Catholic Groups Research Articles

The Movement of Catholic Communists, 1937–45

This article examines the movement of Catholic Communists ( cattocomunisti), who emerged in 1937 and 1938 among a group of young Catholics in Rome. These Catholics maintained that the only way to defeat the Fascist dictatorship was to forge an alliance with the Communists. Marxism was, for these young Catholics, a canon to interpret reality, not a political philosophy. Thus they embraced historical materialism, but rejected dialectical materialism. During the war years, the church tolerated them as long as they remained a minority representing a minimal threat. However, from 1944 the ecclesiastical institution made them the target of criticism and censorship. The group disbanded in 1945 and most of its members decided to join the Communist Party.

Saving and fearing Muslim women in ‘post-communist’ Poland: troubling Catholic and secular Islamophobia

Sexual politics play a key role in anti-Muslim narratives. This has been observed by scholarship problematising liberal feminist approaches towards ‘non-Western’ subjects focusing on countries such as France, the USA and the Netherlands. Yet interrogations into how these debates play out in European national contexts that are located outside of the European ‘West’ have attracted significantly less scholarly attention. Drawing on qualitative data collected in Poland this article aims to begin to fill this gap by analysing the centrality of feminist discourses within Islamophobic agendas in Poland. The article asks how discourses around women’s rights are mobilised simultaneously, and paradoxically, by both secular and Catholic groups in ‘post-communist’ Poland. By showcasing how feminist sentiments are employed by ideologically opposing groups, we sketch out some of the complexities in the ways Islamophobia operates in a Central and Eastern European context.

НОВЫЕ СВЕДЕНИЯ О ПОСТРАДАВШИХ В ПЕРИОД ГОНЕНИЙ НА РУССКУЮ ПРАВОСЛАВНУЮ ЦЕРКОВЬ В СССР В 1920-1930-Е ГГ. (ПО МАТЕРИАЛАМ ВЫСОКО-ПЕТРОВСКОГО МОНАСТЫРЯ Г. МОСКВЫ)

The article gives examples of obtaining new information about martyrs in the 20th century, namely the clergymen and parishioners of the Vysokopetrovsky Monastery in Moscow, including its abbot Archbishop Bartholomew (Remov). The new data are obtained by researching the newly discovered documents in private and foreign archives, a more thorough critical and comparative analysis of the already well-known sources, and interviewing individuals who personally knew those people, who were repressed and lived up to the second half of the twentieth century. The sources introduced into the scientifi c activities come from the private archive of his-torian Sergey Belyaev, as well as from the archives of the General Curia of the Assumptionist Congregation in Rome (the letters from Bishop Pie Eugene Neveu, apostolic administrator in Moscow in 1926-1936) and the Historic archives of the Secretariat of State. There are subjected to critical examination the investigative materials against Archbishop Bar-tholomew (Remov) and the members of the community, who in the investigation case were named members of the “Catholic group of the counter-revolutionary organization under the illegal “Petrovsky monastery”. The author refutes the conclusions made earlier by the researchers on the existence of a Catholic group in the Vysokopetrovsky Monastery, as well as casts doubt on the hypothesis on the adherence of the monastery abbot Archbishop Bartholomew (Remov) to Catholicism.

‘Satan Mourns Naked upon the Earth’: Locating Mormon Possession and Exorcism Rituals in the American Religious Landscape, 1830–1977

AbstractSince its inception in 1830, an important feature of Mormonism has been its belief in a literal Devil and in the ability of the Devil to possess human beings. Despite the pervasiveness of these beliefs and practices, Mormon possession and exorcism is a largely unstudied phenomenon. What follows is a careful study of four historical accounts of Mormon exorcism rituals dating from 1830, 1839, 1888, and 1977, and their narrative presentations. This article traces the development of Mormon possession/exorcism beliefs and practices and situates them within their larger historical contexts. The article also describes the relationship between Mormon dispossession rituals and the dispossession rituals of Protestant and Catholic groups in American history and presents through a consideration of the impact of broader American cultural trends on the theory and practice of Mormon exorcism from 1830 to 1977.

Catholic Progressives in England After Vatican II by Jay P Corrin

Progressives in England After Vatican II. By Jay P Corrin. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. 2013. Pp. x, 523. $49.00 paperback. ISBN 978-0-268-02310-2.)We English Catholics are well-trained in the art of keeping our heads down. Perhaps it is the result of a long-history of state persecution of Catholics after our home-grown Reformation in the sixteenth century. Or that most of us (a good 90 per cent) can trace our roots back to more recent immigrant families, mostly Irish, and therefore feel in some hard-to-define way that we are still outsiders, not quite as thoroughly English as our brothers and sisters in the established Church of England.It is, granted, nowadays more of a collective memory than anything tangible, but we are still a minority faith (fewer than ten per cent of the population, even by the most optimistic estimates) and so are pleasantly surprised when anyone takes us as a subject of serious study, as Professor Jay P. Corrin of Boston University has done. He charts the troubled relationship in the 1960s among the hierarchy, the domestic press, and what he calls the Catholic New Left, a small number of progressives, inspired by Vatican Council II to campaign to make their local Church more outward-looking and socially and politically involved.It is a story that is still very much within living memory, and several of the key players-notably Terry Eagleton, the prominent academic and public intellectual- are quoted extensively. And, as a tale of engaged, passionate lay Catholics, inspired by gospel values, struggling against institutional apathy and clerical conservativism, it is lively and will have strong echoes in other parts of the world.Indeed, Professor Corrin's account of a group of progressive Catholics, some left-leaning and attracted to Marxism, gathered around the Cambridge-based publication Slant in the middle and late 1960s, left me lamenting that such activism is today once more lacking in our typically cautious, heads-down English Church. For many of the leading lights of Slant ultimately either left, or found themselves pushed to the very margins.For some-especially the priests, monks, and nuns among their number- disillusionment with the institution was mixed with a vocation to marriage. The best-known example was that of Charles Davis, arguably the only theologian on these shores at the time on a par with the great conciliar minds of continental Europe. …

"Storming Heaven for Charleston": The Lynch Family and the Civil War

The Irish Immigrants Conlaw Peter and Eleanor (Neison) Lynch in the upcountry South Carolina town of Cheraw raised a dozen children, six of whom were impacted by the Civil War in a significant way and made considerable contributions to it. Indeed the Lynches constituted the largest Catholic sibling group involved in the conflict, and, arguably, their collective involvement was as significant as that of any Catholic family in North or South. The particular involvement of the oldest, Patrick as bishop of Charleston, and of Ellen, the second daughter, as mother superior of the Ursuline Community in Columbia, in very different ways proved noteworthy. The war, to which they were so committed, in the end cost them any hope of realizing the audacious dream they had for Catholicism in the Deep South.

Religious forms in secularized society: Three Catholic groups in comparison

Despite the evidence of a progressive disenchantment, the religious sphere maintains a strong grip on current societies though undertaking some transformations. Pluralism, individualism and privatization are three features we cannot ignore if we choose to study religion in the contemporary world and, more broadly, if we choose to study modernity. The aim of this article is to illustrate some features of the different forms of religiosity in the secular age (Taylor, 2007). We have focused on modern Catholicism, with particular reference to religious experience in the Catholic lay group. The stories of Catholic militants show that the motivation behind their choice is the crucial factor to analyze their religious experience and worldview. In this sense, we will try to reflect on some indicators that can help us to understand the resources and limits of the contemporary Catholic pluralism and the aspects of the ‘modern desire for God’ (Abbruzzese, 2010).

The Rhetorical Shadows of the Anti-Conversion Bill: Religious Freedom and Political Alliances in Sri Lanka

ABSTRACTThe practice of proselytisation is increasingly challenged in many parts of the world, especially in South Asia. Laws to prohibit ‘improper’ or ‘unethical’ conversions are being discussed in several countries. International legal texts are vague and elusive when it comes to the practice of proselytisation, and are susceptible to different interpretations of how to regulate proselytism. Drawing on the argument that religious freedom is trapped within the antinomies of inviolability and regulation, I argue that anti-conversion legislation falls precisely into such antinomies. Hence, political actors are increasingly able to use such antinomies to legitimise and justify their own reading of international norms. A study of the policy process of the anti-conversion bill in Sri Lanka reveals that the formation of political alliances between religious affiliations had a decisive impact on the outcome of the process. This case shows how legislative reform on religious practice and proselytism may be played out in a local context with multiple religious communities, and the importance of formulating an inclusive legislative proposal that speaks to all stakeholders. This paper looks into the politics on the ground around the anti-conversion bill, and how several religious organisations (Hindus, Catholics, Protestants, Evangelicals, and Buddhists) formed and broke up political alliances during the process. In addition to the core argumentation to support and/or oppose anti-conversion legislation, particular alliances and affiliations were important during the process. Why did the All Ceylon Hindu Congress (ACHC) initiate the anti-conversion bill proposal, only to oppose it later? Why were the Catholic groups an interesting partner for the Buddhist nationalists when they sought to create a compromise bill in 2006? By considering the local religious and political context of Sri Lanka, this paper will argue how anti-conversion legislation is not solely dependent on international norms, but also upon the partners and affiliations advocating for them on the ground.

Kocbekovo Premišljevanje o Španiji

EDVARD KOCBEK'S 'REFLECTION' ON SPAINDue to the Spanish Civil War, the ideological conflicts in the Catholic circles became more distinct. The clerical part, particularly the Slovenecdaily, which published biased articles on the Spanish Civil War in 1936 and 1937 with a special emphasis on condemning the rise of the popular front, understood the publication of Edvard Kocbek's essay as an attack on its views. Kocbek's purpose behind the Ponderingwas, however, to present a more balanced picture of the Spanish tragedy that was based on the reports by West European writers who favoured the Spanish republic.The Ponderingwas the central crystallising point that led to the final split in the Catholic circles, while at the same time stirring the left-wing political groups to start fighting for a common goal. But the main reason that it became the central crystallising point was the militant response by the right-wing Catholic group; the essay in itself would have otherwise been only considered a balanced representation of the situation in Spain, which were presented one-sidedly by the clerical press. This shows that political tensions on the territory of today's Slovenia had already reached their climax as early as a few years before the war, thus rendering a dialogue and a democratic compromise that could unite the Slovenians in a national defensive attitude impossible.

Differentiating Among Three Catholic Groups in the United States: The Role of Ethnic-Cultural and Religious-Spiritual Variables

Catholic demographics in the United States have been shifting rapidly to such an extent that more than one third of Catholic parishes have become “multicultural.” Such a shift poses the challenge of maintaining the universal trait of the Catholic Church while adapting to the changes brought in by cultural diversity. In order to validate and further expand on the need to face and adapt to the diversity within the Catholic Church in the United States, this project examined the role of selected ethnic, cultural, religious, and spiritual variables in differentiating among three Catholic groups of European Americans, Asian Indian Americans, and Taiwanese Americans. Multivariate analysis for group differences indicated that the European Americans had higher scores on spiritual transcendence and individualism, and lower scores on exploration and resolution of ethnic identity. Taiwanese Americans scored high on collectivism. Asian Indian Americans scored lower on religious motivation than the European and Taiwanese Americans. Discriminant function analysis resulted in two discriminant functions. The first one discriminated European Americans from the other two groups, with the universality facet of spiritual transcendence and the affirmation of ethnic identity emerging as the significant contributors to the discrimination. The second function discriminated between Taiwanese American and Asian Indian American Catholics, with collectivism and religious motivation emerging as the significant contributors. These significant results, their implications for Catholic parishes, and directions for future research are discussed.

Historical faith and philosophical theology: the case of Thomas White

Today, Thomas White (1593–1676) is remembered as the leader of the “Blackloists” – a renegade Catholic group that took its name from White's sometime pseudonym “Blacklo” – and as the friend and phi...

Finding their way to heaven: Women, self-narratives and Catholicism in Quito, Ecuador

In this paper I look at personal histories of middle class women who belong to a Catholic group in Quito, Ecuador. Using a poststructuralist definition of the subject I explore the reasons why these women intentionally break the Church’s rules and make decisions that constitute sins. I argue that in order to understand their disobedience to Catholicism, it is necessary to contextualise their decisions. Their choices can be explained if we look at these women’s lives not only as Catholics but also as belonging to a social class and ethnicity and as members of a family. In this paper I want to explore how these different affiliations are combined and why and when one is prioritised over the others. In other words, how Catholic women adapt religion to fit in with their other needs. Ultimately, this paper will provide insights on the concept of agency and decision-making.

Religious Groups as Interest Groups: The United States Catholic Bishops in the Welfare Reform Debate of 1995–1996 and the Health Care Reform Debate of 2009–20101

The United States has a long history of religious influence on public policy: the anti-slavery movement, progressivism, prohibition, civil rights, abortion, school vouchers, school prayer and nuclear disarmament are all issues that have involved religion and religious groups in policymaking. In recent decades, the number of religious interest groups (as well as interest groups in general) has greatly expanded, but the role that the religious organizations play as interest groups in the policy arena has received relatively little attention. How are they similar to and different from other interest groups? What tactics do they use? How successful are they? Under what conditions is success or failure more likely? This article examines Roman Catholic religious groups as interest groups in the congressional policymaking process. First, it places Catholic interest groups in the context of the interest group literature, and second, it examines Catholic interest groups’ activity in the passage of welfare reform in 1996 and in the passage of health care reform in 2010. In both cases, they played a greater role in context-setting than in actually changing provisions.

“St. Gemma is My Girl!”: Devotional Practices among Millennial Catholics and the Making of Contemporary Catholic Saints

This article analyzes contemporary devotionalism to saints among a group of millennial-generation Catholics. Devotions to the communion of saints have long-been, for many generations of Catholics, practices of building and sustaining relationships between humans and extra-humans. This article explores a twenty-first century iteration of those practices. Drawing on fourteen months of ethnographic research among Catholic missionaries who evangelize on college campuses in the United States, this article examines how these missionaries remix their devotional practices on and for their contemporary American landscape. The article begins with an introduction to contemporary devotions, paying special attention to the centrality of suffering for this group of Catholics, as well as their efforts to “be saints” in the twenty-first century. Relationships with Saints Gemma Galgani, Faustina Kowalska, and Therese of Lisieux were particularly poignant in this worldview. How these young adults prayed with these saints shaped their Catholic identities. This article contributes to scholarship on contemporary Catholic prayer and the making of religious persons.

Reguliertes Abenteuer: Missionarinnen in Südafrika nach 1945 by Martina Gugglberger

Reviewed by: Reguliertes Abenteuer: Missionarinnen in Südafrika nach 1945 by Martina Gugglberger Martina Cucchiara Martina Gugglberger, Reguliertes Abenteuer: Missionarinnen in Südafrika nach 1945. L’Homme Schriften. Reihe zur Feministischen Geschichtswissenschaft 22. Vienna: Böhlau, 2014. 276 pp. In this noteworthy monograph, Martina Gugglberger seeks to illuminate the personal histories and experiences of European women religious missionaries after 1945. The author based her work on interviews with twenty-three Austrian and German Catholic sisters from the congregation of the Schwestern vom Kostbaren Blut, who have lived and worked as missionaries in South Africa for decades. These mostly elderly sisters represent the last generation of European women who joined new Catholic religious congregations dedicated to charitable works in large numbers during the monastic spring in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries. In this buoyant age of monastic revival, the abbot Franz Pfanner (1825–1905) founded the order of the Missions-schwestern vom Kostbaren Blut in 1885, and hundreds of German and Austrian women subsequently joined the congregation through the 1960s, when the prevalence of religious vocations declined sharply. By the 1970s, few women were entering religious life, and it was only then that scholars in the emerging fields of women and gender studies hesitantly began to turn their attention to the complex roles of women in organized religion. Since then, historians have struggled with the question of why so many women in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries joined the patriarchal Catholic (and Protestant) churches that seemed to oppress rather than liberate [End Page 159] them. Offering satisfactory answers has proven quite difficult, and despite a growing body of research on the topic, in many ways the scholarship on women religious has not moved far beyond the somewhat laconic assertion Martha Vicinus made thirty years ago that “religion opened and closed doors for single women.” Martina Gugglberger, too, focuses on the question of why the women she interviewed took the veil. She writes early on that “Kern der Untersuchung war es, Bilder und Vorstellungen zu eruieren, die die Motivationen für ein Leben als Missionsschwester zeithistorisch begreifbar machen” (16). Although the author’s conclusions are familiar in that the stories of the women missionaries take on the gestalt “eines ‘regulierten Abenteuers’, im Spannungsfeld zwischen individuellen and gesellschaftlichen Begrenzungen und Ausbrüchen,” her substantial chapter on the missionaries’ early lives, their “Herkunftsraum,” is nonetheless a highlight of the monograph (16). Gugglberger’s skillful and sensitive presentation of her interviewees’ early life stories that ended in the cloister addresses a significant gap in the scholarship on religious women, that is, the woeful lack of autobiographical sources on individual sisters. Readers will no doubt study with great interest her detailed descriptions of the women’s rural upbringing that was commonly shaped by “hard work and deep religious attitudes” and the deleterious impact of World War II on already limited educational and professional opportunities and marriage prospects (97). In this often bleak postwar era, many adolescent girls found refuge first in vibrant Catholic youth groups in their villages and then within the “stützende Gemeinschaft von jungen Frauen” in the cloister (175). For women who felt drawn to religious life, the Missionsschwestern vom Kostbaren Blut’s missionary school in Neuenbeken near Paderborn was an accredited Oxford Centre that offered attractive educational opportunities to its candidates for sisterhood. But Martina Gugglberger found that not all missionaries were created equal; unlike the mostly German graduates of Neuenbeken, who usually entered the teaching profession and were well prepared for further university studies abroad, young Austrian women who entered the congregation’s cloister Wernberg in Austria did not achieve the same level of education and usually found themselves employed in lower positions within the congregation in (housekeeping, clerical tasks, farming, and other manual labor). The uneven education the sisters received in Europe perhaps accounts for why quite a few of the sisters the author interviewed were ill prepared for [End Page 160] missionary work. Severe language barriers, feelings of incompetence, overwork, and disappointment about their work assignments caused some to suffer severe breakdowns and psychological crises. This is an important insight that speaks to the potential of oral histories to introduce intriguing nuances to a...

Lying the Truth

Italy’s 1998 Immigration Law 40 includes Article 18, which allows foreign “victims of human trafficking” the right to temporary residence permits on the condition that they participate in a rehabilitation program. The first step of this program, the act of denuncia, is to file criminal charges against exploiters at the police station. However, the resulting testimony cannot be understood through the victim/agent trope of the bureaucratic state, which uses these categories to make the other understandable through a process of what I call “confessional recognition.” In this article, I show how, despite the proliferation of biometric technologies to identify foreign others and so control migration flows at borders, confessional practices continue to play a central role in deciding who is admitted legally. Moreover, I illustrate how the question of redemption and expiation is not only a crucial issue for Catholic groups involved in aid programs for foreigners but is also central to Italian state integration p...

Estratégias de Gênero em Contexto Diaspórico: o caso dos missionários pentecostais brasileiros em Barcelona.

The religious revival of the 'North' (Europe), developed by Pentecostal missionaries of the 'South' (Latin America - Brazil, in particular), in the context of the 'reverse mission', is a dynamic process and in significant expansion. From a localized ethnography - conducted between November 2011 and April 2012 - this article analyzes the work of evangelization and gender strategies developed by two emblematic and differentiated Brazilian neo-Pentecostal religious movements, in the metropolitan area of Barcelona (Spain): the evangelical and transnationalised Universal Church of the Kingdom of God and the Catholic Charismatic Renewal group Raboni Ajaray. From a comparative anthropological study of the daily life of these two religious groups, it discusses how a feminized and manly character, respectively, define important boundaries between Catholics and evangelicals. The ethnographic data demonstrate how certain characteristics of immigrants can act as a source of social differentiation that fosters opportunities and specific doctrinal strategies for men and women, in a context of diaspora.

The Diversity of Asian Immigrants' Participation in Religious Institutions in the United States

Social scientific studies of new immigrants’ religious practices over the last 30 years have been based largely on ethnographic research on immigrant religious institutions. Two major themes emerging from these studies are that (1) non-Christian religious institutions have been transformed in the U.S. context, following the Protestant congregational model, and (2) immigrant religious institutions mainly serve ethnicity and social-service functions for their members. Since Asian immigrants mainly represent nonChristian religious groups, a major survey study of their religious participation sheds new light on these two themes. This study fills a gap in research on Asian immigrants’ institutional religious practices by providing comprehensive statistics using survey data. As expected, our analysis produces important findings that supplement previous and mostly ethnographic studies related to the two major themes. Our major findings also indicate that Asian Protestant and Catholic immigrant groups significantly differ from their American counterparts in institutional religious practices.

The Vatican, Nazi-Fascism, and the Making of Transnational Anti-communism in the 1930s

Given the recent scholarly interest in the history of anti-communism, it is surprising that relatively little has been written on the ambitious transnational anti-communist campaign launched by the Vatican in the early 1930s. Drawing on new archival material, this article explores how the Vatican founded an organization known as the Secretariat on Atheism, which disseminated a form of anti-communism grounded in Catholic teachings. The Secretariat sought to buttress the position of the Roman Catholic church in international affairs and unite Catholic groups across Europe and the Americas, all the while maintaining its independence from other forms of anti-communism – particularly those espoused by Nazi and Fascist forces. However, the Secretariat was only partially successful in preserving its independence. For if the Vatican campaign avoided the antisemitic and nationalistic motifs that characterized Nazi-Fascist propaganda, the key protagonists of the movement cooperated with Nazi, Fascist and proto-Fascist forces on the ground. The Vatican campaign led to joint surveillance efforts, the toning down of the Pope's public denunciations of Nazi-Fascism, and the papal sanction of violence against purportedly communist enemies. Despite its potentially damning association with Nazi-Fascist forces, the Vatican anti-communist movement would outlive both Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy and leave a lasting mark on Cold War politics.

Isolated, but transnational: the glocal nature of Waldensian ethnobotany, Western Alps, NW Italy.

BackgroundAn ethnobotanical field study on the traditional uses of wild plants for food as well as medicinal and veterinary plants was conducted in four Waldensian valleys (Chisone, Germanasca, Angrogna, and Pellice) in the Western Alps, Piedmont, NW Italy. Waldensians represent a religious Protestant Christian minority that originated in France and spread around 1,170 AD to the Italian side of Western Alps, where, although persecuted for centuries, approximately 20,000 believers still survive today, increasingly mixing with their Catholic neighbours.MethodsInterviews with a total of 47 elderly informants, belonging to both Waldensian and Catholic religious groups, were undertaken in ten Western Alpine villages, using standard ethnobotanical methods.ResultsThe uses of 85 wild and semi-domesticated food folk taxa, 96 medicinal folk taxa, and 45 veterinary folk taxa were recorded. Comparison of the collected data within the two religious communities shows that Waldensians had, or have retained, a more extensive ethnobotanical knowledge, and that approximately only half of the wild food and medicinal plants are known and used by both communities. Moreover, this convergence is greater for the wild food plant domain. Comparison of the collected data with ethnobotanical surveys conducted at the end of the 19th Century and the 1980s in one of studied valleys (Germanasca) shows that the majority of the plants recorded in the present study are used in the same or similar ways as they were decades ago. Idiosyncratic plant uses among Waldensians included both archaic uses, such as the fern Botrychium lunaria for skin problems, as well as uses that may be the result of local adaptions of Central and Northern European customs, including Veronica allionii and V. officinalis as recreational teas and Cetraria islandica in infusions to treat coughs.ConclusionsThe great resilience of plant knowledge among Waldensians may be the result of the long isolation and history of marginalisation that this group has faced during the last few centuries, although their ethnobotany present trans-national elements.Cross-cultural and ethno-historical approaches in ethnobotany may offer crucial data for understanding the trajectory of change of plant knowledge across time and space.