John J. Coughlin, O.F.M.
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- January 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195372977
- eISBN:
- 9780199871667
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195372977.001.0001
- Subject:
- Law, Philosophy of Law
This book explores the canon law of the Roman Catholic Church from a comparative perspective. The Introduction to the book presents historical examples of antinomian and legalistic approaches to ...
More
This book explores the canon law of the Roman Catholic Church from a comparative perspective. The Introduction to the book presents historical examples of antinomian and legalistic approaches to canon law. It discusses these approaches as threats to the rule of law in the Church, and describes the concept of the rule of law in the thought of various Anglo-American legal theorists. Chapter One offers an overview of canon law as the “home system” in this study. The remaining chapters consider antinomian and legalistic approaches to the rule of law in light of three specific issues: the sexual abuse crisis, ownership of church property, and the denial of Holy Communion to Catholic public officials. Chapters Two and Three discuss the failure of the rule of law as a result of antinomian and legalistic approaches to the sexual abuse crisis. Chapters Four and Five compare the concept of property in canon law with that of liberal political theory; they discuss the ownership of parish property in light of diocesan bankruptcies, the relationship between church property and the law of the secular state, and the secularization of Catholic institutions and their property. Chapters Six and Seven raise the indeterminacy claim with regards to canon law and the arguments for and against the denial of Holy Communion to Catholic public officials. Although the three issues arise in the context of the United States, they raise broader theoretical issues about antinomianism, legalism, and the rule of law.Less
This book explores the canon law of the Roman Catholic Church from a comparative perspective. The Introduction to the book presents historical examples of antinomian and legalistic approaches to canon law. It discusses these approaches as threats to the rule of law in the Church, and describes the concept of the rule of law in the thought of various Anglo-American legal theorists. Chapter One offers an overview of canon law as the “home system” in this study. The remaining chapters consider antinomian and legalistic approaches to the rule of law in light of three specific issues: the sexual abuse crisis, ownership of church property, and the denial of Holy Communion to Catholic public officials. Chapters Two and Three discuss the failure of the rule of law as a result of antinomian and legalistic approaches to the sexual abuse crisis. Chapters Four and Five compare the concept of property in canon law with that of liberal political theory; they discuss the ownership of parish property in light of diocesan bankruptcies, the relationship between church property and the law of the secular state, and the secularization of Catholic institutions and their property. Chapters Six and Seven raise the indeterminacy claim with regards to canon law and the arguments for and against the denial of Holy Communion to Catholic public officials. Although the three issues arise in the context of the United States, they raise broader theoretical issues about antinomianism, legalism, and the rule of law.
Robert A. Orsi
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780520288423
- eISBN:
- 9780520963368
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520288423.003.0022
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Anthropology, Religion
This chapter explores a question often asked about survivors of clerical sexual abuse: do they remain Catholic? Such a question, this chapter argues, fails to account for the complex reality. ...
More
This chapter explores a question often asked about survivors of clerical sexual abuse: do they remain Catholic? Such a question, this chapter argues, fails to account for the complex reality. Survivors were abused as youngsters so they were usually unable to determine this for themselves. The insistence of adults that children and teenagers who were abused continue going to church was another way of denying the reality of the abuse. (“They drove me to my abuser,” one survivor said of his parents.) Many survivors remained faithful Catholics into adulthood. But most survivors describe a moment when being at Mass became physically and emotionally painful. For many the decision to stay or leave was not simple or final. Some survivors developed strategies for protecting themselves from further fear and harm as they continued attending Mass; others found ways of being both inside and outside the church; still others made different choices over time. The struggle of many survivors with the church in which they were religiously formed, encountered the sacred, and were abused—abuse that always had religious context and significance—offers a revealing perspective on Catholics and Catholicism in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.Less
This chapter explores a question often asked about survivors of clerical sexual abuse: do they remain Catholic? Such a question, this chapter argues, fails to account for the complex reality. Survivors were abused as youngsters so they were usually unable to determine this for themselves. The insistence of adults that children and teenagers who were abused continue going to church was another way of denying the reality of the abuse. (“They drove me to my abuser,” one survivor said of his parents.) Many survivors remained faithful Catholics into adulthood. But most survivors describe a moment when being at Mass became physically and emotionally painful. For many the decision to stay or leave was not simple or final. Some survivors developed strategies for protecting themselves from further fear and harm as they continued attending Mass; others found ways of being both inside and outside the church; still others made different choices over time. The struggle of many survivors with the church in which they were religiously formed, encountered the sacred, and were abused—abuse that always had religious context and significance—offers a revealing perspective on Catholics and Catholicism in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
Maya Mayblin
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780520288423
- eISBN:
- 9780520963368
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520288423.003.0012
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Anthropology, Religion
This chapter concerns the contradiction in modern Catholicism that women can be God-like but not priest-like. Drawing on research into the Roman Catholic Women Priest movement, it explores how this ...
More
This chapter concerns the contradiction in modern Catholicism that women can be God-like but not priest-like. Drawing on research into the Roman Catholic Women Priest movement, it explores how this contradiction persists through the manipulation of metaphors of contagion and containment in relation to notions of sin and virtue. Just as the sins of the one couple (Adam and Eve) contaminate the many and for generations thereafter, the moral failures of any one individual, by analogy, can be applied metaphorically to all of humankind. Yet grace, too, can be contagious, spreading among persons (underlying certain Catholic models of religious practice). Problems arise when some people’s sins turn out to be more contagious than others. Through a mixture of ethnographic and historical sources, the discussion traces how sin and grace are differently containable or contagious according to gender. The infinite manipulability of this sin/grace complex helps to illuminate how opposition to the ordination of women remains institutionally entrenched even as male sex-abuser priests have come to dominate the media. The chapter concludes that Catholicism’s multiform problems with gender are reproduced via this politics of contagion and containment, and that radical repercussions are at stake in sin’s containment.Less
This chapter concerns the contradiction in modern Catholicism that women can be God-like but not priest-like. Drawing on research into the Roman Catholic Women Priest movement, it explores how this contradiction persists through the manipulation of metaphors of contagion and containment in relation to notions of sin and virtue. Just as the sins of the one couple (Adam and Eve) contaminate the many and for generations thereafter, the moral failures of any one individual, by analogy, can be applied metaphorically to all of humankind. Yet grace, too, can be contagious, spreading among persons (underlying certain Catholic models of religious practice). Problems arise when some people’s sins turn out to be more contagious than others. Through a mixture of ethnographic and historical sources, the discussion traces how sin and grace are differently containable or contagious according to gender. The infinite manipulability of this sin/grace complex helps to illuminate how opposition to the ordination of women remains institutionally entrenched even as male sex-abuser priests have come to dominate the media. The chapter concludes that Catholicism’s multiform problems with gender are reproduced via this politics of contagion and containment, and that radical repercussions are at stake in sin’s containment.
Patricia Ewick and Marc W. Steinberg
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- January 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780226644127
- eISBN:
- 9780226644431
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226644431.001.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Social Psychology and Interaction
On January 6, 2002 the Boston Globe published a reports on the Catholic Church cover up of sexual abuse by priests. The banner headline told a tragic story that would, in its basic plot, be repeated ...
More
On January 6, 2002 the Boston Globe published a reports on the Catholic Church cover up of sexual abuse by priests. The banner headline told a tragic story that would, in its basic plot, be repeated with disturbing regularity over the course of the next decade. As a result of these revelations many Catholics would leave the Church; many would remain staunchly faithful. Some Catholics would decide to keep their faith, but also to change the Church. Based on years of ethnographic research, Ewick and Steinberg studied one group of such Catholics—a chapter of Voice of the Faithful. In standing up to the Church, their project parallels that of many change seekers whose efforts face obstacles by the economic and cultural resources and organizational power they seek to change. In the case of the Church crisis, expectations of obedience, deference to hierarchy, and presumption of ecclesiastic immunity collided with individual conscience, liberty and democracy. Caught between their loyalty to the Church and their sense of justice, these Catholics reimagined the Church and their role in it. Over more than a decade they engaged in an ongoing process of collective identity through which they reimagined their place within the institutional order and the meaning of being faithful Catholics. Theirs is an all-too-familiar story about identities under stress and their reconfiguration as collective challengers; about institutional betrayal and the restoration of trust; and, about commitment and the meaning of justice.Less
On January 6, 2002 the Boston Globe published a reports on the Catholic Church cover up of sexual abuse by priests. The banner headline told a tragic story that would, in its basic plot, be repeated with disturbing regularity over the course of the next decade. As a result of these revelations many Catholics would leave the Church; many would remain staunchly faithful. Some Catholics would decide to keep their faith, but also to change the Church. Based on years of ethnographic research, Ewick and Steinberg studied one group of such Catholics—a chapter of Voice of the Faithful. In standing up to the Church, their project parallels that of many change seekers whose efforts face obstacles by the economic and cultural resources and organizational power they seek to change. In the case of the Church crisis, expectations of obedience, deference to hierarchy, and presumption of ecclesiastic immunity collided with individual conscience, liberty and democracy. Caught between their loyalty to the Church and their sense of justice, these Catholics reimagined the Church and their role in it. Over more than a decade they engaged in an ongoing process of collective identity through which they reimagined their place within the institutional order and the meaning of being faithful Catholics. Theirs is an all-too-familiar story about identities under stress and their reconfiguration as collective challengers; about institutional betrayal and the restoration of trust; and, about commitment and the meaning of justice.
Massimo Franco
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780190205423
- eISBN:
- 9780190205454
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190205423.003.0006
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Society
This chapter argues that the new millennium began with Christian voices in Europe as primarily intolerant ones, claiming a “Western identity” that was more ethnic and nationalistic than religious. ...
More
This chapter argues that the new millennium began with Christian voices in Europe as primarily intolerant ones, claiming a “Western identity” that was more ethnic and nationalistic than religious. This portrayal aligns with the concern in Chapter 1 that Islam is unfairly treated in Europe by such groups. It continues with an organizational analysis of the sexual, fiscal, and diplomatic scandals of the Vatican. The decline in the Vatican’s authority and voice occurred because of the “secularization of sin”, with the sexual abuse crisis and organizational failure seen as crimes over which the state should have authority. Addressing the portrayal of Lautsi in Chapter 1 as a victory against secularism, this chapter considers it a pyrrhic one. The government briefs in the Lautsi case had to do with a defensive Western identity against Islam and secularism, not a revived Catholicism.Less
This chapter argues that the new millennium began with Christian voices in Europe as primarily intolerant ones, claiming a “Western identity” that was more ethnic and nationalistic than religious. This portrayal aligns with the concern in Chapter 1 that Islam is unfairly treated in Europe by such groups. It continues with an organizational analysis of the sexual, fiscal, and diplomatic scandals of the Vatican. The decline in the Vatican’s authority and voice occurred because of the “secularization of sin”, with the sexual abuse crisis and organizational failure seen as crimes over which the state should have authority. Addressing the portrayal of Lautsi in Chapter 1 as a victory against secularism, this chapter considers it a pyrrhic one. The government briefs in the Lautsi case had to do with a defensive Western identity against Islam and secularism, not a revived Catholicism.
