Catholic Europe Research Articles

English Convents in Catholic Europe, c. 1600-1800. James E. Kelly.

<i>English Convents in Catholic Europe, c. 1600-1800</i>. James E. Kelly.

James E. Kelly English Convents in Catholic Europe, c. 1600–1800

James E. Kelly English Convents in Catholic Europe, c. 1600–1800

The Persistence of Mysticism in Catholic Europe: France, Italy, and Germany (1500–1675). Volume 6, Part 3 of The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism by Bernard McGinn

The Persistence of Mysticism in Catholic Europe: France, Italy, and Germany (1500–1675). Volume 6, Part 3 of The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism by Bernard McGinn

Lost in Translation? Constructing Ancient Roman Martyrs in Baroque Bavaria

Over the course of the early modern period, parish, monastic, and pilgrimage churches across Catholic Europe and beyond eagerly sought to acquire the relics of ancient Roman martyrs excavated from the Eternal City's catacombs. Between 1648 and 1803, the duchy of Bavaria welcomed nearly 350 of these “holy bodies” to its soil. Rather than presenting the remains as fragments, as was common during the medieval period, local communities forged catacomb saint relics into gleaming skeletons and then worked to write hagiographical narratives that made martyrs’ lives vivid and memorable to a population unfamiliar with their deeds. Closely examining the construction and material presentation of Bavarian catacomb saints as well as the vitae written for them offers a new vantage point from which to consider how the intellectual movement known as the paleo-Christian revival and the scholarship it produced were received, understood, and then used by Catholic Europeans in an everyday religious context. This article demonstrates that local Bavarian craftsmen, artists, relic decorators, priests, and nuns—along with erudite scholars in Rome—were active in bringing the early Christian church to life and participated in the revival as practitioners and creative scholars in their own right.

Afterlives: Testimonies of Irish Catholic Mothers on Infant Death and the Fate of the Unbaptized

Older Irish Catholics remember a metaphysical space or place called Limbo. This was the destination of unbaptized infants. They could never enter Heaven because the stain of original sin had not been removed. In addition, they were denied burial in consecrated ground. Fear of such eventualities drove parents to baptize as soon as possible. Nor was this a purely Irish phenomenon. In emergency cases, even baptism in utero was permitted in some parts of Catholic Europe. The centerpiece of this study is the testimonies of Irish mothers and their remembrances of the perils of Limbo, the disposal of infant corpses (in cillíní), and “churching.” Why belief in Limbo has become almost extinct in recent decades is explored, drawing on both demand and supply side explanations. More generally, considerations of Limbo, the unbaptized, and the afterlife give rise to challenging questions as to secularization and even the definition of childhood.

Benedict XIV’s donation of Amazonian objects to the Istituto delle Scienze of Bologna (1751): origins and history

Abstract In 1751 Pope Benedict XIV made a donation of Amazonian objects to the Istituto delle Scienze in Bologna, a scientific academy located in the city of his birth. This article reconstructs the history of this group of objects back to its origins in the Jesuit missions of the upper Amazon basin, by presenting and examining new documentary evidence. The encounter between a Jesuit missionary and Pope Benedict XIV is analysed in the context of the early modern reception of the New World and its peoples in Catholic Europe. Finally, an overview is presented of the items in this collection, which represent some of the scarcest and oldest known examples of native material culture from the region.

Catholic racism and anti-Jewish discourse in interwar Austria and Slovakia: the cases of Anton Orel and Karol Körper

ABSTRACT Szabó’s study deals with the phenomenon of so-called Catholic racism, that is, the penetration of racist argumentation into anti-Jewish polemics within European Catholicism, in the first half of the twentieth century. It presents the ideas of two Catholic intellectuals—Anton Orel from Austria and Karol Körper from Slovakia—to demonstrate that, while this process unfolded against the background of the rising Nazi movement in Germany, it was specific to the different national contexts of Central Europe. While in Germany several Catholic commentators and theologians sought to reconcile Catholic doctrine with notions of racial supremacy, in other countries they responded differently to such tendencies. The Austrian writer Anton Orel, for example, highlighted the supranational identity of a ‘Great Austria’ (Grossösterreich) based on Catholicism and corporatism, as opposed to German national and Protestant racism, whereas his Slovak colleague Körper surprisingly drew inspiration from the white supremacist ideology of North America. Apart from the different national contexts, Szabó’s study also describes the transnational character of Catholic racism. In modern Catholic antisemitism Jews are stereotyped not only based on religious differences but, in the light of conspiracy theories, they are also presented as an embodiment of modernization, a socio-economic and political ‘threat’. Another specific feature of Catholic racism is the fact that it did not primarily defer to the authority of natural science, which had challenged its earlier monopoly on the interpretation of the world and man’s place in it. Instead, its supporters gave a political character to the traditional doctrine of substitution theology, so-called supersessionism, based on which Christians claimed to assume the role of the Jews as the chosen people. Correspondingly, the chosenness of the Jewish people is negatively connoted as a conspiracy of the ‘Jewish race’ against the Catholic religion and traditional states as well as new Christian-corporative nations, which Jews had allegedly sought to subdue in their conquest for world domination by means of capitalism or Bolshevism. Catholic racism is thus set in the wider context of the development of modern antisemitism towards its most radical Nazi form. Not even the Nazis were able to define their anti-Jewish bias scientifically, and they were therefore dependent on religious cultural models.

The God That Won: Eugen Kogon and the Origins of Cold War Liberalism

Eugen Kogon (1903–87) was one of the most important German intellectuals of the late 1940s. His writings on the concentration camps and on the nature of fascism were crucial to West Germany’s fledgling transition from dictatorship to democracy. Previous scholars of Kogon have focused on his leftist Catholicism, which differentiated him from the mainstream. This article takes a different approach, asking instead how Kogon, a recovering fascist himself, came to have so much in common with his peers in West Germany and in the Cold War West. By 1948, he fluently spoke the new language of Cold War liberalism, pondering how human rights and liberal democracy could be saved from totalitarianism. He did not do so, the article argues, because he had decided to abandon his principles and embrace a militarized anti-Communist cause. Instead, he transitioned to Cold War liberalism because it provided a congenial home for a deeply Catholic thinker, committed to a carceral understanding of Europe’s fascist past and a federalist vision for its future. The analysis helps us to see how European Catholics made the Cold War their own – an important phenomenon, given that Christian Democrats held power almost everywhere on the continent that was not controlled by Communists. The analysis reveals a different portrait of Cold War liberalism than we usually see: less a smokescreen for American interests, and more a vessel for emancipatory projects and ideals that was strategically employed by diverse actors across the globe.

Reform Catholicism and the International Suppression of the Jesuits in Enlightenment Europe by Dale Van Kley

Reviewed by: Reform Catholicism and the International Suppression of the Jesuits in Enlightenment Europe by Dale Van Kley Jeffrey Burson, Maria Teresa Fattori, Harm Klueting, Robert Scully S. J., Mita Choudhury, and Dale Van Kley Dale Van Kley, Reform Catholicism and the International Suppression of the Jesuits in Enlightenment Europe. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018. Pp. xii, 384. ISBN 978-0-300-22846-5. $38.00. Introduction by Jeffrey Burson, Georgia Southern University Professor Dale K. Van Kley’s book, Reform Catholicism and the International Suppression of the Jesuits in Enlightenment Europe is the most recent of four monographs scattered across a scholarly career spanning well over forty years. Although Van Kley modestly notes in his acknowledgments that this book is the accidental offshoot of a still ongoing and longer-term project on the trajectory of “Reform Catholicism” from circa 1750 to 1804, it remains, for all that, a considerable achievement. Throughout Van Kley’s expansive and detailed narrative, he argues, first, that Gallican- or Jansenist-derived anti-Jesuit discourses, mostly French in origin, were exported to the rest of Catholic Europe increasingly after 1750, providing thereby the ideological underpinning and justification of the suppression of the Jesuit Order throughout Catholic Europe and its imperial peripheries. Second, Van Kley’s work asserts that a surprisingly active, transnational, and coherent network of anti-Jesuit scholars, jurists, statesmen, and diplomats actually provided the impetus for a coordinated international campaign to demolish the Jesuits as prelude to a brief era of sweeping Catholic Reform cut short by the French Revolution (pp. 1–9). The various state-specific suppressions of the Jesuits, and that of the papacy in 1773, have long intrigued historians of the eighteenth century, but surprisingly few volumes have been devoted to these suppressions as a group. Of these works, none have uncovered the possible collaborative, conspiratorial, or transnational origins of the eighteenth-century suppressions. But, based in many years of research into sources in Latin, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Dutch, and Portuguese—many of these sources, archival—Van Kley’s most recent book has uncovered, not only that these suppressions had common ideological and socio-cultural origins, but that [End Page 738] they might plausibly be considered a watershed moment in the history of the immediate pre-Revolutionary period of Euro-Atlantic history. The book is divided into three parts, the first of which concerns itself with the sources, historical context, and rhetoric of anti-Jesuitism, and its vital part in the construction of what would ultimately become Reform Catholicism (pp. 113–50). Part II of the work dives deeply into the interconnections and contrasts among the various national suppressions and expulsions of the Jesuits in Portugal, France, Spain, Naples, and Parma, finally culminating in the first suppression of the order by Pope Clement XIV’s brief, Dominus ac Redemptor in 1773 (pp. 150–240). Part III considers developments in the nearly twenty years separating the papal suppression of the Society of Jesus from the French Revolution (pp. 240–93). In all, Reform Catholicism and the International Suppression of the Jesuits in Enlightenment Europe leaves us with five major historiographical interventions to which I will devote the remainder of this forum’s introduction. First, Van Kley maintains that many styles of Catholic Reformism— from Febronianism to Josephism, to followers of Pereira—heretofore treated as largely separate species of Catholic Enlightenment or Catholic Reform, are in fact related through a common intellectual genealogy traceable to an international Gallican-inspired Reform Catholicism with roots largely in France. This argument is most stirringly articulated in Van Kley’s discussion of the Gallican roots of Hontheim/Febronius (pp. 24–30) and of Pereira de Figuereido (pp. 30–32). Van Kley does recognize that a sub-stratum comprising kindred roots of Reform Catholicism existed throughout Europe. Afterall, even French Gallicanism was derived from a fifteenth-century conciliarist jurisprudence that set down roots throughout much of late medieval and early modern Europe well before the advent of Jansenists and Jesuits, and in ways that proved vital to the inception of humanism, and to both Protestant and Catholic Reformations. Dale Van Kley’s extensively researched recent book, however, has...

Emergence of the Clerical Corporation in Western Europe (11–13th Centuries) and in Russia (17–18th Centuries)

Traditional Christian confessions — for example, in Catholicism or in Orthodoxy — in scholarly literature, in modern legislation, or at the level of everyday consciousness, are understood primarily as clerical corporations. This corporate reading of modern Christianity also influences the understanding of the phenomenon of religion itself, as it happens, for example, in the famous essay on the “field of religion” by P. Bourdieu. This reading also determines the perception of Christianity as a historical phenomenon as well, which, within the framework of such a representation, appears as a corporation at every moment of its historical existence. This article argues that a “clerical corporation” is not a form of social organization that was originally inherent in Christianity, but a historical phenomenon that embraces various confessional contexts at different times. In particular, the emergence of a clerical corporation is fixed within the framework of an asynchronous comparative perspective relying on the examples of Western European Catholicism of the 11th — 13th centuries, and Russian Orthodoxy of the 17th — 18th centuries.

Arsāniyūs Shukrī al-Ḥakīm’s Account of His Journey to France, the Iberian Peninsula, and Italy (1748–1757) from Travel Journal to Edition

AbstractIn 1748, the monk Arsāniyūs Shukrī al-Ḥakīm (1707–1786), a member of the Lebanese Maronite Order in Mount Lebanon, was sent to Catholic Europe, tasked with securing financial support and the protection of the French King for his indebted order. The literary byproduct of this journey through the Christian lands of Western Europe was an extensive travel account. Based on recent manuscript findings, the present contribution examines the different versions in which this ego-document has been transmitted, including the original travel journal written en route by Arsāniyūs himself, copies by contemporaries who turned the travel journal into a travelogue, an excerpt included in an anthology dating to the 1870s, and finally the edition by the Jesuit scholar Ferdinand Taoutel (1887–1977). The account of the journey, it is argued, remained the object of a philological engagement that was meant to guarantee the continuity of its relevance and use in changing contexts.

The Impact of European Christian Imagery on Contemporary Orthodox Tewahedo Iconography in Eritrea

Abstract This article addresses the impact of modern European Christian imagery on the visual culture of the Orthodox Tewahedo Church of Eritrea, which has a long history of using illuminated manuscripts, paintings, and crosses as essential elements of worship and prayer. Tewahedo icons are characterized by brown- and black-skinned Christian figures and indigenized settings that narrate Evangelical and monastic scripture for devotees. This study highlights the domination of European white imagery in liturgical spheres in Eritrea and assesses the impact on the semiotic composition of locally produced paintings. Further, nuanced codes of race and skin color are analyzed in relation to connotations of good and evil. The semiotic analysis in this article also shows that European influences are more prevalent in religious paintings that depict recognized saints in Catholic Europe, in comparison to images of local monastic saints, whose depiction continues to mirror the visual metaphors and local myths of the Tigrinya people.

Dalmatinski episkopat i Prvi svjetski rat

Na temelju arhivskih izvora i onodobnoga tiska u radu se prikazuje djelovanje dalmatinskih biskupa u vrijeme Prvoga svjetskog rata pod vidikom njihova odnosa prema Habsburškoj Monarhiji i njezinu ratnom angažmanu. Prikazuje se humanitarni i karitativni doprinos Crkve u Dalmaciji društvu zahvaćenom ratnim nedaćama, kao i njezina uloga potpore Monarhiji i caru iskazana u raznim vjerskim obredima čiji je cilj – osim vjerskih nakana – bilo podizanje ratnoga morala te beskompromisno iskazivanje lojalnosti vlastima. U kontekstu političkih gibanja posljednje dvije godine rata (od Svibanjske deklaracije 1917. do kraja rata) analiziraju se stavovi svećenstva i dalmatinskih biskupa prema političkim pitanjima, gdje se uočavaju znatna razmimoilaženja. Propast Austro-Ugarske Monarhije značit će promjenu političkih stavova većine dalmatinskih biskupa.

“Ye Shall Know Them by Their Fruits”: Prosperity and Institutional Religion in Europe and the Americas

Low competitiveness is a common denominator of historically Roman Catholic countries. In contrast, historically Protestant countries generally perform better in education, social progress, and competitiveness. Jesus Christ described the true and false prophets coming on his behalf, as follows: “Ye shall know them by their fruits”. Inspired by this parable, this paper explores the relations between religious systems (‘prophets’) and social prosperity (‘fruits’). It asks how Protestantism influences prosperity as compared to Roman Catholicism in Europe and the Americas. Most empirical studies have hitherto disregarded the institutional influence of religion. Taking the work of Max Weber as their starting point, they have instead emphasised the cultural linkage between religious adherents and prosperity. This paper tests various correlational models and draws on a comprehensive conceptual framework to understand the institutional influence of religion on prosperity in Europe and the Americas. It argues that the uneven contributions of Roman Catholicism and Protestantism to prosperity are grounded in their different historical and institutional foundations and in the theologies that are pervasive in their countries of influence.

Review: African Pentecostals in Catholic Europe: The Politics of Presence in the Twenty-First Century by Annalisa Butticci, Enlarging the Kingdom: African Pentecostalism in Italy directed by Annalisa Butticci and Andrew Esiebo, Na God: Aesthetics of African Charismatic Power edited by Annalisa Butticci

Review: African Pentecostals in Catholic Europe: The Politics of Presence in the Twenty-First Century by Annalisa Butticci, Enlarging the Kingdom: African Pentecostalism in Italy directed by Annalisa Butticci and Andrew Esiebo, Na God: Aesthetics of African Charismatic Power edited by Annalisa Butticci

Of 'Rage of Party' and the Coming of Civility

Of 'Rage of Party' and the Coming of Civility

La idea de Europa en la cultura franquista 1939-1962

Uno de los rasgos más sobresalientes del franquismo es su aislamiento internacional debido tanto al discurso nacionalista del régimen como al rechazo exterior tras la derrota de los fascismos en la segunda guerra mundial. Sin embargo, el tema de las relaciones entre España y Europa estuvo presente a lo largo de la evolución intelectual y política del régimen. Este artículo pretende mostrar cómo va evolucionando la visión que sobre este problema se tiene en las álites intelectuales del franquismo y los debates en torno a ello, siempre en función de la justificación y supervivencia del sistema. De hecho, frente a la Europa democrática y liberal se opondrá, una vez eclipsado el sueño de una Europa fascista, la imagen de una Europa católica, fuertemente enraizada en unos valores tradicionales identificados con la auténtica esencia europea, que sólo España realmente había sabido guardar de los combates de la modernidad. Esta atención al tema europeo mostraba, por un lado, la preocupación de los vencedores de la guerra civil por la imagen que se tenía de España en el resto de Europa, y por otra, su profundo miedo a aceptar con todas sus consecuencias la herencia intelectual y cultural de la Europa contemporánea.

Dragomans, tattooists, artisans: Palestinian Christians and their encounters with Catholic Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

AbstractIn the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the presence of European Catholic actors in the Ottoman empire dramatically increased, particularly in the Palestinian provinces. The city of Jerusalem and its surrounding hinterland, referred to here by its Arabic name, Jabal al-Quds, witnessed a particularly intensive Catholic presence owing to its sanctified religious status. This article examines the ways in which the local Arabic-speaking Christian population of Jabal al-Quds interacted with these European Catholic actors. It situates these encounters within the wider scholarship on missionary encounters and cross-cultural interactions in the Mediterranean world, arguing that global historians need to pay greater attention to the inequalities embedded in many of these relationships and the frequent episodes of violent conflict they gave rise to. By inverting the standard Western gaze on Jerusalem and looking at these encounters from the inside out, the article seeks to restore local actors as important players within the global Counter-Reformation, albeit within a context of subjugation, conflict, and stymied mobility.

Translating the Jansenist Controversy in Britain and Ireland

Abstract This article explores perceptions of Jansenism in Britain and Ireland in the latter half of the seventeenth century. Grounded in the theology of Cornelius Jansen, the Catholic bishop of Ypres, the wider Jansenist ‘movement’ was a controversial group of theologians, philosophers, clergy and nuns whose disputes with the papacy and French monarchy endured well into the eighteenth century. These centred on questions of divine grace, papal fallibility and even political dissent. In exploring the translation and reception of these ideas, this article foregrounds a moment in the late 1670s when the natural philosopher Robert Boyle and a group of like-minded Protestants attempted to incorporate Jansenist writings into a translation of the Bible into Irish. Enthusiasm for this was based on widely held perceptions that the Jansenists represented a more rational strain of Catholicism which anticipated a broader reform of Catholic Europe. The ensuing ‘Jansenist Preface’ was intended to help unify Christendom by bringing about a more rational religion among Ireland’s Catholics. The shock felt by Boyle and his collaborators upon actually reading Jansenist works, and the reappraisal this engendered, provides the foundation for a wider exploration of how ideas and representations of the Jansenist controversy moved, were translated, and subsequently engaged with across these confessional spaces. In doing so, this article sets British and Irish interests in Jansenism against wider questions of interconfessional dialogue and European reformation, and explores the place of mobility and translation in the framing of the reformation process.

Theological Indebtedness to Jacques and Raïssa Maritain: A Testimony to Their Contribution to My Theological Vocation

Theological Indebtedness to Jacques and Raïssa Maritain:A Testimony to Their Contribution to My Theological Vocation Matthew L. Lamb Robert Cardinal Sarah's important The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise shows the fundamental significance of monastic contemplation and silence for a God-centered renewal of society and culture. Before I would teach at Catholic theological faculties, I realized that I should draw upon an intellectual and contemplative formation I had received previous to any teaching.1 Just before my fifteenth birthday, in May of 1952, I was graced with a vocation to enter the Trappist Abbey of Our Lady of the Holy Spirit in Conyers, Georgia. This gave me the advantage of being in a contemplative monastery where an intellectual asceticism was linked with quests for wisdom and worship. Steeped in the Biblical Word of God and the Divine Office, the intellectual, moral, and religious formation invited the monk to an in depth study of the philosophical and theological writings of the Greek and Latin Fathers, as well as the Medieval monastic and scholastic saints and scholars. I drew upon those fifteen years of study because they were foundational for a much needed renewal of Catholic theology in our times. A serious shortcoming in Catholic circles after Vatican II was a severing of a genuine ressourcement from aggiornomento. This rupture relegated the great intellectual achievements of the biblical, conciliar, patristic, medieval, and [End Page 617] Renaissance periods to historical museums. They were fine for visits, but had little or no relevance to modern issues and questions. As Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI warned, a hermeneutics of rupture made a hermeneutics of reform and renewal dead, leaving Catholics with nothing more than the swirling, ever-changing cultural fashions of the day. The writings of Jacques Maritain were studied and read in the Trappist monastery I had entered. The essay he wrote with Raïssa on "Liturgy and Contemplation" was published in the Carmelite journal Spiritual Life and was important in its relation of the Divine Office to the contemplative life. A most important aspect of Maritain's many writings is how, during the 1920s through the 1960s, he forged in philosophy the importance of recovering the great intellectual achievements of the past in order to provide adequate answers to contemporary questions. He saw clearly that major problems in modernity are due to the failure to keep alive the intellectual, moral, and religious traditions of Catholic Europe. He saw clearly the universal validity of the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas as inviting the reader to discover the natural reason of humanity.2 It was common in the monastery to read Maritain's writings on an array of issues: natural law, the state and democracy, Christian existentialism, art and scholasticism, and the art of Rouault, as well as his contributions to the United Nations charter. His wonderful Reflections on America were read aloud during meals in the monastic refectory. Indeed, it was Jacques Maritain who illustrated in his philosophy how only by recovering human reason (ressourcement) through a thorough study of the ancients could one bring renewal and reform to modern times (aggiornomento). Thus the philosophical recovery of Aquinas by Maritain prepared the intellectual groundwork for a proper understanding of the biblical and patristic renewals, even though this had been unfortunately overlooked by some proponents of la nouvelle théologie.3 Decades before the 1960s, Maritain was recovering important theoretical writings of the Fathers, especially St. Augustine, and the works of St. Thomas Aquinas and his commentators, especially John of St. Thomas. [End Page 618] Maritain realized the importance of this recovery not only to counteract the baneful consequences of nominalism and voluntarism on modern thought and life, but also to provide more adequate perspectives on major issues facing modernity. His philosophical ressourcement was decisive for his philosophical aggiornomento. When he saw the failures of many Catholic intellectuals after Vatican II to live up to the demands of the theoretical recoveries of the Fathers and Aquinas, he wrote the blunt positive and negative assessments of post-conciliar life and thought in The Peasant of the Garonne: An Old Layman Questions Himself about the Present Time. Nevertheless...