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After her 2023 disinterment, the late Sister Wilhelmina Lancaster, foundress of a Benedictine abbey in Gower, Missouri, began making news, including in august secular venues like the New York Times. Nearly four years after her burial, her body was found not to have suffered the typical decomposition process. Since then, stories have periodically surfaced in the mainstream press, from coverage of those initial crowds through discussion of the recent results of an investigation into the lack of decay.

So, when a recent academic conference at the University of Missouri at Columbia turned into an occasion to rent a car and carve out some time to finally go visit the Kansas City area – a place with very good word-of-mouth reputation, at least in Illinois, and deservedly so – the proximity of that abbey in Gower impelled me to schedule in a stopover for Latin Mass there, to see firsthand what’s given rise to so much press coverage.

Much was as could be expected by anyone familiar with Roman Catholic mores, especially those of a more Traditionalist bent – not only the reverential arrangement of the area displaying the glass-boxed body lying in repose, but also quotidian material-culture customs like laywomen’s head coverings and a communion rail. Both, of course, resonate with Sister Wilhelmina’s own preference for an older style of habit in the wake of Vatican II, when her initial order of the Oblate Sisters of Providence updated their garb in the spirit of aggiornamento.

What I did not expect to experience while visiting the abbey at Gower, however, was a subtle but pervasive spirit of manipulation and unhealthy fervency. This became most apparent in a brief photocopied document set out for visitors in the austere church vestibule, an anonymously-authored text using language like “we” and “our” and so which can only be assumed to come from at least some part of that community of nuns. In its version of events, time and again there is a tone of disquieting overconfidence. The community had decided to move her body into the church, it states, since “after much prayer, we decided the rightful place of our holy foundress was in the Church,” adding that “[t]his practice is very common in religious communities, even before their cause has been introduced” (italics added). Although the text is only seventeen sentences long, several other statements also strike a similar self-assured note, whether a mention of “the day Sister’s status is raised,” or the observation that “[o]nce the popular cultus is well established… Sister’s holiness may eventually be recognized officially by Holy Mother Church” (italics added). The document also already contains several pointedly apologetic digressions, defending not only Sister Wilhelmina’s prominent church interment, but also incorruptibility-related issues like the necessary removal of “dirt and mold,” her body’s “shrinking and darkening” due to air exposure, “some damage” attributed to “falling dirt,” and the use of multiple wax coverings on her preserved flesh. In light of all that, one is forced to wonder to what extent the directions to “her original grave” and explicit permission to “take a little dirt with you” are in response to questions commonly asked by visitors, and to what extent they are placing this “popular cultus” practice into people’s minds so as to hasten attempts at canonization. As a friend’s Catholic mother remarked when I stayed with her and her husband during my trip and showed them the document, everything seems “way premature.” And that was even before I delved into a 2020 community-written, pre-disinterment life published less than fifteen months after Sister Wilhelmina’s death, which already attests to no fewer than five miracles, including alleged post-mortem dream “instructions” responding to entreaties led by the new abbess and amounting to concrete advice for healing via alternative medicine (specifically, “baking soda for ten days, flax oil[,] and lots of vegetables”). Whatever the virtues of Sister Wilhelmina during her life, this cause that has sprung up around her after her death seems to be both strongly planned and yet somehow also a touch erratic, and from a group, moreover, that seems to have walled itself off to the point where it has lost track of what it sounds like to other people.

Document found at the Gower, Missouri Benedictine abbey on September 17, 2024

As someone who typically visits not only Roman Catholic places but religious sites in general and has done so for years, this document from Gower stands out as distinctive.

To take just two other instances from this same trip alone, my travels also allowed me to see some Illinois historic sites associated with Father Augustus Tolton in Quincy and Fulton J. Sheen  in Peoria.

Years ago I had discovered that a professional acquaintance who’s a black Catholic was personally involved in canonization efforts for Tolton, and I had also come across a statue of him in a chapel at the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Des Plaines. With these multiple glancing encounters with the Tolton sainthood cause, nothing has ever raised alarm bells. The mix of secular and religious texts found on site-markers and at Quincy’s history museum highlighted Tolton’s tremendous efforts to attain education and ordination, a narrative of perseverance in the face of societal and Church-internal racism that had come up in conversations with my acquaintance and that also surfaces in places like Shannen Dee Williams’ 2022 history Subversive Habits: Black Catholic Nuns in the Long African American Freedom Struggle.

Similarly, although I was prepared to be skeptical about the Sheen effort because of its entanglement with previous Peoria bishop Daniel Jenky and his extreme, divisive “culture warrior” statements, I was pleasantly surprised by what I learned. For instance, Sheen helped dislodge high-profile mid-20th c. communist Bella Dodd from a controlling and cult-like organization typical of many cadres found on the far left, leading to her eventual conversion. He also spent much time and energy to become “bi-ritual” so that he could celebrate the Byzantine rite and be a force for Roman Catholic unity, including in solidarity with those suffering repression behind the Iron Curtain. The Sheen Museum is located in a diocesan building and offers a parting gift to “pilgrims” – a rosary and some literature – but this gesture did not feel presumptuous; it came off like a genuine wish for peace and blessings to anyone who felt compelled to come there, even if they mainly entered with their “historian’s hat” on like I did.

Just like in Gower, the Fulton Sheen Foundation also has sainthood efforts front and center, but the tone is much, much different. For instance, the imprimatur-displaying “Prayer for Canonization” strikes a note of humility when it requests, “If it be according to Your Will… we ask You to move the Church to proclaim him a saint” (italics added).

“Gift pack” and accompanying “Prayer for Canonization” distributed at the Fulton J. Sheen Museum in Peoria, Illinois on September 23, 2024

It cannot be stated enough that Sister Wilhelmina and whatever virtues she possessed are theoretically separable from the later sainthood efforts in Gower. These are also lone impressions, at one slice of time. However, even that brief visit had other unsettling aspects – the apparently local Latin Mass attendees whose devotion is occurring at cross-angles to typical parish structures, or the incredibly young faces of nuns assisting at the Mass and displayed in order literature, or a giftshop children’s book celebrating being a nun at that very convent. Taken all together, they suggest a self-isolating and high-pressure environment where things are beginning to go awry, very much like with the Vatican’s recent guidelines around Marian apparitions and its acknowledgment that claims of the miraculous can mesh with unwholesome and even deeply harmful local tendencies.

Image: A fresco of Benedictine nuns from St. Maurus’s Chapel in Beuron, Germany. From Wikimedia Commons.


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David Mihalyfy

David Mihalyfy received his Ph.D. in the History of Christianity from the University of Chicago Divinity School. His writing on New Religious Movements (popularly known as “cults”) has appeared in venues like the Atlantic Monthly online and the scholarly journal Nova Religio.

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