Catholic Dogma Research Articles

Original Sin, Monogenesis and Human Origins

This paper focuses on the arguments presented by Kenneth W. Kemp in his two articles proposing a form of reconciliation between the evolutionary concept of human origins and polygenism. At the beginning, it is explained that Kemp’s understanding of the relationship between science and faith strays from what Augustine (whom Kemp claims to follow) teaches. Then the current state of science is scrutinized with the conclusion that current scientific evidence does not exclude the belief in the traditional form of monogenism. After presenting Kemp’s solution to the alleged conflict between science and Catholic dogma it is shown that Kemp’s solution is based on some confusion in terms and it also encounters several metaphysical and biological difficulties.

Understanding the Catholic Notion of Redemptive Suffering in a Contemporary Context

Although the Catholic Church nowadays still officially values the ideas of self-sacrifice and the redemptive nature of suffering, academically, there exists a tendency to adapt these ideas to modern values. With the advancement of medical technology, the pursuit of health predominates the mindset of modern people and the practice of redemptive suffering turns out to be an outdated or even ridiculous idea. At the societal level, it is a problem concerning the incompatibility between Catholic dogmas and secular values. At the individual level, it is a question of believing these “empirically unbelievable” religious doctrines without being in a curious form of schizophrenia and insincerity. This paper attempts to examine the difficulties in understanding the Catholic notion of redemptive suffering in the twenty-first century. We attempt to demonstrate that the unintelligibility of this notion lies not in the idea of the willing sacrifice of a person for another human being; rather, it is more concerned with the content and way of suffering, as well as the explanation offered for it. We then suggest that taking the “supernatural Catholic worldview” seriously is an important condition to attain a deeper understanding of the notion of redemptive suffering. Lastly, we will examine whether the notion lacks contemporary significance by looking into some cases in the Catholic communities nowadays.

The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven and the Differences in Concerns between Chinese and Western Thinking

The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven is a book recording the idea-exchange between the Catholic missionaries and Confucians in the Ming Dynasty. In understanding the book, it demands as the background the knowledge of the western history in thought behind Matteo Ricci’s mind-set, such as natural theology, Aristotle’s philosophy, and the Protestant theology. With this consideration in mind, we have traced Ricci’s appealing to the way of logical arguments in demonstrating the existence of God, which presents Catholic dogma as a philosophy. In this way, Ricci became ignored of the development of Chinese thought regarding the issues of arche, essence, and good-evil. Indeed, Chinese thinkers have engaged profoundly in these issues and proposed various solutions which invite thinkers to engage in sentimental appreciation. Ricci’s ignorance of these efforts results in blocking his understanding of Chinese thought at a deeper level. My analyses of the dialogue in the book show that this historical exchange of ideas stays only at a superficial phrase.

Juan Donoso Cortés and Political Theology

AbstractThe article offers a reconstruction of Donoso's idea of political theology by analyzing his main work, the 1851 Essay on Catholicism, Socialism, and Liberalism. Commentators have often confined the role of Donoso to a footnote in the literature on Carl Schmitt. To better appreciate his original thought, this article analyzes his account of the secularization of theological ideas. Donoso understands modern politics as a confrontation between the philosophies of socialism, liberalism, and Catholicism, which diverge on questions about the nature of man, of evil, and of society. Modern worldviews are thus read through simplified Catholic dogma. Donoso's vision of politics as secularized theology develops in dialogue with Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. The Donoso-Proudhon-Schmitt rapport allows a consideration of political theology in terms of metaphor and literary device. Within this larger story, Donoso represents the moment when a traditionalist figure of thought slowly detaches itself from its historical foundations.

Warranted Catholic Belief

Extending Alvin Plantinga’s model of warranted belief to the beliefs of groups as a whole, I argue that if the dogmatic beliefs of the Catholic Church are true, they are also warranted. Catholic dogmas are warranted because they meet the three conditions of my model: they are formed (1) by ministers functioning properly (2) in accordance with a design plan that is oriented towards truth and reliable (3) in a social environment sufficiently similar to that for which they were designed. I show that according to Catholic doctrine the authoritative spokespersons of the Church—ecumenical councils and popes—meet these conditions when defining dogmas. I also respond to the objection that the warrant of Catholic dogmas is defeated by the plurality of non-Catholic Christian sects that deny Catholic dogmas.

The Grace of God and the will of the Holy Mother of God: Russian theologians on the Catholic Dogma of 1854

The Grace of God and the will of the Holy Mother of God: Russian theologians on the Catholic Dogma of 1854

Between Dogma and Data: Wilhelm Schmidt and the Afterlives of 19th-Century Ethnolinguistics

Father Wilhelm Schmidt SVD (1868-1954) was one of the great linguistic and ethnological information hoarders of the early 20th century. Through the missionary Society of the Divine Word, he coordinated an army of trained fieldworkers who supplied him with information for his twelve-volume synthesis of world religions, his atlas of the world’s languages, and the journal Anthropos. Schmidt saw himself as practicing Catholic modern science, based on historical criticism and observational data. His guiding tenet was that language structures and material culture were linked to intersecting patterns of original Kulturkreise (cultural spheres), each with their own form of primeval monotheistic religious awareness. In other words, Schmidt sought to confirm Catholic dogma through data; a confirmation bias that mainly taints his ethnological work. This article investigates to what extent it also informed his more technical linguistic work, and how the two are interrelated.

A Man of Vision and Faithful Sentinel of Catholic Theology: Fr. Francisco Marin-Sola, O.P.

On the occasion of the 500th year of the commemoration of Christianity’s coming to the Philippines, the Filipino people profoundly remember how God bestowed abundant graces to them. Proofs to this remembrance are the external and internal manifestation of gratefulness among the Filipino people. The milestones reached by the Church in the Philippines are not an invitation to blow the horns of triumphalism but a call to profound introspection and humility. Thus, remembering how God has sustained us for half a millennium leads us back to people whom God used as conduits of His overflowing mercy. In this paper, I focus on Fr. Francisco Marin-Sola, O.P., who has contributed significantly to Catholic theology. Fr. Marin, as he is fondly called, had ties with the University of Santo Tomas in Manila. It was in this institution that he was able to hone his virtues and skills as a student, teacher, and writer. This Dominican’s natural talent blended well with St. Thomas Aquinas’ framework that led to the production of works reflecting the latter’s genius. Fr. Marin’s most notable work is titled, The Homogeneous Evolution of the Catholic Dogma, a compilation of articles published in La Ciencia Tomista during the early 1900s. In this work, he used the term “evolution” to investigate the Catholic doctrine’s homogeneous growth, which at that time, many viewed as provocative and a deviation from tradition. Criticized at first, his docility and vigilance earned him respect from his contemporaries. This paper also explored Fr. Marin’s significant contribution to Catholic theology counting him as one of the greatest Dominicans who graced UST with his meaningful presence.

The Black Letter, Political Expression of Gabriel Garcia Moreno's Conservativeness

This essay deals with one of the most controversial characters in Ecuadorian history, President Gabriel García Moreno, an Ecuadorian politics figure of the second half of the nineteenth century. Because of his actions during his presidential term, popular perception was divided, with some considering him an angel while others considering him a demon; in his second presidential term he convoked a National Convention to draft a new Magna Carta. The Constitution of 1869 was called the Black Charter by its contemporaries, by violating rights such as freedom of worship, freedom of expression; it was exclusionary because it did not allow the political participation of the vast majority of the population; education is based eminently on Catholic dogmas, despite all this, it was approved by referendum on July 18, 1869, by 96.36% of voters. Keywords: President, Constitution, Black Letter, Religion, Church.

A Feminist Physiology: B. J. Feijoo (1676–1764) and His Advice for Those in Love

This essay analyzes how the Benedictine monk Benito Jerónimo Feijoo (1676–1764), one of the most popular Spanish natural philosophers in Europe and America, discussed amorous attraction. In an attempt to reconcile Catholic dogma with empirical knowledge, Feijoo explained the origin of love as the result of wave-like interactions between sensual stimulus, imagination, nerve fibers, and the heart. His physiological model considered men and women to be equal in their internal constituents, which had important consequences for a possible science of matching. First, a possible match could only be known by a physical encounter; second, love bonds could be controlled by training the imagination; third, a harmonious society with happy marriages required accepting the intellectual equality of the sexes. The essay suggests how our knowledge about the nature of emotions influences the way we imagine an ideal society, as it is ultimately about the forces that attract and separate people, as well as the mechanisms to control them.

А.С. Хомяков и «мысль народная» в романе-эпопее Л.Н. Толстого «Война и мир»

The article reveals the deep connections of the “people’s thought” and Tolstoy’s philosophy of history in “War and Peace” with the theological and literary-critical works of A.S. Khomyakova. The author of the work analyzes the dispute between Tolstoy and the cult of an outstanding personality, with the Hegelian understanding of his role in the historical process. Tolstoy is alien to the Hegelian rise of “great personalities” over the masses, the Hegelian liberation of the “genius” from moral control and evaluation. Tolstoy believes that it is not an exceptional personality, but the life of the people that turns out to be the most sensitive organism, catching the will of Providence, intuitively sensing the hidden meaning of the historical movement. Anticipating Tolstoy, Khomyakov sharply criticizes the cult of personality in the church hierarchy, the Catholic dogma of papal infallibility, of the unconditional authority of an individual in matters of conscience and faith. Khomyakov reveals deep religious roots that feed the centuries-old Western enmity towards Russia. The article proves that Tolstoy is close to Khomyakov’s idea that Divine Providence overshadows with its grace only the believing people, united into a single organism by Christian love, that the epic basis of “War and Peace” is anticipated in Khomyakov’s literary-critical works “Glinka’s Opera ‘Life for Tsar’”, “On the Possibility of the Russian Art School”, “Ivanov’s Painting. Letter to the editor of ‘Russian Beseda’”. The article proves that “War and Peace” overcomes the conflict between the individual and society, the hero and the people, and reveals the epic horizons lost in the Western European novel.

Nourritures terrestres, nourritures célestes et rhétorique du sublime dans l'art de Bossuet panégyriste

In the Panegyrics of saint Gorgon, Bossuet uses the topics of eating and drinking, and changes its meaning under the paradigm of catholic dogma : it doesn't help any more to express humiliation, but to express the greatness of christianism. This paradoxical construction of christian sublime forms the bedrock of an approach of language as eating and digesting : the topical construction raises the legendary aspect of the narrative of martyrdom - a border case of narrative fiction -, which is itself a component of the poetics of panegyric.

Funnel Representation of Catholic Women in Church Councils

This article problematises the low uptake of higher leadership roles by guild women of the Roman Catholic Church in Zimbabwe. This is despite the fact that they are “over-represented” in the small Christian communities, which they almost “own.” They far outnumber men at the funnel base of the organisation, though they are grossly outnumbered by males from the parish council to national levels. Those that make it to higher positions in the church committees, are often relegated to clerical portfolios. What is intriguing, is the fact that the small Christian communities, which have meticulously absorbed more women in all lay ranks, are the foundational bases of the church. They are the praxis units exposing Catholic dogmas to the community; during celebrations and bereavements, in the absence of the top brass mainly comprised of their male counterparts. They are the conduits that help the catechumens live their faith, and the veins and arteries that feed the Catholic establishment with resources. A similar scenario of firm ecclesiastical control has been noted regarding the same sodality in South Africa. The Manyano/Ruwadzano sodality of the women of the Wesleyan Methodist Church of Southern Africa (used as a control group for the research study that directed this article), presented an equally low uptake of leadership posts, despite the existence of women clergy. The disabling institutions were noted as the guild constitutions crafted or passed by male clergy against women, fear of scandal, inculturation and gender. The study recommends the fulfilment of church documents advocating parity between men and women in the election of office bearers. This article acknowledges the life work and career of the late Mary-Anne Elizabeth Plaatjies-Van Huffel, who dedicated all of her remarkable talents to promote gender-equality and social justice.

“El Todo Poderoso nos ayude, para llegar a lo que deseamos”: homosexuality and Catholicism in Franco’s Spain (1954–1970)

ABSTRACT This article traces the constant struggle for control over representation between gay people and Francoist state agents. Gay narrations of self did not always involve a negation of Catholic dogma, which was often reinterpreted and incorporated into articulate defenses of homoeroticism. Moreover, transnational networks built on the basis of an insider critique of the Catholic hierarchy's stance on same-sex desires preceded the formation of gay liberation fronts by decades. These networks connected Spanish and Latin American queer communities by virtue of the former's reliance on the latter's access to the publishing and entertainment industries, given the stringent censorship imposed by the Franco regime in Spain. This article focuses on judicial transcripts, photographs, personal correspondence and literary and oral sources to explore how shifting cultural ideals and lived experiences informed each other. Thus, I argue that the discrepancy between the state-enforced view of homosexuality as a set of purely physical (“putrefied”) practices leading males to cave to their lowest predatory instincts and people's erotic and affective lived experiences reveals how queer communities were able to articulate dissident discourses at the interstices of homophobic institutions.

Galleon Anxiety: How Afro-Mexican Women Shaped Colonial Spirituality in Acapulco

AbstractAcapulco became a global town during the early seventeenth century, characterized not only by transpacific trade, but also by an increasingly large Afro-Mexican population residing and laboring at the port. A cohort of Afro-Mexican women gained prominence and visibility by delivering accurate predictions on the arrival of galleons to Acapulco. They adapted mixed African and Indigenous divination practices to calm port residents worried about galleon losses on the world's largest ocean. Scholarship on the Spanish Pacific has yet to investigate how the globalization of New Spain through galleon travel affected African and Afro-descendant communities. This article contends that the dangers of Pacific travel, and anxieties about them, frequently exceeded the therapeutic capacities of Catholic dogma. Black women, drawing on the profound West and West Central African estimation of female diviners, practiced clairvoyance to report on the location of galleons and whether they would arrive safely. The confluence of an increasing population of Afro-Mexicans with the economic dynamism of transpacific trade transformed spiritual life at the eastern node of Spain's Pacific empire. Black women positioned themselves at the center of these massive structural transformations and ultimately created new cultures as spiritual authorities in Acapulco.

Catholic Dogma vs. Social Science Dogmatism

This article explores how social science literature views dogmatism and how the documents of the Catholic Church and her teachings are seldom regarded in the conceptualization of the human person, specifically focusing on the helping professions. This article examines dogmatism from a Catholic anthropological perspective and with a full appreciation for the Catholic intellectual tradition. It will be shown how through basic clinical skills, one can believe the teachings of the Church's Magisterium and still be an effective and ethical counselor. A distinction between beliefs and actions will be made, showing how relativism is not the only acceptable belief system for helping professionals.

ОХРАНА ПЕРВОБЫТНЫХ ПЛЕМЕН В МЕЖДУНАРОДНОМ ЭКОЛОГИЧЕСКОМ ПРАВЕ НАЧАЛА XX ВЕКА

The goal of this article is to analyze primitive tribes as a legal subject or subject-matter of the international environmental law of the early twentieth century. The article presents the analysis of the object and subjects formation of the international environmental law legal protection on the example of Berne Conference of Experts in 1913. The issue of preserving the habitat and the lifestyle of national-ities leading a primitive way of life is considered. Nowa-days, the primacy of human rights and freedoms as the system-forming center of modern political systems and regimes is not seriously disputed by anyone. The slightest attempts to talk about the prevalence of other values (state, religious) are perceived as an attempt at sacrilege during the period of the Catholic religion dogmas dominance in Europe.

Biomedical Controversies in Catholic Ireland: A Contemporary History of Divisive Social Issues by Don O'Leary

Reviewed by: Biomedical Controversies in Catholic Ireland: A Contemporary History of Divisive Social Issues by Don O'Leary Colum Kenny Biomedical Controversies in Catholic Ireland: A Contemporary History of Divisive Social Issues, by Don O'Leary (Cork: Eryn Press, 2020, 398 p., paperback, $20.99) Don O'Leary frames within an Irish context some continuing controversies relating to conception, care, and the termination of life. The waning role of the Catholic Church in Ireland has been marked and even hastened by related debates. Not just in Ireland but around the world, questions concerning abortion and assisted suicide, for example, have given rise to arguments so heated that they are at times termed "culture wars," although such "wars" may range beyond what O'Leary calls "biomedical controversies" to include marriage equality, gender fluidity, and other issues. He provides a context for debates by examining developments in biomedical science and law and by interrogating central aspects of Catholic moral teaching. O'Leary dedicates a chapter to each of the following topics: stem cell research and assisted reproduction (2000–2005), frozen embryo and stem cell research (2005–6), embryos and the right to life (2006–11), assisted suicide, assisted human reproduction (2013–20), and abortion (1992–2016). He prefaces these six chapters with an opening on "Papal Pronouncements" and follows them with "Challenges to the Catholic Ethos" before finally considering the successful campaign to repeal the section of the Irish constitution that severely limited the government's ability to legislate for abortion in Ireland. His book is a helpful resource for understanding the complexity of the topics on which he touches, although the absence of an index is regrettable. The volume is referenced and includes a useful bibliography. O'Leary's decision to locate his subject expressly in "Catholic Ireland" raises questions. The independent Irish state has never been constitutionally denominational, even if the Catholic Church long enjoyed a special and influential place in its affairs. Insofar as the state's ethos was for decades Catholic, it reflected [End Page 143] democratically the sentiments of a largely Catholic population that was then obedient to its church's teaching in respect to policy and legislation concerning procreation and marriage. The latter relationship changed fundamentally even before the end of the twentieth century. If there was a signal moment when official Ireland crossed some kind of Rubicon in its relationship with Catholic bishops, it was in August 1996 when, during a visit to Chicago and Detroit to attract financial institutions to Ireland, the Irish Minister for Finance Ruairi Quinn TD described his state as a "post-Catholic, pluralist republic." The head of state by then was Mary Robinson, a human rights lawyer and liberal who had been elected president of Ireland in 1990. If at the time Quinn offended some people, and if others regarded his statement as an expression of personal wishful thinking, in hindsight he seems to have been correct. Census returns continue to show the great majority of Irish people still recording their religion nominally as Catholic, yet their level of attendance at church has fallen steadily and their attitudes and behavior are in practice akin to what hitherto were regarded as Protestant or secular types. The dining metaphor "à la carte Catholics" is used by conservatives, often contemptuously, to describe the contemporary exercise of conscience by individuals with respect to Catholic dogma. Even one quite progressive bishop has spoken of "Nicodemus Catholics … living in a sort of de facto atheism." It is unlikely that Minister Quinn was being deliberately provocative. He did not seek publicity for his comment. It was barely reported, appearing as the very last sentence of a story in the middle of page seven of the Irish Times. He had been fielding a range of questions from Irish emigrants in the United States who remembered when their church's hand lay heavily on Irish social policy. Desmond Connell, then archbishop of Dublin, retorted that Quinn had spoken "in a way that seems to endorse a secular hostility to any Catholic influence on our national outlook." Connell would later be discredited for his handling of child abuse cases in the archdiocese of Dublin, especially when he invoked the casuistic doctrine...

Teológiai érvelések, hitoktatás és misztériumábrázolás a 18. századi csíksomlyói ferences színpadon (2.)

In the grammar school of Csíksomlyó (Șumuleu Ciuc), a Franciscan site of Marian pilgrimage in Transylvania, 104 school plays were produced by the pupils between 1721 and 1786. These were predominantly mysteries in the vernacular: Good-Friday Passions, Judgement-Day Dramas and the odd play for Corpus Christi Day or the Assumption. This annual tradition of education as well as pastoral care preserved the characteristics of mediaeval West European mysteries for the longest time and in the farthest geographical location. This paper addresses the question of how these mysteries presented theological or dogmatic facts as staged Poor Man’s Bibles, that is, theatrical catechesis. The first part examines the 106 types of New Testament scenes and their 71 Old Testament antitypes. The following Roman Catholic dogmas were staged in Csíksomlyó: the Trinity; the Creation of the World; the Fall of the Devils; the Fall of Humanity; the Incarnation of the Christ (the so-called Heavenly Trial, Proces de Paradis); the Immaculate Conception, Virginity, Assumption, and Intercession of the Virgin Mary (Maria Advocata); the doctrine of the Eucharist. The theological teachings were cast in the form of human and allegorical figures and presented by the grammar-school students to a numerous and predominantly illiterate audience on a three-level stage, in mother-tongue performances of illustrative verse, in a style adequately sacred as well as easy to comprehend.

Teológiai érvelések, hitoktatás és misztérium- ábrázolás a 18. századi csíksomlyói ferences színpadon (1.)

In the grammar school of Csíksomlyó (Șumuleu Ciuc), a Franciscan site of Marian pilgrimage in Transylvania, 104 school plays were produced by the pupils between 1721 and 1786. These were predominantly mysteries in the vernacular: Good-Friday Passions, Judgement-Day Dramas and the odd play for Corpus Christi Day or the Assumption. This annual tradition of education as well as pastoral care preserved the characteristics of mediaeval West European mysteries for the longest time and in the farthest geographical location. This paper addresses the question of how these mysteries presented theological or dogmatic facts as staged Poor Man’s Bibles, that is, theatrical catechesis. The first part examines the 106 types of New Testament scenes and their 71 Old Testament antitypes. The following Roman Catholic dogmas were staged in Csíksomlyó: the Trinity; the Creation of the World; the Fall of the Devils; the Fall of Humanity; the Incarnation of the Christ (the so-called Heavenly Trial, Proces de Paradis); the Immaculate Conception, Virginity, Assumption, and Intercession of the Virgin Mary (Maria Advocata); the doctrine of the Eucharist. The theological teachings were cast in the form of human and allegorical figures and presented by the grammar-school students to a numerous and predominantly illiterate audience on a three-level stage, in mother-tongue performances of illustrative verse, in a style adequately sacred as well as easy to comprehend.