Catholic Europe Research Articles

Catholic Europe, 1592–1648: Centre and Peripheries, written by Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin

Catholic Europe, 1592–1648: Centre and Peripheries, written by Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin

African Pentecostals in Catholic Europe: The Politics of Presence in the Twenty-First Century, written by Annalisa Butticci

African Pentecostals in Catholic Europe: The Politics of Presence in the Twenty-First Century, written by Annalisa Butticci

European Left Catholicism in the Long Sixties: Fact or Fiction?

Cette conclusion alternative examine brièvement les principaux aspects des quatre piliers constitutifs de la gauche catholique européenne des années 1960 et 1970. Sont donc envisagés divers groupes influents qui se distribuent, pour l’essentiel, dans les catégories suivantes : ouvriers catholiques, étudiants catholiques, communautés de base, prêtres contestataires. Cet examen conduit à suggérer que, en dépit de leur diversité idéologique et du caractère éphémère de leurs échanges internationaux, ces différentes composantes de la gauche catholique européenne ont eu une réelle dimension continentale. La faiblesse des liens organisationnels ne saurait masquer en effet l’importance d’un esprit commun, assurément efficient.

The Spirit of Vatican II: Western European Progressive Catholicism in the Long Sixties by Gerd-Rainer Horn

Reviewed by: The Spirit of Vatican II: Western European Progressive Catholicism in the Long Sixties by Gerd-Rainer Horn Hugh McLeod The Spirit of Vatican II: Western European Progressive Catholicism in the Long Sixties. By Gerd-Rainer Horn. (New York: Oxford University Press. 2015. Pp. x, 264. $90.00. ISBN 978-0-19-959325-5.) This is a sequel to the author’s The Spirit of ’68 (New York, 2007), a standard work on 1960s radicalism. Gerd-Rainer Horn notes that no reviewer commented on the absence of religion from the book. Yet, in his view, this was a serious lacuna. He argues that the ferment arising from the Second Vatican Council prepared Catholics to be active participants, and sometimes pioneers, in the social movements of the “red decade” from about 1966 to 1976. Moreover, the “utopian” dimensions of progressive theology mixed readily with the utopianism of the “early” Marx that was so influential at the time. The book is entirely about Catholics, although he notes similar developments among European Protestants. The principal focus is on Italy, but there are also substantial sections on Spain, France, and Belgium. Horn brings to this book a unique range of skills. He is the leading authority on “Left Catholicism,” and although primarily a social and political historian, he is well versed in theology and is able to draw on sources in seven languages. The book is written with an enthusiasm that energizes his narrative, without ever becoming uncritical. He has a keen eye for the local and for the role of particular personalities, while also placing these specifics in a wider political, social, and intellectual context. He begins with the Second Vatican Council and the theologians who were shaping the thinking of progressive Catholics, including both internationally renowned figures and those whose influence was more national, such as Ernesto Balducci in Italy and José María González Ruiz in Spain. Subsequent chapters focus on the renewed worker-priest movement and the organizations of radical priests that proliferated in the later 1960s; on base communities (especially numerous in Italy); on Catholic student organizations; and, in an outstanding chapter, on industrial militancy, in which the role of Catholics was especially important in Italy and, for a time, in Spain. In the conclusion he looks both at the reasons for the efflorescence of Catholic radicalism and at its decline in the later 1970s. Summing up, he claims that “in many countries throughout Western Europe, a large number of social movements—of which student movements were often only the most visible component—in the mid-to-late-1960s were animated to a significant degree by Catholics” (p. 254). As he shows, the familiar picture of the “secular Sixties” is a serious oversimplification insofar as many parts of Catholic Europe were concerned. In the early and middle years of that decade, levels of religious practice were high, and in the very specific atmosphere of the later 1960s the dense networks of Catholic organizations were readily mobilized for new causes. The Catholic activists of those years eventually moved in many different directions. Some are still living and still upholding the same ideals in a very different world; some moved into more secular forms of radicalism; some retreated, disillusioned as so many were by the defeat of their utopian hopes, into private life. Horn has not said the last word. There is room, for example, for a book that looks much more closely at the role of the Catholic hierarchy, including both those like Cardinal Michele Pellegrino [End Page 424] of Turin, who provided a relatively favorable environment for radical priests and laypeople, and those like Cardinal Ermenegildo Florit of Florence, who did his best to make life impossible for them. We have here the story as seen through the eyes of the activists, and it is a story that is both important and wrongly neglected (for reasons that Horn explains). But Horn’s impressive book will be the essential starting-point for all future work in this field. Hugh McLeod University of Birmingham (Emeritus) Copyright © 2016 The Catholic University of America Press

Églises et monarchie austro-hongroise

Research into the First World War has ignored the Austro-Hungarian empire, while focussing essentially on the conflict on the western front. However, the religious history of Austria is of major interest, since the Empire was pluri-confessional, but also because it was considered to be the last rampart of European Catholicism. Recent historiography has presented a general panorama of the religious history of the Great War (Religionen im Krieg 1914-1918), while at the same time investigating the pastoral practice and the theology of the bishops (Achtleitner), the spiritual assistance to soldiers (Gröger, Ham, Sammer, Künhert, Houlihan), and the relations between the Austrian and German Catholic churches (Houlihan). In doing so, it has honed its methodological sharpness in order better to connect religious, social and political history.

Shaping the Spiritual Exercises: the Maisons des retraites in Brittany during the Seventeenth Century as a Gendered Pastoral Tool

In the second half of the seventeenth century, on the periphery of Catholic Europe, Brittany was the site of intensive missionary activity aimed at both men and women. Based on a heterogeneous corpus of manuscripts, printed books, and iconographic sources, this article shows how, far from Rome, Jesuits and devout laywomen adopted a gendered perspective in reconceptualizing mission. In the city of Vannes, the Jesuit Vincent Huby and the aristocrat Catherine de Francheville instructed large groups of men and women in the Spiritual Exercises. They supervised two retreat houses to welcome them and created a “missionary kit” of moral images adapted to their gendered pastoral field. The Breton context presents a particularly good example of the importance of gender to missionary interactions. Here, the Jesuit “way of proceeding” allowed for the integration of local communitarian perspectives, in order to enhance the effectiveness of the mission.

Enlightenment and Catholicism in Europe: A Transnational History

Enlightenment and Catholicism in Europe: A Transnational History

Entartung des Jesus-Bildes: Kritische Erwägungen eines osteuropäischen Katholiken: Ein Rezensionsaufsatz (Hellerich, G. & D. White (2012) Postmoderner Jesus)

Entartung des Jesus-Bildes: Kritische Erwägungen eines osteuropäischen Katholiken: Ein Rezensionsaufsatz (Hellerich, G. & D. White (2012) Postmoderner Jesus)

Women and the vote: a world history

Introduction 1. Democracy before Democracy 2. The Rights of Man 3. Early British Radicals 4. Rise of the Middle Class Campaigner 5. New Found Rights in New Found Lands 6. 'In with our women' in the Western US 7. Out of the Doll's House in Scandinavia 8. Lobbyists to Militants in Britain 9. Victory and Disenfranchisement in the US 10. Who Won Votes from the War? 11. The Pope and the Vote - Catholic Europe 12. Latin American Mothers of the Nation 13. The Enfranchisement of the East 14. Africa and the Cold War 15. The Veiled Vote Conclusion Appendix 1: The Strange Case of Switzerland Appendix 2: Chronology of Women's Suffrage Notes Bibliography Index

Jeffrey D. Burson and Ulrich L. Lehner, editors. Enlightenment and Catholicism in Europe: A Transnational History

Jeffrey D. Burson and Ulrich L. Lehner, editors. Enlightenment and Catholicism in Europe: A Transnational History

Klostersturm and Secularization in Central Europe: What Happened to the Libraries?

Unlike the secularization of church property--including libraries--in England during the Reformation, the far greater secularization of church and monastery libraries that took place in Catholic Europe between 1773 and the early-to-mid 1800s has received little attention in Anglo-American historiography. This essay presents an overview of mostly German-language scholarship, including many older studies, dealing with the dissolution and disposition of monastery libraries across German-speaking Europe during these decades. It also considers research suggesting that modern library science arose from efforts to manage the flood of books that came into state possession during these years.

MASTERS IN THEIR OWN HOME OR DEFENDERS OF THE HUMAN PERSON? WOJCIECH KORFANTY, ANTI-SEMITISM, AND POLISH CHRISTIAN DEMOCRACY’S ILLIBERAL RIGHTS-TALK

Prior to World War II, the founder and key theorist of Poland's Christian Democratic movement—the Silesian political revolutionary Wojciech Korfanty—developed a sophisticated “Catholic rights-talk” in conversation with trends in Western European Catholic thought. In the wake of the Holocaust, however, both in ephemeral political opposition on Polish soil and in subsequent exile, Poland's Christian Democrats abandoned their interwar rights discourse. This essay explores that shift, locating its source in interwar Polish Catholic anti-Semitism. Given the Holocaust's perverse fulfillment of Polish Christian Democracy's crucial 1930s advocacy of restricting the political and economic life of Poland to rights-endowed Christians—necessitating the removal of Jewish “non-persons”—the Poles’ transnational postwar advocacy vacillated between Cold War cooperation with American-aligned governments and a desire to participate in the governance of a Poland that, even if Communist, had finally become a “nationally homogeneous state.”

Holy War, Martyrdom, and Terror: Christianity, Violence, and the West by Philippe Buc (review)

Reviewed by: Holy War, Martyrdom, and Terror: Christianity, Violence, and the West by Philippe Buc Michael Stewart Buc, Philippe, Holy War, Martyrdom, and Terror: Christianity, Violence, and the West (Haney Foundation), Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015; cloth; pp. 496; R.R.P. US$49.95, £32.50; ISBN 9780812246858. No topic from medieval historiography sparks as much controversy in today’s world as Western Christianity’s historical attitudes towards holy war, martyrdom, and terror. Unquestionably, developments since the attacks on the United States on 11 September 2001 have highlighted the importance of understanding the origins of religiously sanctified warfare, martyrdom, and [End Page 274] terror. Into this divisive environment arrives the timely new monograph by the medieval historian Philippe Buc. In a rich and sophisticated study, Buc explores what he describes as the long roots of ‘Western violence’ through a dizzying array of texts, time-periods, and historical cultures as diverse as the late Roman Empire, crusader Catholic Europe, Revolutionary France, Stalin’s Soviet Union, and George Bush’s post-9/11 United States of America. Confessing that he will be focusing primarily on the ‘dark side of Western Christianity’, Buc relies on what he sees as the commonalities and not the diversities among these premodern and modern societies’ attitudes towards violence, maintaining that the ‘degree of regularity’ in their views makes his macro-approach credible and, indeed, necessary. Countering current thinking, which postulates that a more militant and more violent Christianity was a particular feature of the post-Constantine Church, Buc argues forcefully that Christianity had always paired irenic and militant ideologies. While this thesis is less revolutionary than his bibliography suggests, it is this yin and yang of pacifism and bloody militarism that forms the monograph’s core. His disparate chapters illustrate that despite outwardly irenic tendencies, the smouldering embers of intolerance could be, and often were, stoked by Christian intellectuals into conflagrations of brutal intolerance. As Buc rightly cautions, in early Christian rhetoric, ‘peace, pax, did not mean the absence of conflict but victorious conflict leading to right order and justice, iustitia’. So, while many Christian rulers and intellectuals preached pacifism and religious tolerance, they spent much of their time engaging in spiritual and material warfare. Certainly, a deft intermingling of spiritual and physical warfare had always played a role in Christian ideology. The Church Fathers were fully aware of the paradoxical pairing of militarism and pacifism in scripture. Devout fifth-century Christian intellectuals like Augustine had famously come to accept (though perhaps not as enthusiastically as Buc suggests) that ‘good’ Christians could serve in the military and destroy Rome’s enemies without committing sin. This position was not limited to a Christian society’s foreign enemies. Buc argues that from its origins, ‘Christendom struggles simultaneously against physical enemies outside, against vices inside the human being and against vicious men inside Christendom – for instance, resident Jews, false brethren (falsi fratres, see Galatians 2. 4), bad clergy, perverts, heretics – and against demons’. Buc posits that it is only by understanding these ancient Christian attitudes that we can begin to appreciate the lingering vitality of such views in both the Christian and post-Christian West. Chapter 1 reveals how American [End Page 275] war ideologies echo these early Christian militant themes. This helps to explain why America has frequently fought ‘moral wars’ against internal and external enemies. I would agree with Buc that the Christian Roman Emperors, Constantine and Justinian, would have understood the notions of exceptionalism and the easy mingling of ‘mildness and strength’ preached by American presidents such as Abraham Lincoln and George W. Bush. While recognising the innovative aspects of medieval crusade, Chapter 2 rightly points out the dangers of underestimating the extent to which these earlier militant Christian ideologies motivated eleventh-century Western crusaders. According to Buc, ‘late antique holy war slowly morphed into high medieval crusade’. So, rather than considering the indiscriminate slaughter of Muslim men, women, and children in the First Crusade of 1096–1100 as an aberration of a violent age, Buc believes we should seek its origins in the late Roman and early medieval Christian worlds. Moreover, we should not underestimate the extent to which Western crusaders were motivated by...

El crucifijo y el baile. El trasvase de sacralidad entre el trono y la comunidad política en la familia real carlista, 1868-1876

The relationship between Catholicism and Carlism has been one of the watchwords of Spanish anti-liberalism political identity, partly because Don Carlos, the pretender to the Spanish throne, used religion as a source of legitimacy. In the search for a deeper knowledge of the complex nature of this linkage, the power mechanisms within his reach have been studied both in the light of Don Carlos’ diffuse Court in exile, and of his political and military praxis. The contradictions of his acts of power as a virtuous Catholic King –an apparently prophetic Prince, liberator of Catholic Europe, opened the way to a deep crisis of self-confidence of great political content. In that context, the erosion of his image and that of his representative body managed to create the conditions for transferring sacredness to other political subjects.

Enlightenment and Catholicism in Europe: a transnational history

Enlightenment and Catholicism in Europe: a transnational history

New pilgrims on a medieval route: mobility and community on the Tro Breiz

Throughout Catholic Europe there has been a resurgence of interest in pilgrimage since the 1990s, despite dramatic declines in regular attendance at mass and other indicators of religious practice. One of the less well known European pilgrimages is the Tro Breiz, or tour of Brittany, a medieval long-distance walking pilgrimage in northwestern France that has recently been revived (or recreated). On the basis of ethnographic research carried out in 2012, I argue that the Tro Breiz fulfils participants' desires for connection to a community that transcends the self and is intimately linked to a particular regional heritage and identity.

So Close to God, So Close to Hollywood: Catholics and the Cinema in Argentina

This article reconstructs and discusses the experience of Catholic laity in influencing the production, distribution and exhibition of films in Argentina. The clergy and laity connected with Argentine Catholic Action developed many important strategies towards cinema at both the national and local levels, principally between the decades of the 1930s and 1960s; these endeavoured not only to control the distribution of specific films but at the same time to promote others, to define alternative spaces and to build audiences. In Argentina Catholics were pioneers in rating films according to age, in the organisation of film clubs and in the setting up of debates around film, and had a decisive influence on State intervention in controlling scripts, cutting films and prohibiting the showing of certain films. These two lines, of promotion and prohibition, developed under the influence of the different experiences of North American and European Catholics, co-existed for much of the time before they finally separated. But as a whole, Catholic militants from different points of view shared the rejection of the idea of cinema as an entertainment industry aimed exclusively at profit and promoted debates about art, mass communication, education and leisure.

Enlightenment and Catholicism in Europe: A Transnational History ed. by Jeffrey D. Burson and Ulrich L. Lehner (review)

Enlightenment and Catholicism in Europe: A Transnational History ed. by Jeffrey D. Burson and Ulrich L. Lehner (review)

The Papal Bull Unigenitus and the Forging of Enlightened Catholicism, 1713–1764

AbstractThis article discusses the relationship between the papal Bull Unigenitus (1713) and the Catholic Enlightenment. The circumstances under which this controversial bull was received in the 18th century in Europe, and particularly in France, partially occasioned the construction of factions in many dynastic states—factions either pro‐Unigenitus or pro‐Augustinian (including but not limited to Jansenists). These factions, in turn, tailored their particular varieties of Catholic Enlightenment in the process of elaborating their respective positions concerning Unigenitus. This article synthesizes general trends in the present scholarship in order to underscore the importance of Unigenitus to the response of the Catholic Church to the Enlightenment. Because the fractures introduced into Catholic Europe by the bull were most acute during the early 18th century in France and the most formative and contentious factionalism is often presumed to have occurred before the suppression of the bull's most stalwart defenders—the Jesuits—between 1759 and 1773, this article focuses chiefly on the formative years of Catholic Enlightenment factionalism in the middle third of the 18th century before the suppression of the Jesuits.

¿Hubo “Retóricas Borromeas” Espanñlas?

This article argues that, contrary to Marc Fumaroli's claim in his classic work on sixteenth-century eloquence (1980), there does not exist in Spain such a thing as a group called “Borrhomaic Rhetorics”. Judging from Fumaroli's words, one might believe that Cardinal Charles Borromeo planned to produce a series of rhetorics in support of his ideas concerning the necessity of educating skillful preachers ready to spread the ideology of the Counter-Reformation all over Catholic Europe. However, the existence of such a plan cannot be ascertained from the available sources, nor can any clear results of it be established. Therefore, we should no longer talk about such a group.