Church Hierarchy Research Articles

The Role of the Church Hierarchy in the Fight against Double Belief in XI-XIII centuty Rus'

The Role of the Church Hierarchy in the Fight against Double Belief in XI-XIII centuty Rus'

Передумови здійснення московського проєкту "Відродження православної церкви" в Русі-Україні (кінець XVI - перші десятиліття XVII століття)

The new conceptual key, based on historical and dogmatic-canonical sources, examines the preconditions of the event, which is known in historiography as the "revival of the Orthodox Church" or "Orthodox hierarchy" in Ruthenia in 1620 within three components – the interest of the Moscow state in restoring / creating an alternative to the legitimate Ruthenian Union Church ununited Orthodox Church, the attitude of Polish authorities to the union process in Ruthenia and the peculiarities of the opposition of the ununited Orthodox Church supporters in Ruthenia itself to the unifying church movement. The Union (Unija) of the Ruthenian Church with the Catholic Church, laid down unique conditions for the іnternal strengthening of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (Rzeczpospolita) and significantly complicated the possibility of Moscow's expansion into Europe. This was all the more significant because Moscow's military defeats lasted from the 1580s (Livonian War) to the 1630s. The situation of military-political isolation and humiliation of international status threatened Moscow to be supplemented by ideological and confessional isolation. Under these circumstances, the Moscow state relied on the possibility of internal weakening of the Commonwealth by maintaining and developing relations with the Ruthenian clergy and church fraternities that opposed the union with Rome and sought to restore the legitimacy of the ununited Orthodox Church in Ruthenia. Also in the first decades of the XVII century the ununited Orthodox clergy, representing the ancient Eastern patriarchates in the Ottoman Empire, became more active. With the loss of the schism of the church hierarchy, foreign clergy, especially the Patriarchates of Constantinople and Jerusalem, were able to influence the situation and interfere in the church life of Ruthenia. In particular, the efforts of the Metropolitan of Sofia Neophyte in 1612 in the Holy Dormition Kiev-Pechersk Monastery created an alternative center of church life and administration, which was at the local level in opposition to the legitimate Metropolitan of Kiev Ruthenian Union Church (Hypatius Potius, 1541–1613). As the foreign non-aligned Orthodox clergy of the Eastern Patriarchates were closely linked to Moscow in receiving financial assistance and mutual political cooperation, Muscovy gained an additional tool to influence Ruthenia and, indirectly, the Commonwealth. It was the foreign Orthodox hierarchs – Patriarch Theophanes III of Jerusalem, Metropolitan Neophyte of Sofia, Bishop Avrahamii of Stragon in 1620 who ordained new hierarchs for the ununited Orthodox Church in Ruthenia. Led by the secretly ordained Kyiv Metropolitan Yov Boretsky, the new hierarchy was already entirely focused on cooperation with Moscow, financially dependent on Moscow and dependent on ideological and political cooperation with schismatic Moscow.

Trust in the Church Hierarchy among the Underground Church Community in Post-1968 Slovakia

Trust in the Church Hierarchy among the Underground Church Community in Post-1968 Slovakia

Introduction to the Special Issue Catholicism and Gender in Modern Spain†

Introduction to the Special Issue <i>Catholicism and Gender in Modern Spain</i>^†

‘Heaven-Bound Dung Beetles’: Gregory of Nazianzus and the Ordination of Slaves in the Early Church

Abstract Gregory of Nazianzus considered the entry of slaves and freedmen into the clergy as debasing the church, calling bishops drawn from slave stock ‘heaven-bound dung beetles’. Such sentiments were shared by the broader church hierarchy and imperial government of the day with council canons, episcopal rescripts, and imperial laws all prohibiting the ordination of slaves. Yet, the ordination of unfree men was widespread. Indeed, we find Gregory himself complicit in the ordination of the slave of a Cappadocian noblewomen named Simplicia. This prompts two interlinked questions that have garnered little attention. Why was the ordination of slaves and freedmen so problematic for the post-Constantinian church, and what were the drivers that led men such as Gregory to ignore its prohibition? Approaching these questions through a close reading of Gregory’s dispute with Simplicia, we find that within the negotiation between traditional Roman practices and the new Christian narratives of the later Roman empire, the ordination of slaves posed a unique threat to the stability of both the church and state. However, it also becomes clear that despite the potential for social destabilization, slave ordination proved to be an all-too-tempting recruitment strategy for ecclesiasts operating within a crowded religious marketplace.

А.С. Хомяков и «мысль народная» в романе-эпопее Л.Н. Толстого «Война и мир»

The article reveals the deep connections of the “people’s thought” and Tolstoy’s philosophy of history in “War and Peace” with the theological and literary-critical works of A.S. Khomyakova. The author of the work analyzes the dispute between Tolstoy and the cult of an outstanding personality, with the Hegelian understanding of his role in the historical process. Tolstoy is alien to the Hegelian rise of “great personalities” over the masses, the Hegelian liberation of the “genius” from moral control and evaluation. Tolstoy believes that it is not an exceptional personality, but the life of the people that turns out to be the most sensitive organism, catching the will of Providence, intuitively sensing the hidden meaning of the historical movement. Anticipating Tolstoy, Khomyakov sharply criticizes the cult of personality in the church hierarchy, the Catholic dogma of papal infallibility, of the unconditional authority of an individual in matters of conscience and faith. Khomyakov reveals deep religious roots that feed the centuries-old Western enmity towards Russia. The article proves that Tolstoy is close to Khomyakov’s idea that Divine Providence overshadows with its grace only the believing people, united into a single organism by Christian love, that the epic basis of “War and Peace” is anticipated in Khomyakov’s literary-critical works “Glinka’s Opera ‘Life for Tsar’”, “On the Possibility of the Russian Art School”, “Ivanov’s Painting. Letter to the editor of ‘Russian Beseda’”. The article proves that “War and Peace” overcomes the conflict between the individual and society, the hero and the people, and reveals the epic horizons lost in the Western European novel.

Care and educational activity of the Salesians in Prague in years of People's Poland

The Society of Saint Francis de Sales was founded by St. John Bosco. The guiding principle of the activities of the Salesians was to take care of abandoned and neglected youth. St. John Bosco (b. 1815, d. 1888), who had the good of young people at heart, launched his works in Turin and gave an example of how to make friendly contacts with young people who were waiting for understanding, spiritual support or the warmth of the family. Henceforth, he funded the Oratory, a place that was a substitute for a family home, where love for God and people was sown and deepened. In the Oratory created by John Bosco, his charges, usually vagrants, street children, people with prison experiences, met with understanding, spiritual values, kindness, help, in an atmosphere conducive to overcoming various types of mental crises, as well as material support. Don Bosco also ensured that they would receive education, mainly vocational one. Although he had no formal pedagogical education, St. John Bosco intuitively sensed the needs and expectations of young people. A distinctive characteristic of the educational method developed by St. John Bosco was its preventive system (pre-emptive, anticipatory). Its three pillars are reason, religion and educational love. In 1898 the Salesians came to Poland to Oświęcim where their Motherhouse still exists. After Poland had regained her independence and undergone structural changes, the parish of the Sacred Heart of Jesus was established in Warsaw's Praga district in 1919 and a few years later the Salesians officially took over the basilica, opening an oratory for abandoned, loitering youths in its basement. Praga was a working-class district populated mainly by poor and unemployed people, living in cramped flats with numerous offspring. In pursuit of earnings parents often did not have the time and skills to take care of their own children, hence there was a high crime rate in this district. The Salesians managed to create an educational community and appointed Fr. Ludwik Rupala, a strict follower of the instructions of St. John Bosco and one of the most outstanding educators with many years of teaching practice, to the position of the head of the Oratory. Rupala was in charge of the Oratory from 1934 until the outbreak of World War II. During the war, the Oratory could not function officially and it was only after 1945 that work with youth was resumed, but in a revised format. This change was dictated by the then prevailing communism in which religion was not tolerated, therefore the functions of the Oratory were taken over by altar boys. The authorities tried to make tutelage more difficult for the Salesians, who, in their eyes, were treated as followers of religion, an opium for the people. The scientific, socialist worldview was the leading theme in Polish schools, where there was no room for either religion or Catholic organizations that successfully functioned in the pre-war Polish education. Despite admonition from the church hierarchy regarding the removal of all religious elements from schools, the state authorities have not changed their position on this issue since 1947. Irrespectively of the position of the authorities, the Salesians unofficially continued their educational and pastoral work among the Praga children and youths, organizing summer holidays, providing shelter, developing interests, promoting culture, creating a healthy educational environment, cultivating Christian traditions by putting on Nativity plays and the Passion of the Lord, receiving the Eucharist. And the reluctance of the residents of both the district and the citizens of the country towards the new system has integrated them, as more and more young people clung to the Praga Oratory which was providing home warmth, religious education, entertainment, education and relaxation.

Конфессиональная лексика в русском переводе энциклики папы Франциска Laudato si’ – пространство традиции и современности

The paper provides a study of religious lexis excerpted from the Russian translation of the encyclical letter Laudato si’. The Russian version of the encyclical was translated and published by Russian Franciscan Publishing House. The analyzed material consisting of single words, as well as compound multi-word expressions, related to the Catholic denomination (264 lexical items – 1000 uses, which accounts for 14% of the entire encyclical), was grouped into semantic fields. The vocabulary was described in terms of the semantics and its functioning and codification, both in the contemporary Russian religious language and in general Russian language. It was assumed that the encyclical is addressed not only to the representatives of the Church hierarchy but also to all the faithful. Hence, there was the need to draw attention to the pragmatic aspects of the religious language, including the balance between comprehensibility and the use of specialist theological terminology in the translated text. It was demonstrated that the majority of the lexical items of religious terminology is coded by the explanatory dictionary of the contemporary Russian language, except for 14 lexical items related to the Catholic denomination that enhance the lexis of the contemporaryRussian language.

Review: Mormonism and White Supremacy: American Religion and The Problem of Racial Innocence, by Joanna Brooks

Over the past ten years scholars have published a profusion of books about institutional racism. Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law (2017) examines how federal, state, and local governments imposed racial segregation in various cities throughout the United States, creating zoning laws meant to stifle African American mobility. In The Color of Money (2019), Mehrsa Baradaran probes how banking policies affected African Americans and kept them mired in poverty. Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow (2012) evaluates the racial inequities in the criminal justice system, particularly among African American men, who were often stripped of their rights by the courts. Now we have Joanna Brooks’ book Mormonism and White Supremacy, which explores institutional racism within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—a faith with which Brooks affiliates. She provides a penetrating case study demonstrating how the Mormon church created a racist theology that continues to persist well into the twenty-first century. As Brooks states, her purpose is to “identify how anti-Black racism took hold in Mormonism” (13).Part history and part cultural analysis, Brooks provides a sweeping overview of Mormon racial theology. She defines white supremacy as “the entire system of ideas, beliefs, and practices that give white people better chances based on perceived skin color and ancestry” (1) and argues that Mormon leaders instituted a number of policies aimed to discriminate against persons of black African ancestry. In 1852, Mormon prophet-president Brigham Young instituted a priesthood and temple ban, which denied black people access to the faith’s most cherished rituals. Then, even after the ban was lifted in 1978 by Mormon church president Spencer W. Kimball, Brooks writes that black people continued to suffer because the Mormon hierarchy failed to reckon with the church’s racial theology. The governing hierarchy neither condemned its racist teaching, which alleged that God had cursed black people, nor sanctioned interracial marriage, thereby giving the impression that it was still sinful and wrong.Like many Protestant and evangelical Christians, Mormons privileged whiteness, creating an inhospitable environment for persons of color to flourish within the church. An underlying theme in Mormonism and White Supremacy is that Mormons suffered from “racial innocence,” blithely unaware of the harm the church has done to people of color (3). Brooks convincingly argues that rather than confront its history of white supremacy, the governing church hierarchy looked to the future rather than correct the mistakes of the past. It was only recently, Brooks writes, when LDS church leaders repudiated Mormon racial teachings. Prompted by Mormon Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential run and a spate of bad publicity in the national news media assailing Mormon racial teachings, the church hierarchy published an essay on “Race and Priesthood” in which it explicitly repudiated the notion that blacks were cursed. The essay also expressed support for interracial marriage and condemned the decades-old teaching that black people lacked moral purity in a pre-earth life.One of the strengths of the book is that Brooks succeeds in demonstrating the ways in which Mormons created a racial hierarchy favoring white people and how, in turn, that privilege poisoned the church body. She is less successful narrating the history of Mormon racial theology. There is very little historical context in her analysis—ideas are static and relationships and influences are assumed, not probed. Nevertheless, this book is a stark reminder that institutional racism plagues even the best of churches.Finally, the book is a call to action for Mormon leaders to do more to confront the pernicious effects of racism in the church. Scholars of Mormonism and religious studies will find this book both informative and engaging.

The Invention of Papal History: Onofrio Panvinio between Renaissance and Catholic Reform

Bauer uses the case of Onofrio Panvinio (1530–1568), an Augustinian friar, to shed light on the development of history writing in early modern Rome as well as on the historiography of the papacy. Panvinio, who left few published works but many manuscripts at his death, accomplished a remarkable amount of historical research during his short life and, as Bauer demonstrates, was an important innovator in historical method. The book’s title refers to Bauer’s thesis that Panvinio’s ambitious collection of primary source material, together with his source criticism and willingness to ask hard questions about the nature of change in the Church’s past, amounted to the invention of modern papal history.The focus on Panvinio’s life also allows insight into the pressures and opportunities faced by historians of the sixteenth century in attempting to work on church history in general and papal history in particular. Indeed, ecclesiastical interest in history was so great at the time that Panvinio’s order was willing to release him from its normal constraints to travel broadly in search of historical materials and to devote his life to historical scholarship. Panvinio’s constant need to find wealthy and politically powerful patrons—for the most part within the Church hierarchy—offers further evidence of what was required to have the luxury of research and writing.Panvinio’s earlier work on ancient Rome was pioneering in its use of multiple sources and methods, from literary works and epigraphy to numismatics and archaeology. His later work largely focused on the history of the papacy and papal elections. After his first two chapters, which provide an intellectual biography of Panvinio, Bauer examines in detail Panvinio’s history of papal elections and the nature of censorship in Rome in the sixteenth and into the seventeenth century.According to Bauer, Panvinio was the first scholar to write a comprehensive account of the many changes in papal elections from their beginnings to his own day. Among the key innovations that he examined were the attempts to eliminate lay influence, including the decree in 1059 limiting electors to cardinals, the introduction in 1179 of the requirement of a two-thirds majority to elect a pope, and the introduction of the conclave, with its exclusion of the outside world, in 1274. Such was Panvinio’s ambition that while completing the ten (unpublished) volumes of this study, he wrote a history of imperial elections—the first one to offer a detailed study of the election of emperors from ancient Rome to the sixteenth century.As Bauer recounts, papal history was a minefield at the time, partly because of the competing papal family dynasties. When a particular family was in power, sympathetic biographies of its popes were much appreciated, but a change in papal regime could render those same biographies unwelcome. With the onset of the Counter-Reformation (or, in Bauer’s terminology, the Catholic Reformation), anything that shed a negative light on the papacy could become victim to censorship; by late in the sixteenth century, Panvinio’s works themselves fell victim to these efforts.In an epilogue, Bauer offers some thoughts about the development of ecclesiastical historiography in the decades and centuries after Panvinio’s death. Most notable was the general lack of interest in church history. Not until the mid-eighteenth century did the Jesuit Collegio Romano introduce its first chair in ecclesiastical history. As for papal biography, the modern form of which Panvinio had introduced in the sixteenth century, it had been reduced to a mere panegyric exercise in church propaganda by the following century. The Church recruited historians into the battle against Protestantism, expecting them to play their part uncritically.The sources that Bauer used for this book are impressive, encompassing a large number of both manuscripts and published works from the sixteenth and early seventeenth century gathered in ecclesiastical and civil archives and libraries in Italy, Spain, Denmark, Germany, Britain, France, and Vatican City. Although the subject may strike those outside the field as arcane, the book offers in compact form valuable insight into an important part of the evolution of European historiography. The book will be especially valuable to early modern European and Church historians, but is accessible to non-specialists as well.

A legislação canônica da escolha dos bispos do Concílio de Trento até o Código de Direito Canônico de 1983

O Concílio de Trento, ocorrido no meio do século XVI, foi uma importante reforma na história da Igreja. Por meio dos debates realizados nas sessões conciliares de Trento, a Igreja tratou sobre o tema das escolhas dos bispos. Isso resultou em significativas resoluções normativas que foram de grande relevância para aquele contexto eclesial. Logo após a normativa tridentina, surgiram muitas orientações pontifícias de cunho jurídico que também regulavam acerca dos requisitos e da escolha dos candidatos ao episcopado. Embora aquilo que fora definido em Trento e pelos papas posteriores não se aplicava para toda a Igreja, uma vez que havia as chamadas concordatas com os estados modernos. Esses acordos firmados entre a Igreja e os estados não eram uniformes, mas cada um tinha prescrições de acordo com cada realidade. Em alguns casos, a autoridade eclesiástica não tinha condições de agir, dando total benefício e privilégios ao poder temporal. Em meio a essa situação, foi promulgado o Código de Direito Canônico de 1917, o qual obteve uma grande vitória ao legislar que somente o romano pontífice nomearia os bispos, respeitando o ius particulare. O Concílio Vaticano II tratou sobre as nomeações episcopais no Decreto Christus Dominus, o qual requisitava que as nomeações episcopais fossem realizadas pela autoridade pontifícia. Pouco tempo depois, o papa Paulo VI emanou alguns documentos regulando a matéria até a chegada do Código de Direito Canônico de 1983 que regulamentou a designatio episcoporum.

Ut primatum habeant: the early medieval church in Dalmatia and the Aquileian strategy

In the ninth century, the church of Rome, having lost power in the Balkans in the iconoclastic period, struggled to maintain control over the eastern Adriatic coast, which was divided between the Byzantine and Frankish empires. The Dalmatian church hierarchy strived to preserve the integrity of their province under the authority of the archbishop of Spalatum, but was challenged by the bishop of Nona from the Slavic Duchy of the Croats, who claimed the metropolitan status for himself. Their conflict was resolved at the Councils of Spalatum in 925 and 928. The article re‐examines the ninth‐ and tenth‐century context for the councils, and suggests parallels between the Dalmatian case and the earlier debate between Cividale and Grado over metropolitan authority in the province of Aquileia. It demonstrates that the Dalmatian church may have followed an Aquileian precedent.

Ladina Social Activism in Guatemala City, 1871–1954

In her beautifully researched Ladina Social Activism in Guatemala City, 1871–1954, historian Patricia Harms opens the windows wide on the world of ladina women's organizations from the outset of the Liberal Party's consolidation of power to the overthrow of the October Revolution's reformist government. The book is primarily an analytical narrative that restores to the historical record the ideas and actions of urban, mainly middle-class ladina women who created maternalist feminist circles. The book, in its introduction, seven chapters, epilogue, informative notes, and useful appendixes with brief biographies of the largely unknown women who formed the core of the women's movement, looks at Guatemala City's ladina women–centered literary circles, journals, and organizations. Above all, Harms examines the intense dynamics of ladina women's mobilizations and ideologies during the period of the reformist October Revolution, from 1944 to 1954. In her introduction, Harms underscores that knowledge of women's history—making visible the invisible—is a prerequisite to, not a substitute for, gender analysis.Harms looks at three broad periods: the development of the Liberal Party and its discourses of progress, order, and secularism between 1871 and 1930; the Jorge Ubico dictatorship between 1930 and 1944; and the ten years of the October Revolution, from 1944 to 1954. The first of these periods saw the birth of a protofeminist consciousness that was articulated in two journals, La Voz de la Mujer and El Ideal, directed to literate urban ladina women and edited by the Lappara sisters, two fascinating women from a poor ladino family in Quetzaltenango. They advocated for a reimagined Liberal Party modernization that included women, poor people, and Catholic workers, and they created a space in which women intellectuals were legitimized to speak and write about civic issues. This important legacy surfaced after the fall of the Manuel Estrada Cabrera dictatorship, when in the 1920s women formed an overtly feminist group, the Sociedad Gabriela Mistral. Although gender roles were not challenged and maternalism remained the unquestioned avenue for women's roles outside the home in moral education and social welfare, the 1920s had many dynamics. Alberto Masferrer's social justice Vitalism and Mistral-inspired theosophy joined in the ideological crucible of maternalism, Catholicism, and liberalism. Out of this came women educators such the remarkable and prolific Luz Valle, who even under the Ubico dictatorship pushed maternal feminist thought to make materialist critiques of social and economic structures.The bulk of the book is devoted to the intense reform years of the October Revolution. The male leadership of the revolution marginalized women, and so has most literature on this period. Harms's important intervention demonstrates women's centrality in the trajectories of both reformism and its opposition. On the progressive side, gains that women made were largely the result of their own activism. They created communal kitchens and day-care centers vital to women workers even before Juan José Arévalo's election, they advocated for and won suffrage for literate women, and in 1947 they organized the first Inter-American Congress of Women, which drew the US State Department's direct attention because of its outspoken opposition to Cold War politics. Harms fascinatingly casts new light on the initiatives of the Alianza Femenina Guatemalteca, known primarily as a women's group formed in 1951 by socialist-leaning urban ladina professionals and artists who supported the revolution. Harms shows that the Alianza Femenina Guatemalteca tried to radicalize the revolution in ways that other progressive groups did not. The group initiated a cross-class alliance that came to include thousands of mainly poor rural and working-class women. Its members sought—without success—to extend suffrage to illiterate Guatemalans, amend the 1947 Labor Code to include domestic workers and pieceworkers, alter the 1952 land reform in the interest of landless rural workers, and arm themselves against the 1954 coup. The Alianza Femenina Guatemalteca stands as a tribute to what could have happened.Sidelining women was the Achilles' heel of reformism, and the absence of a feminist challenge to gender roles left maternal feminism vulnerable to the opposition. The counterrevolutionary movement, and especially the Catholic Church hierarchy, paid close attention to urban women and sought their support as a key part in its strategy. The movement animated a conservative maternalism by claiming that under communism the state would replace the family and the church. Its unmatched hymn was the protection of the traditional woman and of God.Ladina Social Activism in Guatemala City, 1871–1954 is an important book full of exciting information. What Harms leaves unexplored are the serious implications of her observation that ladina feminists turned a blind eye to ethnicity. Throughout these over six decades Mayas formed the demographic majority in Guatemala, the discourse of “el problema del indio” was current, and Mayas worked in the city. Urban ladinas no doubt saw Maya women who worked as maids everyday. Harms's work invites us to consider how feminism can square with racism.

Charismatic Leadership in the Catholic Church

The article analyzes the ideas of charismatic leadership developed in the Catholic Church in the second half of the 20th century. These ideas are connected, on the one hand, with the biblical revival, with the attempts to rediscover the heritage of the Church of the first centuries, and on the other hand, with new social phenomena, which are typical for the era after the Second World War. The social dimension of charisma and its role in the creation of associations were rediscovered in Catholicism during the Second Vatican Council. At the same time, a huge number of new social and evangelical initiatives appealing to charisma appeared. The new church movements became the most prominent and well-known examples of catholic “charismatic associations”. The author shows how the Catholic hierarchy managed to streamline and incorporate the charismatic leadership of lay associations into the reality of the universal church structure. The article emphasizes that the concept of charismatic leadership in the Church is in the process of evolution. The author concludes that the documents of church governance, proclaiming the absence of a conflict between charisma and institution in theory, reflect the political processes of the contemporary Catholic era: the emergence of Catholic movements with a predominant role of laity, the change of generations of Catholic elites and the formation of a new balance of responsibility between movements and the church hierarchy.

‘There seems to be some misunderstanding’: church-state relations and the establishment of Carraroe comprehensive, 1963–67

This paper charts the development of one of Ireland's first comprehensive schools located in Carraroe in County Galway. Through a systematic, historical analysis of Department of Education and diocesan correspondence, this article provides a unique insight into how official policy was reconciled at ground level. The analysis exposes the ambiguity of previous studies surrounding the role of the church hierarchy in educational reform during the 1960s and seeks to clearly identify key personnel involved in consolidating policy concerning the comprehensive school scheme. Underpinning this narrative, is the deliberate exclusion, by both church and state, of local school authorities from policy decision-making regarding the comprehensive school in Carraroe. In particular, this paper illustrates how a paradigm shift in Department of Education negotiation tactics provided the government with an effective means for introducing new educational policy measures in the future.

THE MAIN CONCEPTS OF "RUS CULTURAL AND RELIGIOUS REVIVAL" OF THE LAST THIRD OF THE SEVENTEENTH – EARLY EIGHTEENTH CENTURY AS A PRECONDITION FOR "THE UNION TRIUMPHALISM" IN THE SCIENTIFIC WORKS OF ANDRZEJ GIL AND IGOR SKOCHILIAS

Summary. The purpose of the article is to analyze the contribution of Andrzej Gil and Ihor Skochylias to the study of the preconditions for the "triumph" of the union confession in the western dioceses of the Kyiv metropolis in the context of development of new concepts and ideas by these scientists. The research methodology is based on the use of historical-comparative method and methods of analysis, synthesis and generalization. The scientific novelty of the article lies in an attempt to study the innovative concepts of modern scholars on the topic of the history of the union church of the late XVII ‒ early XVIII centuries. Conclusions. The significant source material is the authors’ concept that at the turn of the XVII‒XVIII centuries there was a cultural and religious revival and large-scale modernization reforms in the Kyiv metropolis leading to the formation of an innovative religious model "Slavia Unita". The scholars state that the main initiators and promoters of the Reformation innovations were the uniate metropolitans of Kyiv, representatives of the Basilian order and the local church hierarchy. Implementation and control over the innovations were carried out during regular episcopal and archimandrite visits and episcopal courts. Everything was codified at local diocesan councils. According to historians, this religious model contributed to the formation of a clear union identity and a closer union with European religious culture. At the same time, it contributed to the preservation of the important principles of the Kyivan Christian tradition. There are at least two objective conclusions made by the authors. One of them is that a direct result of this model was "the union triumphalism" and the "golden age of union" in the Kyiv metropolis, and the second one is that the political consequence of "Slavia Unita" is unification around the union denomination of the Rus nation. The Union Church in the Kyiv metropolis became the most widespread confession and an effective representative of the interests of the Rus people.

Was François Fénelon a Political Philosopher?

During the reign of Louis XIV, few courtiers led careers as full and consequential as that of François Fénelon. Born in 1651 to a nobleman from an ancient line but with little wealth, Fénelon was well schooled through scholarships, rising as a young priest, scholar, teacher, and administrator through the Church hierarchy. The 1685 Revocation of the Edict of Nantes gave Fénelon the opportunity to distinguish himself as an educator at a school for girls who had recently converted from Calvinism to Catholicism. A rising star in King Louis XIV's court, he was mentored by the Crown's leading theologian and political theorist, Jacques Bénigne Bossuet, Bishop of Meaux, and rubbed shoulders with notables like the Duc de Saint-Simon. These associations led to his appointment as special tutor for Louis XIV's three grandsons, one of whom eventually became Philip V, king of Spain. Fénelon's own ambitions were rewarded in 1695, when he was appointed Archbishop of Cambrai. Over the course of his decorated career, Fénelon wrote theology, mysticism, and pedagogy, as well as more lighthearted fictional literature. He died in 1715, a few months before Louis XIV's own death.

Pregovori o konkordatu između Kraljevine SHS i Svete stolice 1925. godine

The Kingdom of SCS and the Holy See established diplomatic relations in March 1920. The Holy See accepted the new country with hostility and hesitation. The nuncio monitored not only the state’s religious policy but also the political atmosphere. He wanted to achieve unity among Roman Catholics in the civil and political spheres. The authorities of the Kingdom of SCS emphasized the need to maintain religious unity as the primary motivation in preparation for the concordat negotiations. Meanwhile, the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy dissatisfied with the state’s religious legislation asked the Holy See not to sign a concordat until their conditions were met. Much of the controversy during the talks concerned government ownership of church land, the establishment of religious orders, and the appointment of bishops. The negotiations were postponed with the intention of being continued. The 1925 talks did not achieve the goal but helped to define certain issues.

‘Middle-class’ Africans in Australia: choosing Hillsong as a global home

ABSTRACT Much of the literature on Pentecostal-charismatic Christianity (Pc/C) and African diasporas in the Global North has focused upon African-Majority or -Initiated churches that are either branches of African churches or were created in the diaspora. This focus often frames the appeal of Pc/C to African migrants in terms of: a) its emphasis upon the ‘Prosperity Gospel’ offering a path not only to salvation, but also to earthly riches; b) its opportunities for achieving status among church hierarchies, which is attractive to socially marginalised groups, and; c) the practical assistance it provides to support settlement. However, African diasporas have diverse histories of migration, and settlement experiences. This article considers the appeal of Pc/C to a group of professional African migrants in Australia, who self-identify as ‘middle-class’. It argues that professional African migrants have consciously favoured the Australian megachurch Hillsong over Australia’s African-Initiated churches. They have done so in pursuit of a process of an imagined class-mobility, and as a result, their choice of church can be understood as largely strategic.

Restoration of the Old Believer Church Hierarchy: from Bukovina to Moscow

This article is a review of materials from one of the influential Old Believer magazines that covered the problems that accompanied the restoration of the church hierarchy of the Old Orthodox (Old Believer) Church of Christ in the sphere of higher church government. The Consecrated Council of 1846 in Belaya Krynitsa restored the conciliar tradition of the Church, although discussions about the format and composition of the Councils continued in subsequent years.