Catholic Orientation Research Articles

Weeping for Parents (ku qin)

The psychology of Lou Tseng-Tsiang (1871–1949) – the famous Chinese diplomat and Beiyang Government politician who became a Benedictine monk in Belgium in 1927 – is not always easy to grasp. This article focuses on the family mausoleum and its garden that Lou built in 1920 for his parents in Beijing, opposite the Catholic cemetery of Zhalan. Not only a remnant of the material culture of the Christianised elite during the early Republic, it is also the most tangible expression of the Confucian principle of filial piety that guided Lou throughout his life. The chapel has an explicit Catholic orientation and is European in style, but contains several dozen epitaphs by then high-ranking politicians, both revealing Lou’s networks and expressing his status at a key time in his life. This in-depth study is based on archival research, fieldwork and Lou’s writings, from a multidisciplinary and transcultural perspective that includes history, religion, architecture and literature. Despite its poor state of conservation and urbanised environment, the mausoleum sums up Lou’s destiny and legacy, at the crossroads of traditional Chinese culture and European modernity, Empire and Republic, Confucian moral thought and universal Catholic faith.

The uncrowned “Bohemian king” and his “bible” castle. Blatná as commisioned by the highest burgrave of Prague castle, Zdeňek Lev of Rožmitál, around the years 1520–1530

This article presents a new interpretation of the ideological message of Blatná Castle after its expansion by Benedikt Ried, commissioned by Zdeňek Lev of Rožmitál around 1520-1530. The key to deciphering the biblical code of the residence of this powerful magnate is found in two columns standing in front of the castle façade, which have not been included in previous research. Their dilapidated state, as well as residually legible profile forms and ornaments, un equivocally point to their dating back to the time of Ried’s expansion. In the history of art, they are a well- known imitation of the bronze pillars of Jachin and Boaz, placed in front of the Old Testament Temple of Solomon. The expressive oriels of the part of the castle erected by Ried may be a reference to a diagram similar to a pentagram, often appearing on the pages of codices called the clavicula Salomonis. In the beginning, they contained the instructions of the great biblical king to his son Roboam. This is reflected in the family situation of the builder, as it is generally agreed that Blatná Castle was built by Zdeněk Lev in connection with the marriage of his son Adam. References to Solomon were quite common at the time, both at Prague Castle and at the residences of several Silesian dukes. They should not be surprising in the case of someone who, for more than 20 years (1507-1530), was the most important person in the state after the ruler (the highest burgrave of Prague Castle). Zdeněk Lev was a very active and influential politician with a Catholic orientation and nationalist, Bohemian disposition, who liked to moralize and judge and use biblical examples or episodes from Bohemian history.

Seeking Signs of Dormant Catholicity in Rural Anglican Parishes: An Enquiry Among Churchgoers in Wales

ABSTRACT The Anglican Church occupies a unique position within the inherited church structure emerging from the nineteenth century. The distinctive claim of the Anglican Church is that it is both Catholic and Reformed, occupying a mid-position between the Catholic Church and the Reformed Churches. The aim of the present study was to explore the extent to which traces of Catholic belief and practice can still be found in rural Anglican parishes in Wales. In a pilot project a modified form of the 21-item Anglo Catholic Orientation Scale proposed by Francis and Littler was completed by 75 churchgoers within five rural Anglican parishes in Wales. The data supported the internal consistency reliability of the revised instrument (α = .94) and demonstrated endorsement of a number of Catholic beliefs and practices, including praying for the dead (80%), priests using vestments, lighting votive candles (65%), and using holy oils (57%).

Selling the Economic Miracle: Economic Reconstruction and Politics in West Germany, 1949–1957

Selling the Economic Miracle: Economic Reconstruction and Politics in West Germany, 1949–1957

Introduction: Early Catholic Orientalism and the Missionary Discovery of Asian Religions

Abstract New encounters in America, Africa, and Asia facilitated the “discovery” of non-Biblical religious traditions that were distinct from the ancient paganism known to Christian humanists and antiquarians from classical sources and patristic literature. Although Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism did not exist as concepts in the early modern period, the three articles in this special issue illustrate the learning process by which a number of influential and pioneering Catholic missionaries came to distinguish these various traditions from each other. We argue that they did not simply “invent” new religions arbitrarily: instead, on the basis of the very broad categories of true religion and idolatry, they engaged in some close interaction and “dialogue”—albeit usually polemical—with local religious elites and their writings, including Eastern Christians. In addition, in the case of the Jesuits in particular, we note that these various engagements were often connected events that influenced each other in important ways, from India to Japan, from Japan to China, and from all these to Tibet.

Roma, Vienna e l’Oriente

Abstract They never met. But the ‚friendship by correspondence‘ (1628–1634) between the traveller Pietro Della Valle and the desk-bound librarian of the imperial library in Vienna, Sebastian Tengnagel, was built on a solid foundation: their shared passion for the Christian and Muslim East, its languages and its books was an „iron bond“ that gave rise to a close and immediate understanding between two men, despite their huge differences of temperament and experience. However, these letters (kept at the Vatican Archives and the Austrian National Library) do not just bear witness to the growing knowledge of the East in the first half of the 17th century. They also show that early Catholic Orientalism had its roots in a highly stratified terrain, in which military conflict, irenic tensions, missionary propaganda, philological investigation, religious disputes, a rejection of book censorship, and theories on sovereignty were layered and interwoven. But how, and why, would anyone choose to become an orientalist, and what did it entail? Rome and Vienna, the cities from which the letters were written, were both normative centres with universalist ambitions; both were engaged in a profound rethinking and redefinition of secular and religious power. The pages written by Tengnagel and Della Valle reflect the writers’ love of and interest in books. But reading carefully between the lines you can also hear the ‚noises off‘ of the cities in which they were penned.

Jerzy Andrzejewski’s Holy Week: Testing Religious Ethics in Times of Atrocity

Abstract Jerzy Andrzejewski wrote the novella Holy Week at the time of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. This real-time Polish fictional response immediately raised critical controversy. Whereas some critics saw it as an inadequate representation of the Holocaust, others considered the 1945 version a product of socialist realism. Here the author argues that Andrzejewski’s wartime fiction investigates the viability of his Catholic existentialist orientation during a time of terror. While his wartime essays and his correspondence with Czesław Miłosz reflected Andrzejewski’s struggle to maintain his faith in human brotherhood, his fiction traced the disintegration of Grace-given faith in the commonality and dignity of all human beings. The stories progress from a tragic ending of friendship to the failure of spiritual resistance and ultimately to the complete moral collapse of the Polish community. The unflinching depiction of the failure of Catholic Poles before their responsibility to extend neighborly love to their doomed Jewish neighbors communicates Andrzejewski’s insistence on the Catholic obligation to love one’s neighbor.

Nationalism and religion in Ireland: the apocalyptic rhetoric of John Mitchel

ABSTRACT While the role of religion in the production of nationalism has been subjected to uneven forms of scrutiny, most of these approaches rely on an implicit or explicit identification between sectarian affiliation and the dominant social group articulating a particular form of nationalism. This article will create a more nuanced picture by demonstrating the influence of a rhetoric of religiosity originating from a social group that generally resisted incorporation into a nationalist movement. It will do this by locating nineteenth century Irish nationalist John Mitchel firmly within a tradition of Presbyterianism at a time that his co-religionists were dominated by unionism and nationalism was taking on an increasingly Catholic orientation. This will show the difficulties of applying classic accounts of religion and nationalism to the Irish context. The ability of John Mitchel to intervene within the discursive space of nineteenth century Ireland is provocative in this context because of the implication that Mitchel’s intervention would imply the existence of a non-sectarian social space through which confessional motifs could be exchanged and circulate with a regularity that is not often granted to Ireland due to the dominant tendency to view political and social conflict through a sectarian lens.

Querying the Origins of Orientalism: Recent Approaches to the History of Representations

This review article draws attention to two recent publications with a potential to revive the debate around the origins of Orientalism, Ângela Xavier and Ines Zupanov’s Catholic Orientalism (2015) and Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s Europe’s India (2017). Both books set out to respond to Said from a distance, by exploring stories of pre-British imperial knowledge making in Asia. Whilst the focus in Catholic Orientalism is on Portuguese (and some Italian, Spanish and French) materials, Europe’s India casts its net more widely also to include British writings. Both books attempt to create some clarity in a field particularly fraught with confusion, especially when it comes to representations of India’s religions. The most promising aspects to take note of are the appearance of new primary materials especially in Portugal, and the increasing intertwinement of European biographies with Asian societal and cultural processes.

Divine Election: A Catholic Orientation in Dogmatic and Ecumenical Perspective by Eduardo J. Echeverria

Reviewed by: Divine Election: A Catholic Orientation in Dogmatic and Ecumenical Perspective by Eduardo J. Echeverria Jordan J. Ballor Divine Election: A Catholic Orientation in Dogmatic and Ecumenical Perspective by Eduardo J. Echeverria (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2016), 314 pp. This study is an ambitious and wide-ranging effort to articulate the clear but generous boundaries of Roman Catholic orthodox teaching concerning predestination within the context of alternatives, both within and without Roman Catholicism. Eduardo J. Echeverria's interlocutors thus range from the Protestant reformer John Calvin (1509–1564) to the Dutch Reformed theologians Herman Bavinck (1854–1921) and G. C. Berkouwer (1903–1996), as well as the German Protestant Karl Barth (1886–1968), Matthias Joseph Scheeben (1835–1888), and Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–1988). A noteworthy feature of Echeverria's engagement with these diverse figures is his care to provide as nuanced and sympathetic an account of their views as possible. Thus, even where there is disagreement—and in some cases it is sharp—Echeverria provides a model of principled and charitable ecumenical interaction. Echeverria's erudition is on full display in this volume. In addition to those figures named above, who receive chapter-level attention, Echeverria brings to bear a wide array of secondary sources and commentators related to the figures themselves and their respective traditions or schools of thought, as well as to Scripture and Church tradition. If the doctrine of divine predestination has been called "a portentous, awesome word in theology" (Scheeben) and "deep waters, in which every human mind begins to flounder" (Balthasar), then this treatment does justice to its subject matter by consistently placing the reader into very deep waters indeed. At the same time, Echeverria provides a very helpful and summative statement at the end of each chapter, as well as in the concluding chapter of the book itself, concerning the Roman Catholic orientation for the elements that have been discussed in the preceding sections. This "Catholic orientation" is one of the clear strengths of the book and provides a valuable service for those looking to, as Echeverria puts it, understand "the boundaries of confessional Catholicism" (283). As might be expected, given the disagreements over predestination and grace that were at issue during the era of the Protestant Reformation, the Council of the Trent [End Page 271] figures largely in drawing such boundaries. Nevertheless, Echeverria is to be commended for making clear from the outset that predestination is itself an ecumenical topic. Much popular and even semi-academic writing has characterized predestination as a specifically Protestant, and particularly Reformed or Calvinist, distinctive. Not so, contends Echeverria. Predestination is itself a biblical doctrine, and thereby an inheritance of theological tradition from the Church Fathers onward, particularly Augustine in the West. Echeverria's book thus explores questions that are of ecumenical or universal concern to all Christians: "The topic of the mystery of God in himself and his relationship with human persons, in short, divine election and human freedom. In other words, how do we reconcile God's sovereignty of grace with human freedom, not just in general but particularly with respect to the Church's full understanding of God's plan of salvation as a work of grace?" (2). Even if predestination as such is not solely the domain of the Reformed tradition, Echeverria does consider whether Calvin, perhaps that tradition's most identifiable figure, is culpable of the heresy of predestinarianism, which logically equates and holds as symmetrical God's decision to elect some to eternal life and reprobate others to eternal damnation in the same manner and mode (62). Likewise, the Reformed tradition, as represented by Calvin, is judged to depart from the "Augustinian Principle," which holds that human nature remains fundamentally unchanged in the states of creation, fall, redemption, and consummation (36). Because this position holds that human nature is capable only of evil in the fallen state, "this fallen state is inconsistent with Calvin's description of the created will in its pre-fallen condition" (46). Echeverria leaves unexplored how the basically Augustinian view that humanity in the fallen state is unable to not sin (non posse non peccare), affirmed and codified by Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153), differs...

Catholic Orientalism: Portuguese Empire, Indian Knowledge, 16th–18th Centuries, written by Angela Barreto Xavier, Inez G. Zupanov

Catholic Orientalism: Portuguese Empire, Indian Knowledge, 16th–18th Centuries, written by Angela Barreto Xavier, Inez G. Zupanov

Divine Election: A Catholic Orientation in Dogmatic and Ecumenical Perspective, by Eduardo Echeverria

Divine Election: A Catholic Orientation in Dogmatic and Ecumenical Perspective, by Eduardo Echeverria

THE WAY TO LATGALIAN LITERATURE DURING THE 90s OF THE 20TH CENTURY

THE WAY TO LATGALIAN LITERATURE DURING THE 90s OF THE 20TH CENTURY

Benjamín Núñez Vargas y la universidad necesaria para Costa Rica

The present work is part of a research project carried out in the National University of Cuyo about the Critic Humanism in Latin America during the second half of the 20th century. It is set in two disciplinary fields: practical philosophy and the history of Latin-American ideas. In this case, we contribute with the revision and reconstruction of Fr. Benjamín Nuñez Vargas’ thought whom we consider as critic and humanist, with catholic orientation, in our America. The focus is on categories of recognition and diversity through his philosophical and sociopolitical discourses, with special attention to his proposals for a necessary university in Costa Rica. We worked mainly on the discursive production, considering the discourses as forms of objectification of the practical reason. That is why we had recourse to a bibliographic review and the contributions of the critical theory regarding the analysis of social mediation, especially those of ideologies. We proceed in three steps: exploratory, analytic and of synthesis.

Book Review: Angella Barreto Xavier and Ines G. Zupanov, Catholic Orientalism, Portuguese Empire, Indian Knowledge (16th–18th Centuries)

Book Review: Angella Barreto Xavier and Ines G. Zupanov, <i>Catholic Orientalism, Portuguese Empire, Indian Knowledge (16^th–18^th Centuries)</i>

Catholic Orientalism. Portuguese Empire, Indian Knowledge (16th–18th Centuries), written by Angela Barreto Xavier and Ines G. Županov

Catholic Orientalism. Portuguese Empire, Indian Knowledge (16th–18th Centuries), written by Angela Barreto Xavier and Ines G. Županov

Sacramental Usury in The Merchant of Venice

That use is not forbidden usury Which happies those that pay the willing loan. (SONNET IV) IN THE LAST TWO DECADES, critics have begun to explore the religion of William Shakespeare. In particular, the old suspicion, advanced by his first biographer, that he dyed a Papist, has been revived by Catholic partisans, mainstream biographers, and even secular academics, some of whom speculate that he was baptized, married, and housed as one. The evidence is mostly from the biography, and it is slippery and circumstantial. (1) The plays are the thing, however, and increasingly they themselves are yielding concrete evidence of Catholic affiliations, long suspected intuitively by such literary giants as Chateaubriand, Newman, and Chesterton. David Beauregard has glimpsed such Catholic differences as the specific elements of sacramental auricular confession and of condign merit; (2) Claire Asquith has seen an elaborate, winking Catholic recusant code systematically at work; (3) Stephen Greenblatt has elaborated the energy of that most contested Reformation bugbear, in Hamlet; (4) Beatrice Groves has found a key to Shakespeare's incarnational aesthetic in the Catholic mystery plays that he may have well seen in his youth at Coventry; (5) Allison Shell has reviewed hints that persecuted Elizabethan Catholics criticized their fellow, well-placed literary sympathizer for not writing enough on behalf of their common Catholic cause; (6) Peter Milward, laboring on the Catholic thesis for several decades, has even recently proposed an inventive correspondence between Shakespeare's plays and the holy Rosary. (7) In general, Shakespeare's plays reveal important field identification markers of a Catholic dramatist in a Protestant land, I contend, not necessarily as code words but as a working theological vocabulary of a thinker formed, loosely and popularly, more in the traditional Augustinian-Thomist tradition than in the Calvinist-Lutheran reform. Where divergences between the Catholic and Reformation theologies arise, Shakespeare leans Catholic: toward hierarchy, natural law, cooperative grace (pilgrimage, penance, purgatory, indulgence), sacraments, liturgical pageantry, religious authority, supererogatory acts of supernatural gift-love, and laxity. (8) To the presence and current relevance of these markers, which abound both as central themes and as casual allusions in a variety of plays, may be added a salient but surprisingly ignored one: the traditional Catholic understanding of economic order in Merchant of Venice, proceeding from sacramental union rather than from capitalistic contract, a contrast, partly imagined, partly reflecting a changing social reality, between a newer anxious economy of debt (Venice) and an older easy economy of sacrificial gift (Belmont), a difference expressed by dichotomous meanings of organizing the idea pageantry of the play: the legal as a temporary, limited, breakable written agreement between two hostile parties, and the marriage bond as a permanent, infinite, indissoluble spoken promise between lover and beloved, a total sacrifice of self that proceeds both by God's operative grace and by an effect of man's cooperative grace that we may call sacramental usury. The word Catholic here does not necessarily mean that Shakespeare's religious longing was ultramontane, recusant, seditious, underground, Marian Roman Catholic, theologically precise, clearly demarcated, coded in a winking argot transparent to fellow Papist sympathizers, or confident about narrow propositions. It rather reflects a general, traditional Catholic orientation or play of mind, some of which can be found within, for example, even the (at times) Thomistic Richard Hooker or the Lutheran Tudor court itself (both Cecil and Elizabeth venerated the crucifix), but clearly opposed to radical Protestantism, represented by Calvinistic Puritans, the theology of which was ushering in a view of usury, moneylending, and money itself more friendly to capitalism. …

Catholic Orientalism: Portuguese Empire, Indian Knowledge (16th–18th Centuries), by Ângela Barreto Xavier and Ines G. Županov

Catholic Orientalism: Portuguese Empire, Indian Knowledge (16th–18th Centuries), by Ângela Barreto Xavier and Ines G. Županov

Paganism in Restoration France: Eckstein’s Traditionalist Orientalism

Early nineteenth-century Orientalism was bound up with the rival responses of conservatives and liberals to the question of whether or not post-Revolutionary society rests on religious foundations. Ferdinand d’Eckstein’s (1790–1861) writings in the Catholique (1826–1829) comprise the most extensive exemplar of Catholic Traditionalist Orientalism. This article, after outlining Eckstein’s intellectual formation, elucidates his version of Orientalism, characterized by Traditionalist understandings of revelation and paganism; discusses its status as a critique of contemporary mythography and as an alleged “Indo-Christianity”; and assesses Eckstein’s place in the intellectual and socio-political life of early-nineteenth-century France by linking his Orientalism to Catholic science and liberal-Catholicism.

The Role of Secularism of State on the Relationship Between Catholic Identity, Political Orientation, and Gay Rights Issues

In discussions of regulations governing same-sex marriage and adoption by gays and lesbians, the issue of state secularism is often called into question. This study aims to test the mediating effects of state secularism on the relationship between Catholic identity, political orientation, and gay civil rights. Participants were Catholic Italians who completed a questionnaire measuring the constructs under investigation. Results showed that state secularism mediates the effects of Catholic identity and political orientation on attitudes toward same-sex marriage and adoption by gays and lesbians.