The Sacramental Body of Audrey Santo: A Holy Mystic Girl in Ritual and Media Spaces in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Beyond

Abstract

This exploratory anthropological essay concerns the paradoxically performative, ritually active body of 21-year old Audrey Santo, a Worcester, Massachusetts girl who has been largely paralyzed, bedridden, and unconscious since falling into her family’s backyard swimming pool in 1987 as a three-year old. The toddler was rushed to a city hospital and soon thereafter to a major medical center. There, doctors and nurses managed to revive her, but brain damage was apparently extensive. That was the health situation to biomedical perception, at least: the exact nature of the girl’s consciousness and intellect has become a point of contestation between the Worcester medical establishment and the family, which favors faith-based interpretations. The hospital staff soon urged the Santos to institutionalize Audrey, asking the mother Linda Santo in what she reports to have been unfeeling tones, “Where will you be placing her?” As Linda remembers (and as one of the family’s several spiritual advisor priest associates has often recounted in special Masses) the mother replied forcefully that she would be placing her daughter not in an institution, but, “In my arms and home.” The child was indeed soon brought back to the Santo house in a middle-class neighborhood of westside Worcester. In the ensuing years, the family and a circle of supporters have provided round the clock care for the girl, who is on a respirator and has received a diagnosis of akinetic mutism. This is a generic medical categorization indicating simply that Audrey cannot move independently and does not speak.