for canonization and its precursor, beatification.

The first official inquiry into Maria Maddalena’s holiness (the ‘informative process’ for her beatification) marked her first step in the legal process for canonization. This chapter explores how this enquiry came to be started and proposes Maria Maddalena’s case as an example of some of the confusion regarding the canonization process at the turn of the seventeenth century. It considers the testimonies that this process gathered and sets out an image of Maria Maddalena’s holiness that incorporated her virtues and many miracles. In particular it explores the contributions made by the nuns of S. Maria degli Angeli and their confirmation of the biography their confessor had produced.

This chapter offers an in-depth examination of Maria Maddalena’s progress to beatification in 1626. This provides us with insights into the difficulties that the causes of the recently deceased faced in the early seventeenth century in addition to the usual challenges of pushing a case through a complex bureaucratic and legal process. At the same time as her cause stalled, her devotional cult had continued to grow, promoted not only by the nuns of S. Maria degli Angeli but also by a range of secondary patrons who shared their belief in her sanctity with others. Her beatification, when it came, was testimony to the power of papal support and came specifically without the involvement of the Carmelite Order: this beata belonged simply to a convent of nuns.

Personal ties between the Barberini family and the convent of S. Maria degli Angeli gave the nuns hope that Maria Maddalena would be canonized soon after her beatification, but this was not the case. This chapter examines Urban VIII’s failure to canonize her in the context of his reforms to the canonization process. The Barberini pontiff, famed for his nepotism, in this case passed over the opportunity to favour his family in order to uphold the integrity of his reforms. The result was that Maria Maddalena’s cause stalled until the 1660s. Papal patronage meanwhile brought two spectacular new convents for the nuns, one in Florence and one in Rome, and the chapter moves to discuss the important contribution these made to Maria Maddalena’s cause for canonization.