The Exceptional Body of Christ

At the start of the Cold War, many Americans sought to transform the social treatment of people with disabilities. Chastened by the violence of previous generations enthusiasm for eugenics, new advocacy groups asked what it might mean to include and even appreciate differences marked by labels like “mental handicaps” within US society.

In The Exceptional Body of Christ, Andrew Walker-Cornetta explores how American Catholics took up such queries over the course of the 1950s. Drawing on a range of previously unexamined archives, he shows how Catholics countered existing exclusions by reclaiming the cognitively disabled as privileged members of the body of Christ and exposes the ambivalent effects of those reclamations. Attributions of sacred power and membership enlarged the worlds available to many people with cognitive impairments, generating new opportunities, relationships, and social forms. But at the same time, those attributions often worked disciplinarily, demanding that disabled persons comply with mid-century Catholic appetites for innocence, detachment, and deference in what was felt to be an uncertain moment. Situated within much broader histories of both disability and Christianity, The Exceptional Body of Christ is, ultimately, a book about the dangerous and promising cultural work of desiring difference.