The Teaching of the Church on Religious Freedom:  A Break or Continuity of Tradition?

This paper elaborates upon the Catholic Church’s teachings on religiousfreedom in the period from The French Revolution to The Second VaticanCouncil. Based on quotations from the original documents, the author presentsthe evolution of the Church’s position that switched from the initialrejection to the final acceptance of the religious freedom over past two centuries.The fact of this dramatic change begs the question about the continuityof tradition and credibility of the contemporary stance of the Church. Basedon the document by the International Theological Commission, “Memoryand Reconciliation: The Church and the Faults of the Past”, as well as theteaching of Pope Benedict XVI, the author demonstrates that – in contrastto some contemporary interpretations – the hermeneutics of continuity ispossible regarding Church’s teaching on religious freedom.

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Reception of the Second Vatican Council in the Mukachevo Greek Catholic Diocese

Ukrainian Religious Studies ◽

10.32420/2013.66.278 ◽

2013 ◽

pp. 309-317

Author(s):

Mariya Mayoroshi

Keyword(s):

20Th Century ◽

Second Vatican Council ◽

Correct Interpretation ◽

International Conference ◽

Pope Benedict Xvi ◽

Benedict Xvi ◽

The Third ◽

Vatican Council ◽

The Church ◽

Made In

The idea of this very formulation of the topic arose under the influence of the words of Pope Benedict XVI, which he made in his message to the participants of the International Conference "The Second Vatican Council: Perspectives of the Third Millennium" held in Peru in 2006. The Pontiff called the Cathedral the most important church event of the 20th century and called for the correct interpretation of its documents. They have "the source of genuine renewal", which can be used to answer the challenges of the Church and humanity in the Third Millennium1. A similar opinion was expressed in his interview and about. Michael Dymid: "It is possible to evaluate the documents, that is, the" transfer "of the Council, when we analyze how their" reception "took place.

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A Hermeneutic of True Reform

The Synod of Pistoia and Vatican II ◽

10.1093/oso/9780190947798.003.0002 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 18-42

Author(s):

Shaun Blanchard

Keyword(s):

Vatican Ii ◽

Second Vatican Council ◽

Church Fathers ◽

Pope Benedict Xvi ◽

Benedict Xvi ◽

Vatican Council ◽

Christian Thought ◽

Catholic Reform ◽

The Church ◽

Different Levels

This chapter argues that the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, or Vatican II, are best understood through a triadic grid: ressourcement (retrieval of past Christian thought and texts, especially scripture and of the church fathers), aggiornamento (updating), and the development of doctrine. It highlights four areas in which Vatican II sought to reform the Church—ecclesiology, religious liberty, liturgy and devotions, and ecumenism. The interpretation of Vatican II is still heavily contested. The chapter argues that the best hermeneutic for interpreting the council, advanced by Pope Benedict XVI and praised by John O’Malley, is a “hermeneutic of reform,” a theologically rigorous and historically conscious hermeneutic that sees Vatican II as having “continuity and discontinuity on different levels” with past teaching. It argues that such a hermeneutic can aid conciliar interpretation and deepen reflection on the nature of Catholic reform through a study of forerunners of Vatican II, who attempted aggiornamento and ressourcement.

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Indicator Values of The Sacredness of Jakarta Cathedral Church, Indonesia

10.31124/advance.14153189.v1 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Rudy Trisno ◽

Fermanto Lianto

Keyword(s):

Quantitative Analysis ◽

Catholic Church ◽

Quantitative Method ◽

Second Vatican Council ◽

Indicator Values ◽

Form Expression ◽

Pope Benedict Xvi ◽

Benedict Xvi ◽

Vatican Council ◽

The Church

<p>According to Pope Benedict XVI, the Catholic building church after the Second Vatican Council reduced the value of sacredness so that the sacredness of the expression of the form of a Catholic church is considered to fade. This statement from the Pope is exciting to be an issue for researchers to search for indicator values of the Catholic Church's sacredness before the Second Vatican Council. The Cathedral Church was founded before the Second Vatican Council. This study's method is a quantitative method by taking as many as 250 respondents who were grouped as users and observers as defining the population and purposive sampling to determine the impression of the sacredness felt by respondents through several indicator values. The conclusions obtained in this quantitative analysis are the sacred indicator values of the church received from; (1) Variables of the liturgy function; (2) Variables of form expression. The findings in this study are: (1) The Catholic Church founded before the Second Vatican Council is still imperfect; that is, this church is not following its ritual function. (2) The expression of the Catholic Church's form can be said to be sacred if the form's concept follows the function by considering indicator values of sacredness.</p>

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Official Ecclesial Documents to Implement the Second Vatican Council on Relations with Jews: Study Them, Become Immersed in Them, and Put Them into Practice

Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations ◽

10.6017/scjr.v4i1.1521 ◽

2011 ◽

Vol 4 (1) ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Philip A. Cunningham

Keyword(s):

Jewish People ◽

The United States ◽

Interreligious Dialogue ◽

Mutual Understanding ◽

Second Vatican Council ◽

Pope Benedict Xvi ◽

Benedict Xvi ◽

Vatican Council ◽

The Relationship ◽

The Church

In the wake of recent tensions in Catholic Jewish relations in the United States, this article examines the implementation of the Second Vatican Council's decision "to evaluate and define in a new way the relationship between the Church and the faith of Israel," as Pope Benedict XVI has described it. Official documents of the Vatican Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews and a body of papal teachings put forth by Pope John Paul have authoritatively delineated the direction according to which the Council is to be interpreted and put into practice. This trajectory of implementation has begun to articulate what could be called a "theology of shalom" concerning the Catholic Church's relationship to Judaism and the Jewish people, which includes a respect for Judaism's continuing covenantal life with God and a commitment to interreligious dialogue for the purpose of mutual understanding. However, this post-conciliar trajectory is challenged by Catholics who fear that the universal salvific mediation of Christ is being threatened. Advancing theological concepts that express a sort of "neo-supersessionist" devaluation of Judaism, these critiques necessarily disregard relevant papal and Vatican teaching. The article ends with an examination of the magisterial weight of the conciliar and post-conciliar implementing documents, concluding that their clear direction must be followed. As John Paul II declared, "It is only a question of studying them carefully, of immersing oneself in their teachings and of putting them into practice."

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Indicator Values of The Sacredness of Jakarta Cathedral Church, Indonesia

10.31124/advance.14153189 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Rudy Trisno ◽

Fermanto Lianto

Keyword(s):

Quantitative Analysis ◽

Catholic Church ◽

Quantitative Method ◽

Second Vatican Council ◽

Indicator Values ◽

Form Expression ◽

Pope Benedict Xvi ◽

Benedict Xvi ◽

Vatican Council ◽

The Church

<p>According to Pope Benedict XVI, the Catholic building church after the Second Vatican Council reduced the value of sacredness so that the sacredness of the expression of the form of a Catholic church is considered to fade. This statement from the Pope is exciting to be an issue for researchers to search for indicator values of the Catholic Church's sacredness before the Second Vatican Council. The Cathedral Church was founded before the Second Vatican Council. This study's method is a quantitative method by taking as many as 250 respondents who were grouped as users and observers as defining the population and purposive sampling to determine the impression of the sacredness felt by respondents through several indicator values. The conclusions obtained in this quantitative analysis are the sacred indicator values of the church received from; (1) Variables of the liturgy function; (2) Variables of form expression. The findings in this study are: (1) The Catholic Church founded before the Second Vatican Council is still imperfect; that is, this church is not following its ritual function. (2) The expression of the Catholic Church's form can be said to be sacred if the form's concept follows the function by considering indicator values of sacredness.</p>

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Liberalism, Catholicism, and the Abbé Grégoire

Church History ◽

10.2307/3163070 ◽

1967 ◽

Vol 36 (4) ◽

pp. 419-439 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Norman Ravitch

Keyword(s):

French Revolution ◽

Birth Control ◽

Catholic Church ◽

Modern Society ◽

Second Vatican Council ◽

Vatican Council ◽

The Church ◽

The Catholic Church ◽

The French Revolution

With the convening and accomplishments of the Second Vatican Council liberal Catholicism seems triumphant in the Catholic Church. Despite continuing controversy over such agonizing problems as birth control, it would appear that the Church has forthrightly and definitely decided to reconcile itself as fully as possible to modern society. From this present perspective, the historian may well need to reexamine certain aspects of the rise of liberal Catholicism and to reassess the work of certain of its pioneers and the frustrating obstacles they encountered. No longer on the defensive, the partisans of liberal Catholicism may want to reclaim those they have ignored or rejected. One curious figure who seldom if ever has been given credit for his role in the emergence of liberal Catholicism is the Abbé Henri Grégoire, priest and politician during the French Revolution and patriarch of the schismatic Constitutional Church.Liberal Catholic historians have tended to shy away from too much attention to this puzzling and perhaps embarrassing figure, leaving him to the attacks of conservative Catholics or the enthusiastic devotion of neo-Jansenist sectarians. Secular liberals who have generally preferred to face a Catholic Church which was unequivocally reactionary have pretended to see Grégoire as an excentric of little significance.

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Promoting the Constants of the Mission with Muslims in Today’s Middle East

Journal of Catholic Social Thought ◽

10.5840/jcathsoc20211818 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 18 (1) ◽

pp. 139-151

Author(s):

Jules Boutros ◽

Keyword(s):

Middle East ◽

Past Century ◽

Special Role ◽

Second Vatican Council ◽

Islamic Fundamentalism ◽

The Past ◽

Vatican Council ◽

Reign Of God ◽

The Church

One of the most important facts that the Second Vatican Council has revealed is that the point of the Church is not itself, but to go beyond itself, to be a community that preaches, serves, celebrates, and witnesses to the reign of God with due respect to the text and context. During the past century, the Church of the Middle East experienced the absence of an authentic missionary enthusiasm and the lack of a clear and pertinent theology with which it could face the challenge presented to Christianity by Islam. This challenge resides in its special role and mission before the Muslims, which this paper will further discuss and, in doing so, answer the question, How can the Church of the Middle East try to approach the Muslims in a time of violent Islamic fundamentalism and persecutions, in a region where most of the Christians are opting to remain distant or to emigrate?

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The Council of Basle and the Second Vatican Council

Studies in Church History ◽

10.1017/s0424208400016569 ◽

1971 ◽

Vol 7 ◽

pp. 229-234

Author(s):

A. J. Black

Keyword(s):

Second Vatican Council ◽

Modern Times ◽

The Past ◽

Remarkable Degree ◽

Vatican Council ◽

The Church ◽

Apparent Conflict

Many will have noticed how the renewal of the Church in modern times has drawn together strands of thought and behaviour that were in the past considered discordant. Thus the Second Vatican Council, it seems, in continuing the work of the First, would be likely to draw on that part of the Church’s heritage which had previously been in apparent conflict with the doctrine of papal supremacy: namely, the notion of the supremacy of the Church as a body and of the council or the episcopate. In some ways there is a remarkable degree of continuity between the thought of the Council of Basle (1431–49) and of the Second Vatican Council.

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“Sister, This is MY Church!” The Sisters of St. Joseph and Contested Sacred Space

10.31235/osf.io/8z25k ◽

2019 ◽

Author(s):

Ryan P. Murphy

Keyword(s):

Lived Experiences ◽

Sacred Space ◽

Qualitative Interviews ◽

Second Vatican Council ◽

Archival Research ◽

Gendered Spaces ◽

Cultural Symbols ◽

The Past ◽

Vatican Council ◽

The Church

Recently, sociologists who study space have paid more attention to the importance of place, in other words—not just physical locations—but also the meanings, interpretations, and cultural symbols bound up within them. In this paper, I examine the “emplaced” and often gendered lived experiences of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Philadelphia after the Second Vatican Council. Drawing on archival research and in-depth qualitative interviews with nearly two dozen Sisters of St. Joseph, I analyze how the congregation negotiated and contested gendered spaces in the Church over the past fifty years. I explore the sisters’ occasionally tumultuous relationships and public disagreements with clergy, particularly about use of chapel and school space. I also examine the subtler ways—like presiding over funerals and annulment tribunals—that sisters in the congregation transgressed prescribed gendered boundaries in responding to the sacramental needs of the faithful and marginalized. Overall, I argue that sisters in the congregation adapted to changing pastoral needs and exercised agency as women in developing strategies of action to meet the needs of those whom they served.

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