Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Michael J. Pfeifer
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Sexual Abuse ◽  
The United States ◽  
Dynamic Interaction ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Upper Midwest ◽  
Catholic History ◽  
American Society ◽  
American Catholic ◽  
Over Time

This book analyzes the interaction of religiosity, national and cultural origin, race, gender, class, and region in the varied and uneasy synthesis of Catholicism and American identity over time. American Catholic studies continues to evince comparatively little attention to region, with the weight of scholarship still focused on the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, with little attention to the varied regions of the United States west of Buffalo. Yet the American Catholic experience diverged significantly among regions, with, for instance, the northeastern pattern of Irish Catholic predominance having less salience in areas of significant Catholic population such as Louisiana, the Upper Midwest, and Southern California. Immigrant Catholic cultures also have hardly been ignored in the literature, yet the lengthy significance of transnational ties for Catholic cultures in the United States has not been extensively pursued, with Americanist scholars evincing a water’s-edge approach after migration that was never actually experienced by Catholics in the United States. Clerical sexual abuse emerges at times in these pages. Like all of the American Catholic history in this book, clerical sexual abuse partakes of a dynamic interaction of particular Catholic cultures and American society and culture.

Anti-Catholicism in the United States

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark S. Massa
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
North American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Human Society ◽  
Boundary Maintenance ◽  
Different Types ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Society ◽  
American Catholic

Historian John Higham once referred to anti-Catholicism as “by far the oldest, and the most powerful of anti-foreign traditions” in North American intellectual and cultural history. But Higham’s famous observation actually elided three different types of anti-Catholic nativism that have enjoyed a long and quite vibrant life in North America: a cultural distrust of Catholics, based on an understanding of North American public culture rooted in a profoundly British and Protestant ordering of human society; an intellectual distrust of Catholics, based on a set of epistemological and philosophical ideas first elucidated in the English (Lockean) and Scottish (“Common Sense Realist”) Enlightenments and the British Whig tradition of political thought; and a nativist distrust of Catholics as deviant members of American society, a perception central to the Protestant mainstream’s duty of “boundary maintenance” (to utilize Emile Durkheim’s reading of how “outsiders” help “insiders” maintain social control). An examination of the long history of anti-Catholicism in the United States can be divided into three parts: first, an overview of the types of anti-Catholic animus utilizing the typology adumbrated above; second, a narrative history of the most important anti-Catholic events in U.S. culture (e.g., Harvard’s Dudleian Lectures, the Suffolk Resolves, the burning of the Charlestown convent, Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosures); and finally, a discussion of American Catholic efforts to address the animus.

U.S. Leadership in a Shrinking World: The Breakdown of Consensuses and the Emergence of Conflicting Belief Systems

1983 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 368-392 ◽  
Author(s):  
James N. Rosenau ◽  
Ole R. Holsti
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Belief Systems ◽  
The United States ◽  
Domestic Policy ◽  
Change Over Time ◽  
Soviet Invasion ◽  
American Society ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Over Time

The adaptation of the United States to its declining role as a superpower is examined through an inquiry into the belief systems of the society's leaders. Three sets of mutually exclusive domestic policy belief systems are identified, along with three sets of mutually exclusive foreign policy belief systems. The degree to which they are linked to each other is explored, and the connections are found to be tenuous—suggesting that the cleavages at work in American society are more enduring and less subject to change than may be readily apparent. The last section of the paper uses more recent data from a sample of American leaders to examine the degree to which foreign policy belief systems are susceptible to change over time, allowing for an analysis of the extent to which the hostage crisis in Iran and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan affected pre-existing belief systems. The overall finding is that the impact was negligible, and that foreign policy belief systems are largely resistant to change.

Writing American Catholic History

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Margaret M. McGuinness ◽  
James T. Fisher
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
New France ◽  
Protestant Christianity ◽  
History Of ◽  
Catholic History ◽  
American Catholic ◽  
Eastern Seaboard

This introductory chapter begins with a brief discussion of the history of U.S. Catholicism, which is traced back to the efforts of Franciscan missionaries in the sixteenth-century Southwest prior to the arrival of Anglo-Protestants along the Eastern Seaboard, and then moved on to Jesuits in New France (Canada) early in the following century. By 1850, Catholicism was the largest religious denomination in the United States, and remains so to this day. American Protestant Christianity has always boasted a substantial aggregate majority of religious adherents, but Protestantism was broken into so many movements by the mid-nineteenth century that no single Protestant group equaled in size the nation's Catholic populace. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

Confession

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick W. Carey
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The United States ◽  
Catholic Theology ◽  
Advantages And Disadvantages ◽  
American Tradition ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Society ◽  
Catholic Tradition ◽  
American Catholic

Confession is a history of penance as a virtue and a sacrament in the United States from about 1634, the origin of Catholicism in Maryland, to 2015, fifty years after the major theological and disciplinary changes initiated by the Second Vatican Council (1962–65). The history of the Catholic theology and practice of penance is analyzed within the larger context of American Protestant penitential theology and discipline and in connection with divergent interpretations of biblical penitential language (sin, repentance, forgiveness, reconciliation) that Jews, Protestants, Orthodox Christians, and Catholics shared in the American body politic. The overall argument of the text is that the Catholic theology and practice of penance, so much opposed by the inheritors of the Protestant Reformation, kept alive the biblical penitential language in the United States at least until the mid 1960s when Catholic penitential discipline changed and the practice of sacramental confession declined precipitously. Those changes within the American Catholic tradition contributed to the more general eclipse of penitential language in American society as a whole. From the 1960s onward penitential language was overshadowed increasingly by the language of conflict and controversy. In the current climate of controversy and conflict, such a text may help Americans understand how much their society has departed from the penitential language of the earlier American tradition and consider what the advantages and disadvantages of such a departure are.

Migration, Regionalism, and the Ethnic Other, 1840-1870

2016 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 33-58
Author(s):  
Terje Hasle Joranger
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Ethnic Groups ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
The United States ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Immigrant Group ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Upper Midwest ◽  
The Social

This article shows accounts of Norwegian immigrants and their encounter with various ethnic groups in America including Native Americans, African-Americans, Chinese, Irish, and Yankees in the period between 1840 and 1870. The article presents several regions in the United States, namely the Upper Midwest, Texas, and California. The use of primary source material including newspapers, guidebooks and letters provide good insights into thoughts and attitudes, and not the least prejudice, among this Old immigrant group toward the ethnic “Other.” The Norwegian immigrant group aimed at becoming good citizens through a negotiating process between the group, the dominant native-born American group and other ethnic groups in the United States. By characterizing several other ethnic groups based on race, Norwegian-Americans employed whiteness in a double negotiation, both tied to the creation of a Norwegian-American identity and in finding their place in the social hierarchy in America.

Small differences? The study of the Irish in the United States and Britain

1994 ◽  
Vol 29 (113) ◽  
pp. 114-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Noel Doyle
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Fiction ◽  
The Past ◽  
Irish America ◽  
American Catholic History ◽  
Catholic History ◽  
American Catholic

How small in fact were the differences between and within the Irish communities overseas, and between their cultures and work achievements and those of their host societies? The past decade has seen the arrival of fairly complete bibliographies of the Irish diaspora in the United States and in Britain, and substantial bibliographical essays on the Irish in Canada and in Australia. The pioneer volume of Hartigan and Hickman, compiled outside the academic grid and its resources, is welcome, intelligent and full of small surprises, despite some odd omissions (e.g. all but one of Denis Gwynn’s relevant titles). Yet, unlike Patrick Blessing, they could not rely on and collate existent bibliographies, as he could do with those of J. T. Ellis and Robert Trisco on American Catholic history (1982), Daniel Casey and Robert Rhodes on Irish-American fiction (1979), and W. C. Miller (1975) and Séamus Metress (1981) on the bibliography of Irish-America overall.

The New American Catholic History

1972 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-229 ◽  
Author(s):  
Moses Rischin
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
Geographic Mobility ◽  
General Interest ◽  
American Catholicism ◽  
Ecclesiastical History ◽  
John Xxiii ◽  
History Of ◽  
Catholic History ◽  
American Society ◽  
American Catholic

Even historians and historically minded Sociologists with little sense or awareness of the current Roman Catholic scene have been stirred by the precipitous flow of events of the last dozen years to ask questions about the Catholic role in American society. Virtually without warning, the history of American Catholicism has been catapulted from specialized ecclesiastical history of interest to Catholics primarily into an ecumenical history of unprecedented general interest. After hovering backstage for centuries, the Catholic presence has erupted almost simultaneously from the secular and theological wings and burst onto centerstage. A convergence of public events dramatized and personalized for world Catholicism by the papacy of John XXIII and for American Catholicism by the presidency of John F. Kennedy ironically magnified a sense of supreme Catholic crisis and confusion that in its scope and implications dwarfed earlier American Catholic crises, making them appear parochial and intramural by comparison. The elevation to the papacy of the most saintly and humble of priests and the brief presidency of the first Catholic president of the United States turned an aged pope and a young president into symbols of a new public Catholicism, cosmopolitan and courageous in its vision and democratic in its thrust. Vatican II, the ecumenical movement, the race revolution, the general revolt against authority, the new ethnic succession, explosive social and geographic mobility, and the heightened self-consciousness of newer ethnics of European origin and largely Catholic religion, combined with the instant exposure of the mass media, synchronized with an era of American world hegemony and the emergence of an American Catholicism of appropriate dimensions.

“God's Representative in Our Midst”: Toward a History of the Catholic Diocesan Clergy in the United States

1998 ◽  
Vol 67 (2) ◽  
pp. 326-349 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leslie Woodcock Tentler
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Historical Knowledge ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of ◽  
Catholic History ◽  
Parish Clergy ◽  
American Catholic ◽  
Diocesan Priests

From a historian's point of view, the Catholic diocesan clergy in the United States look rather like forgotten men. As a group, they have never figured prominently in the scholarly literature. American Catholic history may have had an emphatically clerical bias as late as the 1950s, but the focus then was mainly on the chancery. The parish clergy were almost as neglected as the famously docile laity. The laity have moved in recent years to the forefront of Catholic historical consciousness, and won for themselves a less docile image in the process. But priests have not enjoyed equivalent attention—indeed, in the eyes of at least some practitioners, priests are today mildly suspect as subjects of research. We do not, after all, want a return to the bad old days of “clerical” history. The predictable consequence is a major hole in our church-historical knowledge. Despite the new vitality in American Catholic historical scholarship, we know very little about the history of diocesan priests in the United States—who they were, how they lived and worked, what they thought about their ministry or the people they served.

Effectiveness of Programs for the Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amaia Del Campo ◽  
Marisalva Fávero
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Sexual Abuse ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Prevention Programs ◽  
The United States ◽  
Sexual Abuse Prevention ◽  
Negative Effects ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Methodological Considerations

Abstract. During the last decades, several studies have been conducted on the effectiveness of sexual abuse prevention programs implemented in different countries. In this article, we present a review of 70 studies (1981–2017) evaluating prevention programs, conducted mostly in the United States and Canada, although with a considerable presence also in other countries, such as New Zealand and the United Kingdom. The results of these studies, in general, are very promising and encourage us to continue this type of intervention, almost unanimously confirming its effectiveness. Prevention programs encourage children and adolescents to report the abuse experienced and they may help to reduce the trauma of sexual abuse if there are victims among the participants. We also found that some evaluations have not considered the possible negative effects of this type of programs in the event that they are applied inappropriately. Finally, we present some methodological considerations as critical analysis to this type of evaluations.

An Analysis of Fraudulent Qui Tam Actions Over Time in the United States

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen A. Fitzner ◽  
Charlie Bennett ◽  
June McKoy ◽  
Cara Tigue
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Over Time
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