Lifeblood of the Parish: Men and Catholic Devotion in Williamsburg, Brooklyn by Alyssa Maldonado-Estrada (review)

Reviewed by: Lifeblood of the Parish: Men and Catholic Devotion in Williamsburg, Brooklyn by Alyssa Maldonado-Estrada Timothy Kelly Lifeblood of the Parish: Men and Catholic Devotion in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. By Alyssa Maldonado-Estrada. ( New York: New York University Press. 2020. Pp. x, 283. Paper, $32.00. ISBN 978-1-479-83049-7.) Alyssa Maldonado-Estrada's Lifeblood of the Parish: Men and Catholic Devotion in Williamsburg, Brooklyn is a rich ethnographic examination of a dynamic and enduring devotional practice in a twenty-first century Italian American parish. Though other scholars have studied the devotion to Our Lady of Mount Carmel (OLMC) and San Paolino before, Maldonado-Estrada approaches her work through a new lens and with different aspirations. The result is an insightful and compelling exploration of men working to define and live out understandings of masculinity and Catholic identity. Maldonado-Estrada situates her work as a new focus for the study of Catholic devotional practices. Scholars interested in Catholic history once focused on the church's institutional growth and maintenance, on the actions and policies that church officials performed. Social historians widened that gaze to include lay Catholics acting in connection to the church. Cultural historians further expanded the field of study by exploring and interpreting in rich detail the devotional rituals in which lay Catholics participated. These studies of Catholic devotional practices concentrate primarily on Catholic women, and Maldonado-Estrada argues that in doing so they have left the impression that Catholic devotionalism was a female endeavor. She seeks to right that balance with her study of a male-centered devotional practice in Our Lady of Mount Carmel Parish in Brooklyn's Williamsburg neighborhood. Much of the devotional activity that Maldonado-Estrada addresses took place in spaces that lay men controlled. Perhaps most prominent was the basement in which men labored for months each year building and painting the giglio, a giant tower upon which the statue of Mary and baby Jesus rested. For though the devotion spanned many decades, the giglio did not. Men constructed it each year from papiermâché. Maldonado-Estrada points out that men built more than the parish devotional feast's center piece, though. They also constructed a Catholic masculinity. That masculinity looked in many ways similar to the gender construction shared in popular culture. It involved exhibitions of strength and sacrifice, for example, [End Page 435] as hundreds of men literally shouldered the weight of the giglio and carried it through the streets during the feast. Lifting that weight took great strength, and the men of OLMC parish therefore prized and cultivated physical strength. Readers will likely find no surprise in this close association of masculinity and physical prowess. It will also come as no surprise that Maldonado-Estrada and others familiar with the devotion note the phallic nature of the tower. But the devotion also stressed that male participants develop a sentimental attachment to community and the parish that many would more often associate with femininity than masculinity. The work men did established emotional ties that bound them to each other. Maldonado-Estrada highlights well that most of this devotion takes place outside of the places normally recognized as sacred. The church basement is a jumble of materials, paints, discarded papier-mâché parts, and pieces of statues. Yet Maldonado-Estrada argues persuasively that the work that men undertake in this space—the designing, building, and painting—are religious acts. Maldonado-Estrada reminds readers throughout the book that she was a female ethnographer in a male world, an interloper who often seemed to fit in, to be accepted, but remained throughout an academic and gender outlier. She observed the male behavior over four years and across that span was able to achieve a level of familiarity, perhaps even filial intimacy, with her subjects denied to other women. This enabled her to produce a rich and evocative portrait of Catholic male devotional culture that expands our understanding of Catholic life in the twenty-first century.