French Catholic Research Articles

Brief Notices

Brief Notices Edward R.SethSister VassaDavid J. Udovic, C.MSmithLarinCollins, S.J. Berthelon, Pierre. Antoine Chevrier: Prêtre selon l’Évangile 1826–1879. (Paris: Editions du Cerf. 2010. Pp. 143. €10,00 paperback. ISBN 978-2-204-09179-4.) This is a fascinating, well-written, concise, and accessible biography of Blessed Antoine Chevrier (beatified 1986). The Christo-centric conversion experience of this newly ordained priest on Christmas Eve 1856 led to his decision to become a un prêtre selon l’évangile. For Chevrier and the community he founded at Le Prado in Lyon, this meant living a priesthood modeled on the person and ministry of Jesus Christ as revealed in New Testament texts: a servant-priest living with the greatest personal simplicity and in apostolic poverty so as to be free to preach the gospel in word and deed to the masses of the urban poor created by the Industrial Revolution. Berthelon knows his subject, the influences directing Chevrier’s spiritual journey, and the mature spirituality of Chevrier intimately, but he also succeeds in placing Chevrier within his mid-nineteenth-century contexts— socioeconomic, political, and religious. In doing so, the author illuminates the underappreciated role that Lyonnais Catholicism played in the revival of French Catholicism. In Chevrier’s case this includes the example of a fruitful engagement with modernity that, through its preferential option of identification with and service to people who were poor, linked the Church’s traditional charitable efforts with the first glimmerings of the nontraditional insights and pastoral experiences that would lead to the development of the Church’s social justice teachings. It is not a coincidence that Blessed Frederic Ozanam, cofounder of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, also had Lyonnais roots. The author’s critical use of Chevrier’s great spiritual work Le Véritable Disciple is key to his presentation of the down-to-earth and approachable priest not only as an innovative and charismatic figure in the history of [End Page 406] French and Lyonnais Catholicism but also as a precursor for modern priestly and lay vocations of Christ-like service to those most in need. This work leaves the reader with a desire to learn more about Chevrier. Edward R.Udovic, C.M. (DePaul University) Cassity, Michael, and Danney Goble. Divided Hearts: The Presbyterian Journey through Oklahoma History. (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. 2009. Pp. xix, 340. $24.95. ISBN 978-0-806-13848-0.) As the title, Divided Hearts, suggests, authors Michael Cassity and Danney Goble see tension at the heart of the Presbyterian experience in Oklahoma— tension between “theology and practice . . . ‘civilization’ and ‘heathenism. . .’ tradition and modernization, [and] faith and science” (pp. xv–xvi). The book charts this tension from the early-nineteenth-century arrival of missionaries in the southeast to minister to the Five Civilized Tribes, follows them down the Trail of Tears, and documents the controversial debates on slavery and the Civil War that led to the removal of the missionaries from the Indian Territory. This began a transitory period for Presbyterians as they grew from missionaries to establishment while Oklahoma itself grew from territory to state. As their story progresses through the twentieth century, the authors demonstrate how the Oklahoma Presbyterians dealt with the most important social issues of the day, especially issues of race and sex. Tension defined Oklahoma Presbyterianism on both a congregational and personal level; it developed out of Presbyterianism’s heavy emphasis on education (often state-supported) as a means to achieve salvation and belief in the necessity of participating in a civilized, market-based society. This twin emphasis required serving two masters, the sacred and the secular, which pulled Presbyterians in multiple directions and created sometimes intractable problems. The book does not seek to resolve these tensions; rather, the authors simply describe them and the difficulties they created. The authors demonstrate well how the tensions that divided Presbyterians throughout the United States manifested themselves in Oklahoma; it would be instructive, however, to know more about how Presbyterianism fit into the religious landscape of Oklahoma. Regardless, the book is a solid starting point for further research dealing with Presbyterians and religion in Oklahoma, and the maps throughout the...

Alain de Solminihac (1593–1659). Prélat réformateur de l’Abbaye de Chancelade à l’éveché de Cahors (review)

Reviewed by: Alain de Solminihac (1593–1659). Prélat réformateur de l’Abbaye de Chancelade à l’éveché de Cahors Alison Forrestal Alain de Solminihac (1593–1659). Prélat réformateur de l’Abbaye de Chancelade à l’éveché de Cahors. By Patrick Petot. 2 vols. [Bibliotheca Victorina, Vol. XXI.] (Turnhout: Brepols. 2009. Pp. 507; 509–1091. €140,00. ISBN 978-2-503-53277-6.) Although scholars of seventeenth-century France are familiar with the name Alain de Solminihac, they have waited almost a century for a successor to the standard biography published by Eugène Sol, the diocesan archivist of Cahors (Aurillac, 1927). This was not due to a paucity of sources, for the archives of the Cahors Diocese are among the best preserved of the French Church, as this latest study of Solminihac demonstrates. Patrick Petot’s two-volume study of the Venerable Solminihac (who was beatified in 1981) makes ample use of the 10,000 documents stored in the Fonds Solminihac to analyze his lengthy career and includes a useful annex of 143 of the more important and illuminating. [End Page 373] Petot’s access to such documents has enabled him to track the dualism within his subject’s career, and this forms the basic thematic structure of the biography. One of only a handful of religious who ascended to episcopal status during the heyday of Catholic reform in France, Solminihac found his vocation within the walls of the abbey of the Augustinian canons of Chancelade in Dordogne and carried its influence into his subsequent career as bishop. It is Petot’s contention that it was the spirit of St. Augustine of Hippo that linked Solminihac’s devotion to his religious and episcopal status, although it is obvious that the bishop was inspired by other model bishops such as Ss. Martin of Tours, Charles Borromeo, and Francis de Sales (he met the latter around 1619 when St. Francis visited Paris). His career cannot be broken into two neat segments of Augustinian canonry and Augustinian episcopacy, however, for Solminihac’s progress from the abbey of Chancelade to the diocesan palace of Cahors in 1636–37 was the subject of private procrastination and anguish until he resolved to reconcile both in a form of religious prelacy and of public ecclesiastical dispute. In describing both aspects, Petot draws attention to the internal fissures within French Catholic Reform, which often placed varieties of reform at loggerheads. Dedicated to his companion canons at Chancelade and to the rule of Augustine that they followed, Solminihac had little desire to abandon the monastery in favor of a public pastorate and a more secular rule of life. He finally determined to retain his abbatial office and to adopt as many of the customs of religious life as possible within his episcopal household, including the appointment of his fellow canons as diocesan officials. Coupled with symbolic gestures such as the combining of religious regalia with episcopal, this contributed to the turbulent nature of Solminihac’s relations with the secular clergy of his diocese, often attributed simply to their reluctance to accept the reforming initiatives of a Tridentine bishop. Petot is quite correct to emphasize that Solminihac’s intractable rigor, sometimes criticized by episcopal associates who knew him personally, was a further source of discontent; and he offers a detailed examination of the climax to these tensions in 1651, when a set of malcontents temporarily seized control of the bishop’s synod. Solminihac’s devotion to his religious vocation was a source for a further conflict and related to the drive amongst reformers within religious congregations to restore pure and uniform discipline to associated monasteries throughout France. In Solminihac’s case, Cardinal François de La Rochefoucauld interpreted his appointment as bishop of Cahors as a de facto resignation of the abbacy of Chancelade and the signal for his attempt to absorb Chancelade into the Congrégation de France. There followed an extended dispute that reached to the level of the royal council, as Solminihac strove to maintain reforms in Chancelade and to ensure that the abbey was not simply swallowed by Messieurs de Sainte-Geneviève. Whereas Joseph Bergin and Isabelle Brian have examined attempts at reform...

Le catholicisme comme religion politique en France

How political concepts which were built up by Counter-revolutionary school were been able to graft on French Catholicism since the Revolution of 1789? The historical investigation proves that positivist or socialist theorists were indebt to Joseph de Maistre and Louis de Bonald for their religious prophecies and their theory upon relations between temporal power and spiritual power. These ideas became French catholic ideas with the Saint-Simon socialist school and the Roman Catholic priest de La Mennais and the writers as Honore de Balzac, George Fonsegrive or Paul Bourget. Upon these influences, the French Catholic left-wing put the political principle of reality in the society and not in the human person.

Between Languages and Cultures: Colonial and Postcolonial Readings of Gabrielle Roy (review)

Reviewed by: Between Languages and Cultures: Colonial and Postcolonial Readings of Gabrielle Roy Mariel O'Neill-Karch (bio) Rosemary Chapman . Between Languages and Cultures: Colonial and Postcolonial Readings of Gabrielle Roy. McGill-Queen's University Press. 2009. 320. $95.00 Manitoba-born Gabrielle Roy was exposed early to both French and English cultures. When she began to write fiction, however, she opted to do so exclusively in French, though many of her novels and short stories are set in Western and Northern Canada. Her best-known novel, Bonheur d'occasion (1945), depicting working-class Montreal, was awarded France's prix Femina, while its English translation, The Tin Flute, garnered the 1947 Governor General's Award. The fact that a 1978 poll conducted among professors of English at Canadian universities selected her as the best Canadian woman novelist (in English) shows how well this major French-Canadian writer is integrated into the Anglo-Canadian canon. Rosemary Chapman, a reader in French and Canadian studies at the University of Nottingham, has provided us with a welcome addition to the study of Roy's work by framing it in a carefully analyzed presentation of ongoing negotiations between competing languages and cultures. The objectives of the book are threefold. The first is to lay the groundwork and to provide a conceptual frame, which draws on a wide range of theoretical and empirical studies of both colonialism and postcolonialism, for a background study of the complexities of the Manitoba education system, where Roy was successively both pupil and teacher, and the changing status of the French language in the province. The second strand, based on archival research, aims to show what precisely Roy would have studied - and taught - in both English and French. The third, and most important strand, is a study of Roy's fiction, in French and in English translation, read from these perspectives. The first chapter, provocatively titled 'The Ambivalences of Learning to Be a Canadian,' provides a close reading of curriculum and, more specifically, of textbooks destined for pupils in both anglophone and francophone schools. Each has cultural and moral biases, typical of the time. For example, The Manitoba Reader, in use from 1911 to 1923, when Roy was in elementary school, contains the following ditty by Robert Louis Stevenson, called 'Foreign Children': [End Page 318] Little Indian, Sioux or Crow,Little Frosty Eskimo,Little Turk or Japanee,Oh don't you wish that you were me? This seemingly innocent sounding poem is indicative of the English curriculum that was meant to instil in the Caucasian child an attitude of racial - and linguistic - superiority. In an attempt to preserve the past, the French curriculum was peppered with references to Catholic teachings as well as to the heroes of New France. Roy was exposed to both curricula, and she quickly observed the differences between the discourse of visiting French Catholic dignitaries, who spoke of the survival of the French-Canadian cause, and that of members of the Manitoba Board of Education, who concentrated their remarks on allegiance to Britain, loyalty to the King, and a Canadian identity that stretched from sea to sea. Roy learned to play the game and seemed, though there is some ambivalence, to be equally at ease in both languages and in both cultures. This ambivalence came to a head when Roy wrote about the atmosphere surrounding Bill 101 to a friend, English-Canadian novelist Joyce Marshall, stating that 'the madness may pass over. Or deposit hatred on both sides, which would last almost forever. I was brought up in much the same atmosphere. I dread it like the worst evil.' For Roy, a long-time resident of Quebec who was not a separatist, it is clear that identity cannot be defined in purely linguistic terms. This meticulously researched and cogently argued book is a signal contribution to the study of Gabrielle Roy's oeuvre in that it reveals, along with an ambivalent attitude to Quebec as well as to Canada, 'a sense of fluidity, a constant attraction toward other identities and experiences, and a rejection of any fixed pattern of identification based solely on language or culture.' This monograph will be of great value to historians of...

Synthèse D’une Étude Longitudinale Portant Sur Les Effets D’un Programme De Maternelle 4 Ans À Temps Plein

Since September 2000, the French Catholic School Board of Central and Eastern Ontario (CECLFCE) (Ontario, Canada), has decided to offer a full-day educational program instead of his half-day educational program to all 4-year-old children of its territory. Given the educational, financial and political stakes inherent in the establishment of the full-day preschool program, the CECLFCE has opted to conduct an evaluation of this project in order to determine its effects on children’s development. This article summarizes a longitudinal study conducted in three stages, at the end of kindergarten, grade 2 and grade 5. In each stage, we compared the development of children who attended the full-day preschool program (2000–2001) to other who attended the half-day program (1999–2000). This study addresses the following question: is a full-day preschool program more likely to enhance, in the longer term, linguistic, academic, social-emotional, and psychomotor development than a half-day preschool program? Our results indicate that the full-day preschool program for 4-year-old children is more likely to enhance, in the longer term, linguistic and academic development in reading and mathematics. However, the program has little effect on writing competence, as well as in regard to social-emotional and psychomotor development.

Henrietta Maria: Piety, Politics and Patronage, ed. Erin Griffey

Erin Griffey's contributors reconsider the practices of Caroline queenship in the three realms of the book's title: religious faith, political and national affiliation, and artistic and cultural patronage. The editor concludes (and it would be hard to disagree) that religious faith was the determining factor behind the interconnected cultural and political activities of Henrietta Maria, Charles I's French Catholic consort, and the collection explores her political and dynastic affiliations, her patronage of theatre, craftsmen, artists and musicians, her self-representation and her religious practice. Building on the work of scholars such as Erica Veevers, Sophie Tomlinson, Karen Britland and Melinda Gough, this collection brings together historians, art historians, and scholars of drama, literature and music in an engaging blend of established and emerging scholars. As a French queen of England, Henrietta Maria's patronage and politics are obvious subjects for investigation from a transnational, European angle. This collection takes such an approach very seriously, with productive results. At the outset of his chapter exploring the Queen's domestic and international religious, familial and courtly alliances, Malcolm Smuts immediately sets the young Henrietta Maria's marriage and her factional negotiations against the context of the Thirty Years War. Essays by Jessica Bell on Marian imagery in the self-representation of Marie de Medici and Henrietta Maria, and by Griffey on the depiction of religious jewellery in the Queen's portraiture, unpick a maternal, religious and politicised thread of influence. Sarah Poynting identifies the writer Walter Montague as a pivotal international intermediary, moving between courts and scripting a theatrical production for his queen. Karen Britland examines the Queen's theatrical patronage and spectatorship, positioning Whitehall productions of Fletcher's Faithful Shepherdess and Shakespeare's Richard III in the early 1630s against what she calls ‘a reformatory project’ which presented ‘a new moral standard both for dramatic productions and courtly behaviour’ (p. 64) which emerged from the households of both the King and Queen. Equally though, Britland argues, Henrietta Maria's keen sense of the political nature of such patronage is demonstrated by the support she offered the itinerant French playing company led to London by the actor Floridor in 1634–5 and the Queen's rejection in the same season of a travelling Spanish troupe. The collection concludes with Jonathan P. Wainwright's argument that ‘the most up-to-date Italian music by contemporaries of Monteverdi was performed at the queen's devotions’ (p. 199) at her chapel in Somerset House. In this way, the collection brings to light the European influences of this counter-reformation English queen.

French Catholics, Women, and the Home: The Founding Generation of the Jeunesse ouvrière chrétienne féminine

In 1928 a group of young Parisian working women, guided by Father Georges Guérin, established a Catholic youth group called the Jeunesse ouvrière chrétienne féminine. This study examines the ideas of the founding generation of the so-called Jocists on women and the home; the ways in which these conceptions were rooted in religious assumptions about women and domestic space; the evolution of these positions through the Ligue ouvrière chrétienne féminine and the Mouvement populaire des familles (adult organizations that evolved from the youth group); and the effect of these ideas on the shape of domestic space in France. From this investigation emerges a portrait of conflicted individuals and organizations advocating ideas that were sometimes conservative, sometimes liberal, often contradictory, but all rooted in Catholic social doctrine. This story enriches our understanding of the Catholic Left, of which these associations became an integral part, and the impact that these groups had on France.

La famille de Jacques Maritain et les musiciens russes, d'après les archives de Kolbsheim

The article focuses on Jacques Maritain's connections with various prominent Russian composers from the first part of the 20th century. The French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain's marriage to a Russian émigré, Rayssa Umantsova, played an important role in connecting him with such prominent Russian musicians as Igor Stravinsky, Arthur Lourie and Nikolay Nabokov. The friendly relationships Maritain and his wife established with them lasted, at least for the last two, all their lives. A major source of information on these relationships is the couple's personnal archive, kept in their Alsatian house of Kolbsheim, in the Strasbourg area, which historical significance is highlighted in the present study.

The South China Coast in French and Dutch Literature

The article examines a number of pieces of early French and Dutch writing about the South China coast. The first is the journal of a Swiss mercenary named Ripon, who was employed by the Dutch East India Company and ventured in the East from 1617 to 1627; the second is a group of journals by Isaac Titsingh, Andreas Everard van Braam and Chrétien-Louis-Joseph de Guignes, describing their embassy to Emperor Qianlong in 1794–95; and finally there are a series reports by Dutch Protestant and French Catholic missionaries from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. Such Western sources can be an important supplement to the often scant Chinese sources for certain periods. Sources recording the same event but written by different authors and in different languages can provide an informative range of perspectives and serve to complement each other. And a range of different sources in different languages may combine to produce a fairly full historical picture of a given topic.

Robert R. Palmer's Catholics and Unbelievers in Eighteenth-Century France: An Overdue Tribute

Robert R. Palmer wrote his first book, Catholics and Unbelievers in Eighteenth Century France, under the influence of his mentor at Cornell University, Carl L. Becker. Whereas Becker had claimed that the "enlightened" French philosophes were more indebted to Christianity than they recognized, Palmer argued that French Catholic apologists in the eighteenth century were also more "enlightened" than they knew. The two theses are complementary sides of Becker's wider point that beneath an intellectual debate in the public sphere there lay certain shared assumptions that make discussion possible, or what Alfred Whitehead had called a common "climate of opinion." Devoted to the subsequent historiography of Palmer's subject, this article argues that although research has since vindicated aspects of Palmer's portrait of French "enlightened" Jesuits, it has also altered Palmer's picture of French Jansenists as being globally unenlightened. This development in historiography enlarges Palmer's own notion of a "climate of opinion," while challenging the coherence of recent notions of a single "Catholic Enlightenment."

Catholics and the First World War: religion, barbarism and the reduction to culture

This paper analyses a polemic between French and German Catholics that erupted during the First World War. Building on earlier studies into the role of intellectuals during the war, it supports the view that intellectuals eagerly lent their support to the cause of the nation, and were thus part of a widespread ‘mobilization of intellect’. But it goes further, and looks at how Catholic scholars sought ways to enhance their position within the nation. Because the war was of an order to call into question basic faith in the achievements of culture and civilization, intellectuals shifted to looking at how nations and their politics were governed by culture. As a generative substratum for national character and behaviour, however, culture provided scholars with a way to recast their commitment to universal truth. By looking at the specific ways French and German Catholics accused each other of a reversion to barbarism, the paper develops this insight by showing how such accusations served each side as a strategic ploy for their domestic rehabilitation in France and Germany, respectively.

Incidental Ethnographers: French Catholic Missions on the Tonkin-Yunnan Frontier, 1880 - 1930 (review)

Incidental Ethnographers: French Catholic Missions on the Tonkin-Yunnan Frontier, 1880 - 1930 (review)

An Empire Divided: Religion, Republicanism, and the Making of French Colonialism, 1880–1914 (review)

Reviewed by: An Empire Divided: Religion, Republicanism, and the Making of French Colonialism, 1880–1914 Jean Michaud An Empire Divided: Religion, Republicanism, and the Making of French Colonialism, 1880–1914. By J. P. Daughton. (New York: Oxford University Press. 2006. Pp. xiv, 330. $24.95 paperback. ISBN 978-0-195-37401-8.) This fascinating book’s central contention, in the words of its author, is that “the discord over the role of religion in the young [French] republican empire exposes unexplored themes that are crucial for understanding French political and cultural history between 1880 and 1914” (p. 261). J. P. Daughton, now teaching in the history department at Stanford University, has elected to explore this theme in the French colonial locales of Indochina, Polynesia, and Madagascar. These three settings, with Indochina as the far most important one in demographic as well as economic terms, are exemplary of the second phase of French colonialism, a phase that unfolded over the nineteenth century and lasted until the end of the Algerian war of liberation in the 1960s. About that period, Daughton assesses accurately that the politics of colonial expansionism under the first half of the Third Republic (1870–1940) deserved special attention as a determining moment in French history and the heyday of the French push as a modern and industrial colonial power. Under the Third Republic, the French Catholic Church became an integral part of the colonial project. Many other agents of the state were active in the field, but the Catholic missionaries, as unattached men committed to staying [End Page 505] on location for their whole life, learning local languages and customs, and reporting to the religious as well as civilian authorities on anything that might have threatened the Pax Gallica on the colonial frontier, constituted an unmatched source of dependable intelligence on the ground. Their efficiency was, however, hampered by competition between religious orders both in metropolitan France and in each of these colonies, while the relationship between overzealous bishops and a fiercely secular colonial administration was anything but easy, as show in the case of Bishop Paul-François Puginier, the vicar apostolic in Hanoi. Devotion to the Mère-Patrie could indeed take many forms, some happening to be plainly contradictory. Daughton’s work is exhaustive and scholarly; his detailed understanding of the particulars of societies very distant from one another is praiseworthy. Inevitably, comparison on such a scale results in some vagueness here and there, but Daughton’s overall analysis remains balanced, grounded, informed, and subtle. This book constitutes an outstanding addition to the growing body of studies in history written in English devoted to making French colonial history, as well as the geste of the French Catholic Church, better known outside France. Jean Michaud Université Laval Copyright © 2010 The Catholic University of America Press

Estaria o catolicismo na França do século XXI caminhando em direção a um perfil comunitário?

Este artigo busca discutir, a partir do exame de uma literatura sociológica e antropológica produzida atualmente na França, a experiência comunitária no catolicismo francês contemporâneo. Partindo da ideia de crise das grandes religiões institucionalizadas com o consequente advento de uma religião do self, que cada vez mais se consagra como chave de análise de uma sociologia da religião moderna, pergunta-se qual a pertinência das coletividades e comunidades religiosas no cenário francês. Observando as situações do quadro paroquial, das recentes tensões e mudanças no regime de laicidade francesa (cujo aspecto universalista se direciona-se uma acomodação com o comunitarismo), e da Renovação Carismática, pretende-se expor os arranjos e compromissos que, no seio do catolicismo francês atual, permitem articular individualismo e coletivismo, modernidade e tradição.

Cidade aberta, sem muralhas: a religião luso-brasileira na literatura de viagem (séculos XVIII-XIX)

A partir de finais do século XVIII e início do século XIX, um grande número de viajantes britânicos e franceses aportaram no Brasil, interessados em suas riquezas naturais e desejosos por conhecimento sobre a sociedade luso-brasileira. Um dos seus principais interesses era o conhecimento das práticas religiosas dos brasileiros que servia, tanto para católicos franceses quanto para protestantes britânicos, como um índice de civilidade alcançado por nossa sociedade. Suas descrições tratarão, assim, das igrejas, sua composição arquitetônica e obras sacras, das missas, procissões e festas religiosas, das obras de caridade, do clero católico, dos sacramentos como casamentos e batizados, enterros, etc. Nestas descrições estão colocadas interpretações da sociedade luso-brasileira, as possibilidades de desenvolvimento do novo Império brasileiro e o caráter do catolicismo português transplantado para a América.

Teilhard at Ore Place, Hastings, 1908–1912

AbstractThe crucial role of the French Jesuit theologate in exile at Ore Place, Hastings (1906–26) in the development of la nouvelle théologie has been greatly overlooked in favour of Lyons and Fourvière. In fact, Ore Place played a key early role in the ressourcement of twentieth century French Catholic theology through constituting a unified and sympathetic scholarly community during an era of theological and political turmoil. One of the theologate's best-known students was Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1908–12), while other teachers and students included Pierre Charles, Joseph Huby, Henri de Lubac, Ferdinand Prat, Pierre Rousselot, and Auguste Valensin. Within this congenial scholarly community, Teilhard developed some key theological foundations of his thought on topics including grace and nature (miracles, anthropology, and evolution) and christology, and was ordained. The full importance of theological formation at Ore Place for the thought of Teilhard and other French Jesuits of his generation has rarely been recognized.

Rehabilitating a Radical Catholic: Pope Benedict XV and Marc Sangnier, 1914–1922

Pope Benedict xv's gradual rehabilitation of the French Christian Democrat Marc Sangnier, whose Sillon movement stood condemned for social Modernism, demonstrated his desire to end the excesses of his predecessor's anti-Modernist crusade and to return to the policies of Leo xiii. Sangnier, unofficial emissary of the French republic to the Vatican, helped to prepare for the restoration of diplomatic relations in 1921. Perplexed, like most French Catholics, by papal neutrality on the war, he later campaigned for Franco-German reconciliation, adopting the Vatican critique of the Versailles settlement. Sangnier's pardon, like Benedict's cautious endorsement of the Popolari in Italy, highlights the paradoxical papalism of advanced Social Catholicism.

Further Light on Vatican Council II

Carnets du Concile. By Henri de Lubac. Edited and annotated by Loic Figoureux. 2 vols. (Paris: Editions du Cerf. 2007. Vol. 1: Pp. 1, 567, euro39,00 paperback, ISBN 978-2-204-08528-1 .Vol. 2: Pp. 569, euro36,00 paperback, ISBN 978-2-204-08529-8. Vols. 1 and 2: euro75,00.) Vatican ILA Sociological Analysis of Religious Change. By Melissa J.Wilde. (Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2007. Pp. xv, 196. $38.50. ISBN 9780-691-11829-1.) Vatican II. Hermeneutique et reception. By Gilles Routhier. [Collection Heritage et projet, 69.] (Montreal: Editions Fides. 2006. Pp. 468. C$39.95 paperback. ISBN 978-2-762-12685-3.) This review article continues two earlier discussions of recent publications of sources and studies on Vatican Council II.1 Presented here are (1) the personal diary kept from I960 to 1965 by peritus Henri de Lubac, (2) a sociological study of how the Council came to make its major interventions favoring change in the Church, and (3) a collection of studies and reflections on the Catholic Church's reception over forty years of Vatican II. The Vatican II Diary of Henri de Lubac (1896-1991) The existence of de Lubac 's Council diary2 had been known, but few scholars had access to it, whether in the handwritten original or in the typed text dating from the early 1980s.3 The published text now offers testimony that pinpoints problematic aspects of the Council's doctrinal preparation, with de Lubac 's astute perceptions of conciliar action during the four working periods and his critical views, late in the Council, about how the Church should engage in dialogue with the world.4 1. Problems in Vatican IFs Doctrinal Preparatory Work In I960 de Lubac was appointed, along with Father Yves Marie Joseph Congar, O.P., to work as a consultor of Vatican IPs Preparatory Theological Commission. In this appointment de Lubac saw an indication by Pope John XXIII that it was time to set aside the Vatican difficulties of the early 1950s over theological opinions of certain French Jesuits and Dominicans.5 The Preparatory Commission prepared seven doctrinal and moral draft texts in I96O-62, which in time met incisive criticism by the Council's majority.6 About the preparatory work, de Lubac wrote later that a complete chronicle not be lacking in picturesque but such a chronicle will probably not be written since most of the participants would have no desire to transmit the memory of it to posterity.7 Among the scenes of I960, de Lubac recorded meeting Joaquin Salaverri, SJ., a consultor from Madrid, at the Biblical Institute and candidly telling Salaverri how mistaken he had been about the Jesuit theologate of Fourviere in his critical articles of 1949-51. On November 15, I960, de Lubac went to the Holy Office, where he met another consultor, Father Marie-Michel Labourdette, O.P., who had in 1946 criticized the Fourviere Jesuits (de Lubac, Jean Danielou, Henri Bouillard, Gaston Fessard, and Hans Urs von Balthasar) with an article in Revue Thomiste on theology and its sources. Shortly afterward, de Lubac knelt before Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, who sat between two lighted candles with the book of Gospels in his lap, and took an oath to keep the preparatory work secret.8 Beyond picturesque scenes, de Lubac 's diary describes the commission's controlling mentality, which clashed with convictions underlying de Lubac 's own work of thirty years for theological ressour cement. His Belgian confrere and redactor of the commission's texts on revelation and faith, Edouard Dhanis of the Gregorian, has no sense of the simple grandeur of the faith of the Church that we proclaim, and strangely diminishes faith in Jesus Christ. Those overseeing the drafting of the schemata manifested negativity, a low intellectual level, and mean-spiritedness, while possessing little sense of the world that awaits the Gospel, as shown in the November I960 public lecture by Monsignor Antonio Piolanti, the Lateran University rector, who called on the Council to condemn French Catholic neo-modernist theology by ratifying tenets of Pope Pius IX' s Syllabus of Errors (1864) and Pope Pius XII's Humant generis ( 1 9 50) . …

Working toward the De‐essentialization of Identity Categories in Conflict and Postconflict Societies: Israel, Cyprus, and Northern Ireland

During the past decade, we have conducted research in our own countries, all of which are considered conflict or postconflict societies: Israel, Cyprus, and Northern Ireland. We have focused on a variety of topics related to peace education, reconciliation, and coexistence. Giving special emphasis to the formation of identity in educational settings, two of us have investigated primarily in integrated schools (in Israel and Northern Ireland), while the third has conducted research in multicultural schools (in Cyprus). We believe that a comparative study of these three settings is valuable because such juxtaposition helps to conceptualize how some aspects of identity are developed in practice in the countries in question (Phillips and Schweisfurth 2006). What has attracted our attention in this body of research are the dissimilar ways in which educators and children attend to identity issues when such issues appear in interactional events. Although educators, in their rhetoric and educational practices, often seem to essentialize ethnic or religious identity and mark events as related to absolute categories, children, though knowledgeable of these categories, seem less attentive to them in their social activities and construct their social worlds with less emphasis on ethnic or religious divisions. Regardless of the differences in identity found in the educational policies of Israel (emphasis on Zionist ethos), Northern Ireland (focus on pluralism), and Cyprus (priority on Greek-centered education), we have observed that, in practice, children’s perspectives differ from those of adult educators. In this article, we examine the ways in which educators engage in educational initiatives geared toward peace, coexistence, and/or conflict resolution and consider the implications for such initiatives if children’s perspectives were taken into consideration. We first summarize the similarities and differences with respect to the sources of conflict in the three societies. Then we offer short descriptions of the educational initiatives under examination and the sociopolitical con

Feminized Suffering in Modern French Catholicism: Raïssa Maritain (1883–1960) and Léon Bloy (1846–1917)

This essay examines the relationship between femininity, suffering, and holiness in the writings of two French Catholic Revival intellectuals, Léon Bloy and Raïssa Maritain. Much of the recent English-language scholarship analyzes the prominent place suffering holds in modern French Catholicism in terms of the doctrine of vicarious suffering. Here I seek to understand Maritain’s and Bloy’s texts in relation to other theological and literary currents, such as the decadent movement and the French School of Spirituality. Ultimately, I show how Raïssa Maritain, one of the few female writers of the French Catholic Revival, exerted creative intervention onto the discourse linking suffering, women, and holiness with her discovery of Thomas Aquinas and her prioritization of the faculty of the intellect.