Search Results

Examines the period from 1880–1920, when Catholicism's relationship with American culture intensified. There are five themes: (1) The study of the interaction between Catholicism and American culture is expanded, while continuing to focus on democracy and how this core American value influenced the Catholic community; (2) An examination is also made of the European devotional style of Catholicism that flourished at that time and how it shaped Catholicism; (3) The issue of American national identity is also addressed in relation to Catholicism – this became a major topic of debate in the 1880s and 1890s; (4) The Americanization of Catholic doctrine started as the American cultural traditions of democracy and religious freedom persuaded some Catholics to reexamine Catholic teaching on church and state and religious freedom – as a result, American Catholicism began to take on a distinctiveness that would set it apart from its counterparts in such countries as Italy and France; (5) The final theme examined is that of gender – with the emergence of the American ideal of gender equality, an awakening clearly began to take place among Catholics, which sought to modify the traditional understanding of the role of women in society. These five themes are examined in more detail in the next two chapters.

The five themes presented in Ch. 3 (American national identity, Americanization of Catholic doctrine, democracy, devotional Catholicism, and gender equality) are further examined here in the context of seeking to show how American culture shaped Catholicism in the era 1920–60 . It is shown that during these years, Catholics were beginning to think in a less parochial manner, and emerge from the neighbourhood/parish ghettos that had formed their life previously, and had been subject to attack by nativist revivals of Anglo‐Saxonism and anti‐Catholicism (in the shape of a revived Ku Klux Klan). Such a reorientation gave rise to the emergence of a public Catholicism that sought to influence the shape and values of American society.

The five themes presented in Ch. 3 (democracy, American national identity, gender equality, devotional Catholicism, and the Americanization of Catholic doctrine) are further examined here in the context of seeking to show how American culture shaped Catholicism in the period 1960–2001. The chapter starts by examining the role of President Kennedy in enabling Catholics to stand taller, and the changes initiated by Pope John XXIII's election in 1958, which led to the Second Vatican Council reforms (1962–65). It then examines the further emergence of a public Catholicism that sought to influence the shape and values of American society. The chapter also touches on some issues that have generated considerable controversy among Catholics in recent years – the ethical issues of abortion and birth control, the desire for more democracy in the management of parish life, the role of women in the church, the increased ethnic diversity of Catholicism, and the new rituals of prayer and worship that have emerged in the past 40 years.

This chapter begins by discussing that the number, variety, and importance of religious associations active in Antioquia steadily increased between 1850 to 1930. It explains that these associations were promoted mainly by parish priests and by the Jesuits, and to a lesser extent by the other congregations and the laity. It mentions some of the goals performed by these religious associations: caring for spiritual salvation of deceased brothers, honouring a particular saint, disseminating Catholic doctrine, sponsoring of charities. It notes that the peak of intense activity of religious organisations was during the 1970s. It also describes the development and achievements of the main religious organisations, following a chronological sequence according to the date of their foundation.

This chapter discusses anti-Catholicism in America, the roots of which stretch back to late antique Europe. Religious movements born in Europe and the Mediterranean that challenged the authority of the Roman Catholic Church or its teachings were common in the first few centuries after the Emperor Constantine. Gathering momentum in terms both of their numbers and their ability to attract followers, such movements increasingly emerged as permutations of Roman Catholicism, and especially as representations of altered Catholic doctrine. Because of that, they were considered heretical. Heretics and their followers, as apostates or traitors to the faith, posed a particular danger to Roman leadership as “wolves in sheep's clothing,” or a kind of malignancy thought to be growing in the body of the true church. Rome was ever watchful against heresy, rooting it out wherever it could be found, brutally punishing or exterminating heretical communities.

This chapter provides a detailed analysis of James Joyce's Catholic nostalgia, particularly his returns to bittersweet memories of his Catholic mother as well as his repeated invocations of intellectually provocative Catholic doctrines. It discusses Joyce's abiding interest in the Catholic version of the soul's existence and immortality as evidenced by his study of Saint Thomas Aquinas and Reverend Michael Maher's Psychology. It also highlights Joyce's womb fixation and mother/Mary identification.

By the late 1950s, three distinction conceptions of the welfare state had formed in West Germany, each with strong connections to a particular world view. Father Oswald von Nell-Breuning, in the tradition of Catholic social thinking, defended social policies as a dialectical combination of solidarity and subsidiarity, which could counter the inequities of capitalism to help integrate workers into society and ensure human dignity. Hans Achinger, with his roots in private charity and social work, by contrast, was skeptical of the institutions of the welfare state and described how programs created a permanent bureaucracy with a popular clientele, manipulated information, and had a series of unintended consequences on state, family, and individual alike. Ludwig Preller, finally, the leading Social Democratic expert on social policy, justified extensive social policies as a way to empower individuals, to give them the tools they needed to shape their own lives.

Chapter 3, “Marriage,”examines the local cultures of marriage in each parish in order to show how they are supported and shaped by the social processes of Catholic identity construction and central church metaphors, and consequently, how these cultures support polarizing tendencies among Catholics, particularly around abortion. At Assumption, marriage is tightly coupled with Church doctrine about human sexuality, especially those prohibiting artificial contraception. Marital identities are primarily constituted around family life and retraditionalized gender relations. At St. Brigitta, couples instead tend to ground marital intimacy in romantic love and the ideal of an equal partnership, with couples supporting each other in their involvements in religiously-informed work in service-oriented careers or volunteerism.Common patterns found between church social relations and marriages in each setting explain how Catholicism shapes both the domestic politics of marriage and its relation to moral polarization in public politics of the family.

This chapter presents traditional Catholic doctrine on the creation of the human soul by God. It provides information on the classic philosophical argumentation of Saint Thomas regarding the latter Catholic doctrine. It also discusses new contemporary challenges to it from within Christian thought.

This chapter illustrates how Catholic social doctrine sanctioned the activities of American Catholic clergy to provide pastoral care to braceros even while militating against the bracero program itself. While the priests who protested against the injustices of the program were in the ecclesiastical minority and occasionally clashed with their clerical brethren, they nevertheless benefited from and were supported by papal teaching. In a sense, this story of Catholic clergy and lay opposition to the bracero program can be understood as a prequel to Catholic collaboration with the United Farm Workers (UFW) and its various tactics and labor-organizing efforts. The chapter also highlights the legacy of Catholic critiques of the bracero program.

This book contains a collection of chapters on the theological vision of three of the greatest Jesuit thinkers of the twentieth century: Bernard Lonergan, John Courtney Murray, and Karl Rahner. These thinkers were influential in bringing to fruition—or deliberatively extending—the rhetorical and methodological style of the Second Vatican Council. It might be said that to understand the past forty years of Catholic theology one must understand the contribution of these men. Interestingly, they were each born in 1904 during the height of the Catholic Church's most militant, agonistic rhetoric against all things modern. Lonergan, Murray, and Rahner were also loyal sons of St. Ignatius of Loyola. They shared a certain Jesuit style encapsulated in the motto “finding God in all things”. Whether in the form of Lonergan's theological method, in Murray's reasoned defense of religious liberty, or in Rahner's countless theological investigations into Catholic doctrine and practice, each contributed to the Catholic renaissance encapsulated in the Second Vatican Council's aggiornamento, the “bringing up to date” of the ancient truths of Christian faith.

This chapter examines the question of salvation, looking at the Patristic Age, the Middle Ages, the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, modern Catholic doctrine, Vatican Council II, and postconcillar developments. Using the New Testament as their basic text, the Church Fathers regarded faith in Christ and baptism as essential for salvation. The chapter concludes that Catholics can be saved if they believe the word of God as taught by the Church and if they obey the commandments. Other Christians can be saved if they submit their lives to Christ. Jews can be saved if they look forward in hope to the Messiah and ascertain whether God's promise has been fulfilled. Adherents of other religions can be saved if they sincerely seek God and strive to do his will. Even atheists can be saved if they worship God under some other name and place their lives at the service of truth and justice.

This chapter aims to trace the complex legal history of the Indian Christian community and their attempts at reform in the post-independence period and recent judicial intervention. The process of tracing the developments within the Christian personal law is complex because the laws governing Christians are shaped by two distinct colonial influences, and because the post-independence attempts of reform are marked by the conflict between the conservative Roman Catholic doctrine and the reformist Protestant theology which has its roots within European politics. In conclusion, it must be emphasized that to unravel the legal maze within which the Christian family laws are ensnared, a whole range of legal reforms are necessary and imperative. Unfortunately, even though the community is ready and willing, the political will to legislate for them is sadly lacking.

This chapter shares the author's knowledge about Mario Savio as a person. It suggests that the single greatest influence upon his politics and upon his life was his early exposure to Catholicism and that though he began to reject Catholic doctrine in high school, the search for a God he could believe in was a driving force in his life. Until the end, Mario was unable to totally relinquish even the negative aspects of his Catholic heritage. It suggests that it was Savio's moral purity that had the most impact on people.

This chapter explores the ways in which ethical citizenship operates as a depoliticizing tool while simultaneously opening up new political possibilities. Almost all the volunteers the author spoke to tie their current sense of belonging and self-worth to past leftist solidaristic practice. The promise entailed in the welfare community—that of a moral community laboring outside the purview of commodified market relations—resonated hugely with people like Nullo and Mirella, for whom voluntarism was a paradigmatic anticapitalist act. At the same time, it is precisely these unalienated acts of labor, these acts of compassion, care, and solidarity, which were being put to work in the welfare community. The neoliberal project—ideologically omnivorous when it comes to Catholic doctrine—also converges with and draws upon leftist ethical practice. The chapter thus shows how ethical citizenship allows for leftist norms and practices to become simultaneously done and undone.

In a free and just society, people should be able to depend upon the honesty and the ethics of the professionals who would do business with them as they seek to realize their financial plans. Alas, the marketplace is far too frequently dishonest, and the professionals who work in it are far too often untrue to the ethical ideals of their chosen professions. Catholic scholars have long reflected upon personal virtue and social morality, based in turn on Sacred Scripture and religious practice. After having reviewed the relevant theological principles to be found in Catholic social doctrine, the chapter will then explore the moral failures of individual human beings and groups of people that contributed to the global financial crisis. The chapter concludes by identifying new policies of oversight and regulation, as well as renewed ethical practices and principles that business people and organizations should adopt.

This article is based on a talk Böckenförde gave to the Catholic Student Society in East Berlin in 1965, asking what kind of comportment Christians exhibited during the Nazi regime. He lays out six types of behaviour drawing on individual examples, ranging from opportunism to underground partisanism. Böckenförde is clear from the outset that no type of conduct is immune from incurring guilt. He notes that weighing between different kinds of evil was a key consideration in choosing between these types of conduct and criticizes that Christian moral doctrine had very little to offer a believer in search of orientation. The Staatssicherheitsdienst Stasi documented Böckenförde’s speech and, as became clear decades later, understood his talk to implicitly raise the question of Christian comportment in the GDR.