abstract: This dissertation centers on the life of Patrick Francis Healy, the son of an enslaved woman and an Irish slaveholder. Born in 1834, Healy became a Jesuit priest in 1864 and the president of Georgetown University in 1874, seven decades before Georgetown admitted its first African American student. In the twentieth century, historical investigations of race and American Catholicism cast Healy and his family in a new light. Today, the Healys are upheld in some circles as African American Catholic icons. Patrick Healy is now remembered as the first African American Jesuit and Catholic university president, as well as the first African American to receive a doctorate. This dissertation pursues both the life of Patrick Healy as well as what I call his “afterlives,” or the ways in which he has been remembered since the 1950s, when Albert S. Foley, S.J. discovered that the Healys’ mother was enslaved and refashioned them from white Irish Americans to white-passing African Americans. How and why did Patrick Francis Healy understand and comport himself as a white, upper-class Catholic? How and why have others sought to construct him as African American in the years since his ancestry was made widely known? How has Georgetown incorporated Healy’s legacy, in the context of its and other universities’ coming-to-terms with their dealings with slavery more broadly? I pursue these questions through archival sources (primarily Healy’s diaries and letters) at Georgetown University and College of the Holy Cross, as well as secondary literature on passing, subjectivity, and hagiography. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Religious Studies 2020

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Since 1986, the Catholic Our Lady of Victory (OLV) parish of Lackawanna, NY and the diocese of Buffalo have been working to secure canonization for Father Nelson H. Baker (1842-1936), founder of the North American branch of the Association of Our Lady of Victory and the OLV Basilica and Institutes, which, among other services, included a hospital, orphanage and school. Lackawanna is also the site of the Bethlehem Steel Plant closings of the early 1980s, which have come to symbolize the Buffalo region's difficult and troubled transition to a post-industrial economy. Thus, I frame my dissertation with the overall idea that the possibility of Baker's sainthood offers hope for economic recovery to the city of Lackawanna. Specifically, this work seeks to combine the study of material history with the study of lived religion by using performativity as a theoretical tool. Through a comprehensive presentation of the material history of Father Nelson H. Baker from the 1880s to 2006, I demonstrate that material history is a significant, integral and vital component of lived religion. Further, I make the case that devotional practices include creative acts that both provide evidence of Baker¹s sanctity for his cause and contribute to the performative nature of his material history. As such, this work attempts 1)to fill in a gap in the scholarship about contemporary Catholic sainthood in the U.S. by focusing on a specific cause for sainthood, 2) to further develop an understanding of the communal processes of representing sanctity,3) to offer a way of combining analyses of the built environment, material, print and visual culture with the study of lived religion, and 4) to expand the scope of scholarly approaches to Catholic devotional practices by demonstrating that in the Baker case, devotional practices involve a cooperative effort by both official and popular agents in the creation of material items to promote and further a cause. Visual materials are presented in the body of the text in JPEG format

This dissertation Michael Novak and Patrick Buchanan as Major Representatives of Contemporary American Political Catholicism compares the political thought of two faces of contemporary American political Catholicism represented by the neoconservative Michael Novak and the paleoconservative Patrick J. Buchanan. The first part deals with the context of contemporary political Catholicism and its historical background. The comparison thematizes five problem fields: the issue of democracy and American political system, economic problems, question of foreign policy, the issue of religion and Catholicism and, finally, the conflict over the basis of conservatism. To accomplish the given objective, I analyse the work of both authors, compare their respective ideological positions and set them in the context of other major authors in the given areas and in the context of established political theories. The comparison shows that they both emphasize the significance of the religious and moral aspect of democracy, especially in the American context, however, they do not agree on the universal reach of democratic ideals. In the field of economics, they stand for different views: Novak is an economic neoliberal, while Buchanan a radical economic nationalist. Similarly in relation to foreign policy, Novak...

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