This first critical biography of Msgr. Nelson Baker (Father Baker) places him within the rich context of American Catholic life between 1840 and 1940. Through his devotion to Mary under her title Our Lady of Victory he supervised an orphanage and Protectory for boys and an infant home for unwed mothers and their babies. As a result of more than 50 years of ministry, both as superintendent of these institutions and pastor of St. Patrick's/Our Lady of Victory Parish, Baker became an almost iconic figure in western New York. Additionally, he was integrally involved in the Diocese of Buffalo, both as vicar general and twice administrator when the See was vacant. Nelson Baker's work to date is relatively unknown outside western New York. This biography will broaden the base of people who know of his work and significant accomplishments for the betterment of children. His significant work in the institutions, and most especially his rather unique work with unwed mothers and their children, merits a precise, complete, and historically accurate account of his life.

Catholic Social Networks in Early Modern England: Kinship, Gender, and Coexistence explores the lived experience of Catholic women and men in the post-Reformation century. Set against the background of the gendered dynamics of English society, this book demonstrates that English Catholics were potent forces in the shaping of English culture, religious policy, and the emerging nation-state. Drawing on kinship and social relationships rooted in the medieval period, post Reformation English Catholic women and men used kinship, social networks, gendered strategies, political actions, and cultural activities like architecture and gardening to remain connected to patrons and to ensure the survival of their families through a period of deep social and religious change. This book contributes to recent scholarship on religious persecution and coexistence in post-Reformation Europe by demonstrating how English Catholics shaped state policy and enforcement of religious minorities and helped to define the character of early models of citizenship formation.

This is a critical assessment of the Liturgical Reform after the second Vatican Council that seeks the origins of failure in pre-conciliar developments. If the suppression of the traditional Roman liturgy against the wishes of the Second Vatican Council was, in the words of Silvio Cardinal Oddi, 'a crime for which history will never forgive the Church', why, at the end of the 1960s, did the vast majority of Latin Catholics abandon, with little or no regret, their time-hallowed forms of worship? "The Banished Heart" seeks to account for this cultural and spiritual catastrophe by demonstrating what will surprise many: how the present mainstream Catholic Church, with its modernistic and secular aura, grew directly from the official conservatism of the Church as it was before the Council. T Clark Studies in "Fundamental Liturgy" offer cutting edge scholarship from all disciplines related to liturgical study. The books in the series seek to reintegrate biblical, patristic, historical, dogmatic and philosophical questions with liturgical study in ways faithful and sympathetic to classical liturgical enquiry. Volumes in the series include monographs, translations of recent texts and edited collections around very specific themes.

Faith of Our Fathers traces the historical journey of American Catholics from a minority despised by the founding fathers to a valuable and accepted part of the American tapestry today. Author Edward Mannino, an historian and lawyer, demonstrates how Catholics have continuously functioned as a conscience in the broader American society, and surveys the contributions Catholics have made in the arts, in politics, in law, and in education and public health. Faith of Our Fathers contains chapters on Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Merton, Fulton Sheen, Bruce Springsteen, Denise Levertov and John Berryman in the arts; Al Smith, Michael Harrington, and Robert Kennedy in politics; Catholic Supreme Court justices in law; and American nuns in education and public health. The book ends with a chapter on the portrayal of American Catholics in popular culture, showing how movies and television programs from the mid twentieth century through the present reflect a growing appreciation of the Catholic presence in America.

This study examines the collects assigned to the Sundays and major feasts of the proper seasons in the ordinary and extraordinary forms of the Roman rite. The Latin collects assigned to each day in the typical editions of the respective missals are compared and contrasted both with their respective sources and with one another. Pertinent discussions and decisions of the Consilium study groups responsible for the post-Vatican II revisions of the liturgical calendar and Mass collects are also presented and considered. The goal of the study is to determine whether the two sets of collects present the same picture of the human situation, approach God in the same way, seek the same things from him, and, where they do not, to identify significant changes in theological and/or spiritual emphases.

Mining the unusually rich range of diaries, memoirs, and poems written by Catholics in the sixteenth-century Low Countries, Judith Pollmann explores how Catholic believers experienced religious and political change in the generations between Erasmus and Rubens. The Revolt that ripped apart the sixteenth-century Netherlands came at the expense of a civil war, that eventually became a war of religion. Originally both Catholics and Protestants supported the rebellion, but it soon transpired that Catholics stood much to lose. Their churches were ravaged by iconoclasts, priests feared for their lives, and thousands of Catholics were forced to flee their hometowns; Calvinist city republics imposed radical religious changes, and in the rebel Dutch Republic Catholic worship was banned. Although the Habsburg Netherlands eventually witnessed the triumph of the militant Catholicism of the Baroque, Catholics throughout the Netherlands found that the Revolt had changed their lives forever.
By listening to the voices of individual Catholics, lay and clerical, Professor Pollmann offers a new perspective both on the Revolt of the Netherlands, and on the experience of religious change in this period. She asks why Catholics responded so passively to Calvinist aggression in the early decades of the conflict, only to start offering very active support for a Catholic revival after 1585, when the Habsburg Netherlands once again became a Catholic bulwark. By exploring what it took to turn traditional Christians into the agents of their own Counterreformation, she highlights the changing dynamic between priests and laypeople as a catalyst for religious change in early modern Europe.