Making saints, (re-)making lives: Pilgrimage and revitalization in the land of St. Padre Pio of Pietrelcina.

摘要

Based on nearly three years of multi-sited ethnographic research, this dissertation represents the first truly systemic anthropological examination of the immensely popular cult of Catholic saint and stigmatic Padre Pio of Pietrelcina (1887-1968) from its origins to today. Canonized in 2002, Padre Pio was a twentieth-century Capuchin priest who has become one of the Catholic world's "most revered saints"---to whom more Italians and Irish pray than to Jesus, Mary, or Saint Francis---thanks to his Christ-like suffering and stigmata, supernatural abilities, and the foundation of a technologically advanced research hospital, the Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza, at his monastic home in the remote San Giovanni Rotondo (Italy); today his cult boasts a global network of powerful prayer groups, a shrine complex featuring monuments by Italy's leading contemporary artists and architects, and a mass media empire that nets over 120 million euros annually. While in many ways Pio can be described (as the Vatican sometimes had done) as a classic "Southern Italian saint"---a medieval thaumaturge who engages pre-Tridentine forms of popular religiosity---a close analysis of the emergence of Pio as a "revitalization prophet" (Wallace 1956), his particular "victim soul" theology, and the struggles and negotiations between a number of "epistemic groups" to define and utilize the saint reveal that his movement and subsequent cult is a historically and culturally situated product of the tumultuous twentieth and twenty-first centuries.