Were the Acadians/Cajuns (really)
“devout Catholics”?
Michael P. Carroll
Summary : For almost three centuries the Acadians of Acadia and
their Cajun descendants in Louisiana have been described as “devout
Catholics.” Unfortunately, anyone who searches for evidence of this
long-standing stereotype, either in the historical or ethnographic literature, finds that such evidence is simply not there. Given this problem, my goal in this article is to merge feminist theory with the few
bits and pieces of information that we do have about the lived experience of Catholicism in Acadian communities in order to propose
another way of “seeing” Cajun Catholics and Cajun Catholicism. In
particular, I want to suggest that at least in the nineteenth century,
Cajun religiosity derived less from “piety” (as that term is commonly
understood) and more from ways of “doing gender” in Cajun communities.
Résumé : Pendant près de trois siècles, on a décrit les Acadiens de
l’Acadie et leurs descendants cajuns de la Louisiane comme de pieux
catholiques. Malheureusement, les preuves recherchées pour confirmer
ce stéréotype persistant tant dans les littératures historiques et ethnographiques demeurent introuvables. Le but de cet article est donc d’incorporer la théorie féministe au peu d’informations existant au sujet de
l’expérience vécue du catholicisme dans les communautés acadiennes
afin de voir sous un autre jour les catholiques cajuns et leur catholicisme. J’aimerais suggérer en particulier, au moins pour le XIXe siècle,
que la religiosité cajun venait moins de la piété (comme on l’entend traditionnellement) mais plutôt de « l’institutionnalisation des sexes »
dans les communautés cajuns.
Introduction
Some time ago, Norbert Robichaud (1955), then the Archbishop of Monction, recounted how he had posed a question to a visiting historian who
Michael P. Carroll is Professor of Sociology at the University of Western Ontario, London, ON
N6A 5C2; e-mail: [email protected]. Research for this article was supported by a grant from
the Academic Development Fund of the University of Western Ontario.
Studies in Religion / Sciences Religieuses 31/3-4 (2002): 323 - 337
© 2003 Canadian Corporation for Studies in Religion / Corporation Canadienne des Sciences Religieuses
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specialized in Acadian history. Why was it, asked Robichaud, that Acadian
exiles living in France after 1755 had worked so hard to return to North
America, either returning to Acadia1 itself or settling in southern Louisiana?
After all, said Robichaud, only a century and a half separated them from
their French ancestors. The historian’s response, according to the good
Archbishop, was simple. The Acadians were deeply attached both to their
religion and to the Church, and yet this was a period of French history in
which the French Church was under attack. The Acadians returned to America because there they could more freely practice the Catholicism to which
they were so deeply devoted.
There are of course other ways to explain the return of these Acadian
exiles. Naomi Griffiths (1992: 122 - 23), for example, suggests that these
exiles were dissatisfied with life in France because they had lived for so long
in a land marked by relatively greater material abundance and because they
were unused to the restrictions and obligations imposed by the French
bureaucracy. Nevertheless, the Archbishop’s claim that the Acadians had
a deep and continuing attachment to Catholicism is a claim with a long
history.
The Acadians as “devout Catholics”
The earliest and (seemingly) most authoritative statements depicting the
Acadians as “devout Catholics” appear in the correspondence that Acadian
leaders themselves sent to various authorities during the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. These early self-characterizations, however, need to be
approached with caution. As Carl Brasseaux (1989: xiv-xv) points out, when
writing to French authorities after 1755, Acadian leaders routinely stressed
that their expulsion had been occasioned mainly by their loyalty to the
French crown, whereas when writing to Spanish authorities (who governed
in Louisiana from 1766 to 1803) they suggested that it had been occasioned
by their deep attachment to the Catholic tradition. In other words, it would
appear that Acadian leaders stressed whatever seemed most likely to elicit
support from the particular authority (French or Spanish) to whom they
were writing. Since historians now recognize that the first claim (that the
Acadians of Acadia were deeply loyal to the French crown) was likely incorrect (see Griffiths 1973), there are certainly grounds for scepticism concerning the second claim (that they were good Catholics). Such scepticism
notwithstanding, this early Acadian depiction of themselves as devout
Catholics came to be accepted at face value.
In Longfellow’s Evangeline (1871 [orig. 1847]), which was extraordinarily influential in shaping 19th-century perceptions of the Acadians, the Acadians of Grand Pré (in Acadia) were honest and hard-working rural folk who
freely shared their material goods and delighted in singing ballads and
telling tales. They were also devout Catholics who regularly attended church;
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325
who prayed the Angelus daily; and who obeyed the gentle but firm admonitions of their local priest, Father Felician. Longfellow’s bucolic vision of the
Acadians, including the suggestion that they were devoutly Catholic, quickly
found its way into scholarly histories. Rameau de Saint-Père (1889: 89), for
example, suggested that:
[The Acadians] were, very simply, a decent people—very mindful of one for the
other, very religious and very devoted to their families, living happily in the midst of
their children without a lot of worries. One can characterize these people in two
words: they were happy and they were honest.
Similar depictions can be found in general histories of Acadia straight
through to the 1960s (for examples, see Griffiths 1973: 21-22). Generally, as
regards Acadian Catholicism, scholarly histories differed from Longfellow’s
account in only one respect: historians, unlike Longfellow, knew that priests
were scarce in Acadia. This, however, was (and is) seen as reinforcing the
claim that the Acadians were devout, i.e., the Acadians were good Catholics
because they maintained their faith despite the scarcity of priests (see Dorman 1983: 37; Sigur 1983: 127-29).
Acadian exiles started to settle in southwestern Louisiana during the
early 1760s, and by the late 1780s they constituted a significant proportion of
the local population. We now have several accounts of the Cajun communities and traditions which developed in Louisiana, and these accounts routinely suggest that Cajuns retained that deep attachment to Catholicism
that had been so much a feature of life in Acadia itself (see Baker 1983:
102; Conrad 1983: 12; Dorman 1983: 37).
Unfortunately, anyone who searches for evidence of this longstanding
and continuing depiction of the Acadians and their Cajun descendants as
“devout Catholics” quickly encounters disappointment on both counts.
Thus, I see no details on what might be called the “the lived experience of
Catholicism” in any of the standard reference works on Acadian history
(including Clark 1968; Dorman 1983; Griffiths 1973). Historians, I grant,
might be forgiven for their inattention to the matter of Acadian piety on the
grounds that surviving historical records have little to say about this particular subject. What is more surprising, I think, is that this same inattention to
the lived experience of Catholicism is also a feature of ethnographic
accounts of Cajun life. There is nothing, for instance, in Lauren Post’s
widely cited Cajun Sketches (1990 [1962]), which deals with Acadian life on
the prairies of southwestern Louisiana in the late 1800s and early 1900s, to
suggest that Acadians were especially religious.
Studies of “Acadian Catholicism” do exist, but in almost all cases these
are studies concerned with the institutional Church. John Howard Young’s
(1988: 5-6) review of the “classic” literature on Acadian Catholicism prior to
1755, for example, suggests that it was overwhelmingly concerned with the
activities of missionary orders like the Jesuits and the Sulpicians in Acadia.
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Even now, the vast majority of articles on Acadian Catholicism published in
Les Cahiers de la Société historique acadienne are concerned with things like
the careers of particular missionary priests or bishops; the early history of
particular missionary orders or particular teaching orders; and so on.
Charles Nolan’s (1993) review of “Catholic historiography” in Louisiana
makes it clear that exactly these same topics have always been the primary
concern of those writing on Acadian Catholicism in Louisiana.
This emphasis on the institutional Church is also evident in the one
issue that has generated more debate than any other in the scholarly literature on Acadian Catholicism: the matter of “priestly influence.” It was common for British colonial administrators after 1713 to suggest that the Acadians were overly-influenced by French priests whose loyalty was to the French
crown, and British apologists for the expulsions which occurred in the late
1750s routinely cited such “priestly influence” as among the things that justified those expulsions. One result is that scholars writing on Acadian history
have always felt the need to assess this claim, that is, to determine if the Acadians were (or were not) under priestly control. Even Carl Brasseaux (1987),
whose work is now central to all accounts of the Acadian experience, devotes
most of his chapter on religion (150-66) to “priestly influence.” In regard to
the issue itself, the bulk of the evidence suggests that the influence exerted
by priests on the Acadians was either variable, being highly dependent on
the personality and ideology of the priest involved (Griffiths 1973: 46-47), or
generally minimal (Brasseaux 1987). The main point, however, is that this
long-standing concern with “priestly influence” both reflects and reinforces
the historiographical focus on the institutional Church that has so far pervaded the scholarship on Acadian Catholicism.
John Howard Young: Two reasons for believing that the Acadians were
good Catholics
John Howard Young (1988) is one of the few investigators who constitutes an
exception to the historiographical patterns noted above. Young’s primary
goal, in fact, was to defend the popular stereotype that is the focus of this
article: that the Acadians were deeply and devoutly Catholic. In doing this,
he sets up this claim against a counter-claim: namely, that the Acadian attachment to Catholicism was primarily a matter of identity politics, i.e., they saw
themselves as Catholic mainly because this was a way of distinguishing themselves from other groups with whom they competed for scarce resources.
Young’s argument, in a nutshell, is that while this second hypothesis might
possibly explain Acadian attachment to Catholicism in pre-1755 Acadia
(where their Catholicism was a way of distinguishing themselves from British
Protestants), it cannot explain why the Acadians remained good Catholics in
Louisiana, where they regularly interacted with other Catholics (notably
Spanish and French Creole Catholics).
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Young never once doubts that the Acadians were good Catholics. What is
interesting (for us) are the two (and only two) pieces of evidence that he
brings forward to support this claim. First, he says, one of the recurring
themes in the correspondence that Acadian leaders directed to local authorities (French and English officials in Acadia; Spanish officials in Louisiana)
was a request to send them priests. Second, the Acadians—in both Acadia
and Louisiana—practiced the lay baptism of their children despite the disapproval of this practice expressed by the official Church. For Young, both
patterns are evidence that the Acadians had a deep desire to participate in
the sacramental life of the Church on a regular basis—and so fully justifies
the view that they were devout Catholics. Unfortunately, although the patterns identified by Young are solidly attested in the historical record, they
can be explained in more than one way. Take, for example, the recurrent
Acadian demand for priests.
In his analysis of the relation between priests and laity in Acadian communities, Carl Brasseaux (1987: 155) amasses much archival evidence suggesting that Acadians regarded their priests as “religious administrators”
whose job was to record information (relating to property ownership, for
example) and to administer sacraments (mainly marriage) on an occasional
basis. For Brasseaux, the fact that the Acadians saw priests to be functionaries, expected only to perform certain tasks on an occasional basis, explains
why the Acadians so often requested priests (the pattern that is so important
for Young) and why they were willing to contribute toward the initial establishment of a church—but it also explains, for Brasseaux, why the Acadians
routinely resisted (as they did) contributing to the ongoing maintenance of
their local church and why they responded with hostility (as they did) whenever local priests tried to exercise anything more than a loose control over
their daily life.
Brasseaux’s account, I might add, seems generally consistent with
another pattern: despite their requests for priests, the Acadians themselves—
both in Acadia and Louisiana—were always a poor source of priestly vocations. Young (1988: 187-89) himself recognized that this might be seen as
undermining the suggestion that the Acadians were attached to their faith,
and explains (or really, explains away) the lack of Acadian vocations by suggesting that the great distance of Acadian communities from the nearest
available seminary would have made a seminary education for a son too
prohibitively expensive for most Acadian families. The fact is, however, that
plans to establish a seminary in New Orleans in the late 1700s came to
naught mainly because Church authorities concluded that the French-speaking families, both Creole and Acadian, simply had no inclination to send
their sons to such an institution (Curley 1940: 169-71). This Acadian disinclination to enter the priesthood, I might add, persisted well into the 20th
century (Ancelet 1985: 26; Sigur 1983: 131).
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The main point, however, is that if Brasseaux is correct in his account of
how the Acadians regarded their priests (as functionaries expected to perform only occasional tasks), then there is nothing in the recurrent Acadian
demand for priests which is necessarily indicative of a strongly internalized
desire to participate in the sacramental life of the Church on a regular and
recurrent basis. In the end, then, while the recurrent Acadian request for
priests is obviously evidence that they were Catholic, it cannot be taken as
clear evidence that they were good Catholics or devout Catholics.
What about Young’s second piece of evidence, namely, the fact that
Acadians routinely practiced the lay baptism of infants? In interpreting this
practice, Young takes it as self-evident that Acadian parents baptized their
children only because priests were not available and so implicitly assumes
that parents would have their children re-baptized “officially” when a priest
did visit the community. In fact, although the evidence is fragmentary, it
would appear from Brasseaux’s (1987: 160) analysis of baptismal records in
selected Cajun communities that many, and perhaps most, Cajun children
were not eventually re-baptized by a priest even though a priest might someday visit the community involved. What such data hint at, I suggest, is that
the lay baptism of infants may have had a “meaning” for Cajun parents that
has so far been missed. For example, it would appear that holy water was also
sprinkled on the corpse at Cajun funerals (Daniels 1990: 111). The fact that
holy water was sprinkled on both infants and corpses might suggest that its
meaning was more connected to folk traditions concerning transitions
between this world and the next than to a desire to participate in the sacramental life of the Church.
In the end, then, there are other ways of interpreting the two bits of evidence that Young brings forward in support of his contention that the Acadians were devout Catholics. Does this mean that the Acadians were not
“devout Catholics”? Not at all. It simply means that the case is not proven.
How then to proceed in investigating Acadian Catholicism? One option, I
suggest, is to recognize that the standards associated with the official Church
(regular attendance at Sunday mass, fulfilment of the Easter duty, knowledge
of Church doctrine, etc.) are not the only meaningful criteria that might be
used to assess Catholic religiosity. In particular, Acadian religiosity might
be assessed by looking to see if those things that are routinely taken as indicators of (popular) Catholic religiosity in other socio-cultural contexts were
or were not present in the Acadian case.
The stuff of popular Catholicism in other areas
Although “popular Catholicism” has always exhibited variation over time
and across different cultural contexts, there are nevertheless certain regularities that appear in the historical record. In areas like Spain, the Spanish
Americas, France and Italy, for example, rituals centred around a miraculous
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image (usually of the Virgin) were typically an important element in the
lived experience of Catholicism. Something else central to the lived experience of popular Catholicism was pilgrimage, that is, travel to a site that had
been sacralized in some manner. Sometimes this meant that the site possessed a particularly powerful miraculous image or a particularly important
set of saintly relics; in other cases, it meant that a supernatural personage,
usually the Virgin Mary, had made an earthly appearance there. Many of
these sacred sites might be at some distance from a person’s local community, making pilgrimage a process that was both difficult and time-consuming. The shrine dedicated to St. James at Santiago de Compostella, Spain, for
example, has drawn pilgrims from all over Europe since the Middle Ages,
just as the shrine dedicated to Our Lady of Guadalupe has drawn pilgrims
from all over Mexico since the late colonial period.
More usually, however, Catholic pilgrimage involved travel to sacred
sites relatively close to home. In early modern Spain, the countryside around
towns and villages was often dotted with chapels or outdoor shrines and
community-sponsored pilgrimages (romerías) to these sacred sites, often
involving an overnight stay, were central to the lived experience of Catholicism (Christian 1981: 70 - 91; Kamen 1993: 194 - 98). Local pilgrimages to
nearby churches containing especially important images were also common
in Bavaria (Lepovitz 1991: 116 - 21), while in pre-famine Ireland Catholics
routinely made pilgrimages to nearby holy wells (Carroll 1999: 19- 44).
And yet, despite the centrality of such things as image cults, apparitions
and pilgrimage to the experience of Catholicism in other parts of the
Catholic world, I know of no reports suggesting that any of these things
played a significant role in the experience of Acadian Catholicism, either in
Acadia itself or in Louisiana. This is all the more striking given that miraculous images and pilgrimage (though not, it would appear, apparitions) were
part of the lived experience of Catholicism in colonial New France (Quebec)
during the 17th and 18th centuries (see Cliche 1988), when Acadian culture
was developing in Nova Scotia.
The effects of priestly scarcity: A folkloric experiment
A second option to pursue in trying to develop a new perspective on Acadian
Catholicism is to take the one thing we know for certain—namely, that
priests were scarce—and make it the basis of a question, namely: what sort
of Catholicism might reasonably have developed in Acadian communities
given this relative absence of priests? Some time ago, Ron Bodin came to
wonder about precisely this question in connection with Cajun Catholicism.
In his own words:
For some 130 years rural Louisiana was often without the services of Catholic priests
[and] one wonders what became of the church, and of people’s religious beliefs and
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practices when there was either no priest or only a few circuit rider priests to visit
rural areas every few years. (Bodin 1990: 2)
To answer this question, Bodin devised what might be called a “folkloric
experiment”: he sought out and interviewed Cajun informants over the age
of 65 years from two communities in Vermillon Parish that had not been
served by resident priests until the late 1920s. Using the information provided by these informants, Bodin was able to reconstruct a variant of popular Catholicism that, it would appear, had existed in both communities and
that had been built around the use of sacramentals and lay versions of certain official rituals.
As regards sacramentals, Bodin’s data suggest clearly that the rosary was
the single most important Catholic sacramental in these Cajun communities
and that “praying the rosary” was central to the lived experience of Catholicism. He also found that most homes had family altars, which might include
a crucifix, pictures of a saint, candles, holy water, etc., and that these altars
too served as the focus for family prayer. Finally, he found that the ritual
activities associated with the rosary and other sacramentals had for the most
part been administered by Cajun women.
In regard to ritual activities, Bodin’s informants also reported that Cajun
communities had developed lay equivalents to a number of official sacraments, and that here too women had been central. Lay baptism, for example, was common and most often an infant would be baptized by a mother,
grandmother or aunt. Women also officiated at weekly “white masses” held
in private homes. Sometimes this meant only that a woman would lead the
assembled group in prayer; at other times, a woman would distribute bread
to simulate communion as a way of practicing for the eventual reception of
the real thing when a priest did visit. Most informants had not received
much religious instruction, but when such instruction was provided it had
been provided by women. Finally, these Cajun communities had practiced a
form of lay marriage in which “jumping the broom” was the central ritual
act, and here too, Bodin found, the ritual had been administered by women.
There are many elements in the variant of Catholicism reconstructed by
Bodin which hint at continuing traditions that date from the earliest years of
Acadian culture. As already mentioned, for example, there is solid evidence
that lay baptism had long been widespread in Acadian communities. There
are also scattered references in the documentary record suggesting that
Acadians attended weekly white masses administered by a layperson both in
pre-1755 Acadia and post-1760 Louisiana (Brasseaux 1987: 153, 156), as well
as in the Acadian communities that sprang up in Cape Breton during the
late 1700s (Chiasson 1962: 107-108). Then too, at least in the 18th century,
it was common for Acadian leaders in Louisiana to note (in the reports
they sent to government officials) that a visiting priest had married several
different couples during his short stay (Brasseaux 1989: 103, 105); it is easy to
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imagine that such “clustered” marriages involved the Church giving official
approval to unions that had previously been established by a folk ceremony.
Still, for Bodin himself, the single most important finding to emerge
from his study is that women were central to the maintenance of Cajun
Catholicism. This is reflected in the title of his article, which suggests that the
Cajun woman functioned as “unofficial deacon of the sacraments [and]
priest of the sacramentals.” It turns out, however, that this “centrality of
women” to Cajun Catholicism is a more complex issue than first appears.
Reading Bodin’s report carefully, it becomes clear that women were
central not simply because they provided leadership but because religiosity
itself was gendered. Cajun males, in other words, simply did not have much
interest in religion. Bodin found that Cajun men did not attend Mass even
when it became available (something attested in a number of sources; see
Brasseaux 1997: 163; Ancelet 1985: 28), nor were they much interested in the
sacramentals and lay sacraments that were so central to the experience of
Catholicism for Cajun women. On the contrary, Bodin notes (9), Cajun
males identified more with local Haitian-influenced “traiteur” (healer) traditions than with any aspect of the Catholic tradition. The fact that Cajun
religiosity, at least during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, was gendered is significant for a number of reasons but mainly because it is a familiar pattern.
The feminization of lay Catholicism in the nineteenth century
Over the course of the 19th century, in a variety of Catholic areas, participation in the devotional life of the Church increasingly became the preserve of
women. In the United States, for example, women accounted for the bulk of
the membership in Catholic devotional organizations by the late nineteenth
century, and were the primary consumers of Catholic devotional literature
(Taves 1986: 189-91). Women were also far more likely than men to attend
Mass. A 1902 study in Manhattan, for example, found that 73% of all
Catholic church-goers were women, and similar data is reported for other
American communities of the period (Dolan 1992: 232- 33). In France, the
pattern was similar. One estimate is that women comprised 75% of practicing Catholics around the turn of the 20th century (Pope 1988: 53).
Admittedly, this gendering of Catholic religiosity was not universal. In
Ireland, for example, mass attendance rates jumped dramatically after the
famine, and it was not uncommon for such rates to be over 90% in many
areas (Miller 2000). These high participation rates would not have been
possible unless both males and females were attending Sunday mass. Then
too in some areas of the Catholic world, popular religiosity became increasingly masculinized (not feminized). This was certainly true, for example, in
northern New Mexico where the Penitentes (a lay brotherhood that had
chapters in most Hispano communities) became increasingly central to the
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experience of Hispano religiosity during the first two thirds of the 19th century (Weigle 1976; Carroll 2002). Still, these exceptions notwithstanding,
the more general pattern in most areas of Europe and the Americas—
including, if Bodin’s evidence is to be believed, Cajun communities in
Louisiana—is that participation in Catholic devotional life increasingly
became the preserve of women.
The origins of this 19th-century gendering of Catholic4 practice are not
entirely clear. Certainly, male flight from Catholic practice owed much to the
18th-century assault—by both civil and religious authorities—on the autonomy of lay confraternities, which had historically been dominated by males.
What historians studying the issue disagree about, however, is why women
flocked to the Church. Kselman (2001: 337-38) summarizes the debate here
concisely, pointing out that some historians attribute this pattern to the fact
that the Church sought to sustain itself in the face of modernist attacks by
seeking out a constituency (women) that was superstitious and conservative, while other historians (including Kselman himself) suggest that women
flocked to the Church because it was one of the few institutional arenas
(outside the home) where they could raise and discuss issues that were
important to them as a group (for this view, in particular, see Harris 2000).
However it came about, the increasing “feminization of Catholicism” during
the 19th century is important theoretically because it allows us to see religious behavior as a way in which women in Catholic communities, including
Cajun women, could “do gender.”
“Doing gender”
Over the past decade, any number of feminist theorists have suggested that
gender is less about a fixed set of psychological attributes which are invariant
from one situation to the next, and more about particular things that individuals “do” in interaction with others in order to establish a gendered identity.5 Jill Dubisch (1995: 204) sums up the new approach succinctly:
Gender [is best viewed] not as a rigid set of rules about male and female nature or
about how men and women should behave, but as framework for discourse and
negotiation, worked out in the dynamic context of social life.…To perform [gender], then, is to present the socially constructed self before others, to in a sense
“argue” for that self [and] thus to convince and draw recognition from others of
one’s place and one’s satisfactory performance of that role.
One advantage of the “doing gender” approach, and the one that has so far
been stressed the most by those investigators using this approach, is that it
allows us to understand how and why the meaning of gender can vary from
situation to situation, depending upon the particular audience involved
(see Thorne 1999). Another advantage of this approach, however, and the
one that seems most relevant to the sociology of religion, is that it provides
us with another way of explaining religious behavior. Simply put: in certain
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situations, engaging in overtly religious behavior can be a way of validating
a gendered identity.
One of the very best studies demonstrating how religious behavior can
be a way of “doing gender” is Dubisch’s (1995) own account of pilgrimage
activity at a Greek Orthodox shrine on the Aegean island of Tinos. Dubisch
calls attention to the fact that many female pilgrims to this shrine engage in
behaviors (like moving up the shrine’s steep stairs on their knees) that to
outsiders seem extreme and emotionally excessive. Dubisch rejects those
interpretations which explain such behaviors by invoking an essentialist
view of women (e.g., women are more emotional than men) or by suggesting that Greek women are more pious than Greek men (223). Both explanations, she argues, fail to explain why the emotionalism observed at the shrine
evaporates quickly when the women involved engage in other activities or
why, when underlying attitudes are probed, women often seem less attached
to the Orthodox tradition than men.
Given that religiosity at Tinos is gendered (with pilgrimage activity being
mainly a female activity), Dubisch argues, the pilgrimage site is a public
space in which female pilgrims can act out the “poetics of Greek womanhood” (Dubisch’s term) for an audience consisting mainly of other women,
i.e., women can engage in a number of performative acts that validate their
gendered identity in the eyes of other women. Thus, since “being a mother”
and “an idiom of suffering” are both central to the poetics of womenhood in
Greek culture, women who appear to suffer at the pilgrimage site (by moving up the stairs of the shrine on their knees, for example), especially if
this suffering is part of a vow made on behalf of their family, are engaging in
behaviors that demonstrate that they are “good at being a woman.” This
does not mean, Dubisch notes, that their religiosity is “insincere”; on the
contrary, every aspect of the religious rituals in which these women engage
are pervaded by a deeply felt emotion (218-19). What is true, however, is that
their religiosity derives from a desire “to create expressions of their own
identity” using materials from Orthodox religion (219). It is their desire to
validate a gendered identity, in other words, that fuels their religiosity, not an
innate piety.
Although Tinos is a long way from southern Louisiana (in a number of
ways), Dubisch’s underlying theoretical argument provides us with a new way
of interpreting those few bits and pieces of information we do have about
Cajun Catholicism during the 19th century. For example: when a Cajun
wife/mother maintained a home altar, very visibly prayed the rosary in front
of others in her family, instructed children in the sacraments, orchestrated
a “jumping the broom” marriage in front of the local community, etc., it
seems entirely possible she may have been doing exactly what a female pilgrim at Tinos is doing when she moves up the stairs of the shrine there on
her knees: engaging in behaviours, which happen to be religious behaviours, that established her as “good at being a woman” in a culture where the
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maintenance of family and marital solidarity, caring for and instructing children, etc., were the things that a woman did. Do I mean to suggest here that
Cajun women should not be regarded as “good Catholics”? Well, it depends.
If by “good Catholic” is meant someone characterized by a deeply interiorized piety that motivates them to seek union with God, to engage in Catholic
rituals, to participate in the sacramental life of the Church, etc., in order to
garner spiritual benefits, then the answer would probably be “no.” On the
other hand, given that Cajun Catholicism was gendered (associated mainly
with women) it seems entirely plausible to suggest that “being good at being
a woman” and “being a good Catholic” might very well have been conflated,
i.e., to be “good at being a woman” was what “being a good Catholic” meant
in Cajun communities.
Conclusion
One of the great dangers in trying to recapture the lived experience of
Catholicism in times past is to assume that any evidence of religiosity is evidence of a deep-seated and profound religiosity that is shared by all members of
the group being studied. Another is to assume that religious behavior must
necessarily reflect interiorized piety. Such assumptions do a disservice to
the Catholic communities being studied (and to scholarly investigation) by
ruling out a priori the possibility that commitment to Catholicism varied
substantially from subgroup to subgroup within these communities and/or
that individuals might choose to engage in religious behaviour for reasons
having little to do with an interiorized piety. Such assumptions, in other
words, while they may reinforce stereotypes, can prevent us from recapturing what “being Catholic” meant to the people involved.
With this in mind, I have had two goals in this article. The first was to
demonstrate how little evidence there is to support the “Acadians as good
Catholics” stereotype that is still so firmly entrenched in the scholarly literature. But the second goal was to argue that the evidence which does exist is
capable of more than one interpretation. Such evidence may indeed reflect
a strongly internalised attachment to the Catholic tradition. An equally plausible interpretation, however, and one so far ignored in all existing studies of
Acadian cultures, is that “being religious” was for many women a way of
“doing gender” in a society in which religiosity was associated mainly with
women. Certainly, if the goal is to recover what Cajun society was like for its
participants, then this seems a possibility that merits further investigation.
Notes
1 As Griffiths (1992: 3 - 32) makes clear, “Acadia” meant different things to different groups
at different times. Nevertheless, as practical matter, the vast majority of those who first
developed a distinctly “Acadian” identity lived in and around those parts of Nova Scotia
and southeastern New Brunswick that bordered the Bay of Fundy.
Carroll / Were the Acadians/Cajuns (really) “devout Catholics”?
335
2 “Cajun” came into widespread use only during the latter half of the 19th century, mainly
among Anglos, as a derogatory term for lower-class Acadians. Basically, as Ancelet (1997:
34) suggests, it meant something like “poor white French-speaking trash.” More recently,
however, the term has tended to lose its derogatory connotations and come to be applied
to all French-speaking Louisianans who claim descent (or partial descent) from the Acadians who settled there in the late 1700s. That is the usage I have adopted here.
3 These comments are based on a reading of the articles published since 1995 in Les Cahiers
de la Société historique acadienne.
4 This “feminization of religion” is not a purely Catholic phenomena. Quite the contrary: as
Pope (1988: 52) notes, the term was first introduced by historians studying Protestant
denominations in New England and has subsequently been documented in a number of
case studies involving other Protestant groups (Westerkamp 1999: 78 - 80).
5 For an overview of the “doing gender” approach, see Ginsburg and Tsing (1990); Kimmel
(2000: 100 -104); Marecek (1995: 117 -19).
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