Supernaturalised culture: catholic attitudes and latin lands 1840–60

1975 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 309-323 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sheridan Gilley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Religious Experience ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Mystical Experience ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
Christian Mysticism ◽  
Sudden Appearance ◽  
Mystical Theology

There is still a remarkable book to be written about a phenomenon as yet little recognised or understood: the sudden appearance in England of a serious and scholarly interest in religious experience as a subject worthy of study in itself, at the beginning of the twentieth century. Possibly the two best-known landmarks of the movement were William James’s Gifford Lectures and dean Inge’s Christian Mysticism, which popularised mystical theology beyond the circles to which it had been for the most part confined, within the roman catholic church. Dean Inge had many harsh words for the popish mysticism associated with monasticism, and pervaded by an easy familiarity with the ‘supernatural suspensions of physical law’ of roman catholic hagiography. He passed these strictures on French and Belgian treatises and seminary textbooks, but he might have found materials as outrageous in English, in the writings of the mid-nineteenth century ultramontanes who had striven to reproduce in native dress the religious forms of Italy, France and Spain, and to recreate in England a foreign and professedly ‘supernatural’ culture which accepted mystical experience as an ordinary fact of life.

Two Autobiographical Narratives of Conversion: Robert Hugh Benson and Ronald Knox

1998 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-253
Author(s):  
George Marshall
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
Autobiographical Narratives ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Church

Ever since the Reformation, and increasingly since the example set by Newman, the Church of England has had to contend with the lure of Rome; in every generation there have been clergymen who converted to the Roman Catholic Church, a group either statistically insignificant or a momentous sign of the future, depending on one’s viewpoint. From the nineteenth century Newman and Manning stand out. From the first two decades of the twentieth century among the figures best remembered are Robert Hugh Benson (1871–1914) and Ronald Arbuthnot Knox (1888–1957). They are remembered, not because they were more saintly or more scholarly than others, but because they were both writers and therefore are responsible for their own memorials. What is more, they both followed Newman in publishing an account of the circumstances of their conversion. This is a genre which continues to hold interest. The two works demonstrate, among other things, the continuing influence of Newman’s writings about the identity of the Church.

Newman's Early Roman Catholic Legacy, 1845-1854

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. Michael Shea
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
John Henry Newman ◽  
Christian Doctrine ◽  
European Continent ◽  
The Past ◽  
Immaculate Conception ◽  
Over Time

For the past several decades, scholars have stressed that the genius of John Henry Newman remained underappreciated among his Roman Catholic contemporaries, and in order to find the true impact of his work, one must look to the century after his death. This book takes direct aim at that assumption. Examining a host of overlooked evidence from England and the European continent, Newman’s Early Legacy tracks letters, recorded conversations, and obscure and unpublished theological exchanges to show how Newman’s 1845 Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine influenced a cadre of Catholic teachers, writers, and Church authorities in nineteenth-century Rome. The book explores how these individuals then employed Newman’s theory of development to argue for the definability of the new dogma of the Immaculate Conception of Mary during the years preceding the doctrine’s promulgation in 1854. Through numerous twists and turns, the narrative traces how the theory of development became a factor in determining the very language that the Roman Catholic Church would use in referring to doctrinal change over time. In this way, Newman’s Early Legacy uncovers a key dimension of Newman’s significance in modern religious history.

scholarly journals Fraud and incompetence: Accounting in the Papal States (1831–1859)

2021 ◽  
pp. 103237322110036
Author(s):  
Valerio Antonelli ◽  
Stefano Coronella ◽  
Carolyn Cordery ◽  
Roberto Verona
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
Papal States

The Papal States was a longstanding nation ruled by the Pope, the Head of the Roman Catholic Church. Its accountants included priests and laymen who were employed as bureaucrats. Despite an expectation that the finances would be carefully managed, this research from the mid-nineteenth century shows that incompetence and fraud dogged the Papal States’ latter years, contributing to it losing most of its territory in the Second War of Italian Independence from 1859, and its final demise in 1870. This prosopography of three men who held high bureaucratic positions, analyses their approach to accounting in the Papal States. It shows that waste and deficient accounting arose from individuals undertaking fraud and from organisational (and individual) incompetence. In doing so, it elucidates how the Papal States could be a ‘vehicle for fraud’, and in particular, how it was used as a shield to enable both fraud and incompetence to go unpunished.

Anglicanism, Family Planning and Contraception: The Development of a Moral Teaching and its Ecumenical Implications

2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 147-169
Author(s):  
John Morgan
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Family Planning ◽  
Birth Control ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Moral Theology ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
Official Position ◽  
The Church

AbstractThis essay examines pressures and theological developments regarding sexuality and birth control within Anglicanism, as represented by statements from Lambeth Conferences and in discussions in the Church of England during the early to mid twentieth century, and notes some of the changes in ‘official’ position within US churches and especially The Episcopal Church. It offers comparison with the developments in moral theology within the Roman Catholic Church after 1930 and asks if, and by what means, the two Communions may come to agree on the specific issue of contraception.

scholarly journals ‘Artists Hidden from Human Gaze’: Visual Culture and Mysticism in the Nineteenth-Century Convent

2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 190-220
Author(s):  
Kate Jordan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Women Religious ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
Catholic Theology ◽  
Devotional Practices ◽  
Institutional Church

This article offers a reading of nineteenth-century Roman Catholic theology through the sacred art produced by and for women religious. The practices and devotions that the article explores, however, are not those that drew from the institutional Church but rather from the legacies of mysticism, many of which were shaped in women’s religious communities. Scholars have proposed that mysticism was stripped of its intellectual legitimacy and relegated to the margins of theology by post-Enlightenment rationalism, thereby consigning female religious experience to the politically impotent private sphere. The article suggests, however, that, although the literature of women’s mysticism entered a period of decline from the end of the Counter-Reformation, an authoritative female tradition, expressed in visual and material culture, continued into the nineteenth century and beyond. The art that emerged from convents reflected the increasing visibility of women in the Roman Catholic Church and the burgeoning of folkloric devotional practices and iconography. This article considers two paintings as evidence that, by the nineteenth century, the aporias1 of Christian theology were consciously articulated by women religious though the art that they made: works which, in turn, shaped the creed and culture of the institutional Church. In so doing, the article contributes to the growing body of scholarship on the material culture of religion.

The Roman Catholic Church and the Nineteenth-Century Irish Diaspora

1984 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 188-207 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sheridan Gilley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Roman Empire ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
The United States ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
Ecclesiastical History ◽  
Protestant Churches ◽  
Irish Catholics

Quite the most remarkable achievement of nineteenth-century Ireland was the creation of an international Catholic Church throughout the Celtic diaspora in the British Empire and North America. A true Irish empire beyond the seas, it was often compared in Hibernian self-congratulation to the monastic missions of the Dark Ages and was served by an Irish clergy and a host of religious orders who fostered a distinctively ‘ethnic’ or Irish Catholic expatriate culture, while often showing the higher values of the Catholic spiritual life. It is remarkable that there is no scholarly modern study of this international community now in process of dissolution, for it has given an incalculable strength to twentieth-century Roman Catholicism. Something of its dimensions and importance can, however, be glimpsed from a growing body of historical writing about Irish Catholicism in England and Scotland, the United States and Australia, as well as in Ireland itself. The American Republic and the white settler areas of the British Empire were to Irish Catholics what the Roman Empire had been to Jews and Christians, the alien organisms by which a faith was carried to the far corners of the earth. As a matter of institutional and ecclesiastical history, the subject is one in which the new nations were divided into dioceses and parishes, and provided with churches, convents, colleges, seminaries and schools. This was, moreover, achieved by no easy process, but in spite of endemic conflict within Irish Catholic communities, who were also opposed by Roman Catholics of other national traditions, by the expanding Protestant Churches and by a hostile Protestant or secular state.

Dealing With Development: The Protestant Reviews of John Henry Newman’s An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, 1845–7

2004 ◽  
Vol 38 ◽  
pp. 357-364
Author(s):  
Erik Sidenvall
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Testament ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
Christian Doctrine ◽  
Central Topic ◽  
The Future ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
The Impact

The greatness of John Henry Newman’s Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine has been acknowledged many times since it was first published in 1845. Its international repute was secured by the beginning of the twentieth century; for example, the future Archbishop of Uppsala, Nathan Söderblom, writing on the modernist movement, described it and its author in 1910 as ‘the most significant theological work, written by England’s foremost theologian, and together with Leo XIII, the most important man in the Roman Catholic Church during the last century’. This estimation is confirmed by the impact Newman’s book has had on twentieth-century theology. One recent observer has judged that it is ‘significant, less for its positive arguments … [than] for its method of approach to the whole problem of Christian doctrine in its relation to the New Testament’. In other words, Newman’s book touches on a central topic of modern theology.

The Royal Declaration Against Transubstantiation and the Struggle Against Religious Discrimination in the Early Twentieth Century

2011 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 555-572
Author(s):  
Joseph M. Fewster
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Religious Belief ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
Religious Discrimination ◽  
Bill Of Rights ◽  
House Of Commons ◽  
Parliamentary Debates ◽  
Catholic Faith

Historians have paid little attention to the controversy provoked when Edward VII, in conformity with the Bill of Rights (1689) and Act of Settlement (1701) made the ‘Declaration against Transubstantiation’ which grossly insulted the Roman Catholic faith. Angry protests by Catholics in England were replicated even more strongly throughout the empire and issues of constitutional importance were raised which remain alive to the present day. The records of the lengthy parliamentary debates on this matter between 1901 and 1910 show that despite lingering suspicion of the Roman Catholic Church, and determination that no one professing that faith should ever occupy the throne, most members of both houses regarded Catholics as loyal citizens who should no longer be affronted at the beginning of the sovereign's reign by language born of a bygone age. Even so, to devise a formula which while removing what gave offence could satisfy the diverse interests involved when the religious and political spheres impinged on each other proved extremely difficult. The difficulty was increased because a large proportion of the general public regarded the declaration as a vital safeguard to the Protestant succession to the throne which made politicians hesitant to tamper with what had become ‘woven into the very texture of religious belief and adhesion’ in the country. It is worthwhile, therefore, to examine the various attempts to deal with this ‘thorny and difficult question’, which finally led to a revised declaration being forced in great haste through the House of Commons amid loud protests at what was considered unprecedented procedure.

scholarly journals Beleef die Christelike teologie soos met die vorige eeuwending weer ’n paradigmaverandering?

2002 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
I.J.J. Spangenberg
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Paradigm Shift ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
Protestant Denominations ◽  
Critical Methods

Is Christian theology experiencing a paradigm shift as was the case at the end of the nineteenth century?Biblical scholarship experienced a major paradigm shift at the end of the nineteenth century. This shift had an enormous impact on the way in which the Bible was read and studied by scholars during the twentieth century. During the early stages, it affected primarily Protestant denominations and their doctrine of Scripture. The Roman Catholic Church, however, could not escape its influence. In 1943, biblical scholars in this tradition received permission from Pope Pius XII to use historical-critical methods in their study of the Bible. The results of this shift are only now impinging on theology in the broad sense and there are signs that Christian theology is heading for a new shift which is going to be just as radical as the previous one.

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