In a book of inviting length, Michael J. Rogers tests Francis’s claim in Evangelii Gaudium, no. 126, that “expressions of popular piety” are an important locus theologicus for those “capable of reading them” (xvii). Rather than a single immersive participant-observer ethnographic method, this converted University of Toronto, Regis College, dissertation employs ethnographic tools alongside a fresh reading of primary source documents to bring together the contemporary and the historical in Marian cults from Bolivia to Lourdes to Mexico. Rogers tacks back and forth between descriptions of popular piety and theory that might illuminate them. The research has implications for theologies of prayer, Mary, and inculturation, as it offers “a model for rethinking a contextualized ecclesial communion” (xv). Indeed, its refusal to be hemmed in by theological subdisciplines is one of the book’s laudable attributes.
Rogers prioritizes the agency of the devout as he analyzes popular devotions formed in the wake of European colonialism: Our Lady of Copacabana (chapter 1), Our Lady of Guadalupe (chapter 4), including the cult to Santa Muerte in Mexico (chapter 3). Rogers’s attention to the beautiful, but not untroubled, novelty that emerges from a colonial and Indigenous clash is reminiscent of others who point to the importance of the people whose heritage lies in that bloody past, including Richard Rodriguez in Brown (2003) and Alberto Methol Ferré (called “Bergoglio’s philosopher” by Massimo Borghesi), who emphasized a mission for the patria grande of Latin America.
In examining the emergence of devotion to Our Lady of Lourdes (chapter 2), Rogers notes a less bloody confrontation of Enlightenment culture with village agrarianism, as manifested in source documents promoting the apparitions. In complex, and indeed “mixed,” devotions, Rogers insightfully finds a theology of local and the universal. Cults of the one Virgin Mary, in various cultural mediations, emerge from communities touched by an apparition. As devotion spreads, through the work of the Holy Spirit they become a gift to the universal church, shaping, in turn, doctrine and liturgy.
A strength of Rogers’s method is that it illuminates the sensus fidelium as not merely lodged in the minds of the laity to be considered, or not, by the bishops (163). Surveys are insufficient to perceive the Spirit speaking among the faithful. In dialogue with Newman and drawing upon the development of devotion to Guadalupe as a case study, chapter 4 notably advances a theology of the sensus fidelium as synodal exchange, but one spoken through embodied prayer. Guadalupe is an example of the wider impact of popular devotion, as she was proposed to the church universal for veneration, even as she “helped to forge a new culture altogether” (137). It would be interesting to apply Rogers’s method to the devotion to Saint Faustina, connected to the much older devotion to Our Lady of Częstochowa. That devotion moved from a local cult to liturgical and doctrinal prominence with perhaps a heavier papal hand than some others.
Chapter 3 demonstrates that such listening cannot be one-way or uncritical. Here, Rogers brings together economic analysis, ethnographic observation, the tradition of lament, and Jean-Luc Marion’s theory of idols to investigate devotion to Santa Muerte. The precarity of Santa Muerte’s devout, created by transatlantic and subsequent Western hemispheric domination, inspired a cult of death. Rogers does not prescind from critique of the devotion. Noting Francis’s attempts to redirect death’s devout to Guadalupe, Rogers finds in the devotion something of the human tendency to idolatry (115). Analyzing Lourdes, Rogers recovered a sophisticated theology of patronage as facilitating growth in understanding (77, 84). With Santa Muerte, interestingly, the lack of a patronage relationship, of a give and take, illuminates the idolatry. Death never disappoints. “Supplications offered to Santa Muerte for the death of an enemy … are ultimately always answered” (113). A virtue of Many Paths with Mary is not only its freedom from the boundaries of theological subfields, but also Rogers’s ability to employ insights from nontheological disciplines in illuminating ways, avoiding reductionism.
Quite accessible for having begun as a dissertation, Many Paths with Mary is suitable for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses. It would be of particular interest in courses on theological method.
