Praying

This chapter examines the gendered nature of the Joycean epiphany, and its refashioning by Irish women writers in the aftermath of high modernism. Turning to Kate O’Brien’s The Land of Spices (1941), Edna O’Brien’s Down by the River (1996), and Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, the chapter argues that these works stage an epiphany that signals a perceived rite of passage promising to move the protagonist into some new form of understanding and experience—though importantly, these epiphanies and what unfolds in their wake are not necessarily characterized strictly by good feeling for female protagonists. Taking the ethics of close reading trauma as its central case in point, the chapter argues that slowly reading difficult texts like McBride’s trains readers to sit patiently not only with the discomfort generated by the intellectual challenges posed by modernist innovation but also with the suffering generated by human failing.

What was Kate O’Brien’s ideal of Rome and how did the eternal city influence her imagination? In this essay I want to provide a context for the Italian travel writings of the Irish novelist Kate O’Brien, published in the late 1950s and early 1960s in various journals and magazines and reproduced here. I suggest that context by arguing that Rome provided O’Brien with a vital source of inspiration and a new departure as a novelist at a time of some difficulty in her writing life. Born in Limerick in 1897, Kate O’Brien spent most of her writing career in London from the early 1930s onwards, publishing popular novels and working as a reviewer, broadcaster and travel writer. After a brief marriage, she lived the rest of her life in relationships with other women. Her novels, although accessible and widely read, also featured radical and subversive representations of lesbian and gay sexuality at a time of criminalisation and marginality for the sexually other. For this reason, two of her novels, Mary Lavelle (1936) and The Land of Spices (1941), were banned in Ireland for obscenity. Despite this banning and subsequent negative public discussion of her work, O’Brien left London and returned to live in Ireland in the early 1950s. She settled in Roundstone, Co. Galway where she bought a large house and continued to write her novels and essays. However, by the mid 1950s, her inspiration appeared to be flagging as she struggled to complete what was to be her final novel, As Music and Splendour (1958). The expense of maintaining a large house on her free-lance earnings also became a problem for her and a trip to Italy was a solution, as a place to escape her money problems and to try and locate a new source of inspiration for her novel. As a young woman, she had lived in Spain and two of her novels had Spanish settings but, now for the first time, in the late 1950s, Italy became the location for her imaginative and critical writings and with fruitful results. Rome was to aid her in the creation of her most radical and progressive novel.

A Space Between:Transnational Feminism in Kate O’Brien’s Mary Lavelle Amanda Tucker The title character of Kate O'Brien's novel Mary Lavelle (1936) seems to have everything an Irish girl could want: not only is she the stunningly beautiful daughter of a distinguished doctor, she is also the fiancée of her hometown's most eligible bachelor. But it soon becomes clear that Mary is not entirely at ease with her supposed good fortune. After hearing of an opportunity abroad, Mary determines to leave these two roles behind for a short while, specifically in order to try on a different identity: To go to Spain. To be alone for a little space, a tiny hiatus between her life's two accepted phases. To cease being a daughter without immediately becoming a wife. To be a free lance, to belong to no one place or family or person . . . Spain! 1 These sudden longings for freedom and independence overwhelm Mary as she looks upon the "barren fig tree" in her backyard and realizes that figs "grew and ripened in Spain" (ML 33). Once in Spain, however, Mary does not become a "free lance" as she anticipates. Instead, the relationships that Mary forges with other women there profoundly affect her perception of the world around her. Much like the fig tree in her own backyard, Mary's growth—intellectual, emotional, and sexual—can only come to fruition abroad. Throughout O'Brien's oeuvre, female development in a foreign landscape is a consistent theme. Nearly all of her novels feature some form of transnational movement, in most cases involving Irish women who leave their homeland. In her first novel, Without My Cloak (1931), the illegitimate peasant Christina is banished to America by the powerful Consadine family after they discover her affair with their heir apparent. Fanny Delahunt in The Flower of May (1953) spends an idyllic summer in Italy with her Belgian friend Lucille; together they plan to study at the Sorbonne. O'Brien's last novel, As Music and Splendour (1958), follows two Irish women, Clare Harvey and Rose Lenahan, through [End Page 82] their operatic training and professional careers in France and Italy. In other novels, O'Brien inverts the tale so that Ireland itself becomes a foreign land: in The Last of Summer (1943), Helen Archer, who was born in England and raised in Belgium, spends thirteen years in Ireland as the reverend mother of a convent, and in The Land of Spices (1941), the half-Irish, half-French Angèle travels to Ireland to see the land of her father. Even in these brief descriptions, a pattern emerges in O'Brien's fiction: each protagonist searches for meaning and independence separate from marriage and family. This process leads O'Brien's heroines to become especially invested in their friendships with other women; as Aibhe Smyth points out, "for Kate O'Brien, women are the 'primary presence' (in Adrienne Rich's phrase) and women's relationships to and with one another are what significantly shape her fiction."2 While female relationships form a central part of O'Brien's work, but the critical discussion of these relationships has often overlooked how they are shaped by ethnicity and geography. It is common, for instance, to discuss Clare Harvey's attachment to her lover Luisa in As Music and Splendour, but explorations of how the characters' nationalities—Clare is Irish, Luisa Spanish—and of how the novel's setting in Italy affect this attachment are rare. O'Brien's characters frequently meet other women from different cultural backgrounds who are separated by sexuality, ethnicity, economic status, and other components of identity. Their interactions with these women nearly always produce some radical change within the protagonists. Inderpal Grewal and Caran Kaplan's concept of "transnational feminism" offers a useful strategy for reading Mary Lavelle. They note that relationships between women "are uneven, often unequal, and complex. They emerge from women's diverse needs and agendas in many cultures and societies."3 This assertion challenges any reductive notion of a universal sisterhood fighting patriarchal oppression in favor of a more nuanced understanding of women's interactions with each other. Grewal and Kaplan...

Latin America:Intense Religiosity and Absence of Anti-System Confessional Parties Francisco E. Gonzalez (bio) Introduction The salience of religious political parties might have come across as an anachronistic inquiry to the adherents of modernization a generation ago. But the continuing influence of religion in politics—be it in terms of the religious activism that fundamentalist Christians exert in the U.S. Republican party or in the multiple contemporary conflicts and civil wars with a strong religious undertone—reminds the reader about the dangers of wishing away fundamental sections of highly organized and motivated groups in societies around the world. The supposedly irreversible march of secularism is wishful, naïve thinking from the early decades of the twenty-first century. Latin America is a region of the world that has been relatively homogeneous in terms of religious belief since the Iberian conquest in the sixteenth century. Roman Catholicism, albeit suffused with important Amerindian and African characteristics that have produced a rich syncretism, rules the roost. Different branches of Protestant and Evangelical churches have also made important inroads in some Central American countries, such as Guatemala, Chile, Mexico and, significantly, parts of Brazil. Their presence tends to be more visible in urban slums and cut-off indigenous rural communities. The bottom line, however, remains: Latin America is overwhelmingly Christian. The role of religion in politics and, reversibly, the influence of politics on organized religion throughout the subcontinent remains a rich and variegated tapestry. Its historical evolution underlines the notion that there is no irreversible secular progress. There are many open lines of inquiry on the future of religious political parties. Latin America evidences the difficulty of signaling [End Page S-105] out long-term trends—let alone establishing general laws. This essay explores the reciprocal influence between religion and political parties in Latin America. It will proceed chronologically from the region's independence from Spain and Portugal until today. One key is the extent to which organized religion has been committed to pursue its aims through the laws and norms that underpin representative democracy. Of more specific interest is the extent to which confessional parties have committed to proceed likewise (i.e. to be pro or anti-system). The historical evidence suggests that the region followed an irregular trajectory. It is not possible to identify long-term pro or anti-system political attitudes within organized religion. A myriad of factors underscores this complex relationship between religion and political parties. These range from large scale structural ones, such as state formation trajectories during the latter two-thirds of the nineteenth century or the Cold War period, to highly specific ones, such as the personality of different leaders. In short, this essay supports the perspective of authors such as Jean Meyer that highlighted that the difficulty of channeling the political action of Catholics (i.e. not defying the fundamental rules that provide the framework of representative democracy) derives from the original ambiguity in the tenets of the Church's social doctrine, Catholic Action and Christian Democracy. Poised against both socialism and liberalism, the Catholic Church's social doctrine—officially born after the publication of Pope Leo XIII's Encyclical Rerum Novarum in 18911 —left individuals, groups, and the Church hierarchy significant latitude to apply their own subjective judgments about the social, economic, and political conditions in their countries.2 Generally, they found reality to be below the ideal standards set by Catholic principles and in need of structural repair. Such diversity of living conditions is particularly evident in Latin America, a region plagued by socioeconomic and political privilege, abuse and impunity, inequality, poverty, and a weak adherence to the rule of law.3 From the Iberian Conquest to Independence in Latin America (1490s-1820s) Religion and political domination were deeply intertwined throughout Latin America in the pre-European past: polities were underpinned by theocratic government.4 The Iberian conquest of Amerindian populations between the closing years of the fifteenth century and the middle of the sixteenth century was led by conquistador soldiers, monks, scribes, and priests. During the years of Iberian colonial rule, religion and political domination remained closely woven together. They reinforced the underpinnings of the social and economic systems run...

Eimear McBride’s second novel revisits many of the stylistic practices and conceptual themes which made A Girl is a Half-formed Thing such an important intervention within post-Tiger Irish cultural politics. By setting The Lesser Bohemians in London during the 1990s, however, McBride displaces both the temporal and spatial focus on the here (Ireland) and now (post-Crash) which has tended to dominate contemporary Irish fiction. The theatrical milieu within which the main characters operate, moreover, as well as the novel’s emphasis on the redemptive power of sex, likewise militate against any attempt to regard it as just another Irish “trauma” narrative. By revealing the extent of Irish/British cultural interpenetration, McBride exposes the bad faith of both austerity economics and political isolationism.

Background Periviable preterm birth, defined as delivery between 20+0/7 to 25+6/7 weeks, represents less than 1% of all births but contributes to up to 40% of all infant deaths. Scenarios with high risks of morbidity and mortality to the maternal-neonatal dyad may result in periviable preterm delivery. These situations require shared decision making between healthcare teams and families to decide whether maternal and neonatal patients are candidates for obstetric interventions and neonatal resuscitation at delivery, respectively, and to determine the optimal mode of delivery at the cusp of fetal viability. Objective The primary objective is to describe the influence of patient demographics (i.e. maternal race) and societal factors (i.e. maternal religion) on the decision between neonatal resuscitation and comfort care in periviable deliveries. Our secondary goals are: 1. to quantify the use of obstetric interventions (antenatal steroids for fetal lung maturity, magnesium sulfate for fetal neuroprotection, tocolytics and GBS prophylaxis) at the threshold of viability and 2. to establish whether planned neonatal resuscitation versus comfort care influenced the choice of cesarean versus vaginal delivery. Methods This project is a retrospective cohort study; electronic medical records were queried for data at Ascension St. Vincent Women's Hospital of mothers and neonates delivered at 22 0/7 to 24 6/7 from January 1, 2016 to July 31, 2020. Study patients were separated to compare outcomes between those that received neonatal resuscitation and those for whom comfort care was provided at 22, 23, and 24 weeks gestational age. Results were further stratified by obstetric interventions, mode of delivery, and maternal race and maternal religion with statistical analysis utilizing Fisher's Exact Test. Results Of the 111 patient charts originally identified, 73 patients met inclusion criteria. For those patients that opted for obstetric interventions, the most likely intervention was antenatal steroids (86%), followed by magnesium for fetal neuroprotection (63%) and tocolytics (63%), with the least likely intervention being Group Beta Streptococcus antibiotic prophylaxis (43%). The overall cesarean delivery rate was 53%. Cesarean delivery was selected with increasing gestational age: 9.1%, 52%, and 67% at 22, 23, and 24 weeks respectively. While there was no significant difference in those that opted for comfort care versus neonatal resuscitation at 22 weeks, the majority of patients at 23 and 24 weeks overwhelmingly opted for resuscitation; 5 infants (45%) were resuscitated at 22 weeks, 24 infants (96%) at 23 weeks, and 36 infants (97%) at 24 weeks. Planned neonatal resuscitation increased by gestational age. Patients opting for comfort care were more likely to deliver vaginally (87%) versus those that opted for resuscitation (41%), (Fisher's Exact Test, p=0.02), with the most common diagnoses documented for cesarean delivery being malpresentation followed by fetal distress. As for the influence of maternal race, African American patients opted for resuscitation 100% of the time, regardless of gestational age, in comparison to Caucasian (87%) and "other" (62%) counterparts. As for maternal religion, there was no significant difference between patients that self-identified as Christian, Roman Catholic, Unaffiliated or Other and their decision for neonatal resuscitation at 22 weeks. However, at 23 and 24 weeks, the only patients to opt in favor of comfort care were patients that were Unaffiliated with an organized religion. Overall, our infant survival rates were 7.6%, 44%, 63%, at 22, 23, and 24 weeks respectively, with an overall survival rate of 41%. Conclusion While the decision to resuscitate periviable preterm infants is multifactorial, demographic and societal factors influence the decision for planned resuscitation for this vulnerable patient population. Planned neonatal resuscitation rates were higher among patients identified as African American than other demographics included in this study. Patients not affiliated with an organized religion are less likely to opt for resuscitation at later gestational ages. Regardless ofplans for resuscitation, the majority of patients received obstetric interventions including antenatal steroids and cesarean delivery. These findings may be used by clinicians for shared decision making during future antenatal counseling sessions.

THE CONSUMPTION of beverage alcohol in American society has always been surrounded by a sharp ambivalence. Even during the colonial era moderate use of non-distilled beverages, such as beer, wine, ale, was expected and fully approved, but drunkenness, usually viewed as a moral defect indicating weak self-control, was frowned upon and often punished. During the Revolution and post-revolutionary period, this ambivalent attitude was fostered and alcohol was viewed, on the one hand, as a temporary desirable release from relentless reality and, on the other hand, as a major cause of poverty, crime, divorce and deviancy. The wet-dry controversy was climaxed, of course, by the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1917. After a long struggle, the wet forces were able to obtain the repeal of this amendment in 1933. The impact of this struggle is still felt in contemporary American society. Organized religion, as has been true within the larger society itself, has been divided into several opposing views on the subject of alcohol use. Several of the more fundamentalist groups view the use of alcohol as a moral issue and see total abstinence as the desirable, if not the only acceptable, mode of behavior. On the other hand, Roman Catholics, Jews and Episcopalians are officially unopposed to moderate use of alcohol, although drunkenness is certainly frowned upon. The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of organized religion as it affects the use of alcohol among a sample of teenagers. The Problem. Organized religion, although perhaps less important than family and peer group influences, is usually viewed as an important agent of social control for adolescent behavior. That is, various religions have varying normative standards for their members and the members internalize these norms through the socialization process and reflect the norms in their behavior. Since the use or nonuse of alcohol is a norma-

Environmental worldviews are rooted in culture, and religion defines many cultures. While several studies have addressed the relationship between religion and environmental worldviews, few studies controlled for nonreligious regional culture and political affiliation. We addressed this gap with a case study in the Teton Valley of Idaho and Wyoming, USA. After controlling for demographic factors, environmental worldviews significantly related to being Mormon (member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints), being Christian, not being affiliated with organized religion, political affiliation, and regional culture (n = 401, F = 22.71, R 2 = .41). Environmental worldviews, however, were not related to religiosity. Those not affiliated with organized religion were most environmentally oriented, Mormon respondents were the least environmentally oriented, and Roman Catholics and other Christians fell in the middle. Longer term residents scored significantly lower than newcomers, and Republicans scored significantly lower than Independents, who scored significantly lower than Democrats.

Led by general editor Jonathan Z. Smith, a team drawn from the American Academy of Religion has collected more than 3,200 entries written by 327 leading experts from around the world and across the theological and religious spectrum. The exceptional editorial team includes associate editor William Scott Green and area editors Jorunn Jacobsen Buckley, Lawrence S. Cunningham, Gary L. Ebersole, Malcom David Eckel, Sam D. Gill, Alfred Hiltebeitel, Richard C. Martin, Carole A. Myscofski, Jacob Neusner, and Hans H. Penner.Designed for the general reader, this highly accessible resource addresses everything from the great living traditions such as Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism and Judaism to the very latest new religions. Diverse topics -- from the experience of women in Islam to the troublesome realities of religion and violence -- are covered with compelling facts and figures, eloquent prose, and riveting accuracy.Have You Ever Wondered What draws a person to alternative religious traditions? And what exactly is a cult? What are the branches on the Jewish Chanukah menorah symbolize? And why bitter herbs are eaten at Passover? Why children color eggs at Easter time? What a tree has to do with Christmas? Why is there such a debate over the ordination of women in the Catholic Church? If organized religion is necessary for a fulfilled humankind? How it all began, anyway? All these questions and much, much more are answered in this essential and powerful new tool: The HarperCollins Dictionary of Religion -- the definitive guide to understanding religion today.

The foundations of a theoretical model of social change in organized religion are laid down, drawing from classic and contemporary analyses of conflict and change in organizations, since in many ways religious organizations are just like any other. The writings of Max Weber provide the basis for the arguments advanced, and important recent developments are included from Michael Hannan and John Freeman's population ecology approach to organizational change and from Charles Perrow's qualified power model of organizations. The application of these models to religious organizations and to the Catholic Church in particular is referred to throughout.

The economics literature, for all its richness and diversity, is peculiarly lacking in studies on organized religion. One reason may be that religious activity is not thought to follow the usual optimizing rules of economics. However, with religious organizations comprising a large portion of the nonprofit sector, it is important that researchers afford them an appropriate amount of attention. This study analyzes the U.S. Roman Catholic Church. One of the primary issues facing the U.S. Catholic Church in the latter third of this century has been the shortage of one of its major resources, priests. In 1966 the American Catholic Church had about 59,000 priests serving some 46 million Catholics, or an average of about one priest per every 780 parishioners. Since that time, there has been a significant decrease in the number of priests, and a corresponding increase in the number of U.S. Catholics. In 1990 there were approximately 53,000 priests to service 57 million U.S. Catholics, or an average of one priest for every 1,100 parishioners. The twin trends of an increasing number of Catholics and a decreasing number of priests is expected to continue into the next century. This shortfall in the number of priests has caused the U.S. Catholic Church to make some resource adjustments. One has been a search for some acceptable substitutes for U.S. priests. For example, there has been an increase in the use of foreign born extern priests serving U.S. Catholic dioceses. The church has revived the use of the permanent deaconate. Lay Catholics and religious sisters and brothers have assumed some of the functions that had previously been performed exclusively by priests. Some parishes are headed by women religious serving in the role of parish administrator, with priests available only on a rotating basis for a Sunday mass. In some parishes even this is not an option, and recently Catholic bishops approved guidelines for priestless liturgies. Another form of adjustment has been the closing of Catholic parishes. Often these are urban parishes, serving the poorest areas of a city. Priests are obviously among the primary resources utilized by the Catholic Church. Rightly or wrongly, it appears that the church employs its resources without a basic understanding of the resource allocation issues involved. Some grasp of the impacts of the various options to deal with the priest shortage, and yet maintain parish life, is imperative. This study views the Church as a nonprofit organization and empirically examines some of the options for dealing with the priest shortage. Specifically, it considers parish management schemes other than the traditional one of a parish headed by a resident pastor. To this end, a model is empirically estimated which relates measures of non-traditional parish management schemes to a measure of parish output. The analysis takes place at the diocesan level, where most resource allocation decisions are made. Viewed as nonprofit organizations, churches can be regarded as mutual benefit organizations, akin in many respects to a country club or labor union. The vast majority of their revenue comes from member donations. Only a small portion results from the sale of goods and services and virtually none comes from the government. Churches provide club goods, which are primarily available to members only.(1) These club goods can be divided into two categories, sacramental and nonsacramental. Sacramental functions include services and religious education, while nonsacramental activities include cultural opportunities, recreational pursuits, and youth programs. Churches also engage in philanthropic activities, contributing money, time and property to nonmembers. Biddle, studying both Protestant and Catholic churches, concluded that local churches spend 71% of their revenues on club-type activities, with 59% of the total spending going toward sacramental functions (1992, p. 104). He further estimated that clergy spend 68% of their time on sacramental activities (1992, p. …

As Friedrich Wilhelm Graf has argued, any thorough assessment of religious change in the twentieth century has to pay attention to the interplay between the established churches and social forces in fields of society as different as the media, the economy, the arts, and the sciences. It is the aim of this article to stress both the emergence and the importance of hybrids between organized religion and the human sciences in the decades since the 1950s. I take the Catholic Church in the Federal Republic as a perhaps somewhat unlikely but also illuminating example, although all major Christian denominations both in Germany and in other Western European countries have made ample use of social science methods such as statistics, sociology, and opinion-polling during that period. From the broad range of scientific approaches employed by the Catholic Church, the focus of this article is on the use of psychological techniques used for purposes of therapeutic intervention, or, in Anglo-Saxon parlance, counseling. The emerging psychologization of religious topics and pastoral action is seen as merely one example of the immense significance that the “psy disciplines” of psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, and psychology have attained within the forms of knowledge and practice deployed to describe the “Self.” This process can also be interpreted as a particularly striking example of the “scientification of the social” in the twentieth century, that is, of the process in which human science concepts have shaped new terms and categories for the description of social contexts and offered forms of practical intervention in social problems.

Our aim is to adapt the theory of the demographic transition to the analysis of social change in religious organizations. Assuming the demographic transition of the clergy to be the driving force for pervasive structural change in the Roman Catholic church, we analyze the component processes of the transition as it unfolds over eight decades and document its consequences for changing the size and age distribution of the clergy population. The data are drawn from a nineteen-year censusregistry constructed with the help of church officials in a diocese in the United States and one in Spain. Results show that the two dioceses lost almost 15 and 30 percent of their active priests, respectively, between 1966 and 1984. Projections based on the historical trends indicate that the losses could reach 45-65 percent by the turn of the century. In addition to the precipitous decline in numbers, the clergy is aging rapidly. The analysis describes the movement of a large, young and growing population of diocesan priests through theoretically predictable phases of transformation which include, midway, a stage depicting an old declining population and, eventually, a final stage with a pyramid reflecting a small, young and stable population. We conclude that the well-known structure of the societal demographic transition characterizes, mutatis mutandis, the process of population transformation that takes place in organizations undergoing sustained membership decline. Human resources are the key element in a service organization's internal political economy (Zald, 1970). In this paper, we apply concepts and methods used in demography and population studies to the analysis of changing professional resources in religious organizations. Addressing the issue of social change in organized religion from the emerging perspective of organizational demography contributes to the remedy of Beckford's (1973, 1985) lament that progress in the scientific study of religious organizations has been severely limited by its failure to exploit recent developments in organizational theory. We demonstrate how a Roman Catholic diocese in the U.S. and one in Spain are undergoing a clergy population decline, as a preliminary step toward analyzing the extent to which the decline affects their organizational structure and internal political

The objective of this paper consists in describing and analyzing the position of organized, institutionalized religions in the Czech Republic. It focuses on the role of organized religion in the public sphere of the Czech society, and it pays particular attention to the role of the Roman Catholic Church. The principal aim of this paper consists in describing the secularization in the Czech society, both on the micro (individual level of secularization), and the macro level (societal level of secularization). The juxtaposition of the two levels reveals a discrepancy: the individual level of secularization may be considered relatively high, whereas religion persists on the societal level and comes to be publically discussed on several occasions. The juxtaposition of the two levels of secularization is based on the theory by Karel Dobbelaere. It is based on Dobbelaere's thesis on the need to distinguish the diversity of the processes connected to secularization on various levels of the society. The paper aims to provide explanatory theoretical framework for the seemingly paradoxical situation when religion continues to play a non-negligible role within the highly secularized Czech society on the societal level. The description of the individual level of secularization in the Czech Republic in this paper is based on the recent censuses carried out by the Czech Statistical Office. The available statistical data reveal a high level of individual secularity within the Czech society: the indicators of religiosity in relation to the organized forms of religion (religious proclamation, religious affiliation and church attendance) are decreasing. Nevertheless, organized religion continues to influence the public sphere of the Czech society, as the cases of the legal fight over the ownership of St. Vitus Cathedral in Prague and the Church Property Restitution Bill reveal. The results of the analysis are discussed in relation to the concept of secularization and to the concept of collective memory. The concept of secularization explains the tendencies towards separation of the state and religion and also the decrease of the importance of religion on the individual level. The concept of collective memory provides an explanation for the attempts of the secular state to preserve and strengthen the role of religion.

Indifferentism and a growing anti-religious spirit in modern society have caused organized religion once more to rethink the role of the church in society. Is religion a private affair? Should the church make some accommodation with the state and present-day life in order to preserve some aspect of Christian thought and virtue in the social order? Can religion and the church be more relevant to the contemporary world without compromising orthodoxy?1 These questions were made especially actual for the Roman Catholic Church by Vatican Council II when discussion was begun regarding the role of the Church and the means of modernizing clerical bureaucracy and updating other practices and usages in order to make them more meaningful to the people. As a result, such problems as the extent of episcopal authority, the legitimacy of national councils, and the existence of the Church under unfriendly political regimes have come under scrutiny and produced some change in the methods of ecclesiastical administration and policy. Such problems, however, are by no means new to the Catholic Church. In the France of the Revolutionary era the role of the church in society and the problem of Christian renewal was of