Catholic Europe Research Articles

Teaching religion in postmodern society: some insights from the German “Carousel of Concepts” for the renewal of Catholic religious education in Poland

ABSTRACT Poland, still considered by some to be a bastion of Catholicism in Europe, is becoming more secularised every year, and its society resembles the postmodern societies of Western Europe. The changes in religiousness, which affect especially the younger Poles, are so strong that they call into question the validity of the current form of religious education, i.e. school catechesis, which is proving incapable of fulfilling its tasks, e.g. in the function of Christian initiation. Given the above context, the present article has a threefold purpose: The first step is to present the social and educational challenges of school catechesis in Polish schools. Based on these premises, the second step will outline the main similarities and differences in religious education between Poland and Germany, and then the German ‘Carousel of Concepts’ (H. Mendl) of the 1960s, which contributed to the emergence of a possible optimal model of religious education for a postmodern society. In the third and final step, ideas for the future will be formulated for the renewal of religious education in Poland, making it possible to characterise it in a guiding way as a dialogical-educational concept.

The End of Composite Monarchies: Hugo Grotius’s De iure belli ac pacis and Mid-Seventeenth-Century Iberian Diplomacy

Abstract This article sheds light on the seventeenth-century Catalan, Portuguese and Castilian uses of Hugo Grotius’s De iure belli ac pacis (1625) and, in particular, his chapters on the matter of monarchical succession. By studying the patterns in the ways that Catalan and Portuguese rebels and Spanish diplomats drew on this source to mediate disputes over succession, the article suggests that, while Grotius’s works may have eroded the rights of possession in the Atlantic and the Pacific by building on classical, biblical and Spanish sources, Iberian authors saw the text as a shared rulebook for discussing a sensitive matter that Spain had traditionally resolved through creative ambiguity, by granting and expanding local privileges under the threat of brute force. The article, in this way, encourages a reconsideration of the practical, diplomatic and high-political uses of Grotius’s ideas in Catholic Europe, a reassessment of a clear-cut binary between Dutch ideas of liberty and Spanish visions of empire, and a reconsideration of the historiographical explanation for the decomposition of composite monarchies.

Introduction to the Special Issue: The Catholic Priesthood in Times of Change

This special issue of Review of Religious Research, titled “The Catholic Priesthood in Times of Change,” is dedicated primarily to social-scientific inquiry into the Roman Catholic presbyterate in the United States. The issue’s main focus is to analyze and discuss data from a new and original nationally representative study, The National Study of Catholic Priests. The rationale for dedicating a special issue to this topic stems from the considerable new quantitative and qualitative data made available through this study, which presents a unique opportunity for scholars and practitioners interested in Catholicism to examine contemporary issues facing the priesthood. The issue also aims to place this study within its broader context by including recent research on lay American Catholics, as well as reviewing new books on Catholicism in Europe and Asia. The issue thus comprises three original research articles, two research notes, and four book reviews.

Religious Attraction and Its Discontents: Tensions Surrounding the Monachization of Baptized Jews in Early Modern Italy

Both female monasticism and Jewish conversion acquired an accentuated significance in Catholic Europe during the age of reformations. Their convergence was ritually expressed in the celebration of the monastic vestition of converts from Judaism. This article centres on the experiences of baptized Jewish girls who entered monastic communities, based on an analysis of cases from central and northern Italy. It argues that Church authorities valued the radical break of formerly Jewish girls with the religious traditions of their ancestors. Yet at the same time, the highly esteemed attraction to female monasticism on the part of baptized Jews could also arouse considerable anxiety, which led to distancing attempts. These, the article suggests, were manifested by restricting converts’ monastic professions to designated institutions; by giving the cold shoulder to baptized Jews who took the veil and socially isolating them within their communities; or by not assisting sickly neophytes to fulfill their religious vocations.

Volunteering and Catholicism in Europe. The Inside Perspective Part 2: Empirical

In the paper we analyse the social activity practices of Catholic persons, as a set of individual and collective action emerging from the Catholic identity and – to more or less extent – structuralised under the Church-related formal non-profit initiatives. The purpose of the study is to clarify: (1) to what extent the Catholic unpaid social activities of different kinds could be classified as forms of volunteering and (2) to what extent the third sector definitions of volunteering are included in specific Catholic activities. Three tendencies have been observed with respect to not including religion-oriented volunteering in voluntary studies. Firstly, while using tools for collecting data adequate for the secular world, researchers face methodological difficulties to successfully cover social activities organized in parishes and congregations. Secondly, a reductionist approach reflects the ideological-rooted tendency to treat religion as a matter of private life. Thirdly, some religious-based entities tend to keep social activities of the believers within the Church-related circle. From the Catholic perspective, volunteer engagement represents an important aspect of faith-based every day activities, the so-called lived religion. At the same time, social engagement of believers provided within the Church-related entities, as well as outside them, usually fulfils all main features of volunteering. The relation between volunteering and religion is to be referred not only to the general position of faith-based and religious organizations in the public sphere, but also to the embeddedness of religious life in the society, as in fact both religion and volunteering are categories social per se. We illustrate our reflection on volunteering and Catholicism by presenting empirical evidence from the 2018 panel expert research among representatives of 29 Catholic Bishops Conferences across Europe.

English Convents in Catholic Europe, c. 1600–1800 by James E. Kelly (review)

English Convents in Catholic Europe, c. 1600–1800 by James E. Kelly (review)

Among All the Nations

I spent much of the first decade of the 2000s writing a book about the Catholic Church in nineteenth and twentieth-century Vietnam. I came to the topic as a scholar of Vietnam, and very much not as a scholar of modern Catholicism. In the project's early stages I searched high and low for a general history to fill in the (many) gaps in my knowledge of the subject. The best I could find was Nicholas Atkin and Frank Tallett's 2003 Priests, Prelates & People: A History of European Catholicism since 1750. This book, although excellent and still worth reading, is squarely grounded in scholarship written from an older national and regional approach to the Church's modern history. It essentially ignores the fact that in the modern era more than ever before, Catholicism's historical epicenter in Europe was irreducibly tied to the rest of the world not only through the Ultramontane Church but also through the circulation of ideas and the printed word, migration, and (above all) European imperialism, and that the Church's institutional and cultural evolution since the eighteenth century is incomprehensible outside of such frameworks (Atkin and Tallett devote an astounding 5 of their 333 pages of text to the European empires in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, which made up two-thirds of the global Catholic population at the time they finished their book).

Association between culture and the preference for, and perceptions of, 11 routes of medicine administration: A survey in 21 countries and regions

Medicines can be taken by various routes of administration. These can impact the effects and perceptions of medicines. The literature about individuals' preferences for and perceptions of the different routes of administration is sparse, but indicates a potential influence of culture. Our aim was to determine: (i) any association between one's culture and one's preferred route of medicine administration and (ii) individual perceptions of pain, efficacy, speed of action and acceptability when medicines are swallowed or placed in the mouth, under the tongue, in the nose, eye, ear, lungs, rectum, vagina, on the skin, or areinjected.A cross-sectional, questionnaire-based survey of adults was conducted in 21 countries and regions of the world, namely, Tunisia, Ghana, Nigeria, Turkey, Ethiopia, Lebanon, Malta, Brazil, Great Britain, United States, India, Serbia, Romania, Portugal, France, Netherlands, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, mainland China and Estonia, using the Inglehart–Welzel cultural map to ensure coverage across all cultures. Participants scored the pain/discomfort, efficacy, speed of onset and acceptability of the different routes of medicine administration and stated their preferred route. Demographic information was collected.A total of 4435 participants took part in the survey. Overall, the oral route was the most preferred route, followed by injection, while the rectal route was the least preferred. While the oral route was the most preferred in all cultures, the percentage of participants selecting this route varied, from 98% in Protestant Europe to 50% in the African-Islamic culture. A multinomial logistic regression model revealed a number of predictors for the preferred route. Injections were favoured in the Baltic, South Asia, Latin America and African-Islamic cultures while dermal administration was favoured in Catholic Europe, Baltic and Latin America cultures. A marked association was found between culture and the preference for, and perceptions of the different routes by which medicines are taken. This applied to even the least favoured routes (vaginal and rectal). Only women were asked about the vaginal route, and our data shows that the vaginal route was slightly more popular than the rectal one.

Volunteering and Catholicism in Europe. The Inside Perspective. Part 1: Theoretical

The paper analyses the social activity practices of the Catholic persons, as a set of individual and collective action emerging from the Catholic identity and structuralised under the Church-related formal non-profit initiatives. The purpose of the study is to clarify: (1) to what extent the Catholic unpaid social activities of different kinds could be classified as forms of volunteering and (2) to what extent the third sector definitions of volunteering include the specificity of Catholic activities. There are three reasons for observed tendencies to not include religion-oriented volunteering in voluntary studies. Firstly, while using tools for collecting data adequate for the secular world, researchers face methodological difficulties in order to successfully cover social activities organized in parishes and congregations. Secondly, fonist approach reflects the ideological-rooted tendency to treat religion as a matter pertaining to private life. Thirdly, some of religious-based entities tends to keep social activities of the believers inside the church-related circle. From the Catholic perspective, volunteer engagement represents an important aspect of faith-based daily activities, so called ‘lived religion’. Social engagement of believers provided within the church-related entities, as well as outside them, usually fulfils all the main features of volunteering. The relation between volunteering and religion is to be referred, not only to the general position of faith-based and religious organizations in public sphere, but also to the embeddedness of religious life in the society, as in fact, both religion and volunteering are categories social per se. Reflection on volunteering and Catholicism is illustrated by presenting empirical evidence from the 2018 panel expert research among representatives of 29 Catholic Bishops Conferences across Europe.

W. A. Mozart’s Litaniae lauretanae Compositions and the Loreto Pilgrimage

The Litaniae lauretanae (the Litany of Loreto), a Marian litany with medieval roots, has been set numerous times in polyphony, as well as in grand settings with soloists and orchestra, to be performed all over Catholic Europe. Famous musicians who composed settings of the Litany of Loreto include Orlando di Lasso, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, Claudio Monteverdi, Heinrich Biber, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. This article discusses Mozart’s two settings of the Litaniae lauretanae that were composed in May 1771 and in 1774. The analysis of parts of Mozart’s settings in the light of the historical background of Loreto pilgrimages and the litany’s ritual and musical uses highlights some of their remarkable musical features. It is argued that Mozart’s settings, more than any other major contemporary ones, constitute musical reenactments of ritual experience.

Individual‐Level Determinants of Religious Intergenerational Transmission: Evidence from Catholic Europe1

Although there is a rich body of research on religious transmission, relatively little attention has been given to studying this within specific religious traditions such as Catholicism, especially in Europe. Using data from the 2018 round of the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP), this study uses regression analysis to investigate individual‐level determinants of religious transmission in 12 European countries with a Catholic tradition. We find support for the idea that parental religious socialization impacts adults' religiosity. More specifically, we find that childhood religiosity has explanatory effects separate from the impact of parental religiosity and that the religiosity of the father has a greater impact on offspring religiosity than the religiosity of the mother. We also find that childhood church attendance has a stronger effect in former communist countries than in western European countries. Overall, this study suggests the religious socialization perspective should be considered more in religious group‐specific terms.

Revelation, Revolution and Utopia, c.1770–1820

Abstract The philosophes and France’s revolutionaries are often held jointly responsible for the attack on revealed religion in the course of the eighteenth century. This article suggests that the culture of belief among the laity of Protestant and Catholic Europe was not seriously undermined or even radically altered by the ralliement of State churches to the rationalistic and utilitarian values of the Enlightenment. Scepticism remained a narrowly confined phenomenon and religious ‘enthusiasm’, including literal belief in biblical prophecy, recovered strongly towards the century’s end. Traumatic public events (including the destruction of the Jesuit Order, the war in America, the revolution in France, the rise of Napoleon) were capable of triggering a latent millenarian reflex in nearly all social milieus. Although frequently played down by researchers, biblical literalism, prophetic witness and the quest for spiritual utopia should be considered an integral part of the tumultuous politics of the 1790 and 1800s. The article focuses particularly on the outlook and behaviour of England’s Rational Dissenters, French and Italian Jansenists and German Pietists in order to illustrate this contention. It concludes that, even at elite levels, detachment from religion was superficial and mainly doctrinal in nature. God, in one form or another, survived both the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.

Culturological Analysis of F. R. Chateaubriand's Book "The Genius of Christianity": Success Factors and the Cultural Category of Sinfulness

The historical factors as well as the units of the cultural knowledge which are considered to have provided Chateaubriand’s books, and “The Genius of Christianity” in particular, with the success and the content are the subject of the present article. The following historical reasons which attracted the readers’ attention to the book have been defined: the disappointment of the society with the atheistic ideals of the revolution, the need for religious cult restoring, the authorities’ desire to stop strife in the country and build relationships with Catholic Europe. The semantic content of the work also contributed to its popularity because it responded to the request of finding logic in the religion, had an emotional impact and dealt with the relevant issues of the morality by means of the cultural category of sinfulness. Scientific novelty of the research implies the following: the cultural category of sinfulness objectified in F.R. Chateaubriand’s book “The Genius of Christianity” having been analyzed for the first time as well as the author’s approach to the understanding and cultural information streamlining having been identified. More over cultural-historical factors promoting the book’s prominence among Chateaubriand’s contemporaries have been studied. The author’s using rational way while explaining the basis of the sin, resorting to the strict argumentation and the evidence-based methods, denying religious irrationality have been set. The conducted research has shown the key factors leading to the book’s relevance: the society’s necessity of the religion revival, the authorities’ support of this tendency specified by the political environment.

Portuguese Youth Religiosity in Comparative Perspective

Portugal has been a good example of sociocultural changes during the last decades which have influenced the levels of religiosity, namely among young people. In this context, this article studies Portuguese youth religiosity in a comparative perspective. First, it compares Portuguese youth religiosity with the other Portuguese age groups’ religiosity. Second, it compares Portuguese youth religiosity over time. A supplementary analysis compares Portugal with Catholic Europe in both aspects. Portuguese youth are less religious than the other age groups, mainly the older group, and are becoming less religious over time. Comparing Portugal with Catholic Europe, differences in young people have decreased in the last two decades, reaching similar values in 2020. Quantitative analyses based on four religiosity dimensions (community, practice, belief, and norm), using the European Values Study, were applied. These data confirm secularization, including the theories of individualization and cohort replacement, in line with other studies.

KRITIKA SREDNjOVEKOVNOG ZAPADNOEVROPSKOG DRUŠTVA U FILMU „NEBESKO KRALjEVSTVO“ RIDLIJA SKOTA

This paper shows how Kingdom of Heaven, a 2005 film by Ridley Scott that gives a fiction- alized account of the events leading up to the outbreak of the Third Crusade, criticises the medieval society of Western (Catholic) Europe. The paper contrasts the film’s positive charac- ters with the negative ones and thus yields the conclusion that Kingdom of Heaven denounces the grave perversities of medieval European society – the sacral (the values advocated by the Pope and the Catholic clergy, such as religious hatred, manslaughter as a way to spiritual sal- vation, and hypocritical and egotistic materialism) as well as the secular ones (feudal heredi- tary aristocratism). The author of this paper points out that, in criticising the medieval society of Catholic Europe, Scott does not only aim to point to the improprieties of this social system, but with his film he also implicitly alludes to the contemporary political conflicts in the Mid- dle East, expressing the hope that Baldwin IV’s fictional „kingdom of conscience” as charac- terized by high morality, tolerance, open-mindedness and meritocracy will, one day, be truly realized not only in the Levant but also throughout the world, wherever there are conflicts between different religions and nations. The film Kingdom of Heaven, therefore, does not only have a medievalist but also a universal, timeless significance.

РИСУНОК МАРТЕНА ДЕ ВОСА «ОТШЕЛЬНИК» В КОНТЕКСТЕ ИНТЕРЕСА К ТЕМЕ ОТШЕЛЬНИЧЕСТВА И УЕДИНЕНИЯ В ЕВРОПЕЙСКОЙ КУЛЬТУРЕ В КОНЦЕ XVI В.

The article links the drawing of Martin de Vos (inv. R-7200), in the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, with the engraving for which it was a modello. This allows us to identify the hermit as St. Bavo and to date the drawing 1593–1594, thus correcting the previous proposals of 1585/86 or about 1600. The Moscow sheet is one of about 120 drawings created by M. de Vos for five series of engravings depicting pious hermits, which indicates a great interest in this topic at that time Consideration of these series and their further functions reveals their connection with the world of Catholic Europe, the ideas of the Counter-Reformation and the teachings of Ignatius Loyola, which revived the cult of the holy hermits and preached solitude, for reflection and prayer, as a way towards spiritual improvement in accordance with Christian values.

Americana bei Jean Bodin und Johann Fischart, Hexen bei Jean de Léry

Abstract The scope of Early Modern Demonology is universal, for the perceived threat of the devil is omnipresent, stretching through time and space. This article examines various utilizations of the description of central and south American indigenous peoples in demonological discourse. By means of three closely related examples, I will demonstrate the discursive conflation of deviant behavior in Europe and in America through comparisons and transferences: Jean Bodin’s Démonomanie des Sorciers (1580), its German translation by Johann Fischart (1581/1586), and Jean de Léry’s writings, especially his Histoire d’un voyage (1578/1585). Within this discursive nexus, Léry compares the American Indigenes to European Catholics, whereas Bodin compares them to European witches - and Fischart completes this argumentative triangle by calling for European Catholics to be held accountable for comparable acts in the same way as European witches.

Christian art and architecture: Do they stride hand in hand? Catholic Europe versus Coptic Orthodox Egypt

Amidst the growth and development of different civilizations, art and architecture progressed simultaneously, shaping one another. At many times they advanced analogously. This research presents different aspects of art that are employed in churches and investigates whether there is an analogy between these aspects in church architecture as well or not. Cases from different church denominations are presented from both Egypt and Mediterranean countries in Western Europe, thus discussing the dialect between art and architecture. The domain of the church was selected for this dialect, as art is employed affluently in many worship houses in general and churches specifically, deeming the task viable and comprehensible.

Des légats aux nonces. Les nouveautes dans la représentation diplomatique du Saint-Siège au XVIe siècle

In the sixteenth century papal diplomacy adapted itself to the new conditions of international relations. As elsewhere in catholic Europe, nuncios (the papal ambassadors) become permanent. Moreover, in order to cope with the Protestant reformation, they increasingly have the rank of bishop and their diplomatic mission was accompanied by a religious role. In addition, the council of Trent, which increased the powers of bishops, had as a result a rarity of the legates a latere, the Holy See’s solemn envoys who were still very numerous in the first half of the century. A new profile appeared: more and more the nuncios made their careers in the service of the papacy. These new features in pontifical diplomacy have continued down to our time.

A Gothic Dystopia at the Antipodes

This article offers an analysis of texts which were written in 1802-3 and published in 1812 under the title Panopticon versus New South Wales, namely Jeremy Bentham’s first two letters to Lord Pelham and A Plea for the Constitution, arguing that, in his attempt to show the superiority of his Panopticon plan over the transportation scheme, the reformer depicted New South Wales as a Gothic dystopia. ‘Gothic’ is here understood as a literary genre (with its motifs and scenarios), an ideological term and a critical tool. Bentham upset the conventional cartography of his time by showing that the ‘archaic’ or ‘barbarian’ practices that Gothic novels located in Catholic Europe were actually present in British penal policies. In addition to drawing on the rhetoric and the dichotomies which underlay the Gothic novels published during his lifetime, Bentham anticipated scenarios – such as reverse colonization and contamination – which would be explored in Victorian fiction. By extrapolating in dystopian fashion from trends which were present in the British body politic, Bentham’s Australian writings show how a historical period may be haunted by its future potentialities.