Feudal Privilege in Education

2021 ◽  
pp. 124-141
Author(s):  
Tom O’Donoghue ◽  
Judith Harford
Keyword(s):  
School Principals ◽  
Religious Formation ◽  
Catholic Schooling ◽  
The Church

The concern in this chapter is with how the Church constructed the religious as teachers and as school principals, with memories of how they concurrently constructed themselves. An informing assumption is that one needs to consider these matters to arrive at an appreciation of how the religious were able to operate to pursue the Church’s interests in the classroom. Notwithstanding the nature of their religious formation and the rules that governed their lives, members of the teaching religious were not automatons in their approach to their teaching. If they had been so, then Catholic schooling could possibly have collapsed since the teaching religious would have been unable to respond to challenges, to change, and to demands of them by their superiors. While ‘religious formation’ was very much designed to produce very rigid and largely unbending individuals, the teaching religious were able to execute a certain amount of agency and be leaders even if contained within the structures of the life they lived.

Charlemagne as a Patron of Art

1992 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
pp. 43-77
Author(s):  
Henry Mayr-Harting
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Education ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Church Art ◽  
Catholic Schooling ◽  
The Church ◽  
Looking Back

The lesson that people hold radically differing views about church art is the harder to learn when one comes to it from the iconodul-istic side. Looking back on my own Roman Catholic schooling, and the place of statues and holy pictures in the religious devotions of that milieu, I realize that once sacramental awareness develops, it is not always easily confined to the matter of the theological sacraments themselves. The beheading of the statues in the Lady Chapel at Ely, which I visited at the age of eleven, seemed a shocking circumstance whose motivation was totally incomprehensible, even allowing for the fact that it was the work of Protestants, and the Old Testament, which might have brought the dawn of understanding, was, of course, no part of an ordinary Catholic education at that time. In short, the author of Charlemagne’s Libri Carolini would have found much upon which to make adverse comment in me, my fellows, and the monks who taught us. With the first artistic love of my student days, which was Romanesque sculpture, came an awareness of the voices and practice of those great medieval Protestants, the Cistercians. But only in the later encounter with Charlemagne was I forced to listen seriously to the moral and theological arguments against the unbridled use of figurai art in the service of the Church.

Transgender Policies and Catholic Schools

2019 ◽  
Vol 44 (9) ◽  
pp. 3-4
Author(s):  
Jozef Zalot ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Best Practices ◽  
Catholic Schools ◽  
School Principals ◽  
Gender Ideology ◽  
Catholic School ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Us ◽  
Social Trend ◽  
Practical Guidance ◽  
The Church

Over the past few years The National Catholic Bioethics Center (NCBC) has received numerous inquiries from Catholic school principals and superintendents asking for guidance on how they can (1) respond to gender ideology in their schools and (2) address the particular challenges that arise when a student (or parent) announces that he or she is transgender. In the absence of specific, practical guidance on these issues from the US bishops or the Church universal, these administrators are confused and often at a loss for what they should—and should not—do. The NCBC reviewed various Catholic school policies concerning transgenderism to identify best practices. The following list is neither complete nor exhaustive. Instead it is presented as a guide or framework for other schools to use in drafting their own policies in response to this powerful, but erroneous, social trend.

The Priest and the Elementary School in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century

2001 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 530-542
Author(s):  
John T. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Schools ◽  
Fund Raising ◽  
Day School ◽  
Select Committee ◽  
Government Grants ◽  
Irish Immigrants ◽  
Number Of Children ◽  
School Committee ◽  
Catholic Schooling ◽  
The Church

The Report of a Select Committee in 1835 gave the total of Catholic day schools in England as only 86, with the total for Scotland being 20. Catholic children had few opportunities for day school education. HMI Baptist Noel reported in 1840: ‘very few Protestant Dissenters and scarcely any Roman Catholics send their children to these [National] schools; which is little to be wondered at, since they conscientiously object to the repetition of the Church catechism, which is usually enforced upon all the scholars. Multitudes of Roman Catholic children, for whom some provision should be made, are consequently left in almost complete neglect, a prey to all the evils which follow profound ignorance and the want of early discipline.’ With the establishment of the lay dominated Catholic Institute of Great Britain in 1838 numbers rose to 236 in the following five years, although the number of children without Catholic schooling was still estimated to be 101,930. Lay control of Catholic schools diminished in the 1840s. In 1844, for example, Bishop George Brown of the Lancashire District in a Pastoral letter abolished all existing fund-raising for churches and schools and created his own district board which did not have a single lay member. The Catholic Poor School Committee was founded in 1847, with two laymen and eight clerics and the bishops requested that the Catholic Institute hand over all its educational monies to this new body and called for all future collections at parish level to be sent to it. Government grants were secured for Catholic schools for the first time in 1847. The great influx of Irish immigrants during the years of the potato famine (1845–8) increased the Catholic population and church leaders soon noted the great leakage among the poor. The only way to counteract this leakage was to educate the young under the care of the Church.

Danish Catechism in Action? Examining Religious Formation in and through Erik Pontoppidan'sMenoza

2019 ◽  
Vol 55 ◽  
pp. 225-240
Author(s):  
Laurel Lied
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Christian Education ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
Immigrant Communities ◽  
Christian Formation ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Religious Formation ◽  
The Church

In 1737 Erik Pontoppidan, a Danish bishop of pietist leanings, published a Lutheran catechism,Sandhed til Gudfrygtighed(Truth unto Godliness), which became the Church of Denmark's official catechism for the following fifty years, with new editions being printed in Norway into the twentieth century. For a figure largely overlooked by modern scholarship, he has enjoyed an extraordinarily lengthy influence over Christian formation in Scandinavia and in Norwegian immigrant communities in the USA. Pontoppidan not only left behind this ‘official’ programme of Christian education, but also an unofficial blueprint,Menoza(1742–3). Thisopbyggelse(‘edifying’) novel recounts the conversion of an imaginary Indian prince, Menoza, and his subsequent travels around Europe.Menozamight even be said to offer its readers an alternative or additional Lutheran catechism in literary form. This article examines Menoza's Christian formation in the light of Pontoppidan's official catechism. Which topics of the catechism receive emphasis or are downplayed? Does the progression and linking of doctrinal topics match the catechism's layout or does the author restructure Christian theology for pedagogical purposes? The article also considers the non-doctrinal elements of the characters’ catechesis, especially in relation to pietist expectations regarding conversion. What indoctrination, intentional or unintentional, into the vocabulary and experience of pietist culture did Pontoppidan offer his Scandinavian readers?

Spiritual Healing, Sick Kids and the Law: Inequities in the American Healthcare System

2003 ◽  
Vol 29 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 269-299
Author(s):  
Janna C. Merrick
Keyword(s):  
Medical Science ◽  
Spiritual Healing ◽  
Best Interests ◽  
Legal Rights ◽  
High Tech ◽  
Divine Love ◽  
Religious Minority ◽  
Human Need ◽  
East End ◽  
The Church

Main Street in Sarasota, Florida. A high-tech medical arts building rises from the east end, the county's historic three-story courthouse is two blocks to the west and sandwiched in between is the First Church of Christ, Scientist. A verse inscribed on the wall behind the pulpit of the church reads: “Divine Love Always Has Met and Always Will Meet Every Human Need.” This is the church where William and Christine Hermanson worshipped. It is just a few steps away from the courthouse where they were convicted of child abuse and third-degree murder for failing to provide conventional medical care for their seven-year-old daughter.This Article is about the intersection of “divine love” and “the best interests of the child.” It is about a pluralistic society where the dominant culture reveres medical science, but where a religious minority shuns and perhaps fears that same medical science. It is also about the struggle among different religious interests to define the legal rights of the citizenry.

Ideas and Leaders in Contentious Politics: One Parish Priest in El Salvador's Popular Movement

2014 ◽  
Vol 38 (01) ◽  
pp. 76-101
Author(s):  
PETER M. SANCHEZ
Keyword(s):  
Collective Action ◽  
El Salvador ◽  
Liberation Theology ◽  
Contentious Politics ◽  
Religious Leaders ◽  
Political Movement ◽  
Parish Priest ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
Resource Mobilisation ◽  
The Church

AbstractThis paper examines the actions of one Salvadorean priest – Padre David Rodríguez – in one parish – Tecoluca – to underscore the importance of religious leadership in the rise of El Salvador's contentious political movement that began in the early 1970s, when the guerrilla organisations were only just beginning to develop. Catholic leaders became engaged in promoting contentious politics, however, only after the Church had experienced an ideological conversion, commonly referred to as liberation theology. A focus on one priest, in one parish, allows for generalisation, since scores of priests, nuns and lay workers in El Salvador followed the same injustice frame and tactics that generated extensive political mobilisation throughout the country. While structural conditions, collective action and resource mobilisation are undoubtedly necessary, the case of religious leaders in El Salvador suggests that ideas and leadership are of vital importance for the rise of contentious politics at a particular historical moment.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document