The Battle for Divorce in Italy and Opposition from the Catholic World (1861–1974)

2017 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 401-418 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniela Saresella

The issue of divorce is a thermometer of the cultural, religious, and political sensitivity of Italy’s citizens and political caste. In the liberal period (1961–1922), Italy, a profoundly Catholic country with the Vatican City on its own territory, attempted to establish the nonreligious nature of the State, yet its ruling class never dared pose the problem of the divorce law. Subsequently, with the advent of fascism, close relations were established between the State and the Church, which prevented any challenge to the indissolubility of marriage for years to come. Not until the 1960s and 1970s, in the wake of the changes induced by the Vatican Council II and the new national and international climate in politics, did many believers start freely discussing the possibility of a divorce law in Italy.

Author(s):  
Aled Davies

The aim of this book has been to evaluate the relationship between Britain’s financial sector, based in the City of London, and the social democratic economic strategy of post-war Britain. The central argument presented in the book was that changes to the City during the 1960s and 1970s undermined a number of the key post-war social democratic techniques designed to sustain and develop a modern industrial economy. Financial institutionalization weakened the state’s ability to influence investment, and the labour movement was unable successfully to integrate the institutionalized funds within a renewed social democratic economic agenda. The post-war settlement in banking came under strain in the 1960s as new banking and credit institutions developed that the state struggled to manage. This was exacerbated by the decision to introduce competition among the clearing banks in 1971, which further weakened the state’s capacity to control the provision and allocation of credit to the real economy. The resurrection of an unregulated global capital market, centred on London, overwhelmed the capacity of the state to pursue domestic-focused macroeconomic policies—a problem worsened by the concurrent collapse of the Bretton Woods international monetary system. Against this background, the fundamental social democratic assumption that national prosperity could be achieved only through industry-led growth and modernization was undermined by an effective campaign to reconceptualize Britain as a fundamentally financial and commercial nation with the City of London at its heart....


2020 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 158-169
Author(s):  
João Luís Marques

Since the 1960s, the artistic and architectural interventions carried out in the church of Santa Isabel and Rato Chapel, in Lisbon, brought to the debate the overlap of different narratives in these two different spaces of worship: the first, is a parish church preserved by the earthquake of Lisbon (1755), which had its liturgical space redesigned before the Second Vatican Council; the second, is a private chapel annexed to a 18th century palace that became a symbolic worship space for students and engaged young professionals since the 1970s. Enriched with the work of either well-known artists or, sometimes, anonymous architects, the two case studies show us the life of monuments, where Modern and Contemporary Art and Architecture participate in preserving and enhancing their cultural value. At the same time, the liturgical and pastoral activities are shown to be the engine behind successive interventions.


Author(s):  
Mary J. Henold

In this chapter, the history of the National Council of Catholic Women in the 1960s and 1970s – the years during and following Vatican II – is reassessed. The NCCW has been commonly perceived as a powerful anti-feminist organization for Catholic laywomen that was controlled by the Catholic hierarchy, but its archives reveal a sustained effort to engage with feminist ideas after the Second Vatican Council. Although most of the NCCW’s leadership did not self-identify as feminist, the group espoused many feminist beliefs, particularly about women’s leadership, opportunity, challenging ideas about women’s vocation, and women’s right to participate fully in the life of the Catholic church. The NCCW, under the leadership of Margaret Mealey, developed new organizational structures, educational programs, and publications to educate their membership about changing gender roles and the need to press the church for greater inclusion. Comparison to the international organization the World Union of Catholic Women’s Organizations (WUCWO), reveals the limitations of their feminism, however. Whereas WUCWO was willing to openly embrace feminism and feminist activism, NCCW was divided and preferred not to self-identify as feminist.


2018 ◽  
pp. 95-124
Author(s):  
Donald Westbrook

This chapter introduces features of Scientology’s systematic theology as developed in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1959, L. Ron Hubbard established a headquarters at Saint Hill Manor in East Grinstead, England. This location became the international base of Scientology until the founding of the Sea Organization in 1967. The Saint Hill period was instrumental in the intellectual development of Scientology. During these years, Hubbard systematized Scientology’s educational methodology (Study Technology), theology of sin (overts and withholds), theology of evil (suppressive persons), and standards of orthodoxy and orthopraxy (“Keeping Scientology Working” or KSW). KSW serves to legitimate Dianetics and Scientology within the church because it self-referentially dictates that Hubbard’s “technologies” provide mental and spiritual benefits only insofar as they are uniformly understood, applied, and perpetuated by others.


Author(s):  
Mary J. Henold

The Epilogue considers recent attempts to affirm the importance of Catholic laywomen in the church and extend their participation in decision making, while upholding Catholic teaching on gender essentialism and complementarity. Such limited efforts must be placed in the context of the 1960s and 1970s, when Catholic women’s leadership was also affirmed, and yet these women were still limited to prescribed roles and excluded from power. The work that Catholic laywomen did in these years to challenge Catholic teaching on gender roles, and remake laywomen’s identity, has been largely ignored and forgotten. As a result, the church, and particularly Pope Francis, continue to give lip service to laywomen’s dignity while failing to listen to their voices or give them genuine authority.


2018 ◽  
Vol 98 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 407-424 ◽  
Author(s):  
J.C. Bennett

AbstractUnder the Church Building Acts beginning in 1818, new English Anglican churches received governmental approval to formally rent sittings to congregants. Initial profits seem to have been high enough to make the practice financially viable. But over the Victorian era a flurry of popular protests and governmental acts, combined with lower rates of church-going, reduced the profitability of pew-renting. Churches built under the auspices of the Church Building Commissioners were generally offered grants in exchange for ending pew-rents. S.J.D. Green concluded that pew-renting was generally extinguished by the 1920s or earlier, which is correct regarding Anglican churches which received such “in lieu” grants. But Green’s assessment must be modified for other churches receiving no grants and needing even small profits. Primary sources reflect that many of these continued to set sittings for decades after the 1920s—in a few cases, into the 1960s and 1970s.


2001 ◽  
Vol 60 ◽  
pp. 180-202 ◽  
Author(s):  
Trudie Coker

The contradictory goals of state capital accumulation and redistribution eventually led to the demise of corporatism in Venezuela and probably in much of Latin America. When the Venezuelan state was at its zenith of intervention in the economy, it globalized accumulation via foreign debt. Rather than emphasize accumulation and redistribution as it had during the 1960s and 1970s, accumulation to service the debt became the state's central goal by the 1980s. Declining oil prices by the early 1980s highlighted the weakness of a state caught in the grips of antithetical demands from labor and an increasingly impoverished population, on the one hand, and private capital demanding debt repayment, on the other hand. By definition, corporatism creates a dependency between the state and organized labor. Historically, labor depended on the state for economic subsidies, and the state relied on labor to maintain legitimacy. By the late 1990s, lack of labor autonomy literally dragged labor down with a state drowning in debt and incapacitated by lack of legitimacy. While corporatism is more a relic of things past, the positive implications of increasing labor autonomy are dismal as organized labor has been disarticulated and the democratic state is all but a skeleton.


2016 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 244-263
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Surovell

In their assessments during the 1960s and 1970s of the state of affairs of Third World “revolutionary democracies” and nations that had taken the “non-capitalist road to development,” the Soviets employed a mode of analysis based on the “correlation of forces.” Given the seeming successes of these “revolutionary democracies” and the appearance of new ones, Moscow was clearly heartened by the apparent tilt in favor of the Soviets and of “progressive” humanity more generally. These apparently positive trends were reflected in Soviet perspectives and policies on the Third World, which focused confidently on such “progressive” regimes. Nonetheless, so-called “reactionary” regimes continued to be a thorn in the side of Soviet policy makers. This study offers a fresh examination of the Soviet analyses of, and policies towards three “reactionary” Third-World regimes: the military dictatorship in Brazil, the Pinochet dictatorship of Chile, and Iran during the reign of the Shah. The article reveals that Soviet decision makers and analysts identified the state sector as the central factor in the “progressive” development of the Third World. Hence the state sector became the focal point for their analyses and the touchstone for Soviet policies; the promotion of the state sector was regarded as a key to the Soviet objective of promoting the “genuine independence” of Third World countries from imperialist domination.


2019 ◽  
pp. 108-113
Author(s):  
Oksana Vysoven

The article analyzes the causes and consequences of the split in the evangelical-Baptist environment in the 1960s; found that one of the main causes of the split in the bosom of evangelical Baptist Christians was the destructive influence of state authorities on religion in general, and Christian denominations in particular when initiated by state bodies of the union of Protestant religious communities under the auspices of the All-Union Baptist Council Church for organization under control of special services bodies; it has been proved that the conflicts between the leadership of the Verkhovna Rada and the Council of Churches were artificial. The confrontations among the believers were mainly provoked by SSC agents and secret services, and were only in the hands of the Communist Party regime, which helped him control events, pacify some and repress others; it is proved that under the influence of the movement for the independence of the church from the state headed by «initiators», the regime has been operating since the second half of the 1960s. gradually began to ease the pressure on officially registered communities of evangelical Baptist Christians. Prayer meetings began to be attended by teens, and ordinary members and members of other congregations were allowed to preach. As a result of these changes and some easing of tensions between the church and the government, many believers and congregations began to return to the official union governed by the ACEBC, without wishing further confrontation; it is shown that the internal church events of the 60's of the twentieth century, which were provoked by the SSC special services and led to the split of the EBC community, reflected on the position and activities of the EBC Church and in the period of independence of Ukraine, the higher leadership of the split community (the ACEBC and the Church Council) and could not reconcile and unite in a united union. This significantly weakens their spiritual position in today's globalized world, where cohesion and competitiveness play an important role.


2018 ◽  
Vol 57 (3) ◽  
pp. 543-563 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel S. Loss

AbstractIn the late twentieth century, a new justification for the Church of England's establishment emerged: the church played an important social and political role in safeguarding the interests of other religious communities, including non-Christian ones. The development of this new vision of communal pluralism was shaped by two groups often seen as marginal in postwar British society: the royal family and missionaries. Elizabeth II and liberal evangelicals associated with the Church Missionary Society contributed to a new conception of religious pluralism centered on the integrity of the major world religions as responses to the divine. There were, therefore, impulses towards inclusion as well as exclusion in post-imperial British society. In its focus on religious communities, however, this communal pluralism risked overstating the homogeneity of religious groups and failing to protect individuals whose religious beliefs and practices differed from those of the mainstream of their religious communities.


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