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Books > Religion & Spirituality > Christianity > Roman Catholicism, Roman Catholic Church
Pope Leo I's theological and political influence in his own time
(440-461) and beyond far outweighs the amount of attention he has
received in recent scholarship. That influence extended well beyond
Rome to the Christian East through his contribution to preparations
for the Council of Chalcedon and its outcome. For this he was
alternately praised and vilified by the opposing parties at the
Council. Leo made his views known through letters, and a vast
number of homilies. While so many of these survive, Leo and his
works have not been the subject of a major English-language
socio-historical study in over fifty years. In this brief
introduction to the life and works of this important leader of the
early church, we gain a more accurate picture of the circumstances
and pressures which were brought to bear on his pontificate. A
brief introduction surveys the scanty sources which document Leo's
early life, and sets his pontificate in its historical context, as
the Western Roman Empire went into serious decline, and Rome lost
its former status as the western capital. Annotated translations of
various excerpts of Leo's letters and homilies are organised around
four themes dealing with specific aspects of Leo's activity as
bishop of Rome: Leo as spiritual adviser on the life of the
faithful Leo as opponent of heresy the bishop of Rome as civic and
ecclesiastical administrator Leo and the primacy of Rome. Taking
each of these key elements of Leo's pontifical activities into
account, we gain a more balanced picture of the context and
contribution of his best-known writings on Christology. This volume
offers an affordable introduction to the subject for both teachers
and students of ancient and medieval Christianity.
From the French Revolution to Vatican II, the institutional
Catholic Church has opposed much that modernity has offered men and
women constructing their societies. This book focuses on the
experiences of German Catholics as they have worked to engage their
faith with their culture in the midst of the two world wars, the
barbarism of the Nazi era, and the uncertainties and conflicts of
the post-World War II world.
German Catholics have confronted and challenged their Church's
anti-modernism, two lost wars, the Weimar Republic, the Nazi Third
Reich, the Cold War, German reunification and the impulses of
globalization. Catholic theologians and those others nurtured by
Catholicism, who resisted Nazism to create their own private
spaces, developed a personal and existential theology that bore
fruit after 1945. Such theologians as Karl Rahner, Johannes Metz,
and Walter Kasper, were rooted in their political experiences and
in the renewal movement built by those who attended Vatican II.
These theologians were sensitive to the horrors of the Nazi
brutalization, the positive contributions of democracy, and the
need to create a Catholicism that could join the conversation on
human rights following World War II. This dialogue meant accepting
non-Catholic religious traditions as authentic expressions of
faith, which in turn required that the sacred dignity of every man,
woman, and child had to be respected. By the twenty-first century,
Catholic theologians had made furthering a human rights agenda part
of their tradition, and the German contribution to Catholic
theology was crucial to that development. The current Catholic
milieu has been forged through its defensive responses to the
Enlightenment, through its resistance to ideologies that have
supported sanctioned murder, and through an extensive dialogue with
its own traditions.
In focusing on the German Catholic experience, Dietrich offers
a cultural approach to the study of the religious and ethical
issues that ground the human rights paradigm that will be of
particular interest to students of religion, historians,
sociologists, and human rights specialists.
Medieval Italian communes are known for their violence, feuds, and
vendettas, yet beneath this tumult was a society preoccupied with
peace. Peace and Penance in Late Medieval Italy is the first book
to examine how civic peacemaking in the age of Dante was forged in
the crucible of penitential religious practice. Focusing on
Florence in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, an era known
for violence and civil discord, Katherine Ludwig Jansen brilliantly
illuminates how religious and political leaders used peace
agreements for everything from bringing an end to neighborhood
quarrels to restoring full citizenship to judicial exiles. She
brings to light a treasure trove of unpublished evidence from
notarial archives and supports it with sermons, hagiography,
political treatises, and chronicle accounts. She paints a vivid
picture of life in an Italian commune, a socially and politically
unstable world that strove to achieve peace. Jansen also assembles
a wealth of visual material from the period, illustrating for the
first time how the kiss of peace--a ritual gesture borrowed from
the Catholic Mass--was incorporated into the settlement of secular
disputes. Breaking new ground in the study of peacemaking in the
Middle Ages, Peace and Penance in Late Medieval Italy adds an
entirely new dimension to our understanding of Italian culture in
this turbulent age by showing how peace was conceived,
memorialized, and occasionally achieved.
Reginald Pole (1500-1558), cardinal and archbishop of Canterbury,
was at the centre of reform controversies in the mid 16th century -
antagonist of Henry VIII, a leader of the reform group in the Roman
Church, and nearly elected pope (Julius III was elected in his
stead). His voluminous correspondence - more than 2500 items,
including letters to him - forms a major source for historians not
only of England, but of Catholic Europe and the early Reformation
as a whole. In addition to the insight they provide on political
history, both secular and ecclesiastical, and on the spiritual
motives of reform, they also constitute a great resource for our
understanding of humanist learning and cultural patronage in the
Renaissance. Hitherto there has been no comprehensive, let alone
modern or accurate listing and analysis of this correspondence, in
large part due to the complexity of the manuscript traditions and
the difficulties of legibility. The present work makes this vast
body of material accessible to the researcher, summarising each
letter (and printing key texts usually in critical editions),
together with necessary identification and comment. The first three
volumes in this set will contain the correspondence; the fourth and
fifth will provide a biographical companion to all persons
mentioned, and will together constitute a major research tool in
their own right. This first volume covers the crucial turning point
in Pole's career: his protracted break with Henry and the
substitution of papal service for royal. One major dimension of
this rupture was a profound religious conversion which took Pole to
the brink of one of the defining moments of the Italian
Reformation, the writing of the 'Beneficio di Christo'.
Concerning itself with the complex interplay between iconoclasm
against images of the Virgin Mary in post-Reformation England and
stage representations that evoke various 'Marian moments' from the
medieval, Catholic past, this collection answers the call for
further investigation of the complex relationship between the
fraught religio-political culture of the early modern period and
the theater that it spawned. Joining historians in rejecting the
received belief that Catholicism could be turned on and off like a
water spigot in response to sixteenth-century religious reform, the
early modern British theater scholars in this collection turn their
attention to the vestiges of Catholic tradition and culture that
leak out in stage imagery, plot devices, and characterization in
ways that are not always clearly engaged in the business of
Protestant panegyric or polemic. Among the questions they address
are: What is the cultural function of dramatic Marian moments? Are
Marian moments nostalgic for, or critical of, the 'Old Faith'? How
do Marian moments negotiate the cultural trauma of iconoclasm
and/or the Reformation in early modern England? Did these stage
pictures of Mary provide subversive touchstones for the Old Faith
of particular import to crypto-Catholic or recusant members of the
audience?
Ray, a former Evangelical Protestant and Bible teacher, goes
through the Scriptures and the first five centuries of the Church
to demonstrate that the early Christians had a clear understanding
of the primacy of Peter in the see of Rome. He tackles the tough
issues in an attempt to expose how the opposition is
misunderstanding the Scriptures and history. He uses many
Protestant scholars and historians to support the Catholic
position. This book contains the most complete compilation of
Scriptural and Patristic quotations on the primacy of Peter and the
Papal office of any book available. It has over 500 footnotes with
supporting evidence from Catholic, Orthodox, Evangelical, and
non-Christian authorities.
A shared biblical past has long imbued the Holy Land with special
authority as well as a mythic character that has made the region
not only the spiritual home for Muslims, Christians, and Jews, but
also a source of a living sacred history that informs contemporary
realities and religious identities. This book explores the Holy
Land as a critical site in which early modern Catholics sought
spiritual and political legitimacy during a period of profound and
disruptive change. The Ottoman conquest of the region, the division
of the Western Church, Catholic reform, the integration of the
Mediterranean into global trading networks, and the emergence of
new imperial rivalries transformed the Custody of the Holy Land,
the venerable Catholic institution that had overseen Western
pilgrimage since 1342, into a site of intense intra-Christian
conflict by 1517. This contestation underscored the Holy Land's
importance as a frontier and center of an embattled Catholic
tradition.
An inside look at the reasons Catholic priests and nuns commit
sexual abuse Sexual Abuse and the Culture of Catholicism digs
beneath the public scandals to explore the underlying causes of
sexual abuse by priests and nuns from the unique perspective of an
abuse victim/survivor who is an experienced mental health
practitioner and social science researcher. This powerful book
includes the author's personal account of sexual abuse by a nun and
her years of struggle to recover. Passionate but scholarly and
objective, the book advocates the need for healing dialogue,
empirical research, and informed prevention strategies to bring a
meaningful resolution to the crisis of sexual abuse in the church.
Popular explanations for the reasons behind the crisis have
included issues related to celibacy, homosexuality, the power
structure of the church, and poor seminary screening practices. But
none of these theories are supported by research nor can they
explain why Catholic priests and nuns may be more likely to abuse
children that other adults in positions of trust. Sexual Abuse and
the Culture of Catholicism uses a complex, systemic approach to
draw parallels between the church as a human system and a family
that has experienced incest, presenting a model for a sexual trauma
cycle in the church based on systemic sexual shame passed down
through the beliefs and practices of Catholicism. Sexual Abuse and
the Culture of Catholicism examines: the prevalence and
characteristics of sexual abuse by Catholic priests and nuns
compared to sex offenders in the general population celibacy,
homosexuality, and the power structure of the church as
contributing factors in the sexual abuse crisis an analogy of the
church as a family in which incest occurs the effects and causes of
sexual offending from one generation to the next how current
research on sexual offending applies to sexual abuse by priests and
nuns healing and empowerment for those affected by religious-based
sexual trauma reform and renewal within the Catholic Church and
much more Sexual Abuse and the Culture of Catholicism is a unique
and important resource for clergy, religious order, and lay leaders
in the Catholic Church and other Christian denominations; social
science researchers; social workers and mental health
professionals; lay and religious members of the Catholic Church;
and anyone recovering from religious-based sexual trauma.
This book provides the first comprehensive analysis of the career
of Fryderyk Jagiellon (1468-1503) arguably the most powerful
churchman in medieval or early modern Central Europe. Royal prince,
bishop of KrakA(3)w, Polish primate, cardinal, regent and brother
to the rulers of Hungary, Poland, Bohemia and Lithuania, Fryderyk
was a leading dynastic politician, diplomat, ecclesiastic and
cultural patron, and a pivotal figure in three Polish royal
governments. Whereas Polish historians have traditionally cast
Fryderyk as a miscreant and national embarrassment, this study
argues that he is in fact a figure of fundamental importance for
our understanding of church and monarchy in the Renaissance, who
can enhance our grasp of the period in a variety of ways.
Jagiellon's career constitutes an ambitious state-building
programme - executed in the three spheres of government,
ecclesiastical governance and cultural patronage - which reveals
the multi-dimensional ways in which Renaissance monarchies might
exploit the local church to their own ends. This book also offers a
rare English language insight into the development of the
Reformation in central Europe, and an analysis of the reigns of
Kazimierz IV (1447-92), Jan Olbracht (1492-1501), Aleksander
(1501-6), Poland's evolving constitution, her foreign policy,
Jagiellonian dynastic strategy and, above all, the tripartite
relationship between church, Crown and state.
This volume includes two early seventeenth-century translations of
Roman Catholic books by English recusant nuns - Catherine Greenbury
(a Franciscan) and Mary Percy (a Benedictine). To practise their
faith on the continent both these women fled Elizabethan England
where Roman Catholic practice had been outlawed under pain of
severe penalty (even death). Catherine Greenbury was born at York
into a wealthy upper middle-class family but left England after the
death of her husband, shortly after the birth of her daughter in or
around 1616. After establishing herself in Brussels in a convent
dedicated to St Elizabeth, she became its first elected 'Mother' in
1626. During her early years here she translated the work included
in this volume - FranAois van den Broecke's biography in Dutch of
the saintly Queen Elizabeth of Portugal. A comparison of
Greenbury's version with the Dutch text shows not only that the
translation is very competent and faithful, but also that she takes
the editorial freedom to improve the text. Lady Mary Percy,
daughter of Thomas Percy the seventh Earl of Northumberland, left
England for Flanders and in 1598 she founded a Benedictine convent
in Brussels especially for Englishwomen. Here Mary Percy translated
a 1598 French edition of Breve compendio, by the Italian Jesuit
Achille Gagliardi with his student Isabella Berinzaga, a mystical
handbook which guides the reader through a series of elaborately
defined stages striving towards 'deiformitie' - a state in which
the soul is 'united unto the will of God'.
What does it mean to be a community of difference? St. Mary of the
Angels is a tiny underground Catholic parish in the heart of
Boston's Egleston Square. More than a century of local, national,
and international migrations has shaped and reshaped the
neighborhood, transforming streets into borderlines and the parish
into a waystation. Today, the church sustains a community of Black,
Caribbean, Latin American, and Euro-American parishioners from
Roxbury and beyond. In People Get Ready, Susan Reynolds draws on
six years of ethnographic research to examine embodied ritual as a
site of radical solidarity in the local church. Weaving together
archived letters, oral histories, stories, photographs, newspaper
articles, and newly examined archdiocesan documents, Reynolds
traces how the people of St. Mary's constructed rituals of
solidarity as a practical foundation for building bridges across
difference. She looks beyond liturgy to unexpected places, from
Mass announcements to parish council meetings, from the Good Friday
Via Crucis through neighborhood streets to protests staged in and
around the church in the wake of Boston's 2004 parish shutdowns.
Through ethnography and Catholic ecclesiology, Reynolds argues for
a retrieval of Vatican II's notion of ecclesial solidarity as a
basis for the mission of the local church in an age of migration,
displacement, and change. It is through the work of ritual, the
story of St. Mary's reveals, that we learn to negotiate the borders
in our midst-to cultivate friendships, exercise power, build peace,
and, in a real way, to survive.
A fascinating examination of alleged demon possession and
witchcraft in a seventeenth-century convent in Carpi, Italy. In
1636, residents at the convent of Santa Chiara in Carpi in northern
Italy were struck by an extraordinary illness that provoked bizarre
behavior. Eventually numbering fourteen, the afflicted nuns were
subject to screaming fits,throwing themselves on the floor, and
falling abruptly into a deep sleep. When medical experts' cures
proved ineffective, exorcists ministered to the women and concluded
that they were possessed by demons and the victims of witchcraft.
Catering to women from elite families, the nunnery suffered much
turmoil for three years and, remarkably, three of the victims died
from their ills. A maverick nun and a former confessor were widely
suspected to be responsible, through witchcraft, for these woes.
Based primarily on the exhaustive investigation by the Inquisition
of Modena, The Scourge of Demons examines this fascinating case in
its historical context. The travails of Santa Chiara occurred at a
time when Europe witnessed peaks in both witch-hunting and in the
numbers of people reputedly possessed by demons. Female religious
figures appeared particularly prone to demonic attacks, and
Counter-Reformation Church authorities were especially interested
in imposing stricter discipline on convents. Watt carefully
considers how the nuns of Santa Chiara understood and experienced
alleged possession and witchcraft, concluding that Santa Chiara's
diabolical troubles and their denouement -- involving the actions
of nuns, confessors, inquisitorial authorities, and exorcists --
were profoundly shaped by the unique confluence of religious,
cultural, judicial, andintellectual trends that flourished in the
1630s. Jeffrey R. Watt is professor of history at the University of
Mississippi.
This bestselling book that birthed the Divine Mercy movement, one
of the fastest growing movements in world today. This amazing
narrrative will stir your heart and soul while it chronicles the
experience of a simple Polish nun.
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