Abstract
This exploratory anthropological essay concerns the paradoxically performative, ritually active body of 21-year old Audrey Santo, a Worcester, Massachusetts girl who has been largely paralyzed, bedridden, and unconscious since falling into her family’s backyard swimming pool in 1987 as a three-year old. The toddler was rushed to a city hospital and soon thereafter to a major medical center. There, doctors and nurses managed to revive her, but brain damage was apparently extensive. That was the health situation to biomedical perception, at least: the exact nature of the girl’s consciousness and intellect has become a point of contestation between the Worcester medical establishment and the family, which favors faith-based interpretations. The hospital staff soon urged the Santos to institutionalize Audrey, asking the mother Linda Santo in what she reports to have been unfeeling tones, “Where will you be placing her?” As Linda remembers (and as one of the family’s several spiritual advisor priest associates has often recounted in special Masses) the mother replied forcefully that she would be placing her daughter not in an institution, but, “In my arms and home.” The child was indeed soon brought back to the Santo house in a middle-class neighborhood of westside Worcester. In the ensuing years, the family and a circle of supporters have provided round the clock care for the girl, who is on a respirator and has received a diagnosis of akinetic mutism. This is a generic medical categorization indicating simply that Audrey cannot move independently and does not speak.
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Notes
Doug Rodgers, “Victim Soul: the Enigma of Little Audrey,” Worcester Magazine 22:46 (August 5–11, 1998): 14.
Martha Akstin, “Audrey-nomics,” Worcester Magazine 22:46 (August 5–11, 1998): 10.
Paula M. Kane, “‘She Offered Herself Up’: The Victim Soul and Victim Spirituality in Catholicism,” Church History 71: 80 (March 2002): 80.
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Gregor Goethals, “The Electronic Golden Calf: Transforming Ritual and Icon,” in Religion and Popular Culture in America, ed., Bruce David Forbes and Jeffrey H. Mahan (Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 2000), 140.
Patricia O’Connell Killen, “Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament,” in Religions of the United States in Practice, vol 2., ed., Colleen McDannell (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 44–52.
Andrew Greeley, The Catholic Imagination (Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 2000).
Jack Lule, Daily News, Eternal Stories: The Mythological Role of Journalism (New York: Guilford Press, 2001).
Lynn Schofield Clark, From Angels to Aliens: Teenagers, the Media, and the Supernatural (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
James Carey, “A Cultural Approach to Communication,” in Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (New York: Routledge, 1992): 14, 15.
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© 2006 Bruce T. Morrill, Joanna E. Ziegler, and Susan Rodgers
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Rodgers, S. (2006). The Sacramental Body of Audrey Santo: A Holy Mystic Girl in Ritual and Media Spaces in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Beyond. In: Morrill, B.T., Ziegler, J.E., Rodgers, S. (eds) Practicing Catholic. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403982964_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403982964_13
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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