Catholic Context Research Articles

The naked truth: mindfulness and the purification of religion

To arrive at an understanding of what drives the much debated spiritual turn in Western Europe, we study the spiritual trajectories and identifications of mindfulness practitioners in the formerly predominantly Roman Catholic context of Flanders in Belgium. Fifteen semi-structured interviews addressed their religious and spiritual biographical trajectories as well as the symbolic boundaries they draw with adjacent religious and spiritual groups. We find marked evidence of a process of ‘religious purification’, which unfolds as a critique of the formal and external aspects of both religion (organisations, dogmas, ritual) and spirituality (woolly and frivolous New Age word games). To validate and justify, alternatively, the ‘pure’ and ‘grounded’ spirituality that results, those concerned consistently invoke the authority of science.

Doing Theology after the TRC

Many Canadians, including the leadership of the mainline churches, are still trying to come to grips with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and its Calls to Action as they rethink the colonial foundation of both the Canadian state and the churches. Given the role of Canadian mainline Christianity and the churches in this history, the work of unmasking the colonial theology that sustained the “evangelizing and civilizing” foundational projects of the state and the violence they produced becomes an urgent theological task that is yet to be tackled seriously. With a primary focus on the Catholic context, after a brief historical survey this article considers some of the key theological questions inspired by Indigenous voices and proposals that theology after the TRC can no longer ignore.

The Cardijn Canon

The author situates the question of praxis in theological methodology and Catholic Social Teaching in relation to teaching ethics courses in Catholic higher education. The author uses a genealogical strategy to show that Cardinal Joseph Cardijn’s See-Judge-Act methodology of theological praxis has become canonical in Catholic Social Teaching. The author shows that advocates of Cardijn’s methodology include Pope Pius XI, Pope Pius XII, Saint Pope John XXIII, Pope Paul VI, and Pope Francis. In addition, the author shows that Cardijn’s methodology is used by the committee that drafts Schema XIII, the Conciliar document that becomes Gaudium et Spes. Besides its use in a Western European Catholic Context the author explains that Cardijn’s methodology of theological praxis is appropriated at the Consejo Episcopal Latinoamericano in Medellin, Colombia (1968); Puebla, Mexico (1979); and Aparecida, Brazil (2007). The author also explains how Cardijn’s methodology of theological praxis is integrated in ethics courses in order to develop students’ ability to discern whether a current business, healthcare, or environmental practice is a sign of the kingdom of God or the anti-kingdom. For the author, Cardijn’s methodology of theological praxis leads students to new insight about realities they are unaware and introduces them to the countercultural wisdom of the Catholic intellectual tradition, as well as the importance of moving beyond critical theological reflection and into the realm of social action.

Weaving the American Catholic Tapestry: Essays in Honor of William L. Portier ed. by Derek C. Hatch and Timothy R. Gabrielli

Reviewed by: Weaving the American Catholic Tapestry: Essays in Honor of William L. Portier ed. by Derek C. Hatch and Timothy R. Gabrielli Katherine G. Schmidt Weaving the American Catholic Tapestry: Essays in Honor of William L. Portier. Edited by Derek C. Hatch and Timothy R. Gabrielli. Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2017. 356 pp. $41.00. This collection of essays in honor of William L. Portier, currently of the University of Dayton, is an indispensable volume for the study of Catholicism in America. It will be of interest to anyone interested in American Catholicism, as well as the reader interested in inculturation more broadly. The essays—written by Portier's closest colleagues and former students—perform what can only be described as historical "theology à la Portier" (to borrow a phrase from the volume's editors). To this end, the volume manages to honor the scholar on its cover in the best possible way: by contributing substantively to the contextual theology to which Portier has dedicated himself over the past five decades. Weaving the American Catholic Tapestry appears on the surface a project of ressourcement, of recovering many overlooked sources from the American Catholic context. The volume is better understood, however, as a representation of Portier's larger theological project, namely to reflect on the question of the relationship between nature and grace with careful attention to the context in which the question is asked. The apparent ressourcement, therefore, contributes to this broader and perennial question. The volume is a select dramatis personae for Catholicism in the United States, including Orestes Brownson, Dorothy Day, Abbe Felix Klein, and many others. The volume's final essay by Sandra Yocum on Joseph McSorley, however, may provide the best illustration of "theology à la Portier." Yocum [End Page 93] focuses on McSorley's writings about prayer, opting for a source overshadowed by others that may be perceived as more "scholarly" or "relevant" to academic theology. In so doing, however, Yocum provides new insights for understanding McSorley's role in the Modernist crisis, insights that refer us back to the nature/grace question at the heart of all theological reflection. Yocum is not the only essayist in the volume to mention the Modernist crisis, given that Portier's scholarly work has focused so much on that period. In a sense, Weaving the American Catholic Tapestry may even function talmudically for Portier's book-length treatment on the subject, Divided Friends. In addition, the volume's strength comes not only from its rich historical theology but also from its display of Portier's legacy as a teacher—from both students and colleagues. The collection is a testament to many students turned scholars formed by Portier's pedagogy. If one wants to understand "theology à la Portier," one need look no further than the theological temperament and methodology of his students, whose essays make up more than half of the volume. Given the many passing references to Portier's affinity for things like Bruce Springsteen and baseball, however, the volume could have benefitted from an essay expressly on theology and popular culture. Indeed, given his deeply sacramental imagination as an American theologian, one assumes that these elements are not secondary to Portier's thought but are, in fact, another example of the inculturation that pervades his scholarly life. Ultimately, the collection will be of great utility for graduate students in both theology and history. Instructors will find its essays helpful additions to coursework on both individual and collective bases. Katherine G. Schmidt Molloy College Copyright © 2018 American Catholic Historical Society

On Being Unfinished: Collected Writings by Anne E. Patrick

Reviewed by: On Being Unfinished: Collected Writings by Anne E. Patrick Brianne A. B. Jacobs On Being Unfinished: Collected Writings. By Anne E. Patrick, edited by Susan Perry. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2017. 310 pp. $32.00. On Being Unfinished, a wide-ranging collection of lectures and essays by feminist and moral theologian Anne Patrick, reveals a rigorous and even beautiful framework for what it means to live an ethical life, with what she calls an “ethical spirituality.” At the core of this spirituality is an exhortation toward “creative responsibility,” born, in my view, of a compelling marriage between the influences of Vatican II and H. Richard Niebuhr (223). In her 2009 Madeleva Lecture, “Conscience as the Creatively Responsible Self,” Patrick defines this idea. She writes that there are two ways to be responsible, passive and creative. Passive responsibility is the compliant fulfillment of one’s duties. Creative responsibility “looks beyond the immediate obligations and commandments and social roles and seeks to contribute in new ways to the contexts of one’s life, striving to accomplish good on a wider scale” (193). For Patrick, our lives are pieces of art, tapestries woven day in and day out, in response to the loving call of God. In one essay she asks, “To what new paths, I wonder, is [God’s] eye of love inviting us?” (202). In another, invoking Gerard Manly Hopkins, she asks, “What in God’s eye [S]he is?” (264). Do we respond to this call with literal and static obedience? Patrick exhorts us with ethical spirituality to create and live new solutions to religious and secular challenges. Ethics must be lived with the moral courage of the artist. As the title of the collection suggests, this project, our response, is never complete. The beauty and joy of living is in the process, always unfinished, of creatively expressing God’s love, justice, peace, and truth on earth. Patrick weaves her own creative response most explicitly to the problems of sexism, androcentrism, and patriarchy, which oppress women broadly in society and specifically in the Roman Catholic Church. Patrick’s creative responses include life-giving resources for women, and suggestions for change in the Catholic Church. In one of my favorite essays, “Getting Ready for Voice Lessons,” Patrick suggests [End Page 82] qualities of character for a feminist ethics of spirituality: self-care and solidarity, courage and humility. Patrick also offers imaginative solutions to issues for Catholics, suggesting in “A Conservative Case for the Ordination of Women” that the ordination of women be based on the significance of the sacraments. She offers a feminist mode of virtue for analyzing abortion in “Virtue, Providence, and the Endangered Self: Religious Dimensions of the Abortion Debate.” As she has exhorted her reader to do, these essays seek creative new paths in living God’s love and justice in contemporary contexts. Patrick repeatedly engages indepth with her peers, M. Shawn Copeland, Ada María Isasi-Díaz, Margaret Farley, and Barbara Andolsen, to name a few. She also engages literary figures like George Eliot and Graham Greene. Many of these essays were originally lectures and read with the spiritual force, rhetorical sweep, and welcoming candor of a good homily. I recommend this collection to any reader interested in Patrick’s engagement with this range of literary and theological thinkers, and who are looking for intellectual and spiritual nourishment on the topics of morality and feminism in the Roman Catholic context. To teachers, I particularly recommend her essay, “Feminist Theology,” reprinted from the New Catholic Encyclopedia, which offers a detailed and accessible review of feminist theology from 1960 to 2000. Anne Patrick, a Sister of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary, and professor of theology, taught for decades at Carleton College, where she was William H. Laird Professor of Religion and the Liberal Arts. She served as the third woman president, and first self-proclaimed feminist, of the Catholic Theological Society of America in 1990. In 2013, she was presented its highest honor, the John Courtney Murray Award. What becomes clear through reading On Being Unfinished is that these markers of academic excellence and prestige are undergirded by a deep and compelling faith. As...

“Ahorita estamos en lo nuestro” (“Now We Are Ourselves”): Afro-Venezuelan Music Rituals for Health and Community Wellbeing

In Venezuela, people of West African descent developed rituals for wellbeing within Catholic contexts. This study analyses performances directed at fulfilling health-related desires. The first is ritual street performance staged as part of Corpus Christi, under the name of the Devils of Corpus Christi. It includes instrumental music, dance, special clothing, theatricality and high symbolism. The second performance is the Feast of Saint John, celebrated with drums, songs, dances and rituals. These ritual music festivities also present communal benefits like solidarity, pleasure and unity, since people can express their unique identities through them and use them as acts of resistance.

Modern Asian ecclesiastical interconnections: Catholic Tamil Nadu and its diaspora in Malaysia

This paper explores the dynamics of the modern Asian Catholic ecclesiastical experience in Malaysia within the context of diaspora. Using the South Indian Tamil Catholic community in Malaysia as a case in point, I explore the mediations that occur in ecclesiastical spaces as a result of the points of contact between Catholic Tamil Nadu and its diaspora in Malaysia. Through an analysis of two festivals of ethnic Tamil heritage, the Feast of Our Lady of Good Health and the Pongal Festival, in a predominantly Tamil parish community, the discussion will show how the interactions between ethnicity, culture, and the Catholic Tamil diaspora in Malaysia foreground a sinuous interweaving of the threads of continuity, adaptation and dialogue. I also attempt to extend the investigation a little further to show instances of subtle differences that emerge as a result of the diasporic relocation of vernacular Catholicism inherited from South India. The latter subsequently reveal the modern Asian ecclesiastical interconnections that occur as South Indian Catholicism is practised within its national Malaysian Catholic context.

Introduction: Art and Religious Reform in Early Modern Europe

This introduction situates the essays of this special issue within current scholarship on art and religious reform in early modern Europe. The first section considers iconoclasm and the settlements reached in its aftermath, and emphasizes the richness and diversity of the Protestant and Catholic visual cultures that evolved alongside movements for religious reform. The second section considers the individual essays, and draws out common themes: the relationship between image and word; artists’ and patrons’ responses to new understandings of Christian history and soteriology; images’ role in the construction of confessional boundaries, but also their ability to transgress those boundaries. The introduction highlights the plurality of methodological approaches adopted by the contributors, which reminds us that although attention to the social and political contexts in which images were produced and received is an essential part of both historical and art-historical analysis, the power of art can never be fully captured through words.

The Art of Solitude: Environments of Prayer at the Bavarian Court of Wilhelm V

This essay examines a unique project to revive the place, imagery, and cultural memory of solitude within a reformed Catholic context. Originating at the Munich court of the retired Duke Wilhelm V, the project was closely related to an increase in the practice of meditation across the Catholic world, in which 'controlled' interior spaces as well as material artefacts were given a pivotal role. The focus is on two types of medial and material representations of heremits' spaces, which intersected and interacted with each other: the heremitages built at the initiative of Duke Wilhelm V in his city residence and near his country retreat at Schleissheim; and the series of copper engravings depicting hermits by the Flemish brothers Jan I and Raphael I Sadeler after designs by Maarten de Vos. The new anchorite 'philosophy' that emerged at the court of Wilhelm V soon became fashionable in cities and at court across Europe.

Who Are the “Begats”? or Women Theologians Shaping Women Theologians

Who are the “Begats”? Or Women Theologians Shaping Women Theologians Mary Ann Hinsdale (bio) In 2004, I was invited to give the twentieth Madeleva Lecture at Saint Mary’s College. I chose to speak on “Women Shaping Theology” because, after teaching undergraduates and graduates for almost twenty years (I finished my doctorate in 1984), I began to realize that the students I was then teaching had no idea there was once a time when Catholic women neither taught nor wrote about theology.1 So, I decided I’d like to “tell the story” of how Catholic women became theologians.2 As I mulled it over, I realized that in many ways, the story of how and when Catholic women entered the academic theological world paralleled my own story, so I made it personal and told my own story as well. My high-school years paralleled the Second Vatican Council (1962–65). I graduated in 1965 from a very theologically progressive Catholic girls’ high school in suburban Chicago staffed by the best and brightest members of the religious order I eventually joined.3 Just to give you an idea: my freshman religion teacher had just received her MA in theology from Marquette University, where she worked with Bernard Cooke, a Jesuit who began the PhD program there that admitted laypersons; during my sophomore year, a Sister John Gregory had just finished her MA in philosophy from Saint Louis University and joined the faculty (after Vatican II she would return to her baptismal name, Sandra Schneiders); in my junior year “Schema 13,” the draft of what would become Gaudium et spes (“The Pastoral Constitution on the [End Page 91] Church in the Modern World”) served as our religion text and we also had a class subscription to a fledgling Catholic newspaper, the National Catholic Reporter, which we read for class on Fridays. In senior year, a German lay theologian, Mr. Breidenbach, was our religion teacher. During the council, we were encouraged to go downtown to hear some of the European theologians who assisted the bishops at Vatican II and were giving lecture tours in the United States between the council sessions. I went to hear Hans Küng at the old McCormick Place (I admit I was probably more interested in the extra credit we were promised than hearing him). He had a strong, Swiss German accent, and I can only recall the title of his lecture, which was the same as his book that had just been translated into English: The Council: Reform or Reunion?4 I wrote much of my Madeleva Lecture while I was on sabbatical in 2004 at the University of Dayton. It so happened that a colleague of mine from graduate school days at Saint Michael’s in Toronto was teaching there. When I told him about my idea for the lecture, he asked, “Isn’t that kind of self-indulgent?” This comment caused me a fair bit of disquiet and worry. Very conscious of my own social location as a white, North American, vowed woman religious, I had a fair bit of anxiety: who was I to tell the story of “women shaping theology”? Even just forty years after Vatican II, Catholic theology had become quite pluralistic and interdisciplinary and was being approached from multiple contexts. In the end, I did decide to use my own story, though I tried to be clear, that it was just one angle of vision from the Euroamerican, Catholic context. As I began to think about how to tell the stories of “women shaping theology,” I realized I needed to tell the “backstory” of my own story. I felt some elements had been overlooked in Catholic feminist narratives; namely, the leadership that women religious5 had given to Catholic education, the influence of the Sister Formation Movement, and the founding of Catholic women’s colleges where women ran everything.6 The social movements of the 1960s and 1970s—the civil rights, antiwar, and women’s movements—also interacted with the first heady days after Vatican II. Even the pre–Vatican II “Catholic Action” organizations such as YCS (Young Christian Students), the Sodality (with its “Summer Schools of Catholic Action”), weekend...

A Balsome for Both the Hemispheres: Tears as Medicine in Herbert’s Temple and Seventeenth-Century Preaching

A Balsome for Both the Hemispheres: Tears as Medicine in Herbert’s Temple and Seventeenth-Century Preaching Clarissa Chenovick George Herbert, according to the critical consensus, was no weeping penitent. Although repentant tears, sighs, and groans feature prominently in some 20-odd poems in The Temple, Herbert scholars have tended to agree that the poetic speaker who identifies himself to God as “thy clay that weeps, thy dust that calls” only uses tears ironically or metaphorically, in direct contrast to the self-indulgent lachrymose excesses of his Counter-Reformation contemporaries.1 Stating what has become the dominant appraisal of tears in The Temple, Richard Strier asserted some 20 years ago that Herbert’s “Marie Magdalene” displays a “skeptical attitude toward super-abundant weeping” that “would be, to say the least, odd in a Catholic context.”2 More recently, Gary Kuchar has claimed that in the “Calvinist” poem “Grief,” Herbert “parodies the Southwellian tradition by refuting its ability to express a genuinely contrite experience of godly sorrow,” and Elizabeth Clarke has suggested that the weeping in that poem should be read as intentionally mannered hyperbole intended to act as a foil to the poem’s final spontaneous ejaculation (“Alas, my God!”).3 For these critics, it seems that the orthodoxy of Herbert’s poetry would be called into question by association with what Clarke calls the “indulgence in emotion for the pleasure of the reader” represented by a “‘baroque’ style” of emotional excess that “seems alien to English sensibility.”4 These critics agree that Herbert must reject penitential weeping because the Calvinist Protestantism presumed to have dominated in the seventeenth-century English church clearly denied the efficacy of human actions—including bodily expressions of penitence—as a means of obtaining salvation and grace. But, as recent research has revealed, the tears of repentance were far from empty or metaphorical for early modern English Protestants. Numerous sermons and popular guides to prayer exhort the godly to make tears a constant part of their prayers, and the faithful seem to have complied with enthusiasm.5 Late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century diarists record shedding tears in church (especially when [End Page 559] receiving the sacrament of communion), in small prayer groups, and alone in their closets.6 Lady Grace Mildmay, for instance, upholds devout tears as evidence of the “good example” of piety her mother had given her, describing how every morning she would withdraw herself alone and spend an hour in meditation and prayers to God, with her face all blubbered with tears. . . . And also to my remembrance, I never saw her receive that holy sacrament of our Lord Jesus Christ, his body and blood, but with tears which declared a reverent, gracious and holy mind in her.7 Others shed tears over their inability to weep in a holy enough manner, as Nehemiah Wallington reveals in his distress over the way he “made an Idol of [his] teers,” lamenting, “I have thought very well of myselfe when I had sheed teers and if I have not sheed teers then it could not be well with mee . . . so that you may see I have just cause to weepe and lament over my teers.”8 Wallington’s angst over his perceived failure to weep for the right reasons testifies to the highly fraught nature of Protestant devotional weeping and to its status as a problematically uncertain sign; tears can indicate genuine repentance and sorrow of heart, but they may also result from spiritually empty causes like fear of damnation or sorrow over worldly losses.9 This problem is reflected in Herbert’s own The Country Parson, where he speaks to the parson’s experience of “having doubted sometimes, whether his repentance were true, or at least in that degree it ought to be, since he found himself sometimes to weep more for the loss of some temporal things, than for offending God.”10 Yet despite the problem that tears could indicate worldly as well as spiritual sorrow, seventeenth-century sermons and devotional guides insist almost unanimously on the idea that genuine repentance will result in penitential weeping, and many go as far as to suggest that a lack of tears indicates a dangerous state...

Ben Jonson's Antagonistic Style, Public Opinion, and Sejanus

This article places Ben Jonson's tragedy Sejanus His Fall (perf. 1603; pub. 1605) within a Catholic intellectual context that influenced the playwright during some of his most creative years, showing that the play's antagonistic style has previously unrecognized points of social and political relevance. Building on recent interest in the early modern public sphere, I argue that Jonson's famously combative style of drama offers a bold and original perspective on the experiences of English Catholics navigating public opinion in a society that could be deeply hostile to them.

"Commemorating" the Reformation: Churches Looking Together toward 2017—and Beyond

This essay takes up the subject of the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. It addresses the need to determine carefully how to note this event and points out the arbitrary choice of 2017. The essay indicates the danger of viewing this event only in a Lutheran-Roman Catholic context. The year 2017 places the Reformation in a new setting: 100 years of the modern ecumenical movement and fifty years of Lutheran-Roman Catholic dialogue. This dialogue has been one of the factors in the production of some significant ecumenical texts, including From Conflict to Communion and Declaration on the Way. The conclusion both stresses the need for reception of ecumenical work and the inadequacy of Declaration on the Way to achieve that goal.

Jesuit contributions to the Iraqi education system in the 1930s and later

This article will consider the significant role which the Society of Jesus had played in the Iraqi secondary and higher education systems in the period 1932–1968. The Jesuits’ Baghdad-based school and university formed a part of the substantial Jesuit educational network established across the Middle East from the nineteenth century and this article seeks to bring the fields of Jesuit and Iraqi Studies together and to offer reflection of the Jesuit educational ‘difference’ which was made in and to Iraqi society. This contribution is in Western Christian and Latin Catholic contexts not well known and yet the continued influence which the Jesuit educational and pastoral ethos encouraged is strongly remembered and held in high esteem by both Muslim and Christian Iraqis into the present. (As universally related to me during fieldwork in Iraq and London from 2012 to 2014 by members of the Iraqi Christian and Muslim communities when asked about the Jesuits.)

Widowers and their sisters-in-law: family crises, horizontally organised relationships and affinal relatives in the nineteenth century

The period around 1800 was characterised by a remarkable intensification of horizontally organised relationships and horizontally structured interactions such as sibling relations and cousin marriages. At the same time, in-laws stepped onto the historical stage. The aim of this contribution is to shed light on the importance of affinal relatives – above all that of deceased wives’ sisters as preferred spouses – and to reconstruct the difficulties that widowers had to cope with in terms of domestic organisation.As nineteenth-century marriage dispensation records reveal, the number of marriage applications by widowers and their sisters-in-law was particularly high in the German-speaking world. And though research has already been carried out on the broad-based societal and political debate in Great Britain touched off by the “Marriage with a Deceased Wife’s Sister Bill” of 1835, this same constellation within the Catholic context has so far received relatively little attention. Very often, the death of a wife caused the entire household to slide into a situation of crisis, especially if small children were present. In a large number of the cases in which this happened, the wife’s sister ended up moving into the widower’s household. She took care of the household and the children and also took on agricultural and/or business-related responsibilities.In many cases, it was an obvious next step for widowers and their sisters-in-law to plan their marriage. During the 1830s and 1840s, however, it was very difficult for such bridal couples to obtain the necessary papal dispensation. Therefore, the extensive source material from this period provides revealing insights into the domestic organisation of widowers’ households. It also highlights a close intertwining of social, economic and emotional aspects – for which reason the legally mandated separation of the couple in the case of a rejected dispensation application could become a dramatic matter indeed.

Transposing Devotion

This article extends recent scholarship on new religious movements that has stressed newness, tension, and social alignment. New Catholic communities that have grown around contemporary Marian apparitions allow the application of theoretical models and add nuance to understandings of new movements in the Catholic context. Drawing from fieldwork since 2010 at two apparition sites, rural Emmitsburg, Maryland and suburban Gaithersburg, Maryland, I find that apparitional movements—often marginalized within their parishes—lead to internal tension for individuals involved. The ways that these individuals resolve this tension problematize notions of conflict and alignment, tradition, and innovation. I propose that philosopher Rosi Braidotti’s metaphor of transpositions offers an apt approach to apparitional movements.

The Anglican Choral Heritage and Lectio Divina

The Anglican Choral Heritage and Lectio Divina John-Bede Pauley O.S.B. (bio) I. Introduction A facet of the Anglican patrimony that undoubtedly sprang to the minds of many on the promulgation of Anglicanorum Coetibus is the Anglican choral heritage.1 Parishes and groups in the Ordinariates have indeed established liturgical choirs that perform the Anglican choral repertoire.2 In addition to celebrating this fact, it is perhaps not too soon to ask how this heritage will set down its roots and develop in the Catholic context. In this essay I establish that the Anglican choral heritage already has Catholic roots because of patristic/monastic spirituality’s immense influence in English spirituality. Also, I discuss how this spirituality has or has not influenced the Anglican choral heritage in each musical stylistic period. Because the research on which I rely in this essay is mostly historical, I avoid being either proscriptive or prescriptive in deference to the descriptive. For the sake of transparency, however, I acknowledge my agreement with research (my own included) that [End Page 173] identifies monastic elements—and Benedictine monasticism,3 in particular—in the Anglican tradition.4 Consequently, describing the monastic influence on the Anglican choral heritage implies prescribing—or at least suggesting—this spirituality as a beneficial influence for the future of the Anglican choral heritage. Identifying the characteristics of this spirituality provides a stronger rationale for choral music in the Anglican patrimony than—laudable though they are—the general appeals to dignity, beauty, nobility,5 making “a worthy offering to Almighty God,”6 and providing a means of “strengthening and refreshing our souls.”7 It supplies a patristic/monastic (and Anglican) interpretation of the Catechism’s statement that liturgy “manifests [the [End Page 174] Church] as the visible sign of the communion in Christ between God and men [and] engages the faithful in the new life of the community….”8 What this ethos emphasizes is the role of listening. The first word of the Rule of St. Benedict is obsculta, “listen.”9 The monastic practice of lectio divina, which can be translated “prayerful reading,” is a reading so profound and contemplative that one stills the reading mind for the sake of an interior listening to Holy Writ. The magnificent language of the Book of Common Prayer (BCP) and the Authorized Version of the Bible (or the King James Version, as it also known) is meant to do more than merely inform worshipers. To use the language of the Catechism, the language of the BCP and the Authorized Version engages the faithful and serves as the audible (contrast with the Catechism’s “visual”) sign “of the communion in Christ between God and men.” The Anglican patrimony developed a similar role for the audible art form: music.10 Though my exploration of music in Anglicanism is informed by my training as a musicologist,11 I try to address what follows to a readership of non-musicians. This means there are unavoidable generalizations. The advantage, though, of looking at the topic from a metaphorical thirty thousand feet is that it reveals several constant and salient characteristics of the Anglican choral heritage. For those unfamiliar with terms and ideas related to Anglicanism, [End Page 175] Appendix A explains different versions of the BCP and kinds of Anglican Churchmanship, and Appendix B the musical genres of the Anglican choral heritage. II. Patristic/Monastic Theology in Historical Context Well before the Protestant Reformation, Catholicism on the continent, though never consciously dismissing or ignoring patristic writings, had already shifted its preferred theological method to scholasticism. The patristic/monastic approach to Holy Writ is to reflect, to meditate. The scholastic method, on the other hand, is discursive and poses quaestiones.12 In 1185, this distinction was clear enough for Godfrey of St. Victor to write, “let us [non-scholastics] leave … the disputations of the scholastics, and devote our attention to other things.”13 Both patristic/monastic theology and scholastic theology have always been closely interrelated.14 But they are distinct enough that the differences persist. Indeed, these differences proved to be an issue following John Henry Newman’s conversion to Catholicism. Archbishop (later Cardinal) Henry Edward...

Faith’s Boundaries: Laity and Clergy in Early Modern Confraternities eds. by Nicholas Terpstra, Adriano Prosperi, and Stefania Pastore

Reviewed by: Faith’s Boundaries: Laity and Clergy in Early Modern Confraternities eds. by Nicholas Terpstra, Adriano Prosperi, and Stefania Pastore Kathleen Olive Terpstra, Nicholas, Adriano Prosperi, and Stefania Pastore, eds, Faith’s Boundaries: Laity and Clergy in Early Modern Confraternities (Europa Sacra, 6), Turnhout, Brepols, 2013; hardback; pp. x, 396; 12 b/w illustrations, 11 b/w line art; R.R.P. €100.00; ISBN 9782503538938. The essays in this collection explore early modern confraternal activities and lay life. A number come out of an Italian-focused conference, ‘Brotherhood and Boundaries—Fraternità e barriere’, that was held at Pisa in September 2008, but the geographical reach of this edited volume is somewhat broader. Nicholas Terpstra’s Introduction sets the volume’s parameters as an interrogation of the ownership of religious space: confraternities, as spaces in which the laity and clergy both staked claims, were often sites where such ownership was negotiated. Part I of the volume investigates charity and civic religion in Italy: Daniel Bornstein presents a case study of Cortona’s Misericordia confraternity (a space, after 1411, for challenging Florence), while Anna Esposito looks at the metropolitan focus of Rome’s confraternities on needy foreign visitors. Carlo Taviani argues that Genoese confraternities offered alternatives to family-based factionalism and encouraged communalism; Cristina Cecchinelli contributes a particularly elegant paper on Marian groups in Parma, and their integration into the papal state made possible through links with organisations in Rome. Part II looks at Florence, from Sabrina Corbellini’s fascinating study of gospel harmonies and other vernacular biblical texts in confraternal translation and use, to lay preachers’ confraternal educations in Peter Howard’s study of [End Page 248] Pietro Bernardo. Olga Zorzi Pugliese investigates sermons of a different sort: Machiavelli’s ‘Exhortation to Penance’ and his parodical Rules for a Company of Pleasure. Part III moves outside Italy. Maarten F. Van Dijck contributes a statistical analysis of the social capital of kinship groups in Aarschot, near Antwerp, while Juan O. Mesquida presents a history of Manila’s Misericordia confraternity. Part IV extends the brotherhood metaphor to Islam and Judaism. The essays by Alexandre Papas and Roni Weinstein in this section both stress the importance of mysticism to these contexts but their integration into the otherwise Catholic contexts of the volume (Protestant brotherhoods are not examined) raises as many questions as it explores. Part V surveys race and gender in the confraternity: Federica Francesconi’s paper on Soed Holim, a charitable society organised by Jewish women in Modena’s ghetto, and Susan Verdi Webster’s investigation of native confraternities in Quito—which, she argues, could function as both ‘ethnic leveller’ and ‘ethnic refuge’—are strong contributions. Part VI looks at sites of conflict between laypeople and clergy. Gavin Hammel compares responses to discipline confraternities in thirteenth-century Bologna and fourteenth-century Tournai, finding that differing class habitus (to borrow from Bourdieu) accounts for some clerical opposition in Tournai. Danilo Zardin deconstructs the truism that post-Tridentine confraternities became more clerical and disciplined in his survey of Genoa, Venice, Milan, and Como, and David Garrioch’s study of confraternities in eighteenth-century Paris and Milan explores contentious zones, from space and money, to clerical involvement and heresy. Many of the contributions in this volume are close, convincingly argued interpretations of archival material. As a collection, they lay groundwork that will be of interest to researchers of confraternal studies and lay devotion more generally. Kathleen Olive The University of Sydney Copyright © 2016 Kathleen Olive

Educating the Educators: A Fifty-Year Retrospective of Religious Education in the Catholic Context

The progressive spirit of the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) spawned a myriad of graduate departments of religious education in American Catholic colleges and universities. These departments evolved to include other master degrees (e.g., pastoral studies, pastoral counseling, divinity, spirituality, and social justice). As the numbers of students in religious education degree programs significantly diminished, the degree designation in religious education was often terminated. Today, an ever increasing number of religious education practitioners in the Catholic context do not have graduate degrees in religious education. This ongoing reality significantly alters the field of religious education and its practice in the Catholic context.

Orthodox Christianity in Italy: historical continuity and social discontinuity

From the historical point of view, the presence of Orthodox churches in Italy is a reality established over several centuries; from the sociological point of view, however, their presence is a new phenomenon. As a result of the significant processes of immigration from Eastern Europe over the last 15 years, their importance within the social and religious contexts has grown considerably, to the point that Orthodoxy is rivalling Islam as the second-largest religion in the country. In this article I aim first of all to provide a historical framework for the relationship between the ‘Western world’, especially Italian, and the ‘Eastern world’ of Orthodoxy. Then I shall briefly analyse two examples of different interactions between Orthodoxy and the Roman Catholic context in Italy: the Montaner parish and the monastic community of Bose. Finally I shall present some outcomes from the first research project on the presence of Orthodox churches carried out in Italy during 2011, illustrating the mapping of the spread of the various jurisdictions in the Italian regions, and deepening some elements such as the relationship with the Italian state, the leadership of the various communities and the dynamics of interaction between the Orthodox churches and Catholicism.