Konnersreuth, USA: American Catholics and the Cult of Therese Neumann

The paper treats the American response to the stigmatic Therese Neumann through examination of eyewitness accounts published by American visitors to her village in Bavaria. Therese’s mystical symptoms expressed themselves across four decades, and yet interpretations of her significance expressed national differences, as well as internal tensions within the Catholic Church between national churches and a “world” church controlled by Rome. During Therese’s lifetime, some German Catholics were beginning to reject papal ultramontanism in favor of a zealous German nationalism, only to have to align themselves in the 1920s for or against National Socialism. American Catholics, regarding themselves as underdogs in Protestant America, faced their own struggles: hoping to advance socially and economically without losing their faith.

Since 1926 Therese became the center of a circle of fervent Catholics in Germany and subsequently among Catholics worldwide, who spread news and information about her through a veritable flood of eyewitness accounts. American tourists, pilgrims, priests and soldiers contributed to her growing reputation, notably between 1926 and 1936, and again after 1945 until Neumann’s death in 1962. Although Neumann’s experiences would seem to situate her within a long tradition of affective Christian mysticism, at the same time her symbolic role during the period of greatest conflict—the Third Reich-- was not necessarily understood in the same way by Germans and Americans.

By the 1920s, American Catholics were trying to understand and draw connections between themselves as a national community of the New World, and their Old World origins. Were stigmata an embarrassment to their potential assimilation into WASP America, or a marker of a distinctive identity for an emerging bloc of New World Catholics? As Catholics began to imagine canonization for Neumann, could she be located within a hagiographic record that Americans could embrace, lacking saints and miracles of their own?