scholarly journals Synodality as a return to the origins of Christianity and the way of building the God’s Kingdom

2020 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 118-130
Author(s):  
Sebastian Zygmunt

Over the centuries, exercising authority in the Catholic Church had been generating many doubts and problems. The extreme understanding the Pope’s role as an absolute monarch who independently decides about all dimensions of the Church has supplanted with time the known from the Apostle’s time communal management of the Mystical body of Christ. Just the Second Vatican Council and the last few popes noticed this particular problem. And one of the given solutions was the necessity of the return to the former way of exercising power by the college of bishops united around the Saint Peter’s Successor. Synods whose provisions would be presented to the Bishop of Rome for possible corrections and acceptance could again become a tool of power. By the analysis of the patrology research results, the history of the Catholic Church and dogmatic theology as well as sources and the subject literature it was possible to answer the question what synodality is in general, where does it draw its foundations and what is its role in building of the Kingdom of God. It was also possible to outline the perspective of the further Church development in an increasingly globalised world. The reflection on the historical formation of a proper understanding of collegiality and primacy proved helpful in understanding the goals behind the ”decentralization” of power in the Church postulated today by Pope Francis.

2013 ◽  
pp. 279-286
Author(s):  
Daryna Marcinovska

The history of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) and the theological and archpastoral activities of Karol Wojtyla are inextricably linked, because it was with the participation in the Cathedral of the life of the bishop that a new stage began - he became one of the leaders of the movement for the renewal of the Catholic Church. In 1962-1963, Bishop Karol Wojtyla participated in the work of the 1 st and 2 nd sessions of the Second Vatican Council. It was at this time in Rome that he met with Cardinal Franz König, one of the most influential and intellectual figures in the church in Europe. This was the beginning of an extremely important shift in the career of Bishop C. Wojtyla1. In October 1962, he participates in the work of the first session of the Second Vatican Council as one of his youngest and most active members1 2. Next year, at the closing of the second session, he is appointed archbishop, Metropolitan Krakowski.


1947 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-229 ◽  
Author(s):  
Waldemar Gurian

The history of the Catholic Church includes men who, after brilliant services to the Church, died outside her fold. Best known among them is Tertullian, the apologetic writer of the Early Church; less known is Ochino, the third vicar-general of the Capuchins, whose flight to Calvin's Geneva almost destroyed his order. In the nineteenth century there were two famous representatives of this group. Johann von Doellinger refused, when more than seventy years old, to accept the decision of the Vatican Council about papal infallibility. He passed away in 1890 unreconciled, though he had been distinguished for years as the outstanding German Catholic theologian. Félicité de la Mennais was celebrated as the new Pascal and Bossuet of his time before he became the modern Tertullian by breaking with the Church because Pope Gregory XVI rejected his views on the relations between the Church and die world. As he lay deathly ill, his niece, “Madame de Kertanguy asked him: ‘Féli, do you want a priest? Surely, you want a priest?’ Lamennais answered: ‘No.’ The niece repeated: ‘I beg of you.’ But he said with a stronger voice: ‘No, no, no.


2015 ◽  
pp. 179-199
Author(s):  
Federico Ruozzi

The article presents the entanglement of the Catholic Church and the media by focusing on the case of the Second Vatican Council and the television broadcast of its events. The mass media attention of the council stimulated, according to the author, a double level: the media conveyed more information about the church event than it had ever done before, but at the same time, the mass media influenced the discussion of the council fathers. The article also analyzes, through the lens of the Council, the recent relationship between the Catholic Church and the Italian television.  


2010 ◽  
Vol 79 (2) ◽  
pp. 359-409
Author(s):  
Gavin Brown

Today, most Catholics attending Mass come forward to receive communion as a matter of course. But this fact actually belies a very long history of low communion frequency and an institution's often losing struggle to have Catholics regularly receive the body of Christ. Already by the end of the fourth century, communion frequency in the Church, both East and West, had declined rapidly. Thereafter, outside small circles of especially devout communicants, communion at Mass remained for most Catholics an infrequent act. Yet during the mid-twentieth century, in the space of just a few decades, this situation showed signs of quite dramatic reversal. In the nineteenth century in Australia, average communion frequency among most practising Catholics was relatively nominal—perhaps three or four times a year was typical. On the eve of the Second Vatican Council, however, most Catholics in Australia were partaking of communion fortnightly and even weekly. Why this shift? What happened in the course of a generation which turned around a situation spanning many centuries in the Church's tradition of eucharistic worship?


Exchange ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 246-280 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Jebadu

AbstractIn Nostra Aetate – one of the 16 documents of the Second Vatican Council – the Catholic Church firmly declares: 'The Catholic Church rejects nothing of what is true and holy in other religions⃜ The Church, therefore, urges all her sons and daughters to enter with prudence and charity into discussions and collaboration with members of other religious faith traditions…; (cf. NA. 2). The so-called 'other religions' as stated by Nostra Aetate includes traditional religion in the form of ancestral veneration. It is still widely and popularly practiced by Christians of various ethnic groups in Asia and Africa as well as in other parts of the world – Latin America, Melanesia and Australia (the Aborigines). Despite the suppression and expulsion done in the past, this religious tradition is still able to survive and continue to demonstrate its vital force in the lives of many Asians and Africans, including those who have embraced the Christian faith. In this article we argue that ancestral veneration does not contradict the Christian faith. It has a place in the Christian faith and should be incorporated into, at least, in Catholic Christian devotion.


Sympozjum ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol XXIV (2 (39)) ◽  
pp. 71-82
Author(s):  
Adam Pastorczyk

The universalist ideology: the submission of the local Church to the universal Church? Although more than half a century has passed since the adoption of the dogmatic constitution on the Church at the Second Vatican Council, a discussion continues in the Catholic Church and in ecumenical discussions about the correct interpretation of the conciliar expression „Ecclesia in et ex Ecclesiis”. The subject of this article, therefore, is an analysis of the conciliar and post-conciliar teaching of the Catholic Church and the ongoing theological discussion on the mutual relationship of the universal Church and the local Church.


Author(s):  
Shaun Blanchard

The sources of the Second Vatican Council (1962–65), the history of the road to the council, and the nature of theological reform and development have been the object of much scholarly energy since 1965. To this day, the meaning, significance, and interpretation of Vatican II remain contested, and these debates have great importance for the Catholic Church and for Christian ecumenism. While studies exist that link the council to the thought of the Patristic period, as well as to movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, hitherto the connection of Vatican II to the post-Tridentine but pre-nineteenth-century church has been almost completely overlooked....


1967 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-12
Author(s):  
Julius Cardinal Doepfner

In The Spirit of the Second Vatican Council, the Catholic Church is striving to redefine its relationship with the forces that exert great influence on the life of man. The epoch contemporary with ourselves assigns signal importance to the sciences. To these man in our time looks for norms pertinent to virtually all the spheres of his existence … and therewith for his future wellbeing (cf. the conciliar Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, par. 5).


1967 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 419-439 ◽  
Author(s):  
Norman Ravitch

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.


2018 ◽  
pp. 144-155
Author(s):  
Nikolai V. Chirkov ◽  

In the missionary work of the Roman Catholic Church among non-Christian peoples and cultures, the Church resorts to the use of strategies for the inculturation of Christianity, based on the establishment and development of intercultural and interreligious dialogues. Based on the analysis of the official documents of the Roman Catholic Church (declaration of the Second Vatican Council, social doctrine of the Catholic Church, encyclicals and apostolic exhortations of the pontiffs), the author attempts to reveal the problems of the inculturation of Christianity rising in the context of intercultural and interreligious dialogues and making impact on the missionary work of the Catholic Church. Thanks to the reforms and subsequent decisions of the Second Vatican Council, the aspects, goals, tasks, and instructions for the dialogue of Christianity with non-Christian religions were formulated and set out. In future, the topic of intercultural and interreligious dialogues was developed and expressed in the social doctrine of the Catholic Church, as well as in the encyclicals and apostolic exhortations of the Roman Catholic pontiffs. According to the Roman Catholic Church position, interreligious and intercultural dialogues are aimed at mutual enrichment of various spiritual cultures, and their development should prepare the ground for further evangelization.


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