“St. Joseph, Please Sell My Home”: Considering Positionality and a More Relevant Catholic Studies

Abstract

“St. Joseph, Please Sell My Home”: Considering Positionality and a More Relevant Catholic Studies Kristy Nabhan-Warren42 On a recent drive home from work, I made what I intended to be a quick stop at an Iowa City-area Catholic books and supplies store. You see, we were in the process of trying to sell our western Illinois home in the hope of relocating to the university town one hour away. Several western Illinoisans, self-described “practicing” and “not practicing” Catholics alike, insisted that I purchase a statue of St. Joseph. Each instructed me to bury the statue upside-down and facing the home we hoped to sell. The embodied and literal positionality of the statue was deemed an especially crucial component for a guaranteed sale. The ritual actions of digging a hole deep enough, placing the miniature statue upside down and facing the home was crucial, we were told, in order to sell the home. Praying aloud the prayer to St. Joseph (helpfully included in the box) was also deemed an important component in this material, embodied, and spoken ritual of home selling. These Midwestern Catholics I know are hardworking, salt of the earth individuals who embrace the broader cosmology of mystery, saint culture, and sincere belief in reciprocal relationships between humans and the divine. But they also have deep reservations about the hierarchy, and have been angered over the church’s mixed signals it gives to women, LGBTQs, and parents whose children have been abused by members of the hierarchy. Some of them no longer attend mass and some still do. They are deeply thoughtful people who despite their critique of the broader church, remain steadfastly “Catholic.” So, with the strong recommendation and exhortation of my Catholic friends – “It will work, trust me!” – I walked into the Iowa bookstore, smiled, and asked Olga, the proprietress, if she sold statues of St. Joseph, and I told her what I intended to do with the statue.43 Thinking back on the exchange, I was probably naïve to think that my request would be warmly embraced. My attempt to engage in a conversational [End Page 28] as well as material goods exchange was met with a disapproving look and a mini-lecture on “superstitious paganism.” I was told that what I needed to do was to pray to St. Joseph because “prayer works, not burying statues.” When I responded that it was Catholic friends who recommended that I purchase a statue and these were “good Catholics,” Olga sucked in her breath and gave me a thin-lipped smile and said (I wrote this down verbatim immediately after I left the shop) “well, and these same Catholics are the types who think it is also OK to get an abortion . . . and we know that this isn’t OK!” I stood there, stunned by the analogy she had just drawn. I was surprised by Olga’s assumption that devotional acts such as burying statues (which itself has a larger global context) were not only superstitious acts, but that they conveyed a particular bent of moral politics and unorthodox beliefs and behaviors. Not wanting our conversation to end with my interlocutor in this tense way, I tried another tactic, one in which I positioned myself as an authority figure of sorts and aligned myself more with Olga (and which I was much less comfortable than my identity as an eager shopper). I introduced myself as a university professor who held a Catholic Studies position, and Olga immediately brightened, smiled broadly and said “oh well then you know exactly what I am talking about here.” But I am not sure we ever did agree on the appropriateness of the practice of burying statues. Olga was insistent that it was regular prayer to saints such as St. Joseph and not a selfish act of burying a statue for a perceived good that worked. I agreed that yes, while I understood that prayer is what works, that I was also open to the intercession of the saints like St. Joseph in worldly concerns such as selling my home and thought that burying the statue could be accompanied by prayer. I mentioned how Catholics themselves had...