Institutional Catholic Church Research Articles

‘Our sacred and civil obligations as Christians and as Citizens’: religion, charity and governance in early nineteenth-century Dublin and Edinburgh

AbstractRecent historiography gives an increasingly nuanced picture of interactions between religion and wider society in nineteenth-century Ireland. Yet, when considering the relationships between religion and philanthropy, something central to everyday life in urban centres, emphasis is still placed on the role of the institutional Catholic Church, and there is a sense that lay Catholics were less involved in charity than their Protestant counterparts. Connected with this is the idea that Protestant charities used open forms of governance, but Catholic charities were secretive, an assertion that parallels claims about tensions between Catholicism and democracy. This historiography, however, also suggests that the situation in the early nineteenth century may have been different from later in the century. This article compares small-scale Catholic and Protestant parochial charities in early nineteenth-century Dublin, while also considering similar institutions associated with Presbyterian congregations in Edinburgh. It indicates that some Catholic parochial charities were at least as committed to open procedures and lay participation as their Anglican and Presbyterian counterparts. By exploring these charities and making comparisons, the article shows that some of Dublin's middle-class Catholics were dedicated to the same ideals as early nineteenth-century British reformers.

A Matter of Conscience: American Women Religious, Feminist Agency, and the Catholic Church

Background In 2012, the long-simmering tension between American women religious sisters and Catholic Church leadership was brought into sharp focus when the largest group of American sisters—the Leadership Conference of Women Religious—was reprimanded by the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The Doctrinal Assessment and subsequent Apostolic Visitation concluded that American religious sisters embraced a secular and radical feminist spirit that was incompatible with Church doctrine. Purpose While American women religious were publicly criticized, this conflict is not a unique American phenomenon. In fact, it is representative of the gendered challenges that women religious and lay women continue to negotiate around the globe. In many respects, religious sisters are the faces of the Church to many faithful—as teachers, social workers, advocates, and ministers—yet their structural position as women prevents them from leadership or decision-making power in the Church they serve. Methods In this research, I explore how sisters navigate these gendered boundaries in the Catholic Church in their day to day ministries. Specifically, I analyze in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 23 Sisters of St. Joseph of Philadelphia. Results Sisters in this congregation employ various forms of feminist agency to assert their power within the Church's confining structures. I find that individual sisters in the congregation use resistance and empowerment agency to claim space for their own voices in ministry. These actions do not directly challenge the sisters’ own subordination in the Church, but instead focus their individual and collective agency on satisfying the unmet pastoral needs of the faithful. Through these accumulative actions, other sisters are empowered to contest gendered institutional Church boundaries and individual clergy who reproduce them. Conclusions and implications These sites of empowerment and resistance agency are liminal spaces that point toward greater inclusion of women religious in the institutional Catholic Church, especially as they increasingly meet the ministerial needs of the faithful. Religious sisters in this congregation act with socially-just consciences, standing with the marginalized, and are empowered to increase their spheres of influence in the locations where they minister.

Church Ethics for a Morally Diverse World

Moral diversity occasions conflicts which ecclesial institutions need or simply choose to address, yet there is dearth of scholarship on Catholic Church ethics and on moral diversity. When confronting moral diversity, the institutional Catholic Church tends to prioritize concerns about cooperation with evil, moral confusion, and scandal. These concerns can express genuine love for neighbors, but they can also forego opportunities for deeper engagement, witness, and formation. An ethics of the institutional Church needs to work through such distinctions, connect them to institutional policies, positions, and procedures, and foster moral maturity, prudence, and solidarity in our ecclesial communities and beyond.

The Jesuitesses in the Bookshop: Catholic Lay Sisters’ Participation in the Dutch Book Trade, 1650–1750

The institutional Catholic Church in seventeenth-century Amsterdam relied on the work of inspired women who lived under an informal religious rule and called themselves ‘spiritual daughters’. Once the States of Holland banned all public exercise of Catholicism, spiritual daughters leveraged the ambiguity of their religious status to pursue unique roles in their communities as catechists, booksellers and enthusiastic consumers of print. However, their lack of a formal order caused consternation among their Catholic confessors. It also disturbed Reformed authorities in their communities, who branded them ‘Jesuitesses’. Whilst many scholars have documented this tension between inspired daughter and institutional critique, it has yet to be contextualized fully within the literary culture of the Dutch Republic. This article suggests that due to the de-institutionalized status of the spiritual daughters and the discursive print culture that surrounded them, public criticism replaced direct censure by Catholic and Reformed authorities as the primary impediment to their inspired work.

Gossip and godly work: devotional labour and cartographies of care in Spain

This article explores gossip exchange as a cartographic practice concomitant to women’s devotional labour. The research is based on ethnographic work done in rural Spain in 2018. The article occupies an intersecting place among the geographies of religion, labour and gender, extending current literature on the place of women in Christianity by exploring how their devotional labour allows for the creation of particular local and communal knowledges. In particular, I detail forms of epistemic mapping deployed through gossip and gossip exchange which work in parallel (sometimes against) the male-centred institutional Catholic Church. These tensions provide a context for the scholarly interventions that this article presents: the possibility of knowledge-making processes in a religious habitus through women-centred cartographic rituals.

Charismatic Catholic Renewal in Bougainville: Revisiting the power of Marian devotion as a cultural and socio‐political force

AbstractThis article explores the interplay between culture and Christianity by detailing the history, experience, and impact of the Charismatic Catholic Renewal in the Autonomous Region of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea (PNG). In 1985, the PNG Catholic Bishops' Conference approved the charismatic movement as one of the authentic movements for spiritual renewal of the Catholic Church in PNG. However, the conference stressed this renewal not to be made independent or outside of the Church. In this article I discuss how in Bougainville the Catholic Charismatic Renewal (CCR) has been predominantly operating ‘outside’ the institutional Catholic Church, drawing upon both Catholic and cultural logics to mobilise devotees across Bougainville towards renewal and political change. In particular, I will focus on various local Marian movements, elucidating the power and force of the CCR in contexts of Bougainville's civil war (1988–1998). In doing so, this paper will explore what Catholicism and CCR may contribute to discussions about the positioning of culture within Christianity, at the same time showing how charismatic Marian devotion invites reassessment of recent prevailing discussions on cultural ‘continuity’ versus ‘rupture’, as well as doctrinal boundaries held so dearly by the CCR and the Roman Catholic Church in general.

The Catholic Church in Ireland Today

Studies • volume 106 • number 421 9 The Catholic Church in Ireland Today The Catholic Church in Ireland Today1 Gerry O’Hanlon SJ In the middle of summer 2016, commenting on a controversy surrounding Ireland’s national seminary, St Patrick’s College Maynooth, the country’s leading broadsheet, The Irish Times, had this to say in an editorial: The Maynooth controversy would once have given rise to major public disquiet. That it no longer does so reflects the Church’s recent history. Many Catholics have long since abandoned the institution – its princes, priests and politics – and are choosing to interpret the faith according to their own conscience.2 Coincidentally, earlier in the same year, an academic study in the field of the sociology of religion was published with the title Transforming PostCatholic Ireland.3 The author, Gladys Ganiel, in explaining her choice of title, refers explicitly to an article written by Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin in 2013 titled ‘A post-Catholic Ireland?: Renewing the Irish Church from within’.4 Ganiel defines a post-Catholic Ireland in terms of ‘a shift in consciousness in which the Catholic Church, as an institution, is no longer held in high esteem by most of the population and can no longer expect to exert a monopoly influence in social and political life’.5 She argues that the future of faith in Ireland will depend on the development of ‘extra-institutional’ forms of religious expression (religion practised outside or in addition to the institutional Catholic Church).6 Her analysis ties in with the frequently observed characteristic of modern Catholicism in Ireland – and indeed further afield – as becoming individualised and de-institutionalised. With the new emphasis on personal conscience as opposed to magisterial teaching, this is sometimes referred to as the ‘Protestantisation’of the Catholic Church in Ireland. Dr Martin himself has spoken and written frequently about the crisis confronting the Irish Catholic Church, warning that it ran the risk of becoming an ‘irrelevant minority culture’.7 I propose in what follows to describe briefly some of the background to this crisis and then to suggest some ways forward. 10 Studies • volume 106 • number 421 Gerry O’Hanlon SJ Background to the crisis ThetraditionalCatholicismwhichisnowbeingsupersededinIrelandhadmany distinguishing features.8 It was a defining characteristic of Irish nationalism and identity, with ‘a monopoly on the Irish religious market’, a strong relationship with state power, elevating the status of cleric to extraordinary heights and emphasising the evils of sexual sin.9 This was Catholicism with high levels of religious practice, a stress on rule-keeping and sin, a strong ethos of sacrifice and delayed gratification, a familiarity with austerity and a hope for fulfilment in the after-life. It was characterised by a deep popular devotion featuring the likes of the rosary, benediction, sodalities, indulgences and processions. It provided comfort and fuelled the spiritual and ethical imaginations of its adherents, and had a deeply committed, global missionary outreach. However, its un- and even anti-intellectual nature meant that it was ill-prepared for the challenges posed by a late-emerging modernity in Ireland. It was a religion in which the voice of the priest, the bishop, and the Pope could rely on its formal authority to get a serious hearing, not just from the faithful, but also from the politician. A paternalistic ethos reigned and was almost universally accepted. Apart from the popular devotion already mentioned, this was Catholicism deeply institutional in form, dependent on a type of clericalism which was vulnerable to a more critical culture. From the 1960s onwards this more critical culture emerged in Ireland. The influence of television and other media, economic development and increased urbanisation, foreign travel, EEC membership and enhanced educational opportunities all conspired to open Ireland up to the waves of critical questioning and secularisation already well advanced in many other parts of Europe. Internally, the Church was at best lukewarm in its reception of the Second Vatican Council – there was liturgical change which was received for the most part positively, some increased lay involvement, not least in various episcopal commissions established in the wake of the Council, and a real energy around some issues of social justice (not least in the establishment of...

A Ritual Interrupted: A Case of Contested Ritual Practices in a Q’eqchi’-Maya Catholic Parish

Although Q’eqchi’-Maya Mainstream Catholics and Charismatic Catholics in the Guatemala highlands share many of the same physical and social spaces, the relationship between them is a tense one due to their differing modes of ritual practice. Although this conflict rarely comes to a head directly, on one particular occasion a highly ranked member of a Mainstream congregation, and indeed an outspoken critic of the Charismatics, entered the village chapel during the latter’s weekly service and proceeded openly to criticize their ritual practices, leaders’ religious knowledge, and relationship to the larger institutional Catholic Church. This article analyzes this event as a means of furthering our understanding of what happens when unexpected circumstances threaten the integrity of a religious group’s ritual. How do participants try to circumvent, mitigate or otherwise manage such an occurrence? Examining the spoken and embodied actions taken by both the speaker criticizing the congregation and his intended audience sheds light on the interactive strategies each used to manage their social and ethical standing during the uneasy interaction. This article draws critical attention to the way adherents to two related but distinct forms of Christianity establish and contest their modes of religious authority through language, discourse, and bodily behavior. By investigating an episode in which two modes of Christian practice came into direct confrontation with each other, we can better understand how differing ways of being Christian are dialogically constituted.

Beyond Parish Boundaries: Black Catholics and the Quest for Racial Justice

Abstract According to most historians, the majority of northern urban Catholics before Vatican II (1962–1965) were ensconced in their parish boundaries, viewing their existence through the lens of the parish and focusing the majority of their attention on matters within their particular geographic location. As African Americans moved north during the Great Migration (1910s–1960s) and the racial dynamics of cities changed, some black Catholics began to organize for what they called “interracial justice,” a term that reflected their belief that black equality would benefit African Americans and whites. This article argues that the parish boundaries paradigm for understanding Catholicism prior to the reforms of Vatican II fails to account for the efforts of black Catholics working for interracial justice. This article considers four ways black Catholic interracialists moved beyond their parish boundaries: (a) the national networks they cultivated with white priests; (b) the theological doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ they used to support their work; (c) the local relationships they developed with non-Catholics; and (d) the connections they made with young white Catholics. By advancing this argument, this essay highlights the relationship between race and religion—both how the institutional Catholic church reinforced racial hierarchies and how black Catholics leveraged their faith to tear them down. Finally, this article reorients the history of Catholic interracialism by focusing on black laypeople and connects two bodies of literature that rarely comment on one another: that of Catholicism and the long civil rights movement.

Foreword

Foreword Kristin Norget and Catherine C. LeGrand When we as LARR associate editors learned of the proposal of Jeffrey Rubin, David Smilde, and Benjamin Junge for this special issue, we were eager to be involved. Representing the journal, we had the great pleasure to attend meetings in Boston in 2011 and 2012 of this important new research initiative, initially titled “Religion, Social Movements, and Progressive Reform in Latin America,” where we heard many stimulating papers from a diverse range of scholars working in Latin America and the United States. At each meeting the group of presenters was never the same, which made for much exciting cross-fertilization of thinking in efforts to work through these themes, with stimulating and lively discussions moving from conference venues to restaurants and spilling out later onto the sidewalks of Boston. As our gracious host and the main convener of the meetings, Jeff Rubin skillfully wove together disparate views and approaches, moving toward the common threads that you see highlighted in this volume: zones of crisis, the day-to-day experience of religion, and citizenship. Each of the papers configures these themes in a unique way, demonstrating the undeniable centrality of religion as an inspiration and shaper of subjectivities, personal and public action, and engagement with politics in diverse settings across the Americas. This collection is salutary in many respects. First, it is an attempt to take religion seriously not as an incidental, peripheral element but as a determinative, significant force in analyses of social and political change. In recent decades alone, post-neoliberal Latin America and the Americas as a whole have witnessed the explosion of Pentecostalist Christianity; the apparent waning of liberation theology concurrent with the ascent of a more mediatized, charismatic, and arguably more conservative institutional Catholic Church; and the growing recognition of indigenous cosmogonies and ontologies as reflecting alternative knowledges that can no longer be ignored. How can we see these phenomena, and other expressions of religion, situated within contexts of environmental threat and worsening social inequalities, drug-related and other forms of violence, the emergence of left-oriented regimes in some parts of South America, new attempts at participatory citizenship, and mass migration across national borders? In other words, how do religious forms mediate everyday experience? How are these mediations particular to the region’s history, and how might they be seen as part of other, more encompassing transnational or even global processes or patterns? Second, this issue attempts to address multiple facets of social change and religion in the Americas in an interdisciplinary framework. Such a task poses many challenges, not least because many researchers have harbored a knee-jerk [End Page 3] suspicion or otherwise limited view of religion, including Latin Americans trained within the legacy of Jacobinic, Enlightenment mind-sets that are so deeply inscribed in many nationalist imaginaries and discourses. Due to the customary division of labor in the academic world in Latin America and beyond, in which “religion” was understood as an easily separable realm of everyday life that had little impact on politics and social change (at least in ways that mattered), many scholars trained in the social sciences never had to think about religion. And those who did so were dependent in their interpretations or analyses on categories and frameworks that often worked to perpetuate the sequestering of religion from the realm of the everyday—the same realm where politics begins. Taking religion seriously then means having to hone new conceptual tools and vocabularies and treading into theoretical territory that may feel completely unfamiliar and even uncomfortable. One of the goals of this issue’s editors is to show scholars of Latin America how they can incorporate religion in their research without having to become scholars of religion themselves. This contribution alone is a vital one. Overall, this issue demonstrates that we cannot see religion as limited to readily identifiable institutions or churches, and also that religion is not necessarily a conservative, traditional force, as is often assumed. As several of the essays suggest, and as certain scholars have argued for some time (e.g., Flores Galindo 1986; Lancaster 1988; Costa 1994; Pessar 2004), there is something intrinsically creative about religious imaginaries and...

Cuerpo y blasfemia en Cataluña (siglos XV-XVIII)

The profanity was a social practice which enjoyed a strong vitality from a vast number of people in the cultural framework of the Old Regime Catalonia. Anthropomorphic profanity –verbal and gestural- focused to vilify God bodily organs, and so the rest of the christian pantheon of celestial figures, occupy a privileged position within the transgressive people’s vocabulary. Living expressions of popular religious sacredness that openly violates christian orthodoxy and that institutional catholic Church will proceed to devaluate until its complete disappearance in its strategic program of catholic moral discipline started in the late Middle Ages.

The Institutional Catholic Church in Poland on European Integration

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Duchowieństwo rzymskokatolickie i katolicyzm płaszczyznami sporu o powstanie styczniowe w polskiej historiografii w latach 1863–1918

The Roman Catholic Clergy and Catholicism as a Topic for a Controversy about the January Uprising in Polish Historiography 1863–1918The author’s intention is to demonstrate the complex historiographical discussion about the stance of the Catholic clergy and the involvement of the institutional Catholic Church in the January Uprising as well as the national movement preceding the insurrection. The discussion was composed of two distinct motifs – an apology of the participation of the clergy in the uprising and its criticism. This division reflected rifts in the analysed debate held by historians and publicists. The historiography of the January Uprising was intensely polemical. The text analysing the nineteenth-century debate refers also to recent findings made by historiography examining the presence of the clergy in the 1863 rising. The apologetic current presented a wide spectrum of views based on exalted Romantic Catholicism (e.g. Stefan Buszczyński or Jan Stella-Sawicki). The support offered by the Church to the insurrection and the participation of the clergy was also defended in a more disciplined and intellectually cohesive manner (e.g. Kazimierz Gregorowicz). At the same time, historians often regarded the interests pursued by the national community and political Catholicism as identical. The most outstanding participants of the discussion were Walery Przyborowski and Stanisław Koźmian, with the latter defending religion against its politicalisation and arguing that religion, conceived as the domain of the sacrum, should not be applied for even such lofty proposes as the struggle for independence since it turns into its own contradiction.

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Religious Environmentalism in the West

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Religious Environmentalism in the West

'Suing the Pope' and Scandalising the People: Irish Attitudes to Sexual Abuse by Clergy Pre- and Post-Screening of a Critical Documentary

THE SEXUAL ABUSE OF children became a significant public issue in Ireland in the s, with frequent media reports about the issue. In the main these focused on the issue of abuse of children by members of the clergy and religious orders. Headline cases included the abuse perpetrated by Fr Brendan Smyth, a priest of a religious order who was convicted of multiple counts of sexual abuse of children and subsequently died in prison, and Fr Sean Fortune, a diocesan priest, who committed suicide before his court trial for abuse. While child sexual abuse by clergy was widely exposed in the early s, a subsequent additional scandal was the failure of the institutional Catholic Church to respond adequately to earlier complaints of abuse, and, in particular, to respond adequately to those who experienced abuse. As part of its response to the problem, the Irish Catholic bishops commissioned an independent research agency – the Health Services Research Centre (HSRC) at the Department of Psychology, Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI) – to undertake a programme of research on its behalf. Part of the remit to the research group was to examine the effects on the general public of child sex abuse by clergy. This was done by means of a national telephone survey (N=,), full details of which are reported elsewhere (Goode, McGee & O’Boyle, ). The survey itself took four months to complete. About half-way through the data collection period in , the main UK public service television channel (BBC) screened a documentary entitled ‘Suing the Pope’ which dealt in detail with complaints made to Church authorities about Sean Fortune and the alleged subsequent mishandling of those complaints. This programme was reported in some detail in the Irish media before its showing, and had a high number of Irish viewers since UK channels are accessible in Ireland. The documentary was also reported extensively in other media after screening and was subsequently re-shown on Irish public service channel RTE. The first TV screening provided a point of differentiation within the survey, with some  participants having responded before the screening and  afterwards. It

The Intellectual Origins of Popular Catholicism: Catholic Moral Theology in the Age of Enlightenment

I. Introduction: Catholic Enlightenment and Popular Catholicism One of greatest paradoxes of modern Catholic history is that a seemingly moribund Old Regime Church gave way to a broad-based popular Catholic revival in nineteenth century. How can this reinvigoration be accounted for? Miracles, of course, are always a possibility, but historians are required to look for more prosaic explanations. The Catholic revival has received a fair share of scholarly attention. As a multi-faceted phenomenon, scholars have focused on questions ranging from diocesan organization and clerical training, to in-depth studies on religious experience of common people. For all this interest in nineteenth-century Catholicism at local and popular level, however, it remains to be explained how Old Regime Church could accommodate its traditional distrust-when not outright repression-of popular religious practices, enabling popular Catholicism in fact to become one of key aspects of Church's political and social power. For all emphasis on nineteenth-century developments, then, it remains to be shown how Roman Catholicism in eighteenth century underwent a fundamental revision in its approach to popular religion. While it is certain that social, economic, and institutional factors had an important role in shaping of popular Catholicism, can it also be said that there were intellectual roots as well? The remainder of this article addresses this question by describing intellectual context of eighteenth-century revolution in Catholic moral theology that enabled institutional Church to align itself with practices of popular Catholicism. This essay also hopes to demonstrate that intellectual components of popular Catholicism must be understood on their own terms, and not merely reduced to social or political factors. I propose to demonstrate that new moral system outlined below overcame certain intellectual barriers that would otherwise have stood in way of Church's enthusiastic embrace of popular religious practices and attitudes.1 The central question of this essay, therefore, is how aristocratic-minded Church of Counter-Reformation adapted to social transformations of eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, to become, in words of Louis Châtellier, the religion of poor.2 Rather than seeing this new identity as a late reaction to changes of revolutionary era, I will suggest how its roots extend back into early eighteenth century, specifically to disputes over laxism, probabilism, and rigorism. Social historians like Châtellier have shown how, around eighteenth century, missionaries in Europe shifted their efforts away from trying to force peasants to completely abandon their so-called superstitious beliefs. Instead, missionaries embraced what they now accepted as genuine piety, and sought instead only to strengthen connections between popular piety and institutional Catholic Church. In my view, this shift in pastoral practice should be seen in concert with revolution in moral theology that-while not abandoning concept of original sin-downplayed strongly negative Augustinian condemnation of human nature and embraced a generally more optimistic view of human moral capability. The figure of Neapolitan moral theologian and founder of popular Redemptorist Congregation Alphonsus Maria di Liguori (1696-1787) stands at center of this transformation. Liguori not only authored one of most widely circulated tracts on Marian devotion-the queen of superstition to Enlightenment Christians and rational skeptics alike-the Glories of Mary. He also succeeded in elaborating a system of moral theology which postulated that in cases of doubt about existence of a moral law, human liberty was anterior to law.3 More clearly than others, Liguori overcame negative Augustinian view of human nature that had led Jansenists to follow their rigorist tendencies in moral theology. …

Interpretations of Church and State in Cuba, 1959-1961

Unrestrained excitement greeted Fidel Castro when he entered Havana on January 8, 1959. More than any other leader of the revolutionary forces, he personified Cuba's potential to become a progressive and democratic republic. Castro's immense popularity helped to overcome for a brief period the divisions over political philosophies and programs that soon fractured Cuban life. The Catholic Church stood at the center of the controversies that unfolded, for both what it did and did not do. Until recently, the Church one of the least studied aspects of the Cuban revolution, almost as if it were a voiceless part of Cuban society, an institution and faith that had little impact on the course of events. Beginning in the 1980's more extensive and serious analyses of the revolution began to appear, and for the most part these studies lacked the emotional charges and countercharges so common in revolutionary historiographies. Instead of attempting systematically to survey all of the literature, this essay selects works that represent the main interpretations of church-state relations. Among the many works available, those of Juan Clark and John M. Kirk deserve notice at the outset.1 Though their works differ in tone, focus, and interpretations, they are both essential for understanding the Church in Cuba. The following essay begins with a commentary on interpretations of the Church in Cuba in the 1950's, and then discusses church-state relations during the first years of the revolution, emphasizing the difficulty of understanding why events unfolded as they did. It concludes with an assessment of Castro's explanation of church-state relations, and the extent of the discrimination against the Church. I As students of Latin America long have recognized, generalizing about anything as institutionally, theologically, and historically complex as the Catholic Church is difficult. Recent scholarship on Cuba addresses this issue, and the best of the writing recognizes that the history of the Church is dynamic and full of contradictory tendencies. To view the Church as synchronic rather than diachronic is a mistake for most times and places in Latin America. The literature also recognizes that some historians overemphasize the importance of the Church, while others deemphasize it. The Church becomes the metaphor for all that is good and evil, all that is weak and powerful. The objective then is to come to a balanced appraisal, something difficult to do under the best of circumstances, and almost impossible in an ideologically charged atmosphere.2 Another difficulty is the relationship between formal religion and what is often described as popular or folk religion. Most studies of religion in Cuba refer to the institutional Catholic Church, not to the popular expression of religious beliefs. An exception is Damian J. Fernandez, who argues that widespread belief in different folk religions belies the notion that religion unimportant. Indeed, the revolutionary government created a political religion by using the symbols of traditional folk religions to further its objectives.3 Despite the problems, generalizations about the Church and religion do help to clarify the nature of the discourse abovit church and state. On the eve of the revolution, the Cuban Catholic Church small, ineffective, conservative, dominated by foreigners, confined to the major cities, and out of touch with the serious social and economic problems of the nation. This sentence, obviously a gross oversimplification, does summarize many interpretations that have become a part of the mainstream historiography on the Church. As an example, the Church was merely another feeble institution with only superficial strength. . . . Of the Spanish American people, then, the Cuban the least Catholic.4 This interpretation has even found its way into texts on world religions. In the very few lines devoted to Cuba in his fine survey of world religions, Michel Malherbe notes that well before the instauration of Fidel Castro's regime, Cuba the Latin American country where religious practice the weakest. …

Antisemitism and the Institutional Catholic Church

Abstract Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews, James Carroll (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), xii + 756 pp., $28.00. Under His Very Windows: The Vatican and the Holocaust in Italy, Susan Zuccotti (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), xi + 408 pp., $29.95. The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930–1965, Michael Phayer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), xviii + 301 pp., $29.95. The Popes Against the Jews: The Vatican's Role in the Rise of Modern Antisemitism, David Kertzer (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001), vii + 355 pp., $27.95.

Difficulties in co‐opting a complex sign: Our Lady of Guadalupe as a site of semiotic struggle and entanglement

The Cult of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the product of appropriations authored by both the Aztecs and the Roman Catholic Church, has served as a tool of empowerment, dominion, and accommodation. Central to this contested cult is an indigenous reinvention of the Virgin Mary that is simultaneously index, icon, and symbol. This study demonstrates the difficulties in attempting to selectively appropriate the desirable features of such a sign while excluding those deemed undesirable. In attempting to appropriate certain features of the Virgin it deemed desirable, the authors argue, the Church also annexed aspects of the Aztec religious tradition at odds with the teachings of Catholicism. While Catholicism's attempt to co‐opt this Virgin extended the influence of the institutional Catholic Church, the authors suggest, it also undermined the integrity of the faith the Church promotes by fostering a form of popular Catholicism contrary to the teachings and practices of orthodox Catholicism. This study is grounded in data obtained through interviews conducted with pilgrims in the vicinity of the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe immediately prior to, during, and after the Virgin's annual feastday (December 12). The authors also draw upon anthropological, historical, and religious studies scholarship to make sense of the pilgrims’ beliefs and place them within the broader historical and religious contexts in which they operate.

Participatory Democracy the Case of the Brazilian Ecclesial Base Communities: 1981-1991

AbstractIn the early stages of Brazil's democratisation, ecclesial base communities (CEBs) were regarded by liberation theologians as models for a participatory democracy. However, as democratisation advanced, this model became increasingly difficult to uphold. Reasons for this included differences among liberation theologians on how to approach the fact of political options presented by political parties, the increasing polarisation in the institutional Catholic Church which had previously supported the CEBs, and weaknesses within the CEBs themselves which effectively limited national political participation.