Conversion front Greek Orthodoxy to Roman Catholicism in the Fourteenth Century

Abstract

Several prominent Byzantines, including the Emperor John V Palaiologos, converted to Roman Catholicism in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. This may seem an odd sort of conversion. After all, if the fundamental tenets of the Christian faith are contained in the Nicene Creed, then Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholic believers differ on only one tenet: whether the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father or from the Father and the Son – the Filioque issue. For a Christian to admit the double procession of the Holy Spirit is hardly on the same level as admitting that Mohammed is the prophet of the one God. Indeed, many members of each church have been willing to call the procession of the Holy Spirit unknowable and leave it at that.     

Was Fifteenth-Century Lithuanian Catholicism as Lukewarm as Sixteenth-Century Reformers and Later Commentators Would Have Us Believe?

Abstract

The English are not alone in subjecting their history still to the ideological nonsense of sixteenth-century apologetics concerning the alleged weakness and unpopularity of fifteenth-century western Christianity. In Lithuania the lack of historical source material has led to even more acceptance of superficial Protestant and Jesuit disputes over what constitutes true religion as unbiased reportage of the state of Catholicism in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which paints a picture of failed Polish (sic!) mission and ‘pagan’ resilience. This paper uses material from local diocesan records from Podlasie and the Sacred Penitentiary in Rome to illustrate how common European religious fashions took root in Lithuanian society during the long fifteenth century: the activities of Church courts, fraternities and the cult of the dead, burgher and gentry initiatives to privatize Catholic practices (requests for indulgences, connected in particular with devotion to the Blessed Sacrament, permission to choose confessors, requests for portable altars and so forth).     

Belonging without believing: Catholics in contemporary Italy

Abstract

This article seeks to illustrate some characteristics of the religiosity of Italians, focusing on Catholicism and interpreting the data in the light of the model of religious economy. The issue of belonging to the Catholic Church is addressed first, with an emphasis on problems of measurement and on the factors which underlie the differentiation of religious orientations in Italy. Next, the practice of Catholicism, primarily attendance at Mass, is examined as an indicator of the diffusion and vitality of the Catholic Church, and its course since the Second World War is described. Finally, the article deals with the issue of belief, showing Italians’ widely diffused propensity to ‘deviate’ from full Catholic orthodoxy. Our analysis shows that while the Catholic Church has maintained its pre‐eminent position in Italy's internal religious market, it has lost ground in recent decades and at present must contend with a considerable lack of both vitality and orthodoxy.     

‘To Save a Soul’: Catholic Mission Schools,Apartheid, and the 1953 Bantu Education Act

The Bantu Education Act of 1953 was enacted by the government of South Africa to bring about the election promise of apartheid (separateness) among the races. For the Roman Catholic Church in South Africa, the Education Act was a direct attack on its apostolic work in the country as the church was responsible for educating 15 per cent of the black student population by 1953. Regardless of the Catholic contribution to South Africa’s educational system, the church was viewed as a threat — die Roomse gevaar — to its architects of apartheid. Catholic precepts regarding the unity of the human race under “the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of man” and the belief in the equality of all people as children of God challenged the apartheid ideology of racial separateness and differentiation. Eliminating Catholic control of Bantu education would neutralise the Roman threat. Passage of the Education Act left church leaders with two choices: fight or surrender. They chose to fight, launching the “Catholic Bishops’ Campaign for Mission Schools and Seminaries” in 1955. Although overlooked by most scholars, the campaign was an important part of a larger resistance movement that challenged the legitimacy of the apartheid regime in the 1950s.     

On the current absence and future improbability of political Catholicism in Italy

Clerical ‘non-negotiable values’ were actively promoted by right-wing governments in the 2000s, the Monti government that replaced them was strongly supported by the Vatican and the Italian bishops, and the current left-wing government is led by a former member of the Catholic popolari who attends Mass every Sunday. But this article argues that, rather than a new golden age of political Catholicism, the return of Catholicism to Italian politics has taken a ‘low intensity’ form which lacks the robust combination of ideas, leaders, organizations, and interests that informed earlier, genuinely political forms of Catholic engagement. The article demonstrates this by focusing on the ‘Todi movement’, which played a crucial role in the Monti government, and on Matteo Renzi’s current leadership of the Partito democratico and the national government. It also proposes a theoretical framework to explain the apparent contradiction between the high visibility and the low political relevance of Catholicism in Italian politics.     

Troubling Confessions: Roman Catholicism and ‘The Homosexual Question’

Abstract

Current scholarship on human rights and torture largely ignores places and scenes where extra-judicial violence is routinely practiced. That is, framed within a secular discourse, the agency of religious bodies in the systemic infringement of ‘rights’ is never considered. This paper explores one question with two parts: What are the conditions in church governance (Christian) in which systematic violation of human ‘rights’ is the norm, and in which the production of behaviors very much like torture is made possible, even necessary? Why do such behaviors go unnoticed, or, when they are observed, are they discounted? Using the crisis of homosexual presence within contemporary Roman Catholicism I shall argue that pressure for ‘confessional’ purity produces behaviors and activities within lines of authority that mimic torture. The essay examines documented policies, ecclesiastical directives and procedures concerning the management and treatment of persons (mostly homosexuals and women) during the second half of the papacy of John Paul II (1986-2001).     

The disillusionment of Robert Dell: the intellectual journey of a Catholic socialist

ABSTRACT

This article considers attempts in the late nineteenth century to bring about a confluence of Catholicism and Socialism in Britain by examining the writing and correspondence of one man, the art critic and Fabian socialist Robert Dell. Beginning with Dell’s involvement as a young man in London-based radical politics, the article examines his efforts to bring his socialist politics and Catholic faith together. Dell attempted this through stressing a narrative of Catholic collectivism, under the aegis of a benevolent Church, contrasted with a post-Reformation Protestant individualism leading to the inequities of capitalism. The appeal of Catholicism in a Victorian Britain undergoing a collective crisis of faith is addressed. The second part of the article documents the failure of these attempts and Dell’s disillusionment with the Catholic hierarchy that by 1908 had led to a complete break on Dell’s part with the Catholic establishment. The catalyst for this break was the brutal treatment of Catholic Modernists such as George Tyrrell, Maude Petre and St George Mivart by the Vatican and the English Catholic leadership. Dell’s final rejection of organised Catholicism is charted through pamphlets, newspaper articles and personal correspondence. Ultimately, the article considers how Dell’s early political and theological career reflects on the relative positions of Catholicism and socialism at the turn of the twentieth century, and more broadly the dynamics of personal belief and political allegiances.     

Noble Traditions and Christian Principles: The Integral Spirituality of Bernard Narokobi

ABSTRACT

This article describes some of the major events in the Catholic Church in Papua New Guinea (PNG) following the Second Vatican Council, the ‘self study’ of the church in PNG in the 1970s, and the General Assembly of 2003–4. An outcome of the self study was the establishment of a national Catholic council in which Bernard Narokobi played a significant role. The article continues with a reflection on how Narokobi’s promotion of Melanesian spirituality finds links with a Catholic theology of grace and sacrament and how these two contribute to his understanding of the dual pillars of the PNG Constitution with its noble traditions and Christian principles coming together in the ideal of integral human development. The article lays out different ways Bernard Narokobi was formally involved with the church over his lifetime and how his bringing together of Melanesian experience and Christian faith provided a model for the integral liberation he envisaged and expressed – both in his work in the church and in the National Goals and Directive Principles of the PNG Constitution.     

The curious case of Catherine Mary Hewitt and U.S. Major General of Volunteers John Fulton Reynolds: bodies,mourning the dead,and religion in the era of the American Civil War

ABSTRACT

At the time of his death at the Battle of Gettysburg, General Reynolds was the highest-ranking Union officer killed in the American Civil War. The return of the General’s body from the battlefront represented an uncommon feature of a war noted for its industrial scale and for the casualties it produced. How loved ones grieved Reynolds illustrates mourning practices among middle- to upper-class women in the Civil War North and underscores the centrality of death in nineteenth-century America. The death of Reynolds also occasioned the introduction of Reynolds’s sisters to the General’s secret fiancée, a Roman Catholic convert. Writers have attributed the clandestine nature of the engagement, and the General’s reluctance to introduce his fiancée to family, to Catherine Hewitt’s Roman Catholicism. But Catholics in the North received greater accommodation in mainline Protestant society than previously imagined, and the many kindnesses that the Reynolds family showed Hewitt point to an increasing acceptance of Catholics among Protestants in established social settings. Finally, Reynolds’s loved ones mourned him in religious and Victorian overtones, but it is not altogether clear that for them religion functioned as the predominant paradigm from which they elicited a transcendent meaning of the General’s death. In this local context, the responses of Reynolds’s loved ones to his death suggest the waning of religious belief in the era of the American Civil War.     

German First World War Memorials in Transylvania

Abstract

In 1784 King Stanis?aw August Poniatowski undertook a splendid progress across the south-western parts of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The official account of the journey prompts the reflection that even in this linguistically and confessionally mixed part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the precedence over other confessions of the Catholic Church of both rites, Latin and Ruthenian, was axiomatic. By the mid-eighteenth century, about five-sixths of the Commonwealth’s population, the vast majority of the noble citizenry, and the entire legislature were Catholic. However, Catholics of the Latin rite constituted only about half of the population. Most Catholics of the Ruthenian rite (Uniates) were in only nominal obedience to Rome; they were the object of a struggle for the allegiance and salvation of souls, conducted between an advancing Catholic Church and a retreating Orthodox Church. The fault line between Eastern and Western Christendom ran through both the Polish Crown and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania; Orthodoxy retained strongholds in both parts of the Commonwealth. However, the position of the ‘Latin’ Church was, in most ways, significantly weaker in the Grand Duchy, where the majority of the inhabitants were Uniates. Adapting recent mutations in ‘confessionalization theory’, this paper first reviews the confessional balance, and the privileges, structures, educational institutions, and missionary work of the Catholic Church (of both rites) in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the second half of the eighteenth century. It then asks how the dramatic events of Stanis?aw August’s reign (1764–95) affected Catholic supremacy. These changes included the enforced removal of the Catholic monopoly of the legislature in 1768, the impact of the first partition of the Commonwealth in 1772, the Orthodox revivals under Bishops Georgii Konisskii and Viktor Sadkovskii, as well as the formulation of new policies intended to promote loyalty to the Commonwealth and social cohesion during the Four Years’ Sejm (1788–92). It concludes that the partial ‘deconfessionalization’ of the polity had (or might have had) a proportionately greater impact on the Grand Duchy of Lithuania than on the Polish Crown.     

From excess to encompassment: Repetition,recantation, and the trashing of time in Swedish Christianities

ABSTRACT

I explore the conversion of a Swedish Pentecostal Prosperity preacher to the Roman Catholic Church in order to examine questions of analytical perspective, temporal scale, and ethical discernment in the operation of religiously charged forms of repetition. The paper juxtaposes neo-Pentecostal with Roman Catholic understandings of temporality through tracing the ideological movements of Pastor Ulf Ekman over the past three decades, summarizing these understandings as based around tropes of ‘excess’ and ‘encompassment’ respectively. In exploring repetition as both theoretical category and ethnographic object of observation, I distinguish between actively marked repetition and the merely repetitious, while also drawing distinctions between continuity and the iterative, oscillatory character of repetitive actions.     

The politics of rebirth in Colm Tóibín's ‘Three Friends’ and ‘A Long Winter’

This paper explores the compatibility of Catholic and homosexual identities. Because the language of Catholicism is so deeply entrenched in the popular imagination, I aim to show that not only does it provide a vocabulary for oppression but also for change. For the contemporary Irish novelist, the latter means conferring new meaning onto formerly oppressive language. In ‘Three Friends’ and ‘A Long Winter’, two short stories from Tóibín's Mothers and Sons (2007), the protagonists undergo a ‘baptism’ that signals their emergence into a new world, one tolerant of homosexual desire. Fergus, in the ocean, and Miquel, in the bathtub, experience moments at once erotic and cleansing. I outline their participation in the traditional world – the time before their bathing rites – in contradistinction to a re-imagined, modern, ‘queer’ world. I argue that Tóibín appropriates a Catholic, and therefore heteronormative, rite in a way that includes homosexuals. Thus, he reworks an oppressive framework in order to allow for the formerly excluded to participate and celebrate their non-heteronormativity, or queerness.     

Reactions of the Governments of Nigeria and Biafra to the Role of the Catholic Church in the Nigeria–Biafra War

Abstract

The high incidence of conflict in the world today, and the overwhelming influence of religion on man and his society, have resulted in an increasing engagement of religion in conflict management. However, in spite of its high profile in managing conflict, religion can sometimes form a barrier to conflict resolution. The Nigeria–Biafra war was one of those wars in which religion, as an instrument of conflict management, played a double-edged sword. This paper examines the reaction of the parties to this conflict to the role of the Catholic Church in managing the conflict.

The involvement of the Catholic Church in the Nigeria–Biafra war has ever remained one of the highly controversial themes of this war. While the role played by the church appeared to be a welcome development on the part of the Biafran Government, the Federal Military Government of Nigeria (FMG) was against the church and its activities, particularly its relief programme in Biafra during the war. From the available evidence, the church’s relief services, just like those of the International Committee of the Red Cross, were carried out on both sides of the war. The difference was on the level of dependence on it, as well as the degree of its exploitation by the two parties. In addition to its high dependence on the Caritas airlift, the Biafran Government, in its war of propaganda hinged on religion, was out to exploit every available opportunity provided by the church’s relief programme in Biafra. It therefore made its overtures of ‘friendship’ to the church in Biafra and beyond as it assumed the status of a ‘maligned child’ of the mother church. To the FMG that was out to crush a rebellion, such manipulation of religion, using the platform of the church’s programme of relief in Biafra was more than a frustration of its war effort. Its anger was thus directed against the church both locally and internationally such that the latter, among other things, could achieve little or nothing in terms of conflict resolution, although the relief programme of the church in general saved the Biafran population from a war in which starvation was obviously an instrument.     

The ultimate return: Dissent,apostolic succession,and the renewed ministry of roman catholic women priests

ABSTRACT

Significant numbers of practising Roman Catholics dissent from the Church’s orthodox teachings, especially those relating to sex, gender and contraception. Many such dissenters even occupy positions of ecclesiastical authority themselves. This raises interesting questions about how dissent manifests differently in various Christian traditions; how disagreement about fundamental principles only become legible if expressed in particular ways. This paper draws on research on Roman Catholic Woman priests whose claim to sacerdotal legitimacy rests on their having been ordained in apostolic succession by bishops within the Roman Catholic Church. It asks how do women priests negotiate both difference and repetition at the very same time. The ethnography prompts deeper reflection on Christianity’s long history of dissent which I argue has been written from a predominantly male and Protestant perspective. One in which dissent that leads to institutional differentiation is prioritized over dissent borne quietly that seeks to contain itself.     

The public relevance of the church and Catholicism in Italy

Abstract

This article highlights the particular situation of the Catholic religion in Italy which distinguishes itself for its systematic organization, active association-forming and cultural vitality, unrivalled in any other European country either Protestant or Catholic. On the one hand the church in Italy still disposes of such a wealth of clergy and religious figures, dioceses and parishes, educational and social institutions, ecclesiastical groups and associations, and so on, that it can maintain a diffuse presence scattered over the national territory; it deploys numerous forces and resources which form an integral part of normal social relationships that animate civil society. On the other hand, the church and Italian Catholicism today are particularly active at a cultural level, with their contribution of ideas and experience on vital questions arising in social coexistence (ranging from the family to bioethics, from religious freedom to the secular State, from national identity to the multiethnic presence, and so on).     

A queen without a sceptre: public opinion and the political-constitutional debate in Italy in the first fifty years of national unification

Italy's intellectual debate over the concept of ‘public opinion’ in the first fifty years after unification can be better understood if one starts from an analysis of the constitutional framework. The definition of the rights and duties of rulers and ruled was the most pressing concern for the liberal ruling class. It should be noted that a strong paternalistic element was always present in the Italian intellectual debate. This paternalistic approach emerges clearly in the official Catholic culture. The main difference between Catholic intellectuals and liberals was over the ‘public sphere’. Liberalism mistrusted the masses because they were prone to insubordination and easily manipulated by demagogy, but it also believed the masses could elevate themselves. The ruling class's culture was essentially a synthesis between ‘moderatismo’ and that section of Catholicism that was less closed to modernity. Public opinion was considered by many as ‘queen of the world’, but according to the Albertine constitutional statute, the king was more politically influent.     

"Silently Farting in the Face of the Empire." Review of Paul and the Imperial Roman Order

Abstract

As the Roman Catholic Church's hierarchy ventures more frequently into the sphere of environmental ethics and makes pronouncements on large-scale environmental problems, its effectiveness will consistently be undercut by its commitment to what is traditionally called "Catholic act analysis," which when used to evaluate a host of commonplace actions leads Catholics to believe that they are morally unproblematic. Yet when these same actions are performed day after day and year after year, they contribute to many large-scale environmental problems that are unquestionably harmful—and are often viewed negatively by the Catholic hierarchy. At some point, this pattern of approving morally of certain actions the cumulative, corporate side effects of which cause pernicious environmental problems will strain the Catholic Church's credibility on environmental matters—and until the hierarchy reexamines its commitment to Catholic act analysis, this dilemma will be unavoidable.     

Gallican Liberties and the Catholic League

Summary

Theorists of Gallican liberty took as their premise the idea that France had an exceptional status amongst the national Christian churches. However, as contemporaries had noted, the precise definition of Gallican liberties remained at stake; Antoine Hotman noted in his treatise on the subject that ‘it is a strange phenomenon that everyone talks of the liberties of the Gallican Church and, most of the time, very few people know what they are and cannot account for their origins or for their progress’. Within the context of French reactions to the papal excommunications of Henri III and Henri de Navarre, and reception of the Tridentine decrees, the question of how to define Gallican liberty was an extremely pertinent one. This article examines the treatment of Gallican ideas in Catholic League treatises as they negotiated a balance between arguments for Gallican independence and indirect papal power. Despite accusations from their contemporaries that they were attacking the Gallican church, Leaguer discussions of Gallican liberty frequently proved to be an integral part of the argument that Catholicity was a ‘fundamental law’ of France.     

Christening Masculinity? Catholic Action and Men in Interwar Belgium

Masculine reactions to the ‘feminisation of Christianity’ among Protestants have been widely explored; the Catholic case is less well known. This article focuses on Catholic Action, an organisation regarded as specifically appealing to men. Through an analysis of the discourses of Catholic Action in Belgium, it examines how important masculine involvement was for Belgian Catholicism and how Catholic Action ‘christened’ masculinity. The article also analyses Catholic femininity. It examines the ways that the ideal Catholic man and woman and their corresponding gendered behaviour and role models were defined in relation to each other and the various forms that these ideals assumed.     

Unity from disunity: law,rhetoric and power in the Visigothic kingdom

This paper explores the relationship between the ‘Church’ and the ‘State’ in the Visigothic kingdom of sixth- and seventh-century Spain. The authors examine the copious legal material from this period – both church council records and royal legislation – to see what it reveals about the significant degree of interpenetration of the two spheres. For example, the royal laws gave bishops an important role in the supervision of judges, while a church council could not be called without the permission of the king, who often attended along with his officials and set the agenda for the meetings. There has been significant debate on this issue over the past two centuries, and the authors' analysis will be situated accordingly. The extent to which the Visigothic evidence emerges out of late Roman practices and precedents or is independent of it will also be addressed.