Take & read: Global Christianity

Christianity is growing worldwide, and the reasons for that change are vigorously debated. In simplest form, the disagreement is about how much political power determines the shape of faith. Beyond mere submission to power, what induces people to live—and die—in faith?

That question is the subject of substantial recent literature on the early modern world, including the Iberian-led expansion of Catholicism between about 1500 and 1700. Undoubtedly, Spanish and Portuguese conquerors and traders demanded submission to the church. But what did those new converts actually do with the Christianity they received? What options did they have? Karin Vélez offers some important answers to these questions in her mind-stretching study The Miraculous Flying House of Loreto: Spreading Catholicism in the Early Modern World (Princeton University Press).

The House of Loreto was reputedly the original home of the Holy Family, which was miraculously transported to Italy after the Muslim conquest of Palestine in 1291. As Catholic empires spread worldwide they took with them devotion to the House of Loreto. Vélez studies three 17th-century shrines in the New World: one among the Huron in Québec, another in the Amazon River basin between today’s countries of Bolivia and Peru, and a third on a peninsula in Baja California. Through­out, Vélez finds that local native people were overwhelmingly responsible for supporting and fostering the shrines through “vast and voluntary participation, . . . real, repeated self-enlistment.” While the Iberians imported the cults, native people appropriated them wholeheartedly.