The Roman Catholic Church: committed to the poor in Guatemala

The coexistence of conservative and liberation perspectives within the Roman Catholic Church still causes disagreements. However, since Vatican II, the Catholic Church in Guatemala has established a commitment to act as a church of the poor. There is tension between Guatemala's elite and the Church, which has led to the murders of Church members and the issuance of death threats to others. Although the growth of evangelical movements has caused the Church to lose influence, the Church remains committed to the poor, which places it in sharp contradistinction to neoliberalism.     

罗马教廷、东北天主教会与伪满洲国

罗马教廷在对待伪满洲国的问题上采取了两手策略,一方面极力在外交和法理层面上回避与伪满洲国之间的关系问题,另一方面又在事实上承认了伪满洲国的存在。吉林教区主教高德惠作为罗马教延的实际代表与伪满当局合作,协助当局推行殖民主义政策,其在本质上已经成为日本殖民主义者的帮凶。     

Religion and Politics in the Philippines: The Public Role of the Roman Catholic Church in the Democratization of the Filipino Polity

Abstract

From a social-ethical point of view, an appalling lack of a sense of common good continues to haunt Philippine political life even after the restoration of democracy through the 1986 People Power revolution. Our study contends that it is mainly caused by a polity that does not allow for a participatory deliberation and envisioning of the common good and a political culture that is not nurturing but hindering the collective and institutional commitment for it. While the Roman Catholic Church has been partly responsible for this democratic deficit, it nevertheless remains a social force with a moral high ground for political transformation, if it is able to change its social location and re-invent its social mission. A self-critical Filipino church whose base ecclesial communities are inserted like leaven in civil society holds the most important key to the democratization of Philippine polity and culture in the light of the Gospel.     

The Connolly Association,the Catholic Church,and anti-communism in Britain and Ireland during the early Cold War

ABSTRACT

During the Cold War era, the Connolly Association, an Irish republican socialist political organisation in Britain close to the Communist Party of Great Britain, was seen by British Communists as a potential means of winning recruits amongst Britain’s growing post-war Irish community. This view was shared by the Catholic Church, which, amidst the broader ideological atmosphere of the Cold War, placed an increased emphasis on anti-communism in the early post-war years. This article will discuss clerical opposition to the Connolly Association in early Cold War Britain and Ireland, drawing chiefly on diocesan archives and Catholic periodicals.     

From Empires to Nation-State: Remaking the Roman Catholic Church in an Independent Poland

ABSTRACT

Roman Catholicism is most often imagined as an element of continuity in Poland’s turbulent history: even when a Polish state was absent from the map of Europe from the late eighteenth through early twentieth centuries, a recognizably ‘Polish’ church has been presumed to provide a robust institutional anchor for the Polish nation. This article, however, argues that the creation of a ‘Polish’ Roman Catholic church was a belated and protracted process, one that was only getting started in the years following the achievement of Polish independence in 1918. The church’s ‘Polonization’ was only partially a matter of emancipation from imperial-era restrictions. It often also involved the defence and attempted extrapolation of laws, practices and institutions that had developed under the auspices of the German, Austrian or Russian states and that the Catholic hierarchy viewed as healthy and desirable building blocks for a future Polish church. These imperial precedents continued to provide crucial points of reference in ongoing debates about what ‘Polish’ Catholicism was and what it should become.