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

This thesis examines the development of cremation in England, the first Christian country to cremate, rather than bury, the majority of its dead. It offers the first full length account of cremation in England. The thesis first compares the social setting of funerals in simpler and industrial societies. It then examines successive developments in Roman Catholic policy towards cremation and compares contemporary modes of disposal in selected European countries, emphasising the differing role of specific social institutions. The history of cremation in England is traced from 1820, when the social problems of rapid urbanisation challenged the Churches' monopoly in the disposal of the dead. The development of local authority cemeteries after 1850 is presented as a critical point in the secularisation of death. After legalisation in 1884, the acceptance of cremation was slow, only 9% of funerals by 1945. Thereafter, local authorities rapidly and successfully promoted cremation which first outnumbered burial in 1967. The thesis examines the causes of this rapid change. It estimates the effects upon cremation practice of the Environmental Protection Act 1990. Contemporary choice between burial and cremation is examined from the perspective of 58 families, bereaved in 1988-9. Fieldwork was conducted in a Fenland village and in an East Midlands city. Disposal decisions are revealed as taken on grounds meaningful in family terms and rarely with a religious referent. The funeral is a critical focus for social and conceptual attitudes to death. In developed societies, the traditional functions of the funeral have been reduced and the social threat of death mitigated, by such factors as greater longevity, the professionalisation of death work, the changing role of the family and the reduced salience of religion. Through its analysis of the replacement of burial by cremation, this thesis offers a further understanding of the relationship between death and social structure. -

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The central argument of this thesis is that football in Scotland has acquired characteristics which make it a nationalistic, political and cultural repository. This has its origins in the post-Reformation period in Scotland, Irish immigration into Scotland and Scotland/Britain's historically contentious relationship with Ireland. Part one examines the present situation as regards religious identity in Scotland. It reflects on the development and pervasiveness of Protestantism within society, emphasising its anti-Catholic dimension. Irish immigration to Scotland in the 19th and 20th century is briefly reflected upon within the context of a growing ethno-religious cleavage. The second part of the thesis concentrates upon football. It particularly addresses the 'Old Firm' of Glasgow Rangers and Celtic though substantial reference is made to other clubs and to the Scottish international arena. Here, much of the analysis is based upon an original survey of the political and social attitudes of a sample of the supporters of the nine largest clubs in Scotland. The penultimate section focuses specifically upon anti-Catholicism in Scotland and the present character of Irish identity, particularly in the west of Scotland. The nature of the cleavage between both cultures is explored. Various Protestant and Catholic social and political groupings were also surveyed and the results are reported in this section. The context within which anti-Catholicism in Scotland has developed is established together with the main tenets of the contemporary Irish Catholic identity in part four. The conclusion establishes that previous studies have utilised a flawed approach to analysing religious identity in modem Scotland. Despite being a secular country, religious identity is a dominant cultural idiom in Scotland and its academic neglect has resulted in its miscomprehension of the nature of Scottish society and politics. In sum the thesis suggest five major conclusions: 1) Although the term sectarianism has major limitations it also has relevance for religious identity in Scotland. 2) Football is a crucial element of ethno-religious identity in Scotland, and national, cultural, social and political expressions become more explicit in the Scottish football arena. 3) Anti-Catholic culture runs deep in Scotland. This thesis -has located it in its historical context, explained its wider ideological underpinnings and reflected its complexity and variability in modern society. 4) The term 'sectarianism' has the function of shrouding the character of the Irish immigrant experience and identity. It has also served a long term ideological purpose in its debasement of the Irish identity in Scotland. 5) Identity is a much more useful concept than sectarianism for our understanding of religious cleavage and cultures in Scottish society.

As the Catholic Church continues to expand in Uganda, this thesis offers an ethnographic study of engagement with Catholicism among the laity in a relatively new, rural parish in the Teso Region of eastern Uganda. Founded in the late 1990s, the creation of a new parish in the Sub-County of Buluya has brought people into closer proximity to the Catholic Church, its priests, and its doctrines, throwing into sharp relief some of the tensions between Catholic and local moral and spiritual frameworks. Based on 17 months of ethnographic and archival fieldwork, I examine the way in which people negotiate the challenges posed by this change, as they seek to balance the need to use the tools Catholicism offers for getting on in post-colonial Uganda with desires to protect older ways of seeing the world and acting in it. My central argument is that people respond to the Church’s attempts to embed itself as an all-encompassing presence and influence in the lives of its members, by engaging in processes of limiting this presence and influence. By remoulding and realigning some of its central concepts, by resisting wholeheartedly committing to its claims to spiritual knowledge and healing potential, and by isolating its moral and behavioural directives from certain aspects of their lives, the laity in Buluya rein in the Catholic Church’s attempts to permeate and dominate all aspects of their lives. I suggest that these limits go hand in hand with the pervasive religious uncertainty that underpins people’s engagement with the Church, arguing that these limiting practices serve to maintain their religious uncertainty as doors are left open to alternative ways of engaging with their social and spiritual surroundings. In turn, the productive potential of this religious uncertainty encourages these limits to be enacted and maintained. Limiting Catholicism, in essence, enables people in Buluya to commit to it.

This dissertation examines some of the Catholic ideas and people found in the life and writings of Philip Sidney. Due to Sidney’s aggressive advocacy of a pro-Protestant English foreign policy during the 1570s and 1580s, and to the anti-Catholic biases of many British and American academics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, previous studies have almost unanimously approached Sidney from an exclusively Protestant angle. This Sidney is the hero of English Protestant nationalism, the perfect poet-knight. The Sidney that emerges from the present study is much less unified: thoroughly anti-papal and anti-Spanish in his politics but warmly Catholic in his apparent metaphysical convictions. Catholic theology and devotional traditions were far from dead in Sidney’s England, and he was far from hostile toward them. By recovering Sidney’s engagement with Catholicism, from his consistent generosity to individual Catholics to the numerous sympathetic allusions to Catholic tradition in all his major works, this dissertation provides a new yet historically grounded way of reading Sidney. It also encourages a broader understanding of confessional diversity in the Elizabethan period. / text

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Catholic University of America, 1938 / Includes index. Includes bibliographical references (p. 335-343). Also issued in print and microfiche.

Boston University. University Professors Program Senior theses. / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / 2031-01-02