The Catholic Woman as Deacon of the Sacraments, Priestess of the Sacramentals

I wrote this while at the USL Center for La. Studies. The piece studies two rural communities not served by fulltime Catholic priests until the 1930s. With the absence of clergy, informants from both Meaux and Henry describe the role of women in preserving the sacraments (la messe blanche) and the sacramentals. The bishop of Havana credits women in Louisiana for preserving the faith in those days in the diocese known as the wet swamp.