The author would like to thank Philip F. Gura for early encouragement and suggestions on this project and Laune F. Maffly-Kipp for her helpful critique of the essay.

1. Fisher, Philip, Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 91.Google Scholar Definitions of sentimental writing are not statte, as evidenced by the transition from the classic seduction plot found in Clarissa and many other early novels (a plot popular until about 1818) to the domestic melodramas that followed. See Davidson, Cathy, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 135.Google Scholar Generally speaking, though, sentimental writing includes the “extended central scenes of dying and deathbeds, mourning and loss, the rhetorical treatment of the central theme of suffering, the creation of the prisoner as the central character, the themes of imprisonment, the violation of selfhood, power relations in the intimate and familiar territory, freedom, the centrality of the family, and the definition of the power of literary representation in terms of tears” ( Fisher, , Hard Facts, 93 Google Scholar). Locating a decline in sentimental writing is a more difficult matter, although the Civil War and the rise of realism and modernism have often been suggested as endpoints. On the other hand, sentimental themes recur in Mark Twain, Theodore Dreiser, Ernest Hemingway, and Robert Frost, all of whom combine sentimentality with the later impulses of realism, naturalism, or modernism. Moreover, Radway, Janice A., Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984)Google Scholar, Charts in some detail the fate of sentimental writing in her discussion of late twentieth-century readers of romance novels.

2. The American novelistic tendency toward a “Sentimental Love Religion,” which developed primarily from the decay of Puritanism but with roots in important English precursors such as Samuel Richardson's Clarissa (1747-1748), forms the basis of Fiedler's extended argument in Love and Death in the American Novel (New York: Centurion, 1960) that American novels have achieved true artistic success only to the extent that they have avoided the trap of sentimentality. Significant recent responses to Fiedler's critique of American sentimental literature include Tompkins, Jane, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985)Google Scholar; and Davidson, Revolution and the Word.

3. Samuels, Shirley, ed., The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 6.Google Scholar

4. Sánchez-Eppler, Karen, “Bodily Bonds: The Intersecting Rhetorics of Feminism and Abolition,” Representations 24 (Fall 1988): 28–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Sánchez-Eppler's rhetorical analysis comprises an excellent discussion of the relationship between bodily identity and discourses of sentimentality, particularly the troubled dialectic between sentimental abolitionism and sentimental feminism. Sentimental texts, according to Sánchez-Eppler, have inescapable ties to the body, since the success or failure of the sentimental text may be measured by its ability to make the heart race or to produce tears in the eyes of the reader; it is a literary genre that depends on, and strives for, a visceral reaction on the part of the reader.

Paradoxically, while sentimental fiction (especially abolitionist sentimentality) often attempts to alter conceptions of human value that judge a person by bodily characteristics such as race or sex, these same sentimental writings are continually preoccupied with the relation between personhood and corporeality. Uncle Tom's Cabin, for example, paints a clear picture of the ways that sentiment will be allocated (in the process of determining character and personality) by linking it with skin color, musculature, posture, and so forth. In particular, sentimental abolitionist fiction featuring an elaborate gradation of racial identity written as mulatto, quadroon, octoroon, etc. is “thus simultaneously insisting that the body is a sign of identity and undermining the assurance with which that sign can be read” (Sánchez-Eppler, “Bodily Bonds,” 41). In the end, Sánchez-Eppler argues, it is terror at confronting directly the issue of the body, the white body or the black body, in all its implications and contradictions, that emerges from the heavily sentimentalized feminist-abolitionist literature, so that the attempted rescue of bodies becomes complicit with unseen or unacknowledged oppression of bodies.

5. Gibbons, James Cardinal, The Faith of Our Fathers: Being a Plain Exposition of the Church Founded by Our Lord Jesus Christ, 83d rev. ed. (Baltimore: John Murphy Co., 1917).Google Scholar

6. Taves, Ann, The Household of Faith: Roman Catholic Devotions in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986).Google Scholar

7. See, for example, Bynum, Caroline Walker, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982)Google Scholar; and Bynum, Caroline Walker, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991).Google Scholar

8. Ellis, John Tracy, The Life of James Cardinal Gibbons, Archbishop of Baltimore, 1834-1921, 2 vols. (Milwaukee: Bruce Publishing Co., 1952), 1:75.Google Scholar

9. The census of 1870 lists 1,071,361 inhabitants in North Carolina, an area of 49,412 Square miles. Ninety-six percent of the population lived in rural areas at that time. See Ellis, , Life of James Cardinal Gibbons, 1:77.Google Scholar

10. Ellis, , Life of James Cardinal Gibbons, 1:85.Google Scholar During the consecration of Gibbons as Bishop of North Carolina, the preacher at that Service, the Reverend Thomas Foley, a priest at the Baltimore Cathedral, mixed esteem for the young Gibbons with caution about the desperate Situation for Catholicism in late nineteenth-century North Carolina:

11. Interestingly, Ellis writes in his biography of Gibbons that Gibbons had been inspired, in part, toward his Catholic vocation by reading religious tracts by the former transcendentalist and late convert to Catholicism, Orestes Brownson. Also, as a nineteen-year-old youth living in New Orleans with his parents, Gibbons heard Isaac Hecker and others preach during a mission held there in 1853. That same year, he had been deeply impressed by Brownson, the New England convert. According to Gibbons's brother John:

12. Douglas, Ann, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Alfred A.Knopf, 1977), 6.Google Scholar

13. Fiedler, , Love and Death in the American Novel, 10–11.Google Scholar Fiedler goes on to observe the deeper structure and thematics of sentimental texts, marking the contiguity of mass-market popularity and the idiom of spirituality and proposing that the immensely popular books from the sentimental genre “pretend to be novels, but are in fact secret scriptures” and that “best-sellers are by and large holy books” (11).

14. Stowe, Harriet Beecher, Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly (1852; repr., New York: Penguin, 1986), 164.Google Scholar

15. Ellis, , Life of James Cardinal Gibbons, 1:118.Google Scholar

16. Douglas, , Feminization of American Culture, 347.Google Scholar As Douglas has remarked acerbically on the changing Status of the Protestant minister in the late nineteenth Century, the primary identifying characteristic of the postbellum minister was his moral effeminacy:

17. Ellis, , Life of James Cardinal Gibbons, 1:119.Google Scholar

18. Gibbons, , Faith of Our Fathers, 19 Google Scholar (emphasis added). While she does not take up the question of Catholic catechisms, Ann Taves has shown convincingly the extent to which Catholic devotional literature (prayerbooks) in the nineteenth Century used the figure of the family to coordinate devotional worship. In Household of Faith, she deploys the image of the faithful household to “describe the network of affective, familial relationships between believers and supernatural ‘relatives, ’such as Jesus and Mary, presupposed by the devotions” (viii). “The bourgeois family or household in which the mother played such a prominent role was frequently used [in devotional books] as a metaphor for the relationships between Catholics and the inhabitants of the other world [i.e., supernatural beings]” (47). Taves also maintains that, by the mid-nineteenth Century, the devotional practices that the prayerbooks describe and prescribe had, for many American Catholics, taken precedence over the actual reception of the sacraments. Actual sacramentalism had been replaced by prayers to Mary, Jesus, the Sacred Heart, and the Blessed Sacrament.

19. Warner, Susan, The Wide, Wide World (1892; repr., New York: Feminist Press, 1987), 531-32.Google Scholar

20. See Taves, Household of Faith, 48ff., for a detailed discussion of home devotions among mid-nineteenth-century American Catholics.

21. Taves, , The Household of Faith, 71, 74Google Scholar; Faber, Frederick W., All for Jesus; or, the Easy Ways of Divine Love, 23d ed. (Baltimore: John Murphy and Co., 1854), 128-29Google Scholar, quoted in Taves, , Household of Faith, 48.Google Scholar Devotional texts by Faber were published and reprinted many times in Baltimore by Gibbons's eventual publisher, John Murphy. Taves notes several of these in addition to All for Jesus (1854): Devotion to the Pope (1860); The Foot of the Cross; or, The Sorrows of Mary (n.d.); Growth in Holiness; or, The Progress of the Spiritual Life (n.d.); and The Precious Blood; or The Price of Our Valvation (1860). Gibbons and his biographers make no mention of these books, but it appears likely that Gibbons knew of them and perhaps drew directly on them while writing Faith of Our Fathers.

22. Gibbons's precursor in supervising the North Carolina region, Father Henry P. Northrop of the Diocese of Charleston, South Carolina, wrote to Gibbons before Gibbons's arrival in Wilmington that he had counted only about 700 Catholics in the entire State. Two years after his arrival, Gibbons was able to document 1200 Catholics, very few of whom were attributable to Immigration ( Ellis, , Life of James Cardinal Gibbons, 1:104 Google Scholar).

23. Caroline Walker Bynum, in her studies of the medieval body, has investigated the question of these maternal metaphors in great detail, particularly as they are manifested in medieval painting. Her analysis of the problematic gendering of the Church (and Christ) reminds us that “Medieval texts and medieval art saw the Church as the body of Christ. And ecclesia was, of course, feminine, as a noun and as an allegorical personification. Thus, the Church was depicted in medieval art as a woman—sometimes as Christ's bride, sometimes a nursing mother” ( Bynum, , Fragmentation and Redemption, 93 Google Scholar).

24. Smith, Bonnie G., Changing Lives: Women in European History Since 1700 (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1989), 211 Google Scholar; see 181-221 for a detailed discussion of Victorian domesticity and the changing conceptions of female virtue in Europe during the nineteenth Century, including the rise of the Catholic convent as a prototype for women's domestic education.

According to Smith's earlier study, Ladies of the Leisure Class: The Bourgeoises of Northern France in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981), middle-class women in nineteenth-century France buttressed domestic ideology with conservative adherence to Christianity. Profoundly conservative during a Century of increasing rationalism and progressive dismantling of mythical and religious Systems of belief, “Women not only maintained their relationship with the Christian God, but invented a new cult of the virtuous heroine [in the domestic novel] who ruled a domestically constructed universe” (12). At the same time, retrograde female religiosity (especially Catholicism) during this period stems largely from female bodily experience and continuing exposure to the dangers of pregnancy and childbirth. Smith's most basic formulation of this notion holds that “reproduction predisposed them to a religious world view” (107) and that “the mathematical explanation of life proposed by modern science appeared as patent fatuity to the visibly bleeding, swelling, pained women of the nineteenth Century” (95).

25. Smith, , Changing Lives, 178.Google Scholar

26. The first edition of Faith of Our Fathers was published in late 1876; four editions sold out in six months; 50,000 copies were in print by 1879, sold at one dollar in cloth and fifty cents in paper binding; 250, 000 copies, in 47 editions, were in print by 1895; translations eventually appeared in French, German, Spanish, Italian, Norwegian, Swedish, Japanese, Bohemian, and Braille; 1.5 to 2 million copies were in print by 1917; during a Single six-month period in the year before Gibbons's death in 1921, the book sold over 22, 000 copies. See Will, Allen Sinclair, Life of Cardinal Gibbons, Archbishop of Baltimore, 2 vols. (New York: Dutton, 1922), 1:151.Google Scholar

27. Dolan, Jay P., Catholic Revivalism: The American Experience, 1830-1900 (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1978), 86.Google Scholar

28. Gibbons was appointed bishop for the first time in 1868 at age thirty-four and was assigned to Wilmington, North Carolina, as bishop for the entire State. The youngest Catholic bishop in the world at that time, Gibbons had responsibility for supervising three other priests and for churches in the Wilmington and the other three largest North Carolina cities: Raleigh, Edenton, and New Bern, as well as about fifteen other towns around the State which had Catholic residents. See Ellis, , Life of James Cardinal Gibbons, 1:71.Google Scholar

29. Gibbons, , Faith of Our Fathers, vii Google Scholar (emphasis in original). Not all of those who converted to Catholicism as a result of the popular catechism were immigrants, nor were they all unschooled. Among the more notable of the converts to Catholicism who attributed their new faith to Gibbons's Faith of Our Fathers was George Parsons Lathrop, the essayist, novelist, and associate editor of the Atlantic Monthly. Following his marriage to Rose Hawthorne, younger daughter of Nathaniel Hawthorne, both George and Rose converted to Catholicism in 1891. More to the point, according to a letter written from Lathrop to Gibbons in May 1891, Gibbons's catechism figured significantly in their decision to become Roman Catholics, attesting that they were both “largely converted by your cogent, simple, sincere & winning presentation of the truth” ( Ellis, , Life of James Cardinal Gibbons, 1:585 Google Scholar).

After founding the Servants for the Relief of Incurable Cancer, a charitable religious sisterhood, Rose Hawthorne (who became known in the Catholic church as Mother Alphonsa Lathrop) reiterated what she felt to be the enduring influence of Faith of Our Fathers. Writing to Gibbons in 1906, she told the cardinal that her reading of the book had immediately alleviated her anxieties about the difficulties of becoming a Catholic, devotedly allowing that the book had “kept me observant of the beautiful influence of your holy power during many years” (ibid.).

30. Gibbons, Faith of Our Fathers, xi (emphasis added).

31. The use of the term “habitus” in this context draws on the analysis of culture and lifestyle in Bourdieu, Pierre, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Nice, Richard (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984).Google Scholar “Habitus” refers to those cultural tastes and preferences (e.g., music, literature, clothing, decor, leisure activities, and so forth) that become naturalized and standardized within social classes, classes defined by a matrix of economic capital and “cultural capital.” For a complete theoretical discussion of this concept in terms of domestic Space, see Distinction, chap. 3, “The Habitus and the Space of Life-Styles,” 170-225.

32. This is not to say, however, that Gibbons's theology conformed to mainstream Protestant teachings. Edward J. Stearns, Examining Chaplain for the Anglican diocese of Easton, Maryland, wrote a refutation of the Gibbons catechism entitled Faith of Our Forefathers (New York: T. Whittaker, 1879) and, in 1880, published a response to a two-part review of his book and Gibbons's in the American Catholic Quarterly Journal (January 1880), in which Faith of Our Fathers was highly praised by that leading Catholic Journal of Philadelphia. See Stearns, Edward J., The American Catholic Quarterly Review and “Faith of Our Forefathers”: The Case as It Stands (New York: Thomas Whittaker, 1880).Google Scholar In the same ACQJ review, Stearns, on the other hand, was harshly criticized for his attack on Gibbons and accused of being a freemason and, thus, an enemy of Catholicism (a charge Stearns denied). Stearns also noted, unhappily, the addition of Gibbons's chapter on the “Blessed Virgin Mary” for the tenth edition (1879) of Faith of Our Fathers.

33. Gibbons, , Faith of Our Fathers, vii.Google Scholar

34. Will, , Life of Cardinal Gibbons, 1:133, 92-93.Google Scholar A typical record of Gibbons's periodic trips through rural North Carolina reads as follows:

35. Ibid., 1:145.

36. Gibbons, , Faith of Our Fathers, xv, xi-xii.Google Scholar

37. Ibid., 65, 4, 63, 4, 25, 24, 51.

38. Ibid., 56, 59.

39. Sedgwick, Catherine Maria, Hope Leslie; or, Early Times in Massachusetts (1827; repr., New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 293.Google Scholar

40. Fisher, , Hard Facts, 109.Google Scholar

41. Gibbons, , Faith of Our Fathers, 73, 88.Google Scholar

42. Ibid., 75-76, 96. For broader consideration of the tension between matriarchal and patriarchal models of nineteenth-century Protestantism and Catholicism in America, see McDannell, Colleen, The Christian Home in Victorian America, 1840-1900 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986).Google Scholar McDannell also charts the development of Catholic attitudes toward domesticity and shows the centrality of Irish immigrants as both producers and consumers of domestic ideology, arguing that “as English Speakers and heirs of British colonial rule they could better understand and respond to the Anglo-Saxon sentiments of Victorian American Protestants” (xvi). In addition, her account marks the 1880's (when more immigrant Catholics could afford to live in middle-class homes) as the period when an identifiable American Catholic domestic/sentimental ideology finally appeared consistently in the popular press in such periodicals as the Sacred Heart Review or the Catholic World, which often printed articles on the subject by European (often French) authors. An early example from this genre, McDannell notes, came in 1876 with the publication of “Father O'Reilly's” Mirror of True Womanhood, which stayed in print through seventeen editions by 1892 (53). Additional European influence on the subject of domestic/sentimental ideology came from the French advice books (often written by upper-class women or by priests) that were steadily translated and published by American Catholic presses in the late nineteenth Century (52-76).

43. Gibbons, , Faith of Our Fathers, 168, 173-74.Google Scholar

44. Ibid., 178-79 (emphasis in Gibbons's citation). The Holmes poem that Gibbons excerpts (without naming it) is “L'Inconnue” (see Holmes, Oliver Wendell, The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes [Cambridge, Mass: Houghton Mifflin, 1899], 421)Google Scholar, and the remainder of the poem, which is written to a secret love, illustrates Gibbons's willingness to overlook Holmes's more general characterization of non-familial eros in order to “discover” veneration of Mary within secular discourse. The remaining lines of “L'Inconnue” continue:

45. Other non-Catholics quoted within the catechism, in addition to the ones in the chapter on the “Blessed Virgin Mary,” include Byron, Tennyson, Macauley, Orestes Brownson (in his Protestant incarnation), and Shakespeare.

46. Gibbons, , Faith of Our Fathers, 180.Google Scholar Gibbons reproduces the full text of the following Wordsworth poem:

47. Gibbons, , Faith of Our Fathers, 183, 181, 188.Google Scholar

48. Ibid., 190.

49. The correspondence between Longfellow's view of womanhood and Gibbons's teaching about Mary may be seen in Gibbons's chosen quotes from the Golden Legend. One quote ( Gibbons, , Faith of Our Fathers, 193 Google Scholar) reads in part:

50. Ibid., 193, 190 (emphasis added).

51. See ibid., 191:

52. Ibid., 194.

53. On the “domestication of death,” see Douglas, , The Feminization of American Culture, 200–226, quote on 201.Google Scholar

54. Gibbons, , Faith of Our Fathers, 224.Google Scholar

55. Ibid., 418, 410, 415.

56. Gibbons, James Cardinal, A Retrospective of Fifty Years, vol. 1 (Baltimore: John Murphy Co., 1916), 146 Google Scholar; Gibbons, , Faith of Our Fathers, 20, xi.Google Scholar

57. Maria Monk's Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery (New York: Hoisington and Traw, 1836), a virulently anti-Catholic, quasi-porno- graphic novel focusing on alleged corruptions of domesticity and sexuality in a convent, sold 300,000 copies by the time of the Civil War; only Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin sold more copies during that period. The book influenced American readers until well after the Civil War, into the years of Gibbons's own writing. Like Faith of Our Fathers, Monk's novel was in circulation for many years; even after the exposure of Monk as a fraud and former prostitute, the book managed, in the late 1880's, to interest the “aged Walt Whitman, who reread it while under Horace Traubel's care in Camden.” See Reynolds, David S., Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 65.Google Scholar

58. Gibbons, , Faith of Our Fathers, xi–xii, 370, xii.Google Scholar

59. Ibid., xiv.

60. Ibid., 21-22, 22-23, 23.

61. By 1855, Baltimore already had a population of 188, 251 persons, approximately 25 percent of whom were foreign-born, with a large number of these being Catholics from Ireland and Germany. See Ellis, , Life of James Cardinal Gibbons, 1:32.Google Scholar Nonetheless, the political climate in Baltimore in the antebellum years was anything but hospitable for immigrant Catholics. Seminarians in Baltimore during the years of Gibbons's training at St. Charles College (opened 1848 as a preparatory school for seminarians) and St. Mary's seminary were sometimes singled out for attack on the streets of the city due to the nativist antagonism that Ted to the dominance of the Know-Nothing Party in Baltimore during the years leading up to the Civil War. Politically, the Know- Nothings controlled the city and thirteen of twenty-one Maryland counties until 1860, when they were voted out of the Baltimore city government. See Ellis, , Life of James Cardinal Gibbons, 1:32–33.Google Scholar

62. Will, , Life of Cardinal Gibbons, 1:105.Google Scholar

63. Reid, Christian [Frances Fisher Tiernan], Morton House (New York: D. Appleton, 1871)Google Scholar; Nina's Atonement (New York: D. Appleton, 1873); Valerie Aylmer (New York: D. Appleton, 1870). For a complete bibliography of Christian Reid, see Becker, Kate Harbes, Biography of Christian Reid (Belmont, N.C.: privately printed, 1941), 178-83.Google Scholar

64. The baptism and confirmation of the Fisher family are noted in Becker, , Biography of Christian Reid, 15 Google Scholar; and Smith and Fitzpatrick, de P., Cardinal Gibbons, 68–69.Google Scholar

65. Will, Life of Cardinal Gibbons, 1:85, 1:91. Becker's biographical sketch of Christian Reid maintains that Reid looked upon the young bishop, who was twelve years her senior (she was twenty-two years old when Gibbons first arrived in North Carolina; her first novel was published anonymously in 1870, when she was only twenty-four) as her “spiritual guide” ( Becker, , Biography of Chrstian Reid, 22 Google Scholar). In this role, he wrote to her expressing his disapproval of her career as sentimental novelist, a disapproval that is ironic in light of his later appropriations of the Conventions of sentimental fiction in his own writings. Her rapid success in the field of fiction, however, soon led Gibbons to offer his support for her career as novelist in a letter to her in late 1871. In that letter, he congratulated her on the success of her second novel, Morton House, a Southern plantation novel that her biographer has called “a tale of patient suffering and unscrupulous intrigue” ( Becker, , Biography of Christian Reid, 25–27 Google Scholar).

66. Franchot, Jenny, Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), xxiii Google Scholar; Gibbons, , Faith of Our Fathers, xvi, xvii, xv.Google Scholar

67. Reynolds, David S., Faith in Fiction: The Emergence of Religious Literature in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981).Google Scholar

68. Ibid., 6.

69. Thorp, Willard, Catholic Novelists in Defense of Their Faith, 1829-1865, repr. ed. (New York: Arno Press, 1978), 27 Google Scholar; Reynolds, , Faith in Fiction, 145, 147, 148.Google Scholar