The Persistence of the Sacred

The Persistence of the Sacred examines how Catholic religious practices endured over a century of conflict, revolution, and dramatic social upheaval.

Skye Doney is the director of the George L. Mosse Program in History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Matthew P. Fitzpatrick, Flinders University:
“Offering a tightly bounded history of Catholic pilgrimages to Trier and Aachen, Skye Doney has ably foregrounded how Catholicism in Germany, both as an institutional religion and as a mass movement of millions, sought to straddle faith and empirically-based science.”

Beth Griech-Polelle, Pacific Lutheran University:
“The work offers readers new, engaging ways of thinking about German Catholicism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and provides a glimpse into the world of everyday German Catholics and their attempts to navigate the practice of their religious faith in the modern world.”

Jonathan Sperber, University of Missouri:
“An eminently readable and very fruitful study.”

Brad S. Gregory, Henkels Family College Professor of History, University of Notre Dame:

"This deeply researched, engagingly written study analyses the vitality of Catholic pilgrimage in the Rhineland as a means of understanding popular devotional practices, ecclesiastical politics, and traditional piety’s encounter with modern medicine and science across a crucial century in German history. Based on an impressive array of sources, Doney’s book contributes importantly to our knowledge of modern Germany, modern Catholicism, and the character of religious belief and practice in modern Europe."

Monica Black, Professor of History, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and author of A Demon-Haunted Land:

"The study of religion in modern Germany is expanding rapidly and in many directions. The Persistence of the Sacred focuses on Catholic laity and pilgrimage across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Even as official, clerical definitions of miracles became ever more restrictive, millions travelled to Rhineland relic sites, in groups and on their own, to come into contact with the sacred. Doney’s book is to be commended for the careful way it broadens our image of who took up pilgrimage and why, not least across lines of gender, occupation, class, and age."

Michael E. O'Sullivan, Professor of History, Marist College:

"Through meticulous use of archival evidence and stunning visual images, Skye Doney describes an enduring connection between many German Catholics and the divine through their most revered relics and the tension their fervour increasingly caused with religious leaders. The analysis of Johannes Ronge’s attacks on the 1844 pilgrimage to Trier is compelling and sheds light on the growing concern among many Catholic clergy for how the devotional practices of pilgrims were perceived in the modern era."