In Jesuit Polymath of Madrid D. Scott Hendrickson offers the first English-language account of the life and work of Juan Eusebio Nieremberg (1595-1658), a leading intellectual in Spain during the turbulent decades of the mid-seventeenth century. Most remembered as a prominent ascetic in the neo-Platonic tradition, Nieremberg emerges here as a writer deeply indebted to the legacy of Ignatius Loyola and his Spiritual Exercises. Hendrickson convincingly shows how Nieremberg drew from his formation in the Jesuit order at the time of its first centenary to engage the cultural and intellectual currents of the Spanish Golden Age. As an author of some seventy-five works, which represent several genres and were translated throughout Europe and abroad, Nieremberg's literary enterprise demands attention.

Eric Kemp successively Oxford don, cathedral Dean, and diocesan Bishop, was born in 1915 and served the Church of England in full-time ministry until 2001. His influence on the life and work of the Church of his baptism since the end of the Second World War has been immense. Historian, canon lawyer, architect of synodical government, pastor and administrator, he has been a leading light in the Catholic movement in the Church of England and a doughty fighter for all the causes at the heart of that historic witness to this essential component of Anglican identity. One of the greatest minds in the Church of his generation, he was, as Bishop of Chichester for 28 years, also one of its wisest and entlest pastors. As a member of Convocation and the Church Assembly since 1949 and then of General Synod, there are few key people in the life of the Church in the twentieth century that Bishop Kemp has not known personally. In the pages of this book are charming and perceptive reminiscences of a huge variety of people including Geoffrey Fisher, Michael Ramsey, Robert Runcie and his celebrated predecessor in Chichester, George Bell. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in the recent history of the Church of England and for those who have a care and concern for its future.

From a Church that once enjoyed devotional loyalty, political influence, and institutional power unrivaled in Europe, the Catholic Church in Ireland now faces collapse. Devastated by a series of reports on clerical sexual abuse, challenged publicly during several political battles, and painfully aware of plunging Mass attendance, the Irish Church today is confronted with the loss of its institutional legitimacy. This study is the first international and interdisciplinary attempt to consider the scope of the problem, analyze issues that are crucial to the Irish context, and identify signs of both resilience and renewal. In addition to an overview of the current status and future directions of Irish Catholicism, The Catholic Church in Ireland Today examines specific issues such as growing secularism, the changing image of Irish bishops, generational divides, Catholic migrants to Ireland, the abuse crisis and responses in Ireland and the United States, Irish missionaries, the political role of Irish priests, the 2012 Dublin Eucharistic Congress, and contemplative strands in Irish identity. This book identifies the key issues that students of Irish society and others interested in Catholic culture must examine in order to understand the changing roles of religion in the contemporary world.

This study presents Hans Urs von Balthasar's theology of the Eucharist and shows its significance for contemporary sacramental theology. Anyone who seeks to offer a systematic account of Hans Urs von Balthasar's theology of the Eucharist and the liturgy is confronted with at least two obstacles. First, his reflections on the Eucharist are scattered throughout an immense and complex corpus of writings. Second, the most distinctive feature of his theology of the Eucharist is the inseparability of his sacramental theology from his speculative account of the central mysteries of the Christian faith. In The Eucharistic Form of God, the first book-length study to explore Balthasar's eucharistic theology in English, Jonathan Martin Ciraulo brings together the fields of liturgical studies, sacramental theology, and systematic theology to examine both how the Eucharist functions in Balthasar's theology in general and how it is in fact generative of his most unique and consequential theological positions. He demonstrates that Balthasar is a eucharistic theologian of the highest caliber, and that his contributions to sacramental theology, although little acknowledged today, have enormous potential to reshape many discussions in the field. The chapters cover a range of themes not often included in sacramental theology, including the doctrine of the Trinity, the Incarnation, and soteriology. In addition to treating Balthasar's own sources-Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Pascal, Catherine of Siena, and Bernanos-Ciraulo brings Balthasar into conversation with contemporary Catholic sacramental theology, including the work of Louis-Marie Chauvet and Jean-Yves Lacoste. The overall result is a demanding but satisfying presentation of Balthasar's contribution to sacramental theology. The audience for this volume is students and scholars who are interested in Balthasar's thought as well as theologians who are working in the area of sacramental and liturgical theology.

Thomas Merton, Robert Lax, and Edward Rice were college buddies who became life-long friends, literary innovators, and spiritual iconoclasts. Their friendship and collaboration began at Columbia College in the 1930s and reached its climax in the widely acclaimed magazine, which ran from 1953 to 1967, a year before Merton's death. Rice was founder, publisher, editor, and art director; Merton and Lax two of his steadiest collaborators. Well-known on campus for their high spirits, avant-garde appreciation of jazz and Joyce, and indiscriminate love of movies, they also shared their Catholic faith. Rice, a cradle Catholic, was godfather to both Merton and Lax. Merton, who died some 30 years before the other two, was the first to achieve fame with his best-selling spiritual autobiography, "The Seven-Story Mountain". Lax, whom Jack Kerouac dubbed "one of the great original voices of our times," eventually received recognition as one of "America's greatest experimental poets, a true minimalist who can weave awesome poems from remarkably few words" ("New York Times" Book Review). He spent most of the last 35 years of his life living frugally on one of the remotest of the Greek isles. After Jubilee folded, Rice wrote 20 books on world culture, religion, and biography. His 1970 biography of Merton, "The Man in the Sycamore Tree", was judged too intimate, forthright, and candid by those who, in Lax's words, "were trying so hard to get pictures of [Merton's] halo that they missed his face." His biography of the 19th century explorer and "orientalist" Sir Richard Burton became a "New York Times" bestseller. This book is not only the story of a 3-way friendship but a richly detailed depiction of the changes in American Catholic life over the past sixty-some years, a micro history of progressive Catholicism from the 1940s to the turn of the twenty-first century. Despite their loyalty to the church, the three often disagreed with its positions, grumbled about its tolerance for mediocrity in art, architecture, music, and intellectual life and its comfortableness with American materialism and military power. And each in his own way engaged in a spiritual search that extended beyond Christianity to the great religions of the East.

First published edition of documents and letters from a highly-significant incident within the nineteenth-century Catholic church. The row between Bishop Herbert Vaughan of Salford and the Jesuits became a cause celebre in the 1870s and was only settled eventually in Rome after the personal intervention of the pope. While the immediate issue was the provision of secondary education, at stake were key questions of authority that had troubled the English Catholic community for centuries; the solution played a major part in determining the relationship between the newly restored bishops and the Religious Orders. This volume brings together for the first time all the relevant English and foreign archival sources and enables the reader to take a balanced view of the whole issue. The documents and letters [including Vaughan's private diary] paint an intriguing and not always flattering picture of the principal combatants. Bishop Vaughan [later Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster] was a determined champion of his own and his fellow-bishops' rights as diocesan bishops. Against him stood the leaders of the Jesuit Order, jealous of their traditional privileges and heirs to centuries of service to the English Catholic community. By the 1870s that community wasbeginning to develop a commercial and professional middle class who demanded secondary education for their children. Many of them looked to the Jesuits to provide it and they claimed the right to do so, irrespective of the wishesand rights of the bishop. The source material is accompanied by an introduction placing them into their social and historical context, and explanatory notes. It forms an important addition to an understanding of the nineteenth-century English Catholic Church. Father Martin John Broadley is a priest in the Catholic diocese of Salford; he also lectures at the University of Manchester.

General Principles of Sacramental Theology addresses a current lacuna in English-language theological literature. Bernard Leeming's highly respected book Principles of Sacramental Theology was published more than sixty years ago. Since that time, there has been a noted decrease, especially in English-language sacramental theology, in treatments of the basic topics and principles-such as the nature of the sacraments of signs, sacramental grace, sacramental character, sacramental causality, sacramental intention, the necessity and number of the sacraments, sacramental matter and form, inter alia-which apply to all of the sacraments. Rather than deconstruct the Church's tradition, as many recent books on the sacraments do, Roger Nutt offers a vibrant presentation of these principles as a sound foundation for a renewed appreciation of each of the seven sacraments in the Christian life as the divinely willed means of communion and friendship between God and humanity. The sacraments bestow and nourish the personal communion with Jesus Christ that is the true source of human happiness. Recourse to the patrimony of Catholic wisdom, especially St. Thomas Aquinas, can help to highlight the sacraments and their significance within the plan of salvation. This book will be of use in seminary, graduate, and undergraduate courses. It is further offered as a source of hope to all those seeking deeper intimacy with God amidst the confusion, alienation, and disappointment that accompanies life in a fallen world. The sacraments play an irreplaceable role in pursuing a Universal Call to Holiness that is so central to Vatican II's teaching.

Although the history of the book is a booming area of research, the journeymen who printed books in the sixteenth century have remained shadowy figures because they were not thought to have left any significant traces in the archives. Clive Griffin, however, uses Inquisitional documents from Spain and Portugal to reveal a clandestine network of Protestant-minded immigrant journeymen who were arrested by the Holy Office in Spain and Portugal in the 1560s and 1570s at a time of international crisis. A startlingly clear portrait of these humble men (and occasionally women) emerges allowing the reconstruction of what Namier deemed one of history's greatest challenges: 'the biographies of ordinary men'. We learn of their geographical and social origins, educational and professional training, travels, careers, standard of living, violent behaviour, and even their attitudes, beliefs, and ambitions.
In the course of this study, many other subjects are addressed, among them: popular culture and religion; the history of skilled labour, the history of the book, and of reading and writing; the Inquisition; foreign and itinerant workers and the xenophobia they encountered; and the 'double lives' of lower-class Protestants living within a uniquely vigilant Catholic society.

If you had a chance to speak to the Pope, what would you say? This is the question that 13 noted Holocaust scholars--Christians of various denominations and Jews (including some Holocaust survivors)--address in this volume. The Holocaust was a Christian as well as a Jewish tragedy; nonetheless, the Roman Catholic hierarchy has offered very little official discourse on the Church's role in it. These essays provide solid constructive criticism and make a major contribution to both Holocaust and Christian studies.