Tenth International Conference on Religion & Spirituality in Society

Abstract

In History of Sexuality Volume 1, Michel Foucault claims that despite commonly held beliefs that Victorians restricted public references to sex, they and subsequent generations could not stop talking, writing and researching topics that dealt with intercourse. If Foucault’s hypothesis is true, and this paper assumes it to be so, a question to research is how different groups within Western Culture understood, constructed and dealt with sexuality from the Victorian era into the twentieth century. This article explores how the Roman Catholic Church reacted to a changing perception of sex and how the male and female bodies were ideally and popularly reconfigured through the hagiographies of Saints. Catholicism has traditionally defined itself as a religion that encouraged sexual abstinence as a means of achieving salvation, but restraint was particularly placed on the female’s body until the early nineteenth century. From the second half of the nineteenth century, a shift occurred emphasizing both male and female agency to police their bodies. Changes began to occur in that regard from the second half of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through the figure of the martyr for chastity who became a symbol for Catholicism to communicate to the Laity a sure way to attain salvation through the exercise of the will and the control of the body.