Praying in the Roman Catholic tradition takes place within networks of relationships on earth, and between heaven and earth. For Catholic men and women, supernatural figures are taken to be really, literally present in the everyday circumstances of their lives. Catholic sacramental theology holds that bread and wine become the actual body and blood of Christ at the moment of consecration in the Eucharist. To take consecrated bread out into the streets and fields in a great golden monstrance, as Catholics have done for centuries, is to bring Christ himself to the people.

Early theorists of religion understood the presence of supernatural figures in religions as evidence of a “primitive” mentality. Only “savage,” “primitive,” and “unenlightened” races and persons—in the terminology of modern theory—imagined their gods to be tangible, to be really present in places and things, to be danced with, to be begged for help, and to be cursed. Practices of presence came to be associated with women, children, dark-skinned people, and the lower classes. But the prototype for this judgment was Catholicism. The notion of the “fetish,” for example, of the thing alive with the presence of the spirits, was explicitly derived by analogy with Catholic sacramental theology and devotional practice. Catholics were modernity’s once and future “primitives.” This judgment may still be found in developmental theories of the stages of faith development, in which practices of presence directed to beings who hear and respond are taken as indicators of a lower level of religious consciousness.

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William A. Christian, Jr., Person and God in a Spanish Valley, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972

William A. Christian, Jr. and Gábor Klaniczay, eds., The Vision Thing: Studying Divine Intervention, Budapest: Collegium Budapest Workshop Series No. 18, n.d.

Corinne G. Dempsey, Kerala Christian Sainthood: Collisions of Culture and Worldview in South India, New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.

Rebecca J. Lester, Jesus in Our Wombs: Embodying Modernity in a Mexican Convent, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.

David Morgan, The Embodied Eye: Religious Visual Culture and the Social Life of Feeling, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012.

Robert A. Orsi, Thank You, Saint Jude: Women’s Devotion to the Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996.

Elaine A. Peña, Performing Piety: Making Space Sacred with the Virgin of Guadalupe, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.

Thornton, John K. The Kongolese Saint Anthony: Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita and the Antonian Movement, 1684-1706, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Sandra L. Zimdars-Swartz, Encountering Mary: From La Salette to Medjugorje, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.

Not surprisingly motion pictures proved to be a potent medium for depicting the interaction between humans and supernatural others at the same time that the congregation of large numbers of Catholics in American cities created an audience for them.