Projecting Faith: French and Belgian Catholics and the Magic Lantern Before the First World War

Abstract

Around 1900, the Catholic Church in Belgium and France started to systematically use the magic lantern for religious education, but also as a propaganda tool in their fight against their laic opponents in both countries. In the course of the nineteenth century, the magic lantern had become a major visual mass medium in Europe and the United States. The light beam of the lantern was seen as a powerful means to sustain faith and disseminate the views of the Church. While numerous members of the Catholic clergy embraced the projections lumineuses as a continuation of the long-standing tradition to teach the gospel through images, from glass windows to paintings, they had to face opposition by those who thought the magic lantern unfit to be used to lecture on religious matters. Despite such resistance, the projected image became an important medium used throughout the first decades of the twentieth century by the Catholic Church.

Electric light and the visualization of Catholic power in Spain during the Restoration Era (1874–1931)

“…However, far from plain rejection, Spanish Catholics were especially concerned over the secular attempts at weaponizing techno-scientific developments. The result would be a public struggle to define the cultural values of science and technology which explains the intense science popularization campaigns in the Catholic popular press (Herra´n 2012;Kessler and Lenk 2020). 5 In this sense, from early on even traditionalist journals such as La Hormiga de Oro accommodated the main advances in electricity via specific scientific sections.…”

Enlightening religion: Light and darkness in religious knowledge and knowledge about religion

“…One fruitful (but still quite underdeveloped) line of inquiry that invites precisely this sort of rethinking of the relationship of religion and light focuses on the actual uses of lightbearing technologies-from mirrors and candles to electricity-and material practices of manipulating light, as they unfold on the ground among particular groups of actors engaged in religious practice. Elsewhere, we have begun to redress this gap in the literature by introducing new research that explores some of the varying material conditions of illumination and light projection as deployed in the contexts of ritual performance, church architecture, and missionary work, among other sites of religious activity, both historically and in the present day (Meyer and Stolow 2020; Kessler and Lenk 2020;Pentcheva 2020;Rakow 2020;Verrips 2020). This issue of Critical Research on Religion further elaborates how the topic of light matters for the study of religion, focusing especially on questions of the ways the language of light operates as a mode of theological imagination and cosmological speculation, as well as exploring how light and darkness figure within diverse practices such as healing, mystical contemplation, and prayer.…”

“…P erez-Zapico examines the history of Catholic debates over the legitimacy and role of electrical illumination in churches in Spain over the course of the late nineteenth-and early twentieth-centuries (cf. Kessler and Lenk 2020). As he demonstrates, the Spanish Catholic church was far from uniform in its response to the arrival of electricity and the new possibilities it offered to illuminate church spaces, generate spectacles, or reorganize ritual practices.…”