Innovative Catholicism and the Human Condition gives an anthropological account of a progressive religious movement in the Roman Catholic Church that is attempting to reconcile religious conviction ...and reason, and, ergo, modify the human condition. Investigation is given to a representative group of this movement, "Innovative Catholics," who are endeavouring to maintain the momentum for change which began in the 1960s and 1970s. They now find themselves caught between traditional notions of religion and a secularised society, while trying to reconcile these polarising forces to find a pathway forward. While ethnographic fieldwork for this research was conducted in Australia, this movement is to be found across the Western world. The research is framed by the question posed by Jürgen Habermas, who asks whether the democratic constitutional state is able to renew itself, and recognises a benefit in learning from religion. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, subsequently Pope Benedict XVI, responds by asserting the need for a common ethical basis and limits on reason. This latter position, however, remains problematic for Innovative Catholics who are conscious of history and culture. The research explores how Innovative Catholics, who in taking the middle position, inform this dialectic on secularization through their ideas and practices about the human condition.
Through the lives and works of three women in colonial California, Bárbara O. Reyes examines frontier mission social spaces and their relationship to the creation of gendered colonial relations in ...the Californias. She explores the function of missions and missionaries in establishing hierarchies of power and in defining gendered spaces and roles, and looks at the ways that women challenged, and attempted to modify, the construction of those hierarchies, roles, and spaces. Reyes studies the criminal inquiry and depositions of Barbara Gandiaga, an Indian woman charged with conspiracy to murder two priests at her mission; the divorce petition of Eulalia Callis, the first lady of colonial California who petitioned for divorce from her adulterous governor-husband; and the testimonio of Eulalia Pérez, the head housekeeper at Mission San Gabriel who acquired a position of significant authority and responsibility but whose work has not been properly recognized. These three women’s voices seem to reach across time and place, calling for additional, more complex analysis and questions: Could women have agency in the colonial Californias? Did the social structures or colonial processes in place in the frontier setting of New Spain confine or limit them in particular gendered ways? And, were gender dynamics in colonial California explicitly rigid as a result of the imperatives of the goals of colonization?
Migrant Hearts and the Atlantic Return examines contemporary migration in the context of a Roman Catholic Church eager to both comprehend and act upon the movements of peoples. Combining extensive ...fieldwork with lay and religious Latin American migrants in Rome and analysis of the Catholic Church's historical desires and anxieties around conversion since the period of colonization, Napolitano sketches the dynamics of a return to a faith's putative center. Against a Eurocentric notion of Catholic identity, Napolitano shows how the Americas reorient Europe. Napolitano examines both popular and institutional Catholicism in the celebrations of the Virgin of Guadalupe and El Senor de los Milagros, papal encyclicals, the Latin American Catholic Mission, and the order of the Legionaries of Christ. Tracing the affective contours of documented and undocumented immigrants' experiences and the Church's multiple postures toward transnational migration, she shows how different ways of being Catholic inform constructions of gender, labor, and sexuality whose fault lines intersect across contemporary Europe.
Throughout the history of the Crusades, liturgical prayer, masses, and alms were all marshaled in the fight against Muslim armies. In Invisible Weapons, M. Cecilia Gaposchkin focuses on the ways in ...which Latin Christians communicated their ideas and aspirations for crusade to God through liturgy, how public worship was deployed, and how prayers and masses absorbed the ideals and priorities of crusading. Placing religious texts and practices within the larger narrative of crusading, Gaposchkin offers a new understanding of a crucial facet in the culture of holy war.
It is often said that there are two Frances—Catholic and secular. This notion dates back to the 1790s, when the revolutionary government sought to divorce Catholic Christianity from national ...life. While Napoleon formally reconciled his regime to France’s millions of Catholics, church-state relations have remained a source of conflict and debate throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
In Catholic and French Forever Joseph Byrnes recounts the fights and reconciliations between French citizens who found Catholicism integral to their traditional French identity and those who found the continued presence of Catholicism an obstacle to both happiness and progress. He does so through stories of priests, legislators, intellectuals, and pilgrims whose experiences manifest the problem of being both Catholic and French in modern France.
Byrnes finds that loyalties to the French nation and Catholicism became so incompatible in the revolutionary era that Catholic believers responded defensively across the nineteenth century, politicizing both religious pilgrimage and the languages of religious instruction. He shows that a détente emerged in the first decades of the twentieth century with the respect given to priests in arms during World War I and to the work of religious art historian Émile Mâle. This détente has lasted, precariously and with interruption, up to the present day.
PADRES Martinez, Richard Edward
2005, 20050101
eBook
From the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo to the 1960s, Mexican American Catholics experienced racism and discrimination within the U.S. Catholic church, as white priests and bishops maintained a ...racial divide in all areas of the church’s ministry. To oppose this religious apartheid and challenge the church to minister fairly to all of its faithful, a group of Chicano priests formed PADRES (Padres Asociados para Derechos Religiosos, Educativos y Sociales, or Priests Associated for Religious, Educational, and Social Rights) in 1969. Over the next twenty years of its existence, PADRES became a powerful force for change within the Catholic church and for social justice within American society. This book offers the first history of the founding, activism, victories, and defeats of PADRES. At the heart of the book are oral history interviews with the founders of PADRES, who describe how their ministries in poor Mexican American parishes, as well as their own experiences of racism and discrimination within and outside the church, galvanized them into starting and sustaining the movement. Richard Martínez traces the ways in which PADRES was inspired by the Chicano movement and other civil rights struggles of the 1960s and also probes its linkages with liberation theology in Latin America. He uses a combination of social movement theory and organizational theory to explain why the group emerged, flourished, and eventually disbanded in 1989.
When an independent Poland reappeared on the map of Europe after World War I, it was widely regarded as the most Catholic country on the continent, as "Rome's Most Faithful Daughter." All the same, ...the relations of the Second Polish Republic with the Church-both its representatives inside the country and the Holy See itself-proved far more difficult than expected.Based on original research in the libraries and depositories of four countries, including recently opened collections in the Vatican Secret Archives,Rome's Most Faithful Daughter: The Catholic Church and Independent Poland, 1914-1939presents the first scholarly history of the close but complex political relationship of Poland with the Catholic Church during the interwar period.Neal Peaseaddresses, for example, the centrality of Poland in the Vatican's plans to convert the Soviet Union to Catholicism and the curious reluctance of each successive Polish government to play the role assigned to it. He also reveals the complicated story of the relations of Polish Catholicism with Jews, Freemasons, and other minorities within the country and what the response of Pope Pius XII to the Nazi German invasion of Poland in 1939 can tell us about his controversial policies during World War II.Both authoritative and lively,Rome's Most Faithful Daughtershows that the tensions generated by the interplay of church and state in Polish public life exerted great influence not only on the history of Poland but also on the wider Catholic world in the era between the wars.
War and Faith Bobiec, By Pavlina
2012, 2012-01-20, Letnik:
5
eBook
Drawing on the themes of religious rhetoric, embedded in social and political contexts, this study offers new insights into the manners in which the Catholic Church helped mould the Slovenians' ...responses to WWI and reconsiders the reasons for the clergy's political actions amid tensions, which resulted in the Habsburg empire's collapse.
Translating Catechisms, Translating Cultures explores the dimensions of early modern transcultural Christianities, the leeway of religious negotiation in and outside of Europe by comparing catechisms ...and their translations in the context of several Jesuit missions (including China, India, Japan, Ethiopia, Northern America and England).
PDF
