By Ryan Ramsey
Ryan Ramsey (PhD, Baylor University) is a Visiting Assistant Professor of History and World Christianity at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary and a Louisville Institute Postdoctoral Fellow. His research in the Americas intersects decoloniality, popular theological development, historiography, and interreligious engagement. With Anna Wells, he is co-editor of The Five Distinctives of World Christianity: Essays in Honor of Carlos Cardoza-Orlandi, forthcoming with Baylor University Press.
Editorial Note, Stephen Di Trolio: For the following weeks, we will explore the theme of women and world Christianity. We will highlight the work of Baylor University PhD students and graduates as they discuss the centrality of women within the discussion of World Christianity and their research. This series provides a path for thinking about the manifold ways in which the theme of women and world Christianity intersect in their research and study. We are grateful for sharing these insights on their ongoing research. This is the second part – please see part II
The previous post from Anna Redhair Wells dealt with representations and translations of sanctity in Ethiopia. My research likewise deals with representations and—in a way—translations of the life of a saint. In my case, however, the saint is not recognized as one. Teresa Urrea, La Santa de Cabora, is not canonized. Yet I think that if they had been able to look into the future, her earliest followers would have been surprised by this reality. Sources around 1890 are full of hagiographic tropes: a Marian apparition, a reluctance to accept her call, and a proliferation of miracle stories. Even clerical disapproval was to be expected. Writers frequently compared her to holy women such as Bernadette Soubirous and Joan of Arc. Of course, they were rejected before they were beatified. Soubirous’s vision of the virgin at Lourdes took time and clerical discernment. Joan of Arc was famously executed as a heretic, only to be canonized hundreds of years later. Urrea has received no such holy reappraisal (and, to be honest, I doubt she will).
But why did Urrea’s story turn out so differently from her canonized counterparts? My study has revealed a variety of reasons. Akin to my colleagues’ subjects, the female body and representations of it were essential to her marginalization. In both Mexico and the United States, Urrea faced expectations of gender performance, which she did not neatly fit. In these contexts, hagiographic tropes quickly translated into evidence of insanity, instability, and delusion. In the eyes of some, Urrea’s indigenous blood and sexuality nullified whatever good came of her healing powers and religious authority. She transformed from a saint into someone hysterical and superstitious—even a witch. Nonetheless, many of her supplicants maintained devotion. The Christian gospel had been translated into their realities—not unlike at Tepeyac or Lourdes. Yet she had not been accepted like Juan Diego or Soubirous, and she and her devotees followed the gospel into an interreligious borderlands.
Many of the best primary sources on Urrea come from spiritists and spiritualists, in whose communities Urrea found acceptance. To those who might reject her saintliness, this religious crossing confirmed that her Christianity was merely surface level. I, however, find that it was Urrea’s Christianity that drove her own interreligiosity. There are two levels for understanding this. On the one hand, sources show the depth of Urrea’s commitment to Christ, Mary, and Christian ethics. Where those commitments stray from orthodox Roman Catholicism, they seem to be drawn from Indigenous Catholics of northern Mexico (who had fraught relationships with clergy). Her Christianity—even among spiritists—was deep-seated and grounded in an indigenized Catholicism.
Yet, on the other hand, lies the question of whether spiritism even constituted a separate religion. For some, it certainly did, but evidence shows that many Mexican spiritists understood themselves as Christians (some Catholic, some Protestant). Indeed, they understood spiritism as a church reform for the modern world and renewal of apostolic Christianity. Urrea represents this camp of spiritists. In seeking to follow Jesus closely, Urrea landed within this Christian renewal movement, spiritism. Her Christianity drove—what we at least perceive to be—her interreligiosity.
As I said, my attention to representations of women is akin to Well’s work, and questions of religious agency are surely affected by Andrilenas’s influence. Along these friends, I undertook much of my study of Urrea, presenting research in classes, conversing in the hallway, and learning from each other’s methodologies. Surely, the work of advisors, teachers, and readers played significant roles, but the practical influence of learning alongside each other shaped my research questions. Much of this collaboration has been informal, interspersed with laughter and stories about each others’ lives and families. No one truly thinks or researches in a vacuum, and my own questions are shaped and formed by my friends’ questions. One’s “comparative imagination” (to use Paul Kollman’s term in Jehu Hancile’s 2021 volume World Christianity) may be best exercised within these friendly dialogues, allowing other research contexts to cross-pollinate one’s own. In this way, the forthcoming post from David Chrisna will build on how we both encountered Christian interreligiosity among our research subjects, working together to find ways of understanding stories that are so distinct yet so familiar.
