Catholic Village Research Articles

The Heritage of Catholic Village Regulations in the Red River Delta: Characteristics and Values

Catholic village regulation is an remarkable product of Catholic culture’s integration to Vietnamese villages. Formed on the basis of Vietnamese village regulations, Catholic village regulations bear in them Vietnamese village element and religious element, thus carrying spectacular features, including political – religious institution and Catholic ceremonies. With the role to manage villages, maintain moral and cultural traditions in social life of the community, Catholic village regulations sketched out vigorous picture of various yet secret physical and spiritual life of the Catholics, and at the same time transmitted historical, ethical, cultural and social value throughout each period of Vietnam’s history. That is the value of Catholic village regulation herigate in the Red River Delta we would like to introduce in this study.

Migration of Telugu Catholics in Madras Presidency – ce 1780–1910

Abstract The Catholic dioceses of Madras-Mylapore and Chingleput are home to 44 Telugu Catholic villages. These villages were established between 1780 and 1910 by Telugu Catholics who migrated from Andhra Pradesh to Tamil Nadu. This article delves into archival materials to trace the origins and destinations of these migrants, the factors that prompted their migration, the key protagonists and institutions involved, the caste dynamics at play, the assimilation process, and the contributions they made to the local society from a historical perspective. While this article primarily focuses on research about early colonial peasant migrations, it also explores the micro history of the Telugu community, offering insights into the challenges faced by contemporary migrations, including issues of land ownership, citizenship, and identity crisis. Furthermore, it analyses the post-migration environment, highlighting the social interactions, as well as the cultural, religious, and spiritual experiences of these communities. This analysis aims to demonstrate how these Telugu communities have successfully assimilated into the local society while preserving their unique identities.

Blurring Boundaries: The Significance of Horse and Bull Iconography in Occitan and Provençal Cemeteries

ABSTRACT This paper investigates how the use of horse and bull iconography in Occitan and Provençal Catholic cemeteries facilitates the expression of a more-than-human regional identity and, thereby, challenges the boundaries that separate humans from the nonhuman world. The presence of nonhumans in the way humans process and understand death across faiths and cultures is often explained by the fact that humans, as they deal with death, need to make sense of it by reaffirming the singularity of human life, in opposition to that of other beings. Relegating the use of animals in death rituals as a pagan practice associated with idolatry and metempsychosis, Western Christianism has largely banished animals and animal iconography from human deathscapes. However, research in 22 Catholic village cemeteries around the Camargue region indicates that, in this part of France today, animals – especially bulls and horses – are included in the religious and social practice of death. At first glance, the use of this symbolism in the Camargue region and its vicinity seems to subvert the Christian condemnation of animal imagery. Upon closer examination, however, rather than challenging Christian norms, the use of animal imagery merges with Christian signs, indicating that local cemeteries are spaces where humans can express both religious affiliation and regional spiritualism simultaneously. Moreover, by evoking narratives of more-than-human osmosis promoted by the Félibrige literature, this imagery also effaces the boundaries that separate humans from animals and the environment. Therefore, the use of horse and bull iconography in those cemeteries not only blurs the conceptual boundaries between Catholic faith and fé biou (the “religion of the bull” to which the horse also participates) but also between humans and the nonhuman world.

PLACE, ALTERITY, AND NARRATION IN A TAIWANESE CATHOLIC VILLAGE. By MarcoLazzarotti. Asian Christianity in the Diaspora. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. Pp. xx + 193. Hardback, €109.99; Paperback, €109.99.

Religious Studies ReviewVolume 48, Issue 4 p. 605-605 Short Reviews of Recent Publications: East Asia PLACE, ALTERITY, AND NARRATION IN A TAIWANESE CATHOLIC VILLAGE. By Marco Lazzarotti. Asian Christianity in the Diaspora. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. Pp. xx + 193. Hardback, €109.99; Paperback, €109.99. First published: 30 January 2023 https://doi.org/10.1111/rsr.16248Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume48, Issue4December 2022Pages 605-605 RelatedInformation

Pentecostalism and Social Integration: the Conversion of a Csángó Woman

Between 2013-2017, I conducted research in an ERC research project in a micro-region of Moldova in Roma, Orthodox Romanian and Moldavian Csángó Pentecostal communities. The fieldwork-based analyses focused on the ritual practices of these communities, the relationship between migration and conversion, the modelling of conversion stories, etc. (The summarizing volume of the studies: “We have the gift of Christ in us.” Pentecostalism in Romanian, Roma and Csángó communities from Moldavia. Balassi Kiadó–Erdélyi Múzeum-Egyesület, Budapest–Kolozsvár, 2020.) Based on this research project, but expanding it with new fieldwork and research perspective, the study analyzes the story of a Csangó woman who converted to Pentecostalism in a Catholic village in Moldova. The analysis gives an insight into the functioning of the norms and institutions that determine the life of the person, the reaction of the Roman Catholic community, the response of the family and the strategy of the priest in the situation. Along the lines of John Lofland and Rodney Stark’s 1967 model defining aspects of religious conversions, I present the life events deemed most important in her approach to Pentecostalism, as well as the fundamental changes in her worldview.

Protestant Missionaries Are Associated With Reduced Community Cohesion

AbstractDo Protestant missionaries affect community cohesion? This study puts forth two mechanisms that link missionaries to trusting, cooperative community life: pro-social preferences and social networks. On the one hand, Protestant missionaries espouse charity, and they establish regular venues of social interaction. On the other hand, Protestant missionaries propagate an individualist faith, and they provide an identity along which communities may separate. The effect of Protestant missionaries on community cohesion is thus unclear. To make headway on these conflicting theoretical predictions, we study variation in missionary activity in southeastern Peru. We document that villages with Protestant missions show lower levels of community cohesion compared to non-missionized, Catholic villages. We point to weakened networks as the most likely causal channel and show that effect sizes are particularly large among Pentecostal missionaries.

Barakah: The Pilgrim’s Divine Gift at the Shrine of Sunan Pandanaran

Through the ethnographic examples and a framework of the everyday life, “The Pilgrim’s Divine Gift at the Shrine of the Sunan Pandanaran” shows the important role which the shrine of saint Sunan Pandanaran, located in Bayat, Central Java, plays in the lives of the Javanese people. This paper shows how the Javanese sacred space is inclusive of a historical continuity of different faiths that make up the local culture. Exposing the unnoticed, the inconspicuous, and the unobtrusive, this paper goes beyond the settled cultural patterns and problematizes heterogeneities, ambiguities, and indeterminate classification of categories into a homogenous identity of place, culture, and state—one singular, unified entity. The shrine is an heirloom of the Javanese kingdoms of Surakarta and Yogyakarta—Sunan Pandanaran is considered an ancestor of the Mataram Kingdom—but through the efforts of a Catholic village chief, this shrine has been revitalized as an important pilgrimage site for Javanese of any religious affiliation.

Global Entanglements of a Man Who Never Traveled: A Seventeenth-Century Chinese Christian and His Conflicted Worlds, by Dominic Sachsenmaier

<i>Global Entanglements of a Man Who Never Traveled: A Seventeenth-Century Chinese Christian and His Conflicted Worlds</i>, by Dominic Sachsenmaier

Fancsaly É., Gúti E., Kontra M., Molnár Ljubić M., Oszkó B., Siklósi B., Žagar Szentesi O. A magyar nyelv Horvátországban / szerk. M. Kontra. Budapest: Gondolat; Eszék: Media Hungarica Művelődési és Tájékoztatási Intézet, 2016. 306 o. [Fancsaly É., Gúti E., Kontra M., Molnár Ljubić M., Oszkó B., Žagar Szentesi O. The Hungarian Language in Croatia / ed. M. Kontra. Budapest:

The review sheds light on the collective monograph published in 2016 by Hungarian and Croatian linguists on the sociolinguistic situation of the Hungarian community in Croatia, which is a continuation of the book series “Hungarian language in the Carpathian basin in the 20th century”. The monograph is an example of a quantitative study. The authors conducted an extensive questionnaire survey using participants from eight localities in Croatia. As a result, the following elements of the language situation were analyzed: language use in various fields, language prestige, and bilingual education. It is revealed that the number of Hungarians during the 20th century decreased rapidly. Fifteen variables were selected for linguistic analysis of the data, and these were chosen to reflect the most peculiar contact and dialect features in the speech of community under scrutiny. Unlike other regions with a Hungarian minority, there were many Hungarians in Baranja and Slavonia who stayed for a long time outside their homeland, but because of the war in the 90s they were forced to move to Hungary. Among all the rural communities, the most archaic dialects are found in four villages with Reformed populations in Slavonia, while in Catholic villages the Hungarians are descendants of later settlers from Bačka and from today’s Hungary and are thus more modern. The book will be of interest to linguists, ethnologists, and specialists in sociolinguistics.

Kiszombor veszteségei az elsõ világháborúban az anyakönyvi vizsgálatok alapján

In this paper, I examined how a medium-sized Hungarian village affected by the First World War. I had two questions about the damage. How many casualties did the settlement have during the war? How did the demographic impact of the losses look like in the village? Kiszombor was a Hungarian, Catholic village in the middle of the Great Plain in Hungary between two cities: Szeged and Makó. 4000 people had lived there around the beginning of the 20th century, most of them made a living lived from agriculture. The village was the center of the Rónay family’s estate. I counted 101 dead in 1916–1920 in the burial registers. Most of them died in 1917. The most common month was the December because the author of the records could not know the exact date of their death. Therefore they used the 31st of December formula. The deceased distribution by profession or religion is following the rate of the village’s population. The soldiers’ age were between 18 and 48 years, most of the dead (9%) were 31 years old. The majority of the deceased were married. This issue caused the most crucial problem in the village. 10% of the men between 20–60 died in the war; therefore the number of the 0–6 years old population decreased by 35%. The population growth stopped in the 1910s, as the community reached the carrying capacity of the land and stagnation started in the late 1900’s. Although after the war, the growth of the population increased significantly. Naturally, there were slightly more women than men in the village. During the war, this rate increased and reached six percentage points of difference. In 1920 there were 240 more women than men, even though the disparity decreased at the end of the decade. The regional comparison is quite impressive. Looking at settlements in the 30 kilometer radius of Kiszombor. The average loss was 3% of the whole population of Hungary, however Kiszombor’s result is much higher (5%). We can say that one quarter of the population was enlisted and 5% of the population died in the war from this region.

Sanctioned Heterodoxy: Local Cults in Two Chinese Catholic Villages, 1900—Present

While ecclesiastic and state authorities in Europe largely abolished medieval cults of saints because of their “heterodoxy,” late-imperial and modern Chinese Catholic communities in Shanxi still promulgate local cults dedicated to women and men who are believed to have performed posthumous miracles or who represent heroic virtue. Although constrained beneath the scrutiny of imperial, ecclesial, and modern political ideas of “orthodoxy” and “heterodoxy,” two Shanxi Catholic villages, Dongergou and Liangquandao (Liuhecun), have managed to preserve and promote Sister Maria Assunta Pallotta and Father Wang Shiwei as contemporary versions of traditional local cults. One of the manifest characteristics of these two Chinese Catholic local cults is how they have been transformed by traditional Daoist cults and have successfully survived in a liminal space between “orthodox” and “heterodox.” Relying on archival materials from the former Taiyuan Catholic Diocese Archive, records held in Roman archives, and oral testimonies, intricate patterns of accommodation and resistance to political and church authorities can be discerned as means for these remote Catholic villages to construct identity and cultivate social cohesion.

Music and Catholic culture in post-Reformation Lancashire: piety, protest, and conversion

AbstractThis essay adds to our existing understanding of what it meant to be a member of the English Catholic community during the late Elizabeth and early Stuart period by exploring Catholic musical culture in Lancashire. This was a uniquely Catholic village, which, like the majority of villages, towns and cities in early modern England, was filled with the singing of ballads. Ballads have almost exclusively been treated in scholarship as a ‘Protestant’ phenomenon and the ‘godly ballad’ associated with the very fabric of a distinctively Protestant Elizabethan and Stuart entertainment culture. By investigating the songs and ballads in two manuscript collections from the Catholic network surrounding the Blundell family this essay will show how Catholics both composed and ‘converted’ existing ballads to voice social, devotional, and political concerns. The ballads performed in Little Crosby highlight a vibrant Catholic community, where musical expression was fundamental. Performance widened the parochial religious divide, whilst enhancing Catholic integration. This essay uncovers the way Catholics used music to voice religious and exhort protest as much as prayer. Finally, by investigating the tunes and melodies preserved in the manuscripts, I demonstrate how priests serving this network used ballads as part of their missionary strategy.

The Missionary's Curse and Other Tales from a Chinese Catholic Village. By Henrietta Harrison. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. xvii, 276 pp. $65.00 (cloth); $26.95 (paper).

The Missionary's Curse and Other Tales from a Chinese Catholic Village. By Henrietta Harrison. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. xvii, 276 pp. $65.00 (cloth); $26.95 (paper).

IYunIl(?~1867) and Catholic Villages in MunGyeong area

영남지역의 순교자 이윤일은 천주교 대구대교구에서 主保聖人의 하나로 존중되고 있다. 필자는 최근 이윤일에 대한 새로운 정보를 필사본 자료인 『병인박해치명사적』과 깔래 신부의 서한을 통하여 확인했다. 따라서 본고는 영남 천주교회사의 상징적 인물인 이윤일의 생애를 밝힘과 동시에 박해시대 천주교 신자들의 생활을 밝혀보고자 했다. 우선, 본고에서는 이윤일의 가족관계에 대한 검토를 진행하여 당시의 순교자들이 강한 혈연적 유대를 가지고 있었음을 밝혔다. 이 과정에서 이윤일은 순교자 박경화, 박사의와 인척이었음이 밝혀졌다. 이로써 을해박해, 기해박해, 병인박해를 거쳐 시대를 달리하여 순교한 사람들간의 연결관계를 살필 수 있었다. 둘째로, 본고는 이윤일의 신앙을 구체적으로 밝힐 수 있었다. 그는 조선에 신부가 한명도 없던 시절에 태어나 성장했다. 그러면서도 그는 12년간이나 감옥에 살고 있던 박사의의 딸과 혼인했다. 그의 장인과 처의 조부가 순교했음은 물론, 병인박해 과정에서 자신은 물론 자신의 두 아들 시몬과 타대오가 순교했다. 이윤일의 집안에서는 사위와 사위의 삼촌, 처의 사촌인 박수산나 등이 순교했다. 그뿐 아니라 두 살 난 손녀는 옥에서 죽었고, 또 자신과 함께 살던 수없는 사람들이 죽었다. 이윤일의 순교는 그 집안 대대로 굳혀온 신앙의 결과였다. 그들은 목숨을 걸고 자신이 터득한 새로운 세계관을 지키고자 했던 사람들이었다. 세 번째, 본고는 병인박해기간 여우목과 한실 교우촌이 박해를 견디는 모습과 그들의 향방을 추적했다. 이를 위해서 본고는 깔래 신부가 병인박해 때 8개월이나 피신해 있던 한실에서의 체험을 자세히 적어 놓은 서한 자료를 얻어냈다. 그리고 그 이후의 모습은 『병인치명사적』(으)로 보완할 수 있었다. 그리하여 박해기간 동안의 신자들의 생활과 교우촌간의 결속, 및 선교사에 대한 신자들의 존경을 확인했다. 그리고 폐허화 된 교우촌 신자들이 다른 교우촌을 의지하여 새로 시작하는 모습들을 보았다. 또한 이를 통해서 우리는 19세기의 조선인들이 조정의 압박을 피해 스스로 난관을 극복해 나가던 방법을 이해할 수 있게 되었다.

The relationship between the spread of the Catholic Church and the shifting agro-pastoral line in the Chahar Region of northern China

The Great Wall of China roughly follows a transition belt between subhumid region and arid/semiarid region, often thought of as a boundary between agricultural and pastoral area. However, in the mid-18th century, the farming activity began to cross the Great Wall and infiltrate the pastoral region. The agro-pastoral line moved substantially northwards and westwards resulting in a changing landscape beyond the Great Wall. The Catholic Church, which had been proselytizing in Inner Mongolia since the turn of the 18th century, played an important role in this historical process. This paper evaluates the role of Catholic churches in this shift of the agro-pastoral line in Chahar Region in the 19th century.Chahar, a semi-arid region in the southeastern Mongolia Plateau, had a significant Catholic activity after 1700s. As congregation obtained land from the Mongols, missionaries converted local Han Chinese to Catholicism while lending land, housing and farm implements. By 1952 most people living there had been converted. As a result of intensive land management by the Catholic missions, the semiarid landscapes, formerly used for grazing lands, were changed to more intensive agricultural use. This study examines the important role of the practices of an authoritarian religious organization on the movement of the agro-pastoral line and the relationship between those religious missions and environmental change. This study shows that when the missionaries began preaching to the impoverished Han people coming from within the Great Wall rather than the local Mongols of the Chahar Region, increasing numbers of Han Catholic villages appeared beyond the Great Wall, cultivating what used to be grazing land. Meanwhile, to manage these Han people, the local administrative system was transformed from the Meng-Banner system into Banner-county system. As the name suggests, this latter system was based on Mongol-controlled Banners and Han-controlled counties. Thus the boundary between Banner and county hints at the movement of the agro-pastoral line. By tracking this movement we found that the agro-pastoral line in Chahar region shifted in the late Qing Dynasty. Meanwhile, Catholic villages became more concentrated in the counties, indicating that the Catholic Church had played an important role in this movement of the agro-pastoral line.

The Missionary's Curse and Other Tales from Chinese Catholic Village. By Henrietta Harrison. Asia: Local Studies/Global Themes. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. xvii + 276 pp. $65.00 cloth; $26.95 paper.

The Missionary's Curse and Other Tales from Chinese Catholic Village. By Henrietta Harrison. Asia: Local Studies/Global Themes. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. xvii + 276 pp. 26.95 paper. - Volume 83 Issue 4

The Missionary’s Curse and Other Tales from a Chinese Catholic Village by Henrietta Harrison (review)

The Missionary’s Curse and Other Tales from a Chinese Catholic Village by Henrietta Harrison (review)

Book review: The Missionary’s Curse and Other Tales from a Chinese Catholic Village

Book review: The Missionary’s Curse and Other Tales from a Chinese Catholic Village

The Missionary's Curse and Other Tales from a Chinese Catholic Village by Henrietta Harrison

The Missionary's Curse and Other Tales from a Chinese Catholic Village by Henrietta Harrison

Helena Waddy, Oberammergau in the Nazi Era: The Fate of a Catholic Village in Hitler's Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 350. £22.50 (hbk).

Helena Waddy, Oberammergau in the Nazi Era: The Fate of a Catholic Village in Hitler's Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 350. £22.50 (hbk).