Stigmatising Faith? Differing Modes of Sanctification in Gian-Carlo Menotti’s The Saint of Bleecker Street

Abstract

Although best known for his Christmas opera Amahl and the Night Visitors (which is often asserted to be the most frequently performed music drama of the twentieth century), Gian-Carlo Menotti composed other operas in which he explored the confrontation between religious faith and practice on the one hand and scepticism on the other. In his heralded The Saint of Bleecker Street (1954), this duality is manifested in a case of a girl believed by other Catholics to have received the stigmata, while her brother rejects this and attributes the phenomenon to illness. It is argued in the present article that this work, which received numerous awards after its introduction in New York and within months was being performed internationally, can be interpreted more deeply as an exploration of the evergreen theme of popular religion confronting honest doubt in an evolving social and religious environment. It is also demonstrated that apart from the stigmata the purported ‘saint’ ministered to other Italian-Americans in conventional, non-thaumaturgic ways.

Keywords: Menotti, The Saint of Bleecker Street, opera, Italian-Americans, saint, stigmata