In this frank and damning expose of the Teresa cult, Hitchens details the nature and limits of one woman's mission to help the world's poor. He probes the source of the heroic status bestowed upon an Albanian nun whose only declared wish was to serve God. He asks whether Mother Teresa's good works answered any higher purpose than the need of the world's privileged to see someone, somewhere, doing something for the Third World. He unmasks pseudo-miracles, questions Mother Teresa's fitness to adjudicate on matters of sex and reproduction, and reports on a version of saintly ubiquity which affords genial relations with dictators, corrupt tycoons and convicted frauds. Is Mother Teresa merely an essential salve to the conscience of the rich West, or an expert PR machine for the Catholic Church? In its caustic iconoclasm and unsparing wit, The Missionary Position showcases the devastating effect of Hitchens' writing at its polemical best.

This book presents a range of perspectives on the current state of Catholic education in the opening decades of the twenty-first century. All of the chapters have their origin in an International Conference on Catholic Education, held at Heythrop College (University of London) in September 2016. The book brings together many leading scholars to present a survey of the latest research on Catholic education in areas such as the aims of Catholic education, Catholic schools and Catholic identity, leadership issues in Catholic schools and fresh thinking about the place of Religious Education (RE) in Catholic Education. This book demonstrates how the field of Catholic Education Studies has firmly come of age. Rather than being a subfield of educational or theological discourse, it is now an established field of research and study. As such, the book invites readers to engage with much of the new thinking on Catholic education that has grown rapidly in recent years. It offers a broad range of contemporary perspectives on research in Catholic Education and rich insights into current thinking about Catholic Education.

The Catholic Church through the Ages, now in its second edition, is a one-volume survey of the history of the Catholic Church from its beginning until (and including) the pontificate of Pope Francis. The book explains the Church's progress by using Christopher Dawson's division of the Church's history into six distinct "ages," or 350-400 year periods of time, each cycle beginning with great enthusiasm and advancement and ending in decline and loss. Writing with the experience of thirty years of teaching, the author has fashioned an ideal text that combines substance with readability. Undergraduates, graduates, and interested lay people have given the author an idea of what topics should be emphasized. As a result, he has emphasized such areas monasticism, the Crusades, medieval theology, the Inquisition, Reformation, French Revolution, the nineteenth century, and the Church in the United States. And he has added material on the Oxford Movement, John Henry Newman's contributions to the Oxford Movement and to the Catholic intellectual tradition, and the Catholic literary revival that took place in several countries in the early twentieth century, as well as on the last three popes. As a supplement to each chapter, the author has included an updated the recommended readings and bibliography, as well as the audio-visual materials.

Rethinking Catholicism in Renaissance Spain claims that theology and canon law were decisive for shaping ideas, debates, and decisions about key political and religious problems in Renaissance Spain. This book studies Catholic thought during the Spanish Renaissance, with the various contributors specifically exploring the ecclesiology and heresiology of the period. Today, these two subjects are considered to be strictly branches of theology, but at the time, they were also dealt with in the field of canon law. Both ecclesiology, which studied the internal structure of the Church, and heresiology, which identified theological errors, played an important role in shaping ideas, debates, and decisions concerning the major political and religious problems of the late medieval and early modern periods. In contrast to the conventional monolithic view of Spanish Catholic thought on ecclesiastical matters, the chapters in this book demonstrate that there was a wide spectrum of ideas in the field of theology and canon law. The topics analyzed include Church and Crown relations, diplomatic controversies, doctrinal debates on slavery, ecclesiological disputes in dialogue with the Council of Trent, and theories for distinguishing heresies and repressing them. This book will be essential reading for those interested in disciplines such as Church history, political history, and the history of political and legal thought.

Philip Schaff's The Creeds of Christendom is a massive set, originally published in three volumes and here reproduced across five volumes, cataloging and explaining the many different creeds from the myriad Christian denominations. The differences in belief between Calvinists, Lutherans, and Presbyterians, for example, can often be subtle, so a thorough examination of the particulars as well as an explanation for how those different beliefs result in a different worldview is necessary. Volume Two covers: . Scripture Confessions . the Anti-Nicene and Nicene Rules of Faith and Baptismal Creeds . Symbola ecumenica . Romans Creeds . Greek and Russian Creeds . Orthodox Confessions of the Eastern Church . the Confession of Dositheus, or the Eighteen Decrees of the Synod of Jerusalem . the Longer Catechism of the Orthodox, Catholic, Eastern Church . and the Old Catholic Union Creeds. Swiss theologian PHILIP SCHAFF (1819-1893) was educated in Germany and eventually came to the United States to teach at the German Reformed Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania. He wrote a number of books and hymnals for children, including History of the Christian Church and The Creeds of the Evangelical Protestant Churches.

This Chapel Clothbound Edition of the Roman Missal, Third Edition will be published For Use in the Dioceses of the United States of America and has been Approved by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and Confirmed by the Apostolic See.

This volume (approx. 1500 pages) includes the enhanced features that celebrants have come to know and trust ...

2021 Catholic Media Association Award first place award in backlist beauty. Benedictine Daily Prayer provides an everyday edition of the Divine Office for people who desire to pray with the church in a simple manner. Based on fifteen hundred years of liturgical prayer within the Benedictine monastic tradition, Benedictine Daily Prayer offers a rich diet of classic office hymnody, psalmody, and Scripture. This fully revised edition includes: A new organization for the Office of Vigils, structured on a two-week cycle Daily Offices also arranged on a two-week cycle Patristic readings for each Sunday Concluding prayers for the daily and seasonal offices A more user-friendly layout Benedictine Daily Prayer is designed for Benedictine oblates, Benedictine monastics, and men and women everywhere. Small enough to fit in a briefcase for travel, it is arranged by date. Scripture readings are from the NRSV.

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In an age when few people ventured beyond their place of birth, Andre Palmeiro left Portugal on a journey to the far side of the world. Bearing the title Father Visitor, he was entrusted with the daunting task of inspecting Jesuit missions spanning from Mozambique to Japan. A global history in the guise of a biography, The Visitor" tells the story of a theologian whose extraordinary travels bore witness to the fruitful contact and violent collision of East and West in the early modern era.

In India, Palmeiro was thrust into a controversy over the missionary tactics of Roberto Nobili, who insisted on dressing the part of an indigenous ascetic. Palmeiro walked across Southern India to inspect Nobili s mission, recording fascinating observations along the way. As the highest-ranking Jesuit in India, he also coordinated missions to the Mughal Emperors and the Ethiopian Christians, as well as the first European explorations of the East African interior and the highlands of Tibet.

Orders from Rome sent Palmeiro farther afield in 1626, to Macau, where he oversaw Jesuit affairs in East Asia. He played a crucial role in creating missions in Vietnam and seized the opportunity to visit the Chinese mission, trekking thousands of miles to Beijing as one of China s first Western tourists. When the Tokugawa Shogunate brutally cracked down on Christians in Japan where neither he nor any Westerner had power to intervene Palmeiro died from anxiety over the possibility that the last Jesuits still alive would apostatize under torture."

An invaluable collection of primary sources for the study of eighteenth-century convent life. Between 1728 and 1744 the Catholic lawyer Mannock Strickland (1673-1744) acted as agent for English nuns living on the Continent, including St Monica's, Louvain, the Brussels Dominicans and the Dunkirk Benedictines. Most convent archives perished at the French Revolution, but Strickland's papers survived in the archives of Mapledurham House, Oxfordshire, offering a unique insight into the workings of English convents. These extraordinary documents reveal the reality of exile for a group of formidable yet vulnerable women, "doubly dead" to English law. Two hundred letters tell stories of hardship, isolation, severe winters, war, starvation, Jacobite intrigue and international finance. They show that convent bursars became skilled at playing international exchange markets yet remained at the mercy of unscrupulous investors. The letters are presented here with full notes; a thorough introduction sets theletters, cash day books, bills of exchange and other documents in context. Richard G. Williams is Librarian and Archivist of Mapledurham House; he has also held senior posts at the University of Warwick, Imperial College London, Birkbeck College London and at Yale University.

Dorothy Day died recently in New York City. With her death, the Catholic Worker Movement lost the last of its founders and leaders. In this insightful and well-documented study, Aronica answers the question whether and how the Movement has survived beyond the founders. Starting from the notion of charismatic leadership, the author converts the Catholic Worker Movement into a test case for the classical analysis of social organization. Through participant observation, Aronica uncovers and explains the system of power and authority, the process of incorporation and the services provided to the poor by the Catholic Worker Movement. The Movement's paper, the "Catholic Worker, "was used to help provide a typology of membership categories. The book is more than a study in the transformation of charismatic leadership; it is also a study of the place of radical social thought within American Catholicism. Aronica shows the problems that the church structure has with grass-roots activities. She also illustrates the difficulty that a grass-roots organization has in transforming itself into a functioning bureaucracy. The book adds a new organizational dimension to the growing number of books on social movements. It is well suited for an audience interested in the sociology of religion and for those concerned with a fruitful application of modern ethnographic research to classical frameworks.

Unlike most recent studies of the Catholic Church in Latin America, Philip William's book sets out to analyze the Church in two very dissimilar political contexts - Nicaragua and Costa Rica, focusing especially on the period since Vatican II.;Despite the obvious differences, Williams uses first-hand research to argue that in both cases the Church has responded to social change in a remarkably similar fashion. The efforts of progressive clergy to promote change in both countries has been largely blocked by Church hierarchs, fearful that such change will threaten the Church's influence in society.

An examination of the Spanish Church in transition over recent decades, as it responded to far-reaching societal change. Having disengaged from Francoism, it embraced democracy but found itself somewhat at odds with various aspects of the modernisation of Spain, the ongoing process of secularisation and the 'supermarket' approach to doctrine of its own membership. In its goal of maintaining influence, its long-established strategy of alliances with secular - political and socio-economic - power groups became pointless in a society not so much hostile as indifferent to institutionalised religion. The challenges facing the Spanish Church are placed in the context of Vatican and grassroots Church developments as well as within the sweep of Spanish history.

The lives and experiences of Irish women religious highlight how an expanding nexus of female houses perpetuated European Counter-Reformation devotion in Ireland. This book investigates the impact of the dissolution of the monasteries on women religious and examines their survival in the following decades, showing how, despite the state's official proscription of vocation living, religious vocation options for women continued in less formal ways. McShane explores the experiences of Irish women who travelled to the Continent in pursuit of formal religious vocational formation, covering both those accommodated in English and European continental convents' and those in the Irish convents established in Spanish Flanders and the Iberian Peninsula. Further, this book discusses the revival of religious establishments for women in Ireland from 1629 and outlines the links between these new convents and the Irish foundations abroad. Overall, this study provides a rich picture of Irish women religious during a period of unprecedented change and upheaval.

This edited volume starts from the perspectives of Beijing in how it sees that religion should serve the interests of the state. From China's viewpoint, religion should act as a stabilizing force of society, or else the Christian Churches will lose their reason for existence. This might be incomprehensible to Western Christians, who believe in the freedom of religion and their right to embrace their faith. This collection of articles represents the concerted efforts of Chinese, Italians, and an American-who live in China, Europe, and the United States and belong to different disciplines, such as History, Religious Studies, and Language Studies-to promote a better understanding of the Catholic Church in the world and in China.