Discreet Proto‐Pentecostals: The Catholic Apostolic Church in North America

Much recent work has been undertaken on the beginnings of Pentecostalism in North America, and its antecedents in the nineteenth century. These efforts have outlined the theological contributions of the Holiness movement, revivalism, and nineteenth‐century healing movements. One group that has been largely overlooked is the Edward Irving influenced Catholic Apostolic Church, which has been seen as making a minimal contribution as a precursor to Pentecostalism in general; it has especially been seen as peripheral in the Americas. This article will use contemporary newspapers and recently digitised primary sources to argue that the Catholic Apostolic Church was a significant force in the pre‐history of American and Canadian Pentecostalism, with hundreds of followers in key cities, regularly exhibiting prophecy and glossolalia throughout the second half of the nineteenth century.     

“Australianizing” the Local Catholic Church: Polding to Gilroy

The Catholic Church in Australia until around the 1940s has commonly been described as “Irish” and “Roman”. Historians cite the high proportion of Irish clergy and bishops, the latter often educated in in Rome. While the above pattern is accepted, there is evidence of earlier “Australianization.” This article examines such evidence in the foundational Archdiocese of Sydney and focuses on two archbishops, John Bede Polding and Norman Thomas Gilroy. Polding (archbishop 1842–1877) contributed to Australianization by initiating the Australian hierarchy, establishing a local seminary, seeking leaders experienced in Australia, and founding the local Sisters of the Good Samaritan. Gilroy's episcopate (1940–1971) saw the consolidation of the Australianizing trend. Witness to the Anzac landings, the first native‐born archbishop of Sydney and cardinal, Gilroy led the archdiocese as the Australian episcopate and clergy became further Australianized. On his retirement, after being named “Australian of the Year,” the Catholic Church in Australia could best be termed “Australian” and “Roman.”     

“The Evil State of Tepidity”: Mass‐Going and Absenteeism in Nineteenth‐Century Australian Ecclesiastical Discourse*

This paper sets out to explore how the Australian Catholic Church's perceptions of Mass‐going and absenteeism evolved in the mid‐to‐late nineteenth century. By examining the Lenten pastorals of Archbishop John Polding of Sydney, along with various mission sermons, the paper argues that a decisive shift is discernible after the 1860s. Where previous emphasis had fallen on absenteeism as a breakdown in the individual's relationship with God, later understandings introduced a dominant ecclesial imperative: Catholics who failed to attend Mass were also weakening the Church and effectively aiding hostile secular and Protestant forces arrayed against her. This shift was itself the product of a critical transformation in the field of ecclesiastical discourse as it gravitated inexorably towards more agonistic expressions.     

Lay Defender of Catholicism: Dr. Edward Swarbreck Hall in Tasmania 1833–1881

Tensions between Protestants and Catholics persisted throughout nineteenth‐century Australia. Historians have tended to examine the part played by the clergy, pressure groups or newspapers in sectarian disputes in the main colonies of New South Wales and Victoria. This article contributes to an understanding of anti‐Catholicism in the Australian colonies by focusing on the actions and writings of one Catholic layman, Dr Edward Swarbreck Hall, in mid nineteenth‐century Tasmania. To minimise religious hostility, Hall was tolerant towards Protestants, loyal to the British Crown, and worked co‐operatively with other creeds in helping the poor. This approach made Catholicism more acceptable to Protestant society until the late 1860s. Thereafter religious divisions became more pronounced with the appointment of Irish Bishop Daniel Murphy, who adopted the authoritarian policies of the papacy and asserted the rights of Catholics. Feeling threatened by Catholic assertion and antagonised by Catholic doctrinal beliefs, Evangelical Protestants expressed anti‐Catholic sentiments at public meetings and in newspapers. In showing how Hall defended Catholics when aspersions were cast on their clergymen, their character, or their religious practices, this article concludes that Catholics were not passive victims, but Hall's fierce polemical style worked against his desire for religious peace.     

The Elusiveness of Protestantism: The Last Expatriations for “Apostasy” from the Church of Sweden (1858) in a European Perspective*

By studying the responses to the last expulsion for “apostasy” from the Swedish National Church in 1858, this article examines how an international Protestant identity was constructed in mid‐nineteenth‐century Europe. It is the argument of this study that a comprehensive identity — including both evangelicals and theological progressives — could be built around the notion of religious liberty. The advocacy of religious freedom became a line of demarcation that separated this group from the Roman Catholic Church, as well as from those Protestants that were firmly attached to an exclusivist position. In order to manufacture this unity, strategies that had been used to fortify the Catholic–Protestant divide were now also used to establish distinctions between different forms of Protestant belief. It is the argument of this article that this unity definitely broke with the theological disputes of the 1860s.     

“Hymns of a More or Less Idiotic Character”: The Impact and Use of “Sankey's” Gospel Songs in Late Nineteenth‐Century Australia

Through the large inter‐denominational evangelistic campaigns of the last quarter of the nineteenth century in Australia, the gospel songs commonly described as “Sankey's” were introduced to both church‐goers and the general community and came into wide public knowledge. This article explores their early acceptance, dissemination, and use, and argues that while their impact upon church‐goers was considerable since they were so widely sung in many churches, they were also known, or known about, in the wider community, occupying a significant cultural space.     

Draper,the “Conflict Thesis” and Secularising Politics in Late Nineteenth‐Century Argentina

Despite appearances to the contrary, late nineteenth‐century Buenos Aires (Argentina) seems to be a suitable scale model to explore the relationships between the “conflict thesis” and secularisation. John W. Draper's History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874) arrived in the country in the midst of political battles over the shape of the future relationships between the state and the majoritarian Catholic Church. In the decade between 1875 and 1885 variants of the “conflict thesis” were expounded, discussed, and used as rhetorical weapons in the battles over the issue of religious teaching in elementary schools. This article analyses the discussions over the “conflict thesis” between liberal secularists and Catholics in newspaper articles, public speeches, parliamentary debates, and other forms of public discourse during that period. Against the backdrop of a weak institutional church, a vigorous growth of nascent scientific institutions, and a cultural atmosphere permeated by positivism, the opposing parties argued about the “conflict thesis” while each reclaimed for itself the legitimacy of science. The episode permits a close look at how the intellectual leaders who conceived the project of a secularised state utilised science‐based philosophies for purposes of political argument and ideological legitimation.     

“Visions on the Battlefields”: Alexander A. Boddy,Early British Pentecostalism,and the First World War, 1914–1918*

This article investigates the relationship between religion and politics in the First World War by examining the work of Rev. Alexander A. Boddy, a Church of England minister and key leader in early British Pentecostalism. The article surveys a wide variety of responses to the war in Great Britain, but focuses, in particular, on how Pentecostalism shaped Boddy's distinctive understanding of events, especially his view of supernatural phenomenon, his attitude toward the nations involved, and his eschatology. The article explores how Pentecostalism, by focusing on signs and wonders in everyday life, contributed to an interpretation of state politics and world events that placed unique emphasis on determining the role of the supernatural in contemporary events that remains part of popular Pentecostalism today.     

Containing "Contamination": Cardinal Moran and Fin de Siècle Australian National Identity, 1888–1911

Cardinal Patrick Moran, the Catholic Archbishop of Sydney 1884–1911, believed that Australian Catholicism would flourish with the emergence of the new nation through Federation in 1901, provided that Australians turned away from foreign influences, including anarchism and nihilism. Moran also sought to use Australia to "Christianise" the enormous population of China, and believed that Chinese immigration could make a useful contribution to nation building. As the nineteenth century closed, Moran's aims were also complicated by the more insidious threats represented by a challenge to religious faith by fin de siècle ideas — a modernism manifesting as both a general challenge and a specific doctrinal relativism that might erode the Church's authority, and the threat Moran felt was posed to the development of the liberal Australian state and the Catholic Church by radical political alternatives. Concern that a mood of religious apostasy and secularisation might spread to the Catholic community also influenced Moran's support for the fledgling Australian Labor Party, which Moran believed could develop as an instrument to reinforce a moral and inclusive sense of Australian identity for the Catholic working class. Like his pro-Chinese views, Moran's advocacy of "the rights and duties of labour" was defined by an imagined alliance of evangelism and nation building, stimulated by the fear, as he expressed in 1891, of "an unchristianized world."     

Divine Healing in Australian Protestantism, 1870–1940

The topic of divine healing was not at the forefront of the Protestant movement during its first three centuries as it reacted to what was seen as an exaggerated and often fallacious miraculous supernaturalism in Roman Catholicism. By the middle of the nineteenth century the Protestant churches in Britain, America, Europe and Australia had to consider divine healing in light of a newly emerging holiness movement. This article examines the developments in practice and theological perspective of the Protestant churches in Australia, particularly as they responded to the clear claims of the growing Pentecostal movement in the nation and the sacramental perspective on healing supported by the High Anglican sector of the Australian Church of England.     

Religion,politics and socio-cultural change in twentieth-century ireland

The Catholic Church assumed vast power and influence in early twentieth century Ireland based on political, social and religious developments in the course of the nineteenth century. The first Irish governments under Costello and de Valera were deferential in relation to the power and place of the Catholic Church in Irish life. The 1950s represented the final phase of the dominance of the Catholic Church. Since then, a wide variety of influences from emigration to the mass media to issues related to family planning have undermined the social framework of Church dominance in Irish life. By highlighting the ideas and arguments of priests and prelates, this article summarizes the remarkable changes that have come to Ireland undermining the status and privilege of the Church in Irish politics and society.     

Marriage by exception: Marriage dispensations and ecclesiastical policies in nineteenth‐century Rome

A set of documents discovered by chance in the Ecclesiastical Archive in Rome, presenting the preliminary steps that set in motion petitions for marriage dispensations in the mid‐nineteenth century, throws light on the systems of marriage formation among the rural poor. These procedures also illustrate how church laws were understood and employed by ecclesiastical functionaries and by the faithful. For less skilled artisans and unskilled workers, second marriage with the brother or sister of a deceased spouse was customary, and made it possible to renew ties between the original couple's families that would otherwise have dissolved. This required a special dispensation, however, and the procedures required to obtain this illustrate the cultural and political stance of the Catholic Church, and in particular that of the ecclesiastical institutions in Rome in the nineteenth century, which conferred an ambiguous but decisive role on premarital sexual relations, while willingness to make exceptions to the law appears as a means of governance.     

You gotta throw away culture once you become Christian: How ‘culture’ is Redefined among Aboriginal Pentecostal Christians in Rural New South Wales

ABSTRACT This paper is an ethnographic and historical exploration of Aboriginal Pentecostalism, which permeated quickly into the Aboriginal community in rural New South Wales in Australia during the early twentieth century. Today the Aboriginal Pentecostal Christians in this region renounce Aboriginal ‘culture’. This, however, does not mean they reject Aboriginality. By examining Malcolm Calley's ethnography on the mid‐twentieth century Pentecostal movement in this region and drawing upon my own fieldwork data, I show the way in which this group of Aboriginal Christians of mixed descent in a ‘settled’ part of Australia have maintained Aboriginality and reinforced attachment to the community through faith in the Christian God, whilst, paradoxically, developing strong anti‐culture and anti‐tradition discourses. This paper advocates shifting the study of social change from a dichotomised model that opposes invading moral orders against resisting traditional cultures, to one that examines the processual manifestations of the historical development of vernacular realities.     

Finding Antichrist: Apocalypticism in Nineteenth‐Century Catholic England and the Writings of Frederick Faber

The article discusses the apocalyptic beliefs of the nineteenth‐century English Oratorian and devotional writer, Frederick Faber, though initially providing a context among earlier and contemporary English Catholic apocalyptic writers. It proceeds, by means of a consideration of Faber's conscious de‐secularisation of language, to give an account of his identification of the elements of a transvalued contemporary popular concept of modernity as the signs of apocalyptic crisis. The article as a whole is intended to provide an aid to the perception and understanding of a pervasive apocalypticism in nineteenth‐century English‐speaking Catholicism.     

“Free,Compulsory and (Not) Secular”: The Failed Idea in Australian Education*

The nineteenth century radically transformed education from a church function to a state duty. During the early to late 1800s, Australian legislators debated the foundations of education for their new society. Decades of acrimonious argument, and sustained (but failed) attempts to create a workable denominational system led the colonies to explore more radical options. To minimize religious division, Australia's proposal was for public education to be “free, compulsory and secular.” New South Wales legislated these then politically progressive principles in the Public Instruction Act of 1880, following Victoria in 1872, and Queensland and South Australia in 1875. No state defined the term “secular” and each interpreted it differently. Prolonged, ambiguous applications of the secular principle continue to create confusion and division today. This article examines constructions of the “secular” in education and compares the approaches of Henry Parkes in New South Wales and George Higinbotham in Victoria. It follows the erosion of secular intent in public and parliamentary debates from early settlement to 1880.     

Martin Luther in Nineteenth‐Century France

French‐language readers had little available about Martin Luther before the French Revolution. A few Catholic authors had written about him from a confessional perspective. At the beginning of the nineteenth century interest was aroused by an essay competition, but the topic had to do with political influence rather than with Luther's life. In 1835 there began a series of publications which addressed the life of the reformer, and included vast amounts of quoted material from the letters and table talk. One of these early works, by Michelet, was from a Romantic but nonsectarian perspective, that by Merle was Romantic and providential, while another by Audin was from an arch‐Catholic point of view. Over the course of the century both Catholics and Protestants continued to write essays about Luther, from confessional points of view, but there was a growth of works which achieved a greater degree of non‐partisanship, even if appreciative of his contributions. Toward the end of the century there was a treatment of Luther which recognised explicitly that he belonged to a bygone era which was increasingly inaccessible to contemporary French readers.     

The Dichotomous Legacy of the Catholic Church’s Opposition to the Philippine Revolution of 1896

ABSTRACT

This article examines the repositioning of the Catholic Church in the aftermath of the Philippine Revolution of 1896–98, during the transfer of Spanish to American colonial rule. It reviews the consultations between the outgoing Spanish bishops and the Vatican’s Apostolic Delegate, Placido Chapelle, in January 1900, and the subsequent religious settlement promulgated in the Vatican’s Apostolic Constitution for the Philippine Church, Quae mari Sinico, in 1902. The Delegate’s identification with the Spanish bishops and their opposition to Filipino nationalist aspirations and the Filipino secular clergy confirmed the anti-Filipino position of the Church in the American colonial period. Both the Filipino bishops and the American bishops opposed independence and distrusted the nationalist leaders as anti-clerical Masons. This is followed by a discussion of the claimed reconciliation of Church and Filipino political aspirations in the post-Vatican II period in the 1960s, which culminated in the Church’s role in bringing down President Ferdinand Marcos in 1986. Committed to a theology of social justice, the bishops now aligned the Church with progressive democratic nationalists. In its successful opposition to the Marcos dictatorship in the name of “People’s Power,” the hierarchy claimed that through the “Miracle of EDSA” the Church had identified with and indeed represented the political will of the Filipino people.     

‘Poor Gordon’: What the Australian Cult of Adam Lindsay Gordon Tells Us About Turn‐of‐the‐Twentieth‐Century Masculine Sentimentality

The popularity of the British‐born Australian poet and sportsman, Adam Lindsay Gordon (1833–1870), flowered after his death. Between 1870 and 1920, he was widely extolled as an exemplar of the Australian bushman and of British imperial masculinity alike. Fans lauded Gordon as a daredevil horseman who had lived in the bush in the Australian colonies’ roaring days. Fascinatingly, though, they expressed their enthusiasm for him in sentimental terms. This article shows that sentimental expressions of devotion to Gordon were part of a distinctive form of masculine sentimentality emerging in Western culture at the turn of the nineteenth century. The proponents of this sentimentality encouraged the members of Western imperial and settler‐colonial publics to sympathise with rugged bushmen such as Gordon – to collectively experience their sorrows, griefs and joys. In so doing, they helped to reinforce masculine and settler‐colonial power, since they elevated the sentiments of hardy masculine types at the expense of feminine ones. In Australia, sentimental representations of Gordon also helped divert attention from the violence committed by settlers against Aboriginal peoples. Based on the insight that masculinity and sentiment were profoundly intertwined in the day, this article calls for a new way of thinking about the relationship between these two phenomena in the turn‐of‐the‐century era.     

Moody and Sankey Down Under: A Case Study in “Trans‐Atlantic” Revivalism in Nineteenth‐Century New Zealand*

This article examines the reception of revivalism inspired by the work of Dwight Moody and Ira Sankey in the Wanganui‐Manawatu region of New Zealand in the 1870s and 1880s. The success of Moody and Sankey's 1873–75 British campaign inspired interest in revivalism, and led to rapid and widespread adoption of their distinctive methods. Though it aroused opposition in some quarters, Moody and Sankey style revivalism became established as a significant feature of New Zealand religiosity at that time. Some aspects continued to appeal well into the twentieth century. This article traces the rise and growth in influence of this form of revivalism, and considers reasons for its appeal in late nineteenth‐century New Zealand.