Jack Downey

This paper examines the history of Lacouturisme, a retreat movement founded by the Jesuit retreat leader Onésime Lacouture (d.1951), in Québec and the United States. Based on a redaction of the Ignatian Exercises, Lacouture’s ascetic theology was especially popular among Canadien seminarians, until it was subject to formal censure—based both on questions of orthodoxy and its apologists’ pugilistic iconoclasm. “The retreat” migrated southward, largely under the stewardship of Pittsburgh diocesan priest John Hugo (1911–85), and became deeply critical in the spiritual formation of Dorothy Day. Lacouturisme signaled an upswell of enduring Christian debates, such as the relationship between nature and grace, the boundaries of orthodoxy, and the call to moral perfection. Although the retreat’s theology counselled a measure of social withdrawal, it became spiritual fodder for the Catholic Worker Movement’s radical personalism.

This paper will investigate the contemporary phenomenon of Tibetan autocremations, considering them as responses to Chinese colonization, in the larger contexts of self-mortification and political protest.  The Tibetan self-immolations have been chronically underreported in the international media, but have elicited charged internal conversations within the Tibetan and allied communities.  As a modern protest tactic, autocremation originated with the Saigon immolation of the Vietnamese monk Thích Quảng Đức in 1963.  As then, the current cycle of Tibetan self-immolations inaugurated some debate about the nature of these acts, and how they are to be interpreted as agentive manifestations of “communicative suffering” – whether these are suicides, patriotic sacrifices, religious offerings, or something altogether different.  This renders the Tibetan pawos (Tib. heroes, martyrs) themselves as sites of conflict – conflict over their “message,” who is ultimately responsible, and what can or should be done.  This essay uses the theoretical insights of Giorgio Agamben, Banu Bargu, and Michael Biggs to think through self-immolation protests within a mystical-political framework that constructs these acts as martyrdoms.