Colonial Saints: Discovering the Holy in the Americas.

Colonial Saints: Discovering the Holy in the Americas Edited by Allan Greer and Jodi Bilinkoff Routledge, $24.95, 317 pp.

The papers that make up Colonial Saints were first delivered at a Toronto conference. The plural "Americas" in the subtitle is quite correct: the collection includes essays discussing saintliness in Central and Latin America (as well as one on Haiti) and the world of New France, with one paper focused on the thirteen colonies. At least one essay makes some links here: Allan Greer expertly examines the way a biography of the Mohawk blessed, Kateri Tekakwitha, was used in Mexico to argue for the right of Indian women to enter the cloister, by showing that indigenous people (women in particular) were capable of heroic sanctity and "constancy" (read: sexual discipline), despite stereotypical judgments to the contrary.

Carla Pestana's discussion of Quakers hanged in seventeenth-century Massachusetts because of their perceived heterodoxy raises the issue of how the Quakers themselves could find an adequate language for their martyrs, without identifying with the vocabulary of either Catholics or the popular Protestant martyrology compiled by John Foxe. What the Quaker accounts had in common with the oldest acts of the martyrs (think of the Martyrdom of Polycarp) was the Christological reading they gave to sacrificial deaths. The martyrs died in allegiance to Christ, who died at the hands of executioners.

Dominique Deslandres's study of the great women of New France--so central to Catholicism's vigor in the seventeenth century--demonstrates the way these women (some of them great mystics like Marie of the Incarnation) imitated earlier female saints and, at the same time, advanced new modes of holiness, whether as hospital sisters, recluses, or teachers. She points out--and this can never be noted enough--that they frequently served as spiritual directors for many lay people.

Many of these studies look closely at the lives of people well known to any educated Catholic (Rose of Lima and Isaac Jogues, for example). Others bring to our attention lesser-known figures. Jodi Bilinkoff, one of the editors of this volume and the author of a fine book on Avila in the time of Saint Teresa, provides us with a wonderful study of spiritual friendship in the story of Gregorio Lopez who came to Mexico City and soon developed a reputation for great holiness. He led the life of a recluse but caught the attention of a local priest, Francisco Losa, who gave up his comfortable curacy to join him as a kind of chaplain, servant, and friend. Losa later wrote a life of Lopez but, as Bilinkoff notes, nobody thought it odd that a priest should put himself under the tutelage of a mere layman. Losa continued his hermit life for another twenty years, providing a living rebuke to those clerics who were often dismissed as "poorly educated, venal, and corrupt."

Some studies investigate the diffusion of the cult of saints whose origins were not in the New World (for example, Saint Anne and Saint Anthony of Padua), while others deal with cases like that of the Mexican bishop of Puebla, Juan de Palafox, who was never canonized (except in the hearts of the faithful of the region) for reasons that were political and unedifying.

The authors of these essays are professors of history, literature, or art history. A few are weak in matters pertaining to Catholic doctrine and practice, but the essays are generally free of academic jargon. The book is especially interesting in reminding us that great sanctity is not confined to Europe. Nonetheless, even when the cult of saints was exported from the Old World to the new, figures like Antony of Padua and Anne transplanted quite well.