In honor of the Feast of Saint Jude, we've dug up this interview with Robert Orsi from 2005 about the history of devotions--devotion to St. Jude being among the most popular.

Orsi is the Charles Warren Professor of the History of Religion in America at Harvard Divinity School. His latest book, Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them (Princeton) follows Thank You, St. Jude (Yale) and The Madonna of 115th Street (Yale).

In the late 1980s, when Robert Orsi had just begun his work studying devotion to St. Jude, he had dinner with a prominent liturgist who had spent years promoting liturgical change after Vatican 11.

As Orsi began to describe his research on St. Jude devotees, he noticed the liturgist becoming more and more agitated. "Suddenly he pushed himself back from the table," writes Orsi, "and said loudly and furiously as he got to his feet something along the lines of 'You are trying to bring back everything we worked so hard to do away with.' Then he walked out."

Orsi would beg to differ. He is most certainly not, he says, trying to bring back the devotions he has spent his life documenting. But, he says, Catholics would do well to examine why almost any mention of these traditions produces such extreme reactions among some. We need a "disciplined attentiveness" to these practices, he insists, "particularly those we find alien or objectionable."

How did you end up researching the devotional life of American Catholics before Vatican II?

It's always seemed to me one of the richer moments of American Catholicism. I was drawn to the 1920s, '30s, and '40s as a historian, and I have to say I'm fascinated by the saints and the relationships people form with them. From the beginning I wanted to study religion not as it was doctrinally presented but religion as it was lived, the stuff of everyday life.

You go to great pains to say that religion is about relationships, but that in this context "relationship" is not a friendly, fuzzy word.

In communities that practice religion, you have aunts, uncles, fathers, mothers, siblings, but these people very often live in networks that also include sacred figures or demons or ancestors or ghosts or spirits, and people are in very complicated and intense relationships with them.

My grandmother's favorite saint, for example, was St. Gemma Galgane of Italy. Gemma's story is a story of pain and suffering and sacrifice. Her intimacy with Jesus is never free of pain and victimization. When I hold this life up in relationship to my grandmother's life, where also love and pain and victimization were very connected, it seems to me that it wasn't an accident that this was my grandmother's favorite saint because their lives so thoroughly resonated with each other. But in many ways this was a tragic intersection. Gemma's life was not exactly a good model for my grandmother.

There's a tragedy about religion, I think. We live in a culture in which religion is thought to make life better. But it doesn't always do that. There's a realness to life with religion. It doesn't necessarily make life worse, but it can. And it certainly doesn't always make life better.

How should we in the 21st century look at the devotional practices of Catholics before Vatican II?

We need a disciplined attentiveness to the practices of people, particularly those practices we find alien or objectionable.

I am always coming up against people who ask me, "Why are you studying these superstitious practices?" Often it's women's devotions, by the way, or children's devotions, that are deemed superstitious. Usually superstition means anything that white men in power do not do.

Let's take the devotion to the infant of Prague. I mean, to a post-Vatican II Catholic, what is more troubling than a bunch of women sitting in a church basement sewing sequins on a statue's nightgown? But for the women involved in that devotion it was an important form of friendship. We may not like it. I'm not calling for a return to Infant of Prague devotions. But the challenge is not to be so terrified by the preconciliar past, not to dismiss it and say nothing went on back there. Not to say, "That was the moment of Catholic infancy in America." What hubris. Let's pay attention to devotions in a way that withholds judgment and actually asks people, "What were you doing?"

Not long ago I read a new, admirable American Catholic encyclopedia, a great book. Yet in this supposedly authoritative view there is no reference to St. Jude, no reference to Sacred Heart devotions, no reference to rosaries. How could there be an effort to talk about American Catholic life and history with no mention of these devotions?

What are people who try to wipe this out of the Catholic past afraid of?

Before the Second Vatican Council, American Catholicism was a culture with many opportunities to have direct experiences of the holy. Not simply you and the host at Mass, but lots of other opportunities to have powerful encounters with sacred presence. Today sacred presence is not tolerated in the modern world. This is true everywhere modernity has landed. I think that because a certain experience of presence became threatening in the modern world, liberal Catholics thought a firewall had to be drawn against those experiences.

Do you think that fear was completely misplaced? What about excesses, like claiming to see the face of Mother Teresa in a cinnamon roll?

Whether or not they are theologically appropriate is somebody else's question, it's not mine. As a historian, I want to know the world in which these things happened, why they happened, and what they meant to the people who were involved.

I've been trying to draw this line for 20 years, and sometimes people suspect that I'm speaking out of a certain bad faith. It is true that I find many of the things that I've worked on compelling and powerful. It's also the case that I have been trying to argue for 20 years that whether or not we find these things personally compelling, they are there in the Catholic past and therefore we need to think about them historically and culturally. Even Mother Teresa in a cinnamon roll-I think that's a phenomenon worth attending to.

If the pre-Vatican II faith was all about presence, what replaced that?

The general trajectory of the modern world is to deny divine presence as a physical reality in the mundane world of everyday life.

Such as saying Jesus didn't really rise from the dead, but rather the apostles just felt his presence?

Right. I'm not saying, by the way, that presence disappears from the modern world. I personally think that presence endures, that the Catholic imagination is oriented toward it and that it endures. But in the modern world presence becomes an embarrassment.

What do you make of the fact that 30 years later, we're saying that not enough Catholics believe in the Real Presence in the Eucharist?

The "believing" notion of presence is not a good thing. If I were going to design a religion, I would not want to throw my money on people believing in something. The whole part of my research on growing up Catholic is that Catholic children didn't "believe in" presence, but rather they were oriented toward the "reality of presence" by everything in their world.

Can you explain that?

If you ask Catholics who grew up before Vatican II about their First Communion, the first thing they remember is being taught never to touch the host. The nuns needed to get home to these children that this is really God. That's an incredible cognitive task.

How else was presence made real for children back then?

There was a real sense that childrenboth saintly children and children in general-could have direct experiences of sacred presence. Speaking only for myself, I know I certainly was constantly waiting for a miracle.

Here's a story to illustrate the Catholic imagination in a typical child from the 1950s. I remember once in about fifth grade, in my parish in the Bronx, I was standing in front of a portrait of Pope John XXIII. He may have just died. All of a sudden a red button skidded across the floor. I didn't know where it came from. I quickly checked out all possibilities. I picked up the red button, and it seemed to me that it looked just like the buttons on the pope's robe. And I thought, "Aha, could this be it? Is this my moment?"

The point of the story is that I was really prepared emotionally, intellectually, and cognitively to experience a miracle. If a culture prepares children for this experience, they'll have this experience.