Catholic Tradition Research Articles

‘The Lord defends refugees, protects the orphans and widows’ (Psalm 146:9). Emerging Challenges in Supporting People after Loss and Traumatic Events

This study, rooted in patristics and social sciences, delves into the historical evolution of support for orphans and widows in the Christian and Catholic tradition, underscoring its profound significance in the identity of these faith-based communities. Tracing the modes of assistance from pre-Christian times through the Old and New Testaments and the teachings of the Church Fathers, the paper elucidates various aspects of the caregiving process. Additionally, it explores the evolving sensitivities across different epochs in modernity, encompassing the contemporary, postmodern and recent years, with a specific focus on the periods before, during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. In light of this analysis, a fundamental question arises: What are the primary pastoral responsibilities of Catholic parishes in Poland regarding support to individuals who have experienced the loss of loved ones, borne multiple losses or endured severe traumas (such as war refugees from Ukraine in local communities)? This work provides guidance to over 10,000 Catholic parishes in Poland, considering the context of an aging society and the lessons derived from the COVID-19 pandemic. It extends an invitation for further research and the initiation of practical endeavours by pastoral theologians and specialists in social and healthcare, to ensure the highest quality of care in parish communities and local societies.

NATO Expansion after 1989: An Argument from the Catholic Social Tradition

Pope Francis’s statement about NATO expansion provoking Russia to invade Ukraine raises the question about whether it is legitimate to support NATO generally and its expansion after 1989 in particular. This article argues that the right of nations to self-determination and legitimate defense and the ethic of solidarity as understood in the Catholic social tradition can justify NATO’s existence and enlargement. The author concludes that not only was NATO enlargement after 1989 justified, but it should also be open to Ukraine and other countries in the region in accordance with these tenets of Catholic social teaching.

Unity, Charity, and Fraternity as Foundations for International Law in Francisco Suárez

The Jesuit philosopher and theologian, Francisco Suárez (1548–1617), believed the common rational nature of all human beings provides the foundation for both the natural law and international law. He also believed that the human race has a certain unity supported by the principles of mutual love and mercy. This article shows how the unity of the human race and the theological virtue of charity provide a basis for Suárez’s notion of international law. The article situates Suárez within the Catholic tradition of Aquinas and Vitoria, and it distinguishes between the natural law and the law of nations. The final part of the article shows how Suárez’s principles of human unity, charity, and fraternity are affirmed by recent popes.

Propagating the Rosary in the Early Qing—A Case Study of del Rosario’s Comprehensive Manuscript

Studies on the Rosary in the late Ming and early Qing usually focus on works written by Jesuits and mostly stem from an artistic aspect. This article, however, shifts the focus to The True Peace of Humankind, a manuscript written by the Dominican missionary Arcadio del Rosario in the seventeenth century, the first comprehensive book on the Rosary in Chinese. It first summarizes the early-stage propagation of the Rosary in China by the Jesuits and then examines the structure and content of The True Peace of Humankind. It is noteworthy that the manuscript repeatedly uses an analogy with flowers to highlight Mary’s intercession. Dating back to the Catholic tradition in Europe, the propagation of the Rosary through analogy with flowers resembles the propagation of reciting Buddhist prayers in Chinese society. This article applies contextual studies to explore two main questions: how is del Rosario’s manuscript different from the previous texts on the Rosary written by the Jesuits? What is the significance of the manuscript in the context of the Chinese Rites Controversy?

A Dialogue between Hindu and Catholic Perspectives in Taking Care of Newborns at their End-of-Life.

Hinduism is considered one of the most ancient religions in the world. Although the technological innovation of modernization has undermined the reliance on their traditions, Hindus may still rely on Hindu Scripture when making decisions. From their standpoint, contrary to Western medicine, human lives cannot be reduced to statistical and empirical facts. They focus more on preserving the spirit, rather than considering survival as one of the goals of medicine. Consequently, when a preterm infant is born, Hindu parents might struggle to understand the goals of Western neonatologists. This divergence may create misunderstandings when discussing end-of-life decisions. Since they value relational aspects to be of utmost importance, they may accept treatments only in the likelihood of good neurological outcomes. Being able to interact allows Hindus to act virtuously with the aim of purifying their soul toward moksa. When it comes to end-of-life decisions on behalf of newborns, Hindu parents may opt to forgo treatments and let the baby peacefully die, while praying for their soul to have a better rebirth. This paper aims to evaluate quality-of-life assessment in the Hindu tradition in comparison with the Catholic tradition. It draws parallelisms between these two different religions to investigate whether an inter-religious dialogue is possible. This work will help Catholic, and more broadly Western, doctors to have a better understanding of the Hindu end-of-life views.

Using ecumenical experiences to respond to new public life challenges

The description of the history of the church in Zimbabwe highlights the presence of a visibly united church that has been actively involved in supporting public life since the colonial era. The division within the Christian community is not a recent phenomenon but has existed throughout colonial history. The Zimbabwe Heads of Christian Denominations (ZHOCD) serves as an umbrella organisation that aims at re-uniting Christian efforts of Catholic, Protestant, Evangelical, and Indigenous traditions, in order to have a collective influence on democratic processes in Zimbabwe. The ZHOCD takes a combative approach towards state tyranny and is proactive in seeking solutions for public life challenges. This active engagement is beneficial for national agendas, that allow citizens to freely choose and join political parties of their preferences. The individual actions and activities of the ZHOCD members contribute towards the overall work of the churches in Zimbabwe. This demonstrates religious confidence in addressing the political and economic impacts on human well-being. By fulfilling its mission and tasks, the ZHOCD actively participates in the shaping public life in Zimbabwe.Contribution: The article contributes towards alternative ecumenical responses to national crises, using the case of the Zimbabwe Heads of Christian Denominations. These responses can be used by any ecumenical Christian bodies to deal with challenges arising in a state due to political differences and challenges.

Review of Erin M. Brigham and Mary Johnson, eds., Women Engaging the Catholic Social Tradition: Solidarity toward the Common Good

Review of Erin M. Brigham and Mary Johnson, eds., Women Engaging the Catholic Social Tradition: Solidarity toward the Common Good

Preparations for Marriage in the Jewish and Catholic Traditions

In many churches nowadays, there has been a standardized approach to premarital counseling for couples involving social, pastoral, and psychological perspectives. In contrast, many rabbis and other Jewish officials still concentrate on legal aspects alone. The need for resolving important issues on the verge of wedlock is too often left to secular experts in law, psychology, or counseling. However, in recent years, this lack of formal training for marriage preparation has also been acknowledged by the Jewish clergy in order to incorporate it in the preparatory period before the bond is tied. This case study focuses on Jewish and Roman Catholic conceptions of marriage, past and present. We intend to do a comparative analysis of the prerequisites of religious marriage based on the assumption that both Judaism and the Roman Catholic Church have a distinct legal framework to assess marriage preparation.

Principle in Practice

This article draws on Alasdair MacIntyre’s influential theory of practice and employs it as a framework to analyze community organizing, focusing on the organizing tradition of Saul Alinsky. As a practice in MacIntyre’s sense, it argues, community organizing constitutes a teleological form of social activity that is oriented toward distinctive kinds of “internal goods” and that functions to develop new capacities within its practitioners to recognize, desire, and attain those goods, relying on standards of excellence, characteristic institutions, and its own “tradition” of practice. Such a MacIntyrean analysis of organizing foregrounds its ethical character as a practice and tradition of practice, informed by larger moral-cultural traditions. It also shows how organizing embodies, in practice, the core principles of the Catholic social tradition. Thus, it enables a clearer articulation of the conceptual and historical relationship between community organizing and the Catholic social tradition, and lays a theoretical foundation for further dialogue.

Christopher Dawson and the Catholic Intellectual Tradition

Christopher Dawson and the Catholic Intellectual Tradition

WOMEN’S EQUALITY: THE FINAL REDEMPTION

The aim of this paper is to correct a historical error, one that I will argue is at the heart of the contemporary feminist movement: the ancient claim, grounded in a flawed understanding of the reproductive act, that woman is inferior to man. I will show that the lineage of this can be traced as far back as the pre-Socratic philosophers, finally finding its earliest concrete expression in a claim most have either dismissed, forgotten, or never heard: Aristotle’s argument that women are merely “malformed males” and are therefore “inferior to man”. The theory found support in the first century with a historical interpretation of Genesis 2:18-23, traceable in particular to the Hellenistic Jewish philosopher, Philo (BC 13-AD 54). Philo’s own theory about woman echoed that of Aristotle’s; his legacy includes the vague feeling that Scripture itself declares that, since woman is created after man, she is necessarily subservient to him. She becomes, as it were, the “second sex”. The combination of Aristotle and Philo proved too persuasive even for the mind of St. Thomas Aquinas and the theory accelerated and then spread through the university system inaugurated during the Middle Ages, subsequently informing the social structures and norms of Western civilization, going mostly unchallenged throughout human history, silently persisting even into the present time. This error represents what can be called a chronic “wound” in our intellectual tradition. And it is a wound that must be healed. I argue that the antidote is to correct this account and that it can be defeated on its own terms. Through the lens of Hebraic and Aristotelian-Thomistic anthropology, and building on the insights of St. John Paul II, I provide a robust, philosophically and theologically grounded account of man and woman from within the Catholic exegetical tradition, showing that man and woman are both equally human, equally endowed with intellect, will, and freedom while at the same time reflecting two different ways of being in the world.

Enacting Catholic Social Tradition: The Deep Practice of Human Dignity

Enacting Catholic Social Tradition: The Deep Practice of Human Dignity

Women Engaging the Catholic Social Tradition: Solidarity toward the Common Good

Women Engaging the Catholic Social Tradition: Solidarity toward the Common Good

Civil Rights and Prophetic Indictment: A Discursive History of Jesuit Superior General Pedro Arrupe’s On the Interracial Apostolate

In 1967, the superior general of the Society of Jesus, Pedro Arrupe, sent a memorandum on the American “racial crisis” to the Jesuit priests, brothers, and social institutions of the United States. Through appeals to the American legal and Catholic moral traditions, On the Interracial Apostolate articulated why Jesuits should strive to achieve racial equality, initiating a historic period of expansion in Jesuit civil rights programs. Given scholars’ limited engagement with On the Interracial Apostolate’s distinctive rhetorical features, this article explains why the document was framed within the discursive framework of prophetic indictment by uncovering the influence of William J. Kenealy, a Jesuit legal scholar, on the document’s drafting. In light of this drafting history, this article concludes by suggesting that the emergence of twentieth-century “Jesuit anti-racism” can, in part, be explained by how questions about racial equality came to be understood as discrete expressions of broader debates about the American legal tradition’s moral foundations.

Martin Luther and the Shaping of the Catholic Tradition eds. by Nelson Minnich and Michael Root (review)

Martin Luther and the Shaping of the Catholic Tradition eds. by Nelson Minnich and Michael Root (review)

Presença de São Tomás de Aquino na construção da narrativa medieval sobre o dinheiro

ABSTRACT As a reverse effect of constraining interpretation and limiting itself to the moral ordering of commerce defended by Aquinas, the Summa Theologica both motivated the enrichment of the Christian imaginary in narratives like Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy and Geoffrey Chaucer’s work, The Canterbury Tales. In the case of the Divine Comedy, it expanded the reflection on the categories of sinners related to money, and as regards The Canterbury Tales, it provided support for the construction of anti-models in some of the framed narrative types of misers, simoniacs, and fraudsters. This article aims to present Aquinas’ instructions regarding the uses of money, juxtaposing, at times, with literary texts. For this purpose, biblical passages, commentators of the Catholic tradition Bible, and texts from economists are brought in as the Summa Theologica is analyzed. Theoretical thinkers of Christian thought, such as Augustine and Boethius, and economic thought, such as Molina and Robbins, have been used.

Az abortusz megítélése megítélése az ókeresztény korban

The study aims to prove that the views of the movements fighting for abortion freedom are not at all compatible with the Catholic tradition. It is true that in some early Christian works we come across the view that the foetus only becomes a human when it is formed. However, those statements are all related to that part of the Septuagint that the translators formulated under the influence of Greek philosophy, and they differ significantly from the original Hebrew text. Nowhere in the early Christian writings is there even a faint hint that early abortion was permissible. The foetus was considered as an object of divine providence from its conception; it was believed that the foetus already possessed all the characteristics that would develop later. The applicability and extent of the church punishment for abortion was therefore independent of the stage of pregnancy in which the abortion took place.

A View from Behind the Microphone During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Lessons Learned.

Based on experience as a physician providing audio, video, and print media in the Catholic sphere during the COVID-19 pandemic, the author discusses patterns of behavior observed in the media that contributed to polarization among people of good will. Such patterns included the practice of biases such as the fundamental attribution error, the white hat bias, and motivated cognition. Polarized beliefs also developed from individual and secular cultural over-reliance on the left brain's discomfort with uncertainty to find certainty where it did not exist. Reliance on the right brain's expertise of seeing the big picture and fostering relationships while incorporating information from the left brain would lead to better understanding and action. Counterfeit versions of individual human dignity and the common good led to media reporting battles between proponents of individual rights versus the common good, while a Catholic understanding of human dignity and the common good harmonizes them instead of seeing them in opposition. Finally, the article examines some practical advice to put relationships above being right. These include active forgiveness, examination of conscience around our biases, and the CAKE acronym among other bits of wisdom from medical literature, modern psychology, and the Catholic tradition for how we can each be better versions of ourselves when discussing polarizing medical topics.

Use of the MMPI-3 with Catholic and Episcopal Seminary and Religious Life Applicants

Psychological evaluations and testing using the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) among other instruments have been used to screen clerical and religious life applicants for decades. While much research has been conducted and published regarding these evaluations, the newer MMPI-3 has not been examined among this population. This study reviewed MMPI-3 results from 18 applicants to seminary and religious life from the Roman Catholic and Episcopal faith traditions to determine if the participants are generally psychological healthy and if they have any consistent elevations in their MMPI-3 testing scores. Additionally, we examined MMPI-3 differences among Catholics versus Episcopal applicants. Our preliminary results using a small sample suggest that applicants to seminary and religious life are generally psychologically healthy but tend to be defensive, presenting themselves in a favorable and virtuous manner. Additionally, Catholics tend to score higher on inconsistent responses but lower on psychoticism than Episcopalians. Further research should use larger and more diverse sample sizes to better understand how the MMPI-3 performs among this population.

Religious History in Portugal from Lusitania Sacra (1720) to the Enciclopédia de História Religiosa (2023): An Overview

The religious history in Portugal remains fragmented despite the progress made, especially in the last four decades, compared with other European historiographies. This article intends to identify factors that explain the Portuguese religious history landscape through an exhaustive diachronic presentation of the main works and authors. It aims to present the fundamental milestones of the field’s evolution, both thematically and institutionally. The ambiguous relationship between national memory and the hegemonic Catholic religious tradition, the ideological and political debates surrounding the late modern reset of national identity benchmarks, and the impacts of a dictatorial experience that conditioned the academic landscape for almost 50 years are the reasons for the late emergence of religious history in Portugal and its discreet presence in the academy. After establishing the essential chronology and underlining the main results, this article will outline Portuguese religious historiography’s most pressing tasks and challenges.