La Placita and the Evolution of Catholic Religiosity in Los Angeles

2021 ◽  
pp. 92-130
Author(s):  
Michael J. Pfeifer

In 1814 a Franciscan priest, Fray Luis Gil y Taboada, laid the cornerstone for a church at the founding plaza of Los Angeles, at the site of the original “sub-mission” chapel established by the Spanish in 1784. Originally intended to serve mixed-race settlers of the Los Angeles pueblo, La Iglesia de Nuestra Señora de los Ángeles (the Church of Our Lady of Angels), nicknamed the Plaza Church or La Placita, became the focal point of Catholic culture in Los Angeles—and of the mediation of cultural relationships between Hispano-descended Catholics and the largely Protestant Americans who migrated into Southern California after American annexation in 1846. The evolving social and cultural matrix of worship at La Placita has charted many shifts amid the creative persistence of Mexican Catholic religiosity. La Placita’s history suggests both significant variation around the West in the development of Catholic cultures and the ways in which the American West diverges dramatically from a model of American Catholic history predicated on nineteenth-century European Catholic immigration and institution building.

1993 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-59 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Elizabeth Brown

Italians have long been the exception to generalizations about ethnic American Catholicism. As early as the 1880s, American bishops considered them a “problem.” In 1946, Henry J. Browne summarized the “problem”: Italians did not regularly attend mass, did not receive the sacraments, did not contribute to the support of the church, did not educate their children in their faith, did not respect the clergy, and did not appreciate that they should be doing better in all these areas. Although Browne's work has become the subject of revisionist criticism among students of Italian American Catholicism, specialists in other aspects of American Catholicism have incorporated into their work generalizations generated by the Italian-American experts.James Sanders's study of Chicago parochial schools referred to Italians as least likely to support such schools. David J. O'Brien's history of the diocese of Syracuse emphasizes the difficulties Italians faced and the troubles they created for the clergy and hierarchy. Dolan's survey of American Catholic history has a large bibliography on which to base its conclusion that “thereligion of the [southern Italian] people was not the same as the official religion of the church.


1959 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas T. McAvoy

ToUnderstand the limited accomplishment of American Catholic intellectual activities in the second half of the twentieth century it is not sufficient to examine the immediate antecedents. The American Catholic history since the beginning of the first World War has, indeed, witnessed important efforts to raise Catholic intellectual activities to the level of traditional European Catholic culture, but these efforts have been handicapped by a bad starting point. The absence of similar efforts during the decades preceding World War I — a period in which Catholic intellectual activities were seriously out of step with the intellectual development of the United States — has much to do with the present mediocre status of Catholic intellectual activities and accomplishments. Unfortunately, the period in Catholic history between the Americanist controversy and the formation of the National Catholic War Council in 1917 has not been seriously studied and consequently its effect on subsequent American life is not fully understood.


2003 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-46
Author(s):  
A. D. M. Barrell

Author(s):  
Олег Викторович (Oleg V.) Кириченко (Kirichenko)

Статья посвящена малоизученному явлению – церковному инакомыслию, которое было порождено влиянием «советской духовности» не только на общество, но и на Церковь. Автор ставит проблему инакомыслия и диссидентства как явлений, выросших в недрах высшей советской номенклатуры и потом уже распространившихся на низшие слои, затронувшие и церковную среду. Апелляция к Западу, как к третейскому судье, была закономерным явлением советской действительности, что требует научной проработки и объяснения. The article is devoted to a little-studied phenomenon – church dissent, which was generated by the influence of "Soviet spirituality" not only on society, but also on the Church. The author poses the problem of dissent and dissidentism as phenomena that grew up in the the higher Soviet nomenclature and then spread to the lower layers, affecting the church environment. An appeal to the West as an arbitrator was a natural phenomenon of Soviet reality, which requires scientific study and explanation.


Author(s):  
Anthony Macías

I am writing this analytical appreciation of cultura panamericana, or pan-American culture, to propose a wider recognition of how its historical linkages and contemporary manifestations confront colonialism, honor indigenous roots, and reflect multiple, mixed-race identities. Although often mediated by transnational pop-culture industries, expressive cultural forms such as art and music articulate resonant themes that connect US Latinos and Latinas to Latin Americans, pointing the way toward a hemispheric imaginary. In US murals, for example, whether in the Chicago neighborhood of Pilsen or the Los Angeles neighborhood of Highland Park, pan-American expressive culture offers alternative representations by embracing indigeneity, and it creates a sense of place by tropicalizing urban spaces.


Author(s):  
Peter Linehan

This book springs from its author’s continuing interest in the history of Spain and Portugal—on this occasion in the first half of the fourteenth century between the recovery of each kingdom from widespread anarchy and civil war and the onset of the Black Death. Focussing on ecclesiastical aspects of the period in that region (Galicia in particular) and secular attitudes to the privatization of the Church, it raises inter alios the question why developments there did not lead to a permanent sundering of the relationship with Rome (or Avignon) two centuries ahead of that outcome elsewhere in the West. In addressing such issues, as well as of neglected material in Spanish and Portuguese archives, use is made of the also unpublished so-called ‘secret’ registers of the popes of the period. The issues it raises concern not only Spanish and Portuguese society in general but also the developing relationship further afield of the components of the eternal quadrilateral (pope, king, episcopate, and secular nobility) in late medieval Europe, as well as of the activity in that period of those caterpillars of the commonwealth, the secular-minded sapientes. In this context, attention is given to the hitherto neglected attempt of Afonso IV of Portugal to appropriate the privileges of the primatial church of his kingdom and to advance the glorification of his Castilian son-in-law, Alfonso XI, as God’s vicegerent in his.


2018 ◽  
Vol 81 (3) ◽  
pp. 411-417
Author(s):  
Laurence Terrier Aliferis

Abstract The ruined Cistercian church of Vaucelles is known only by a few preserved fragments and a plan of the choir reproduced by Villard of Honnecourt. Historical sources provide three key dates: 1190 (start of construction), 1215 (entry into the new church), 1235 (date of the dedication). From the nineteenth century until now, it was considered that the foundations were laid in 1190 and that the construction started on the west side of the church. In 1216, the nave would have been completed, and the choir would have been built between 1216 and 1235. Consultation of the historical sources and examination of the historiographic record changes this established chronology of the site. In fact, the construction proceeded from east to west. The choir reproduced in 1216 or shortly before by Villard de Honnecourt presents the building as it then appeared, with the eastern part of the building totally completed.


2014 ◽  
Vol 83 (4) ◽  
pp. 1014-1018
Author(s):  
Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp

Last week, sandwiched in between updates on Beyoncé's trip to the West Coast and sighting of the latest super moon, the Huffington Post featured an article by power preacher Lillian Daniels entitled “Spiritual But Not Religious? Please Stop Boring Me.” Daniels lamented her situation on long plane flights, where she had to endure the stories of fellow travelers who, upon finding out she is a minister, confessed their rejection of religious institutions in favor of finding spirituality in sunsets and walks on the beach. Inevitably, they would present their experience to her as a revelation: “Like people who go to church don't see God in the sunset! Like we are these monastic little hermits who never leave the church building. How lucky we are to have these geniuses inform us that God is in nature.” Daniels' article represents a backlash coming from the institutional end of the spectrum, but her plea for loyalty to religion-in-community was met by many who found her (apparently, according to the comments section) insulting, condescending, and close-minded.


Horizons ◽  
1987 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 328-342
Author(s):  
Mary Jo Weaver

AbstractContemporary issues in the American Catholic Church can sound like a modern-day confusion of tongues making communication impossible. Furthermore, the traditional marks of the Church have supported the notion that dissent and controversy are to be discouraged. This article examines catholicity and shows that its definitions and uses in history have tied it to uniformity when its essential characteristic may well be the celebration of pluralism. Catholicity is placed in the context of modern mission theory in such a way that current challenges can be interpreted as so many new languages which require patient understanding.


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