Martin Luther’s Perspective on Political Life

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ralph Keen
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
The People ◽  
Two Kingdoms ◽  
Civil Government

Luther’s position on the duties of rulers to preserve social order and on the obligation of subjects to obey them for the sake of civil tranquility is scripturally grounded, principally in Romans 13:1–7, and presupposes an anthropology in which humans are so sinful as to need worldly government. The foundations of Luther’s thought about politics can be located in two sources: his doctrine of the Two Kingdoms and his understanding of the Pauline precept in Romans 13 to obey worldly authorities. Woven into each of these positions is a theological anthropology that holds that fallen humanity is too sinful to survive without divine aid. In the political realm, this aid takes the form of civil government; as a correlate, the authority of the church for Luther is limited to spiritual matters only and has no influence in the governance of the people. Luther’s defense of the social order and civil government set him in sharp opposition to the leaders of the Peasants’ War and led him to support the Protestant princes in their opposition to the Holy Roman Empire (founded on the spurious authority of the Roman Catholic Church in political affairs) after the 1530 Diet of Augsburg. In his defense of obedience to worldly powers and his grounds for justified resistance to impious rule, Luther left a seemingly ambiguous legacy that manifested itself after his death in a division over advocates of obedience to a conciliatory ruler (who wished to reintroduce elements of Roman worship) and purists who insisted that such obedience was a violation of Luther’s intention.

The Aggiornamento Phenomenon and the Second Vatican Council

2020 ◽  
pp. 98-105
Author(s):  
Hiermonk Ioann ( Bulyko) ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
Second Vatican Council ◽  
Church Fathers ◽  
John Xxiii ◽  
The People ◽  
Vatican Council ◽  
Pope John Xxiii ◽  
The Church

The Second Vatican Council was a unique event in the history of the Roman Catholic Church. Initiated by Pope John XXIII, it was intended to make the Roman Catholic Church more open to the contemporary society and bring it closer to the people. The principal aim of the council was the so called aggiornamento (updating). The phenomenon of updating the ecclesiastical life consisted in the following: on the one hand, modernization of the life of the Church and closer relations with the secular world; on the other hand, preserving all the traditions upon which the ecclesiastical life was founded. Hence in the Council’s documents we find another, French word ressourcement meaning ‘return to the origins’ based on the Holy Scripture and the works of the Church Fathers. The aggiornamento phenomenon emerged during the Second Vatican Council due to the movement within the Catholic Church called nouvelle theologie (French for “new theology”). Its representatives advanced the ideas that became fundamental in the Council’s decisions. The nouvelle theologie was often associated with modernism as some of the ideas of its representatives seemed to be very similar to those of modernism. However, what made the greatest difference between the two movements was their attitude towards the tradition. For the nouvelle theologie it was very important to revive Christianity in its initial version, hence their striving for returning to the sources, for the oecumenical movement, for better relations with non-Catholics and for liturgical renewal. All these ideas can be traced in the documents of the Second Vatican Council, and all this is characterized by the word aggiornamento.

Roman Catholic Church in the political life of modern Poland

2021 ◽  
pp. 134-153
Author(s):  
Vadim V. Volobuev ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
Social Doctrine ◽  
The Social ◽  
Foreign Policies ◽  
Law And Justice ◽  
The Government ◽  
Doctrine Of The Church

The chapter describes the influence of the Roman Catholic Church on the domestic and foreign policies of Poland from the signing of the Treaty of May 1989 between the government and episcopate to the parliamentary elections of 2019. The author shows the interaction of the clergy and parties sharing the social doctrine of the church, in particular the Law and Justice Party, and the role of the personality and views of John Paul II in current Polish politics. Finally, the author considers the disputes and conflicts within Polish Catholicism.

scholarly journals Roman Catholic Ecclesiology from the Council of Trent to Vatican II and Beyond

2018 ◽  
pp. 262-292
Author(s):  
Ormond Rush
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Vatican Ii ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
Second Vatican Council ◽  
Council Of Trent ◽  
People Of God ◽  
The People ◽  
Vatican Council ◽  
The Church

For 400 years after the Council of Trent, a juridical model of the church dominated Roman Catholicism. Shifts towards a broader ecclesiology began to emerge in the nineteenth century. Despite the attempts to repress any deviations from the official theology after the crisis of Roman Catholic Modernism in the early twentieth century, various renewal movements, known as ressourcement, in the decades between the world wars brought forth a period of rich ecclesiological research, with emphasis given to notions such as the Mystical Body, the People of God, the church as mystery, as sacrament, and as communio. The Second Vatican Council incorporated many of these developments into its vision for renewal and reform of the Roman Catholic Church. Over half a century after Vatican II, a new phase in its reception is emerging with the pontificate of Pope Francis.

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.

scholarly journals Church Growth in Times of Secularization: A Case Study of People Joining Evangelical Congregations in the Netherlands

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Vermeer ◽  
Peer Scheepers
Keyword(s):  
The Netherlands ◽  
Church Growth ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Religious Orientation ◽  
Religious Affiliation ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
Protestant Churches ◽  
The People ◽  
The One

AbstractBackground: Today the Dutch religious landscape is characterized by two opposite trends. On the one hand, there is a massive and dominant trend of religious disaffiliation which mostly affects the Roman Catholic Church and the mainline Protestant churches, while on the other hand the Netherlands also witnesses the emergence of several independent, evangelical congregations of near megachurch size. Purpose: Against the background of these opposite trends, this paper focuses on the second trend and tries to explain why some people join an evangelical congregation. Methods: For this purpose, quantitative data gathered among the audiences of six thriving evangelical congregations are analyzed in view of the following research questions: (1) What was the previous religious affiliation of the people who switched or converted to one of the six participating evangelical congregations? and (2) Which factors induced the switch or conversion to these congregations? Results: Results of bivariate and multivariate analyses show that these congregations attract both mainline and orthodox Protestant switchers as well as a significant number of secular converts, whose decision to join these evangelical congregations is induced by early socialization experiences, their intrinsic religious orientation and the switching of their partner. Closer scrutiny into the background of the apparent secular converts reveals, however, that several of these converts are probably re-affiliates. Although these secular converts indicated to be a religious none in their early teens, their conversion to evangelicalism is in part still induced by certain, early religious socialization experiences. Conclusions and Implications: This insight puts the alleged success of these evangelical congregations in more perspective. It shows that their success is more a matter of circulating, religious believers and not so much a matter of successfully reaching out to the unchurched. In all likelihood, then, thriving evangelical congregations will remain an exception in secular societies like the Netherlands and evangelical church growth in no way marks a break with the ongoing trend of religious disaffiliation.

Epilogue

2021 ◽  
pp. 233-236
Author(s):  
Kathryn Dickason
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
The People

During a 2007 conference on the liturgy and the sacraments, Francis Arinze, a Cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church, was asked about the role of dance in the Mass. Cardinal Arinze answered that “dance should not enter the liturgy at all.” And, he continued, “the people discussing liturgical dance should spend that time saying the rosary. . . . We have already enough problems. Why banalize more? Why desacralize more?”...

The Church and Contemporary Slovene History

1993 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-80 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zdenko Roter
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Social Conditions ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
World War ◽  
European Public ◽  
The Church

In the eyes of the European public, Slovenia is still considered a Catholic country. Since before the last World War, this has had a double meaning. First of all, the Roman Catholic Church has been the leading ecclesiastical institution since the Christianization of the territory settled by Slovenes, decisively influencing the constitution of the cultural and political life of the Slovene nation, as well as its character. In spite of changed social conditions and its fate in the period of “real-socialist” rule from 1945 to 1990, the Church has preserved this role to the present time, although in different forms.

Parsons, Priests, and the People: The Rise of Irish Anti-Clericalism 1785–1789

1962 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-163 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. E. Burns
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
Religious Practices ◽  
Religious Institutions ◽  
Missed Opportunities ◽  
Catholic Clergy ◽  
The People ◽  
Self Interest

During the eighteenth century the major problem confronting the leaders of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland was that of survival. Throughout most of the century the Irish Catholic clergy had to live and work under a code of laws designed to destroy the ecclesiastical organization of their church and, thereby, to end Catholic religious observances in Ireland. In their effects, however, the Popery laws failed their purpose. Ireland was not transformed into a state, “Protestant and past all danger of relapsing again into Popery.” In all of their respective parts, the laws against priests were impossible to enforce, perhaps never even meant to be enforced. Although the laws were sufficiently enforced to affect profoundly Catholic religious institutions and religious practices, Ireland's Catholic environment was never destroyed and never replaced by a Protestant one. The Irish language, divisions among Protestants, self-interest, jobbery, politics, missed opportunities, and stupidity combined to prevent rigorous enforcement of the laws and to frustrate the missionary and educational schemes planned by the leaders of the Established Church.

Mathematics teaching in Scotland today

2003 ◽  
Vol 87 (509) ◽  
pp. 250-266
Author(s):  
Chris Pritchard
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
School Education ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
The People ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
The City ◽  
State Schools ◽  
Scottish Executive

Home to just over five million souls, Scotland is the most sparsely populated part of Britain. The people are overwhelmingly white (some 98.7%) and English speaking. Levels of deprivation vary considerably across the country as a whole. Some 20% of the school population was entitled to free school meals in 1995, though the figure was twice as high in the City of Glasgow, where life expectancy is 10 years below that of affluent parts of the south of England. In July 1997 proposals were presented for the creation of a Scottish parliament. Whilst the Westminster parliament would ‘remain sovereign’, many powers would be devolved to Edinburgh, including those relating to virtually every aspect of education. So today, the Scottish Executive Education Department (or SEED) administers Scottish Executive policy for pre-school and school education in co-operation with local authorities that are responsible for providing school education in their areas. No less than 96% of youngsters are educated in state schools. Schools associated with religious groups including the Roman Catholic Church were incorporated into the state system in the 1920s. The annual cost of running the whole education system is a little under £5 billion or some 9% of Scottish GDP [1, p. 17].

scholarly journals Poland: A Dark Side of Church Cultural Policy

Studia Humana ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 13-22
Author(s):  
Konrad Szocik ◽  
Aneta Szyja
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Cultural Policy ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
Dark Side ◽  
Cultural Policies ◽  
Polish Society ◽  
Specific Outcome ◽  
The One

Abstract The cultural policy of the Roman Catholic Church in Poland is incorporated into state-run cultural policies. The organs of public authority enforce the objectives of Church regardless of Church’s actual ability to influence the society. It should be pointed out that the secularization of religion in Poland is frequently misinterpreted and usually equated with its deprivatization. It is worth mentioning that Catholicism is the dominant religion of the country and the Roman Catholic Church has hold a special position in Poland and play a major role in the country’s social and political life. In practice, however, Polish society appears to be religiously indifferent. This paper proves that the official, state-run cultural policy in Poland is based on favoritism of the Roman Catholic Church, regardless of Church’s actual ability to wield influence on society. Thus, there is a variety of implicit and explicit cultural policies implemented by the authorities to support Church. This work also aims at addressing the question of social attitudes to women, especially the one concerning the UN and EU law embracing women’s rights, until recently still not implemented in Poland. This paper further explores some peculiarities of this topic as an example of a specific outcome of Church cultural policy and its impact on both the past and present-day society.

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