French Stranger; Spiritual Home: A Material Biography of the Church of Saint Peter and Paul (Bern), 1846-2022

This thesis constitutes and contributes a material biography of the Church of Saint Peter and Paul (Kirche Sankt Peter und Paul) in Bern, Switzerland. Built between 1858 and 1864, Saint Peter and Paul was the first Roman Catholic edifice to be raised in Canton Bern after the Reformation. By 1875, however, it had become a “bone of contention” among the bifurcated Catholic community of the city of Bern (divided between liberal and ultramontane in-groups). Saint Peter and Paul has a contested provenance that speaks to intra-confessional schism and to change and crisis as much as to shared culture and Christian identity. With major elements of French Gothic and minor elements of the Romanesque, Saint Peter and Paul has earned the moniker French Stranger; Spiritual Home (Französischer Fremdling; Geistliche Heimat). This thesis is an integrated art-historical and church-historical examination of that space. It combines a macrocosmic pan-European view of nineteenth-century phenomena and institutions (Switzerland, France, and Rome) with a microcosmic view of the parish (the canton and capital city of Bern). It undertakes close analyses of the architectural profile of the building, according to Gothic and Romanesque typologies, as well as its material holdings in stained glass, statuary, and other artworks. It uses an approach and methodology crafted from material culture/religion and argues there is much work to be done to address Old Catholic material and visual culture with the attention it warrants and to keep pace with scholarship around Roman Catholic material culture— thus far there are no published studies of/on Old Catholic material culture. This thesis seeks to make a contribution to the interdisciplinary study of Swiss Old Catholicism