Matthew J. Cressler – författare

Explores the contentious debates among Black Catholics about the proper relationship between religious practice and racial identity Chicago has been known as the Black Metropolis. But before the Great Migration, Chicago could have been called the Catholic Metropolis, with its skyline defined by parish spires as well as by industrial smoke stacks and skyscrapers. This book uncovers the intersection of the two. Authentically Black and Truly Catholic traces the developments within the church in Chicago to show how Black Catholic activists in the 1960s and 1970s made Black Catholicism as we know it today. The sweep of the Great Migration brought many Black migrants face-to-face with white missionaries for the first time and transformed the religious landscape of the urban North. The hopes migrants had for their new home met with the desires of missionaries to convert entire neighborhoods. Missionaries and migrants forged fraught relationships with one another and tens of thousands of Black men and women became Catholic in the middle decades of the twentieth century as a result. These Black Catholic converts saved failing parishes by embracing relationships and ritual life that distinguished them from the evangelical churches proliferating around them. They praised the "quiet dignity" of the Latin Mass, while distancing themselves from the gospel choirs, altar calls, and shouts of "amen!" increasingly common in Black evangelical churches. Their unique rituals and relationships came under intense scrutiny in the late 1960s, when a growing group of Black Catholic activists sparked a revolution in U.S. Catholicism. Inspired by both Black Power and Vatican II, they fought for the self-determination of Black parishes and the right to identify as both Black and Catholic. Faced with strong opposition from fellow Black Catholics, activists became missionaries of a sort as they sought to convert their coreligionists to a distinctively Black Catholicism. This book brings to light the complexities of these debates in what became one of the most significant Black Catholic communities in the country, changing the way we view the history of American Catholicism.

Exposes the deep Catholic roots of American horrorFrom exorcisms to suffocating catacombs, grinning corpses, and electric holy water, Catholicism and American horror go hand in hand. Body and Blood cuts horror open to reveal how the Catholic tradition has shaped its supernatural and grotesque aesthetics in the modern world.Making the case that it is impossible to understand the enduring popularity of horror without recognizing its religious elements, this volume makes two groundbreaking claims. First, that there is a profoundly Catholic current coursing through modern American horror and that the genre comes alive in new ways when we hold it to the light of the Catholic past. And second, that Catholic history is horrifying in ways that demand our attention, ranging from the supernatural figures who visited children with visions of the apocalypse to settler colonialism and clergy sexual abuse. Catholicism is not exceptional in its capacity to horrify, of course. However, this book shows how contending with the Catholic dimension of the genre teaches us something important about horror and its hold on audiences in the United States, and it invites us to understand Catholicism anew.Offering a shocking view of Catholic history as you have never seen it before, Body and Blood presents both scholars and fans alike with an accessible entry into the dark underbelly of America's religious landscape.