Position Of Catholics Research Articles

The origin and development of the national doctrine and its impact on changing the position of the Catholic Church from the Italian colonial policy at the turn of the twentieth century

Italian Nationalist Preserved uniting their efforts until the end of the 19 th Century , to Work toward urging Successive Italian governments to build the national Country of Italy . The study tackled the historical role of the political life in Italy starting with its unity, the origin of the national doctrine and its development, the position of the Catholic Church from the movement of modernity and the colonial movement, and the role of civil national movements. The research also tackled the role of universities in building modern national thought, Modern Catholic parties, and the role of the Italian press in influencing the position of Catholics in the adoption of national thought. The research also included a set of results and a list of sources and margins

Verschuivende verhoudingen : Religieuze systemen in plurale contexten

In this final contribution we start with a discussion of religious systems of law in a context that differs from the North West European context that has been the main point of focus in the other contributions: The United States of America where religion is still an important element in public discourse. We discuss the importance of the first amendment of the American constitution that includes both freedom from religious establishment and freedom of religious practices. The emergence of religious court systems in Jewish, Christian and Muslim communities can be seen as a way in which religious people decide to engage in arbitration with a religion-specific choice of law and choice of forum. In recent times, the specific position of Catholics in the United States is often discussed with reference to the appointment of judges in the higher courts, or to different forms of pro-life activism. The recent emergence of debates about the Mortara case in which Pope Pius IX refused to give back parental authority of a baptized Jewish child to his parents has rekindled several aspects of the tension between Catholic sacramental theology and principles of natural law concerning parental authority. Fifty years after the declaration Nostra aetate it is clear that the religious landscape is shifting and that Christians no longer hold the central place in interreligious relationships. Paying attention to new relationships between Jews and Muslims, and Jews and Hindus is one of the forms in which Catholic theology can become better aware of its own place in an age of decolonization.

The Papist Represented: Literature and the English Catholic Community, 1688–1791 by Geremy Carnes

BOOK REVIEWS 261 seven, “God’s Just Yoke: Power and Justice in Paradise Lost,” focus on the intertangling of politics, power, and divine justice in Paradise Lost, and are particularly relevant to recent debates surrounding Milton’s God. This God’s famous inconsistencies become more understandable as Chernaik locates them within Milton’s lifelong intellectual patterns, and bracingly argues for recognizing these inconsistencies as real, important, and irradicable. Chapter eight, “‘Tyrannie Must Be’: Milton and the Restoration,” is a masterful analysis of how Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes each explore Milton’s own Restoration plight of those “who seek to serve God in a hostile, unjust society” (181), seeing in Paradise Regained the admirable resistance of the faithful believer in an oppressive society, and in Samson Agonistes the “tragic freedom” (205) of the flawed and oppressed individual in a tyrannous world, where the promise of freedom and justice is providentially distant and delayed. In its comprehensive scope, focused analysis, and lucid engagement with Milton’s writings and intellectual contexts, Milton and the Burden of Freedom is a compelling and challenging book, showing us new aspects of Milton by striving to show us all of him, and refusing to compromise or simplify an irreducibly complicated and powerfully contradictory writer. Claire Falck Rowan University The Papist Represented: Literature and the English Catholic Community, 1688-1791 Geremy Carnes University of Delaware Press, 2017. xlviii + 213 pp. $95 hardback. Geremy Carnes’s The Papist Represented is a captivating read; an extremely insightful analysis of eighteenth-century literature and its synergy with Catholic discourse. This study brings back the lived experiences of past Catholics, inviting the reader to think about the community as a whole, as human and not solely a monolithic body of political activists, Jacobites, or rural gentry living in semi-feudal conditions. Instead, Carnes presents us with a people with fears, emotions, beliefs and, most of all, as a minority striving for acceptance. By comparing eighteenth-century political debate on the civil position of Catholics with the current position of women and LGBTQ communities, Carnes invites Catholic historians to revisit the Religion & Literature 262 relevance of their field. This work is truly thought-provoking. The author draws an interesting parallel with current events, stating that integration in the twenty-first century moved along similar lines as in the eighteenth, when after decades of debate and violence, major legal changes happened over just a few years (comparing the 11 years between the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1778 and the Catholic Relief Act of 1791 with the 2015 repeal of the American same-sex marriage ban of 2004). Carnes clarifies how literature provides an analysis of a changing society and of an evolving political climate with complex issues such as homophobia. The chapter on John Dryden focuses on the meaning and symbolism of the closet, a covert community forced to be discreet and worship privately, along the same lines with today’s gender minorities. In doing so, he challenges the idea of a community repressed and in solitude within a sheltered and intimate gathering, where select people share ideas and experiences. Politics aside, Carnes introduces the importance of literature in the mainstream political debate of the time. He rethinks the concept of modernity, particularly its nineteenth-century Whig construct of being a Protestant product, arguing that minorities were a part of that complex and diverse time. He challenges the narrative of Steve Pincus in 1688: The First Modern Revolution (2009) of the eighteenth century as a more secular era, reaffirming instead the role of religion in the secularisation process. He reflects on Catholics as part of the making of modern Britain and looks into their struggles to achieve their own rights, much like contemporary minorities whether racial, gender, or religious. Gender in particular plays a prominent role in the book where the narrative looks at the gendering of the community with female characters depicted as vulnerable, threatened, and condescending. Finally, it explores the identity crisis of Elizabeth Inchbald who expresses the feelings and frustrations of being both a Catholic and a woman. Throughout the book, Carnes contributes to rethinking the narrative of the English Catholic community with various works by Alexander Pope, John...

Religiosity, Spirituality, and God Concepts

Within a German sample ( N = 478), the current cross-sectional questionnaire study conducts interreligious and interdenominational comparisons between Catholics, Protestants, free-church Protestants, Bahá’ís, Muslims, Spiritualists, i.e., religiously unaffiliated persons who label themselves as “spiritual,” and religious/spiritual “nones.” The comparisons refer to self-ratings of religiosity and spirituality, centrality of religiosity, as assessed by the Centrality of Religiosity Scale, and God concepts. The study is largely exploratory in nature, but also aims at identifying contexts of faith in which the term “spiritual” is typically used as a self-description. The results show that only Spiritualists and free-church Protestants substantially label themselves as “spiritual.” However, they differ in many respects from each other, thus representing two distinct contexts of faith. The results further reveal a medium position of Catholics and Protestants in between the other subgroups, commonalities as well as specific differences between free-church Protestants, Bahá’ís, and Muslims, and some religious/spiritual approaches even within the “nones.”

John Henry Newman: Analogy, Image, and Reality

By apologetics one generally means the kind of intellectual apologetics that we find in Newman’s Development of Christian Doctrine, Apologia, and Grammar of Assent. But Newman was also the persuasive apologist of the imagination, particularly in his two novels and Difficulties of Anglicans and Present Position of Catholics. In Loss and Gain Newman takes his readers into a Catholic church to experience the reality of Catholic worship, an imaginative experience designed to impress upon their imagination the difference between a real and an unreal religion. In Difficulties of Anglicans he warns Anglo-Catholics against the misuse of the imagination when unguided by the reason. But the misuse does not take away the use, and he explains how important a part imagination had played in his own conversion to Rome. The analogies he presses on the imaginations of his Anglo-Catholic readers are nothing to the analogies he piles up in Present Position of Catholics, where the most vivid imagery in all his writings is to be found, as he employs shock tactics in his attempt to delete the anti-Catholic stain on the English Protestant imagination. And finally in Callista, Newman practically abandons his most famous apologetic argument from conscience for the existence of God in favour of a direct appeal to the imagination of the heroine, to her need for liberation from self-imprisonment, a liberation that she can only find in the image of an incarnate God.

Newman polémiste et satiriste

Newman is widely recognized in the English-speaking world as one of its great satirical authors (though it has to be admitted that his subtle irony sometimes escapes the translators of his work into other languages, notably French !). He admirably illustrates also that literary genre so prized by our Victorian ancestors, polemic. The source of these two characteristics is to be sought in the circumstances of the composition of most of his published works, namely the various struggles in which he participated throughout his long life. But irony, satire and his typically English form of self-deprecating humour also take on in Newman’s work a psychological and even a spiritual function.This article seeks to illustrate and to analyse these various features in four of his writings : The Tamworth Reading Room of 1840 ; Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics of 1851 ; Discourses on University Education of 1852 (which will become in 1873 the first part of The Idea of a University) ; and the Apologia pro vita sua, particularly in its now little known first edition of 1864 but also in the much revised version of 1865 which forms the basis of all subsequent editions.

Employment discrimination in Northern Ireland and the Good Friday Agreement

The paper analyses employment differences between Northern Ireland's Catholics and Protestants and examines whether the Good Friday Agreement signed in 1998 was followed by an improvement in the relative position of Catholics.

Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England. By John Henry Newman. Introduction and Notes by Andrew Nash. The Works of Cardinal John Henry Newman: Birmingham Oratory Millennium Edition, 1. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press; Leominster, England: Gracewing, 2000 (1851). xcv + 500 pages. $40.00. - Sermon Notes of John Henry Cardinal Newman 1849 – 1878.

Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England. By John Henry Newman. Introduction and Notes by Andrew Nash. The Works of Cardinal John Henry Newman: Birmingham Oratory Millennium Edition, 1. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press; Leominster, England: Gracewing, 2000 (1851). xcv + 500 pages. $40.00. - Sermon Notes of John Henry Cardinal Newman 1849 – 1878.

Some Aspects of Modern British Catholic Literature: Apologetic in the Novels of Josephine Ward

However strongly some authors may oppose the adjective ‘Catholic’ as limiting their vocation, a recognisable body of British Catholic literature does exist from the mid-nineteenth century. Its boundaries are not always easily definable since its origins are mixed. It was moulded initially by pre- and post-Emancipation renewals, the number and energy of the new converts from the Oxford Movement, the effects of Irish immigration, and the anti-Catholic rhetoric in both Protestant revivals and rising liberal secular thought. As a result British Catholicism formed a distinctive apologetic, which marked its literature from the beginning. Thus, Newman’s Loss and Gain: The Story of a Convert (1848) made the case for Catholicism against Elizabeth Harris’s novel, From Oxford to Rome, and in his Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics (1851) he defended the faith during the ‘Papal Aggression’ fury. Similarly, both Wiseman and Newman responded to anti-Catholic caricatures in Charles Kingsley’s Hypatia (1851) with their own fictional depictions of the early Church, Fabiola (1854) and Callista (1856) respectively.

The Homosexual and the Vatican: an American attempt at dialogue

Four years ago the contributors to Robert Nugent’s A Challenge to Love discussed the position of gay and lesbian Catholics in the Church in the aftermath of the 1975 Vatican declaration on sexual ethics. Now Sister Jeannine Gramick, co-founder with Father Nugent of New Ways Ministry, has co-edited with Pat Furey (a pseudonym used ‘for professional reasons’) The Vatican and Homosexuality. This is a collection of reactions to the Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons which the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued in October 19863. Of the nineteen participants in the earlier symposium, only Gramick and Nugent re-appear among the twenty-five leading Catholic educators, journalists, activists and officials who write in it.Gramick cites The Tablet as having called the document ‘violently hostile’, and The Month as having noted a failure to address ‘the reality of homosexuals in their living of Christian discipleship’ (p. 93). In the United States, the editors say, reactions were ‘as might have been expected, swift and strong’. One prominent Catholic and former Trappist monk writing in the Washington Post dismissed the letter as ‘homophobic rantings’. A more dispassionate and scholarly response came from the Archbishop of San Francisco, John R. Quinn: his article ‘Toward an understanding of the letter’, first published in America, is reprinted here.

Blanco White’s Evidence

In his Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England, published in 1851, John Henry Newman examined the evidence against Catholicism of two witnesses: Joseph Blanco White and Maria Monk. Of Blanco he could speak from his own experience. He was, he said, ‘a man of great talent, various erudition and many most attractive points of character… I admired him for the simplicity and openness of his character, the warmth of his affections, the range of his information, his power of conversation, and an intellect refined, elegant and accomplished. I loved him from witnessing the constant sufferings bodily and mental, of which he was the prey, and for his expatriation on account of his religion… He was certainly most bitter-minded and prejudiced against everything in and connected with the Catholic Church; it was nearly the only subject on which he could not brook opposition; but this did not interfere with the confidence I placed in his honour and truth’. Newman went on to contrast Blanco’s character with that of Maria Monk. ‘Whatever the one said was true, as often as he spoke to facts he had witnessed, and was not putting out opinions or generalising on evidence; whatever the other said was, or was likely to be, false… Yet the truth spoken against us by the man of character is forgotten, and the falsehood spoken against us by the unworthy woman lives’.

Robert Manning and Thomas Howlatt: English Catholic Printing in the Early Eighteenth Century

In seeking signs of vitality in the English Catholic Church of the early eighteenth century John Bossy notes first the publication of new books reformulating the position of Catholics in England, and also the growth of catechising, spearheaded by the introduction of several new editions of simplified catechisms. But he makes no mention of the problems, surely severe, which an underground organisation must face in printing and circulating its propaganda. The Church needed books rather than pamphlets or broadsheets, and the presses on which books were printed cannot have been either itinerant or easily hidden; rather, they would have needed the constant attendance of skilled compositors and pressmen, and a steady supply of bulky materials such as ink and paper.

The Position of Catholics in Social and Economic History

The subject of my paper, namely, the position of Catholics in the social and economic history of Scotland could, I suppose, be dismissed in a sentence. Catholics on the social and economic history of Scotland have no position. I am not aware of anything that has been done on these aspects o f Scottish history by any Catholic in Scotland. Indeed, if we add the other aspects of history to the list—ecclesiastical and political —there is little else to show. In church history we have Bellesheim's four volumes on the history of the Catholic Church in Scotland. And who was Bellesheim ? He was a canon of Cologne Cathedral who became interested in Scottish Catholic church history through his work on the archives at Rome. He brought out his four volumes on the history of the Catholic Church in Scotland in the 'eighties of last century and they were translated with additional notes by D o m Oswald Hunter Blair. But in the preparation of his book Bellesheim did no direct work over here. M u c h of his material was collected by correspondence and therefore, while the volumes are an example of German industry, they lack that intimate touch with the temper of ecclesiastical Scotland essential for the presentation of its Catholic history and to be achieved only by a Catholic reared in its atmosphere. Forty years ago Father William Forbes Leith o f the Society of Jesus edited two volumes of the Memoirs of Scottish Catholics during the iyth and 18th Centuries, and twenty years later we had Major M . V . Hay's edition o f The Blairs Papers, 1603-1660, and his brilliant Chain of Error in Scottish History. Apart from Mr. Peter Anson's Catholic Church in Modern Scotland and a very few pamphlets concerning the protagonists of the Counter-Reformation there is not, so far as I know, anything more to put against the vast array of Scottish eccles­ iastical history as written by Hill Burton, Hume, Lang, Cochran-Patrick, Mathieson, Kinloch, McCrie, Skelton, Muir, Maclean, Duke, Grub, Dowden, Lockhart, Cunningham, Mitchell and Hay Fleming. Even for our knowledge of Bishop Hay, Bishop Geddes and the Catholic vicarsapostolic of the post-Reformation period we are indebted to the Episco­ palian clergyman, J. F. S. Gordon, who edited in the 'sixties of last cen­ tury the four volumes of the Ecclesiastical Chronicle of Scotland. There may be work in progress, duly noted in the Bulletin of Historical Research, but we have no means of knowing from that periodical when the research student is pursuing his subject from the Catholic point of view. Any attempt to survey the field of Catholic endeavour, arising out of this week-end conference, will o f course remedy that weakness.

Trends of Catholic Thought on The Continent

Amidst the turmoils of the war, of which the Eternal City itself has become one of. the centres, the Holy Father has issued two Encyclicals devoted entirely to subjects interest in which is apparently confined to theologians. These are the Encyclical oh biblical studies and the earlier Mystici corporis Christi. The encouragement given through the first of these Encyclicals to the study of Holy Scripture is of the greatest significance with regard to countries which, in that respect, still labour under ideas formed during the Penal times. But what interest to these is the refutation of certain theological errors as given in the Encyclical Mystici Corporis? Where, in English Catholic literature, have the excesses of the liturgical movement or the exaggerations of the teaching on the mystical Body of Christ, referred to in that Encyclical, been advocated?The passages in which the Encyclical concerns itself with those errors clearly refer to the Continent, in particular to Central Europe. If we regard the spiritual position of German-speaking Catholics as one of the most important points in the reconstruction of Europe and its Christian tradition, those errors gain in topical significance. The history of Catholic theology and philosophy of the 19th century reveals two main influences. The one, mainly concerning philosophy and dogma, originated from the philosophical movement known as German idealism. Far from being confined to Germany, however, it comprised, in its very origin and foundation, at least France as well. It influenced not only German Catholics whose teachings the Church condemned, such as Hermes, Guenther, Frohschammer and in later years Schell, but also French and Italian thinkers including Lammenais, Bautain and Rosmini.

A United Front

In an admirable artide on the Spanish situation by the Dominican Father H. Munoz these words occur: ‘What Spain needed was an intelligent organizer who could coordinate all the disjointed elements into a united front against the destructive forces of irreligion and anarchy.’ On reading this it is impossible not to reflect that this is an echo of what many English Catholics have been saying about their own country for a long time.The present position of Catholics in England is not so very far removed from that of Catholics in Spain just before the revolution. Indifference and lack of organization sold the pass and allowed the forces of an anti-religious Socialism to seize power. And not till the Catholics of Spain found their diurches pillaged, convents burned, schools secularized, religious orders expelled and a sheaf of anti-Catholic laws on the statute book did they wake up to the realities of the situation and organize themselves into a force which now promises to be the salvation of Spain.In England, a generation of ever-increasing indifference in matters of faith and morals has enabled the anti-God propaganda of Moscow to make tremendous progress. The traditional Conservative and Protestant party, product of the Reformation, exists in a fog. In matters of faith and morals they simply do not know where they stand, having neither standards nor guidance. And from not knowing to not caring is but a short step.Liberalism no longer counts. The more extreme Liberals have gone over to Labour. A few have thrown in their lot with the Conservatives. The rest plough a lonely furrow in the wilderness.