4. Elaborating a Public Culture: The Catholic Church in Nineteenth- Century Quebec

Author(s):  
Roberto Perin
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.


Author(s):  
Noel Malcolm

This essay presents a hitherto unknown work: the first autobiography ever written by an Albanian. It was composed in 1881–2 by a young man (born in 1861) called Lazër Tusha; he wrote it in Italian, and the manuscript has been preserved in an ecclesiastical archive in Italy. Tusha was the son of a prosperous tailor in the city of Shkodër, which was the administrative centre of the Catholic Church in Albania. He describes his childhood and early education, which gave him both a love of Italian culture and a strong desire to serve the Church; at his insistence, his father sent him to the Catholic seminary there, run by the Jesuits. He describes his disappointment on being obliged, after six years, to leave the seminary and resume lay life, and his failed attempts to become either a Jesuit or a Franciscan. Some aspects of these matters remain mysterious in his account. But much of this unfinished draft book is devoted to things other than purely personal narrative: Tusha writes in loving detail about customs, superstitions, clothes, the city of Shkodër, its market and the tailoring business. This is a very rich account of the life and world of an ordinary late-nineteenth-century Albanian—albeit an unusually thoughtful one, with some literary ambition.


2021 ◽  
pp. 292-304
Author(s):  
Jennifer Walker

Taking the 1903 death of Pope Leo XIII as its starting point, the conclusion extends beyond the legal separation of Church and State (1905) in order to trace the ways in which the processes of transformation that were set in motion during the late nineteenth century continued well into the twentieth century. Pierre Nora’s concept of the lieu de memoire illuminates the numerous ways that the sites of Catholic and French memory that the book explores—whether as opera, popular theatre, or concert—found an extraordinary ally in the Republic as it collectively harnessed the power of memory. From its “origin” in the French medieval era, to its transformations throughout the fin-de-siècle, to the response to the devastating fire at Notre-Dame in 2019, the Catholic Church provided (and continues to provide) a new mode of expression for the French Republic. In effect, the success of the twentieth-century renouveau catholique was set in motion by its nineteenth-century forbear: the path was paved by the Republic’s musical Ralliement and the memorialization of its Catholic past as a fundamental cornerstone of its modern existence.


1964 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 334-341
Author(s):  
Leonard Swidler

“It is in the nineteenth century—the century of freedom and liberalism—that we witness an extraordinary growth of arch-conservative authoritarianism, of Catholic ghettoism. … If the first session of Vatican Council II can be said to mark the wedding anew of the Catholic Church and freedom, the Catholic University affair of the spring, 1963, was its consummation. … The issue of freedom in the Catholic Church is one that suddenly and providentially has a glowing future.”


2013 ◽  
Vol 38 (152) ◽  
pp. 600-619 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Roddy

The idea of an ‘Irish empire’ has had enduring appeal. It was a rare source of pride promoted by politicians and churchmen during depressed periods in independent Ireland, particularly the 1950s, and the phrase provided an evocative title for at least one popular – and notably sanguine – version of the Irish diaspora's story as late as the turn of this century. In such contexts ‘Irish empire’ can appear simply a wry play on a far more commonly used and, if recent scholarship is to be taken into account, by no means unrelated term, ‘British empire’. Yet as many historians of the Irish abroad, the Irish Catholic Church, and Irish culture more generally have noted, the existence of a peculiarly Irish ‘spiritual empire’ was widely spoken of even as the island's ports were daily choked with emigrants. Nevertheless, the pervasiveness and persistence of the concept, invariably involving the perception of a special, God-given emigrants' ‘mission’ to spread the Catholic religion in whatever part of the world they settled, warrant a more searching analysis than historians in the above-mentioned categories have hitherto devoted to it.


1969 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-105
Author(s):  
John P. Marschall

In spite of the nativism that agitated the United States during the second quarter of the nineteenth century, the Catholic Church experienced a noticeable drift of native American converts from other denominations. Between 1841 and 1857 the increased number of converts included a significant sprinkling of Protestant ministers. The history of this movement, which had its paradigm in the Oxford Movement, will be treated more in detail elsewhere. The purpose of this essay is simply to recount the attempt by several converts to establish a religious congregation of men dedicated to the Catholic apostolate among native Americans.


2011 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 125-154
Author(s):  
Carmel Cassar

AbstractThe Holy See became aware of the potential evangelising role of the Maltese in Ottoman lands at least from the mid-sixteenth century. This had much to do with Malta's geographical proximity to North Africa, coupled with the ability of the Maltese to speak a native Semitic language, believed to be close to Arabic, while at the same time being fervently Catholic Christians. Malta was singled out for this role mainly because the majority of Levantine Christian communities, then largely under Ottoman rule, were known to speak some form of Arabic. The combination of these factors appeared to be an excellent combination of circumstances to the Catholic Church authorities in Rome who believed that Malta was ideally suited for the teaching of Arabic. In Rome there was a general belief that the establishment of a school of Arabic in Malta, would help make the Catholic Church more accessible to the Christians of the Levant. However, despite continuous efforts, throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, by the Holy Congregation of Propaganda Fide, the teaching of Arabic never really took off in Malta. Under British colonial administration, in the early nineteenth century, Arabic remained on the list of subjects taught at the University of Malta and was later introduced at the Lyceum and the Valletta Government School. The British colonial authorities may even have encouraged its teaching and for a brief time, in the mid-nineteenth century, the well known Lebanese scholar Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, was lecturer of Arabic at Valletta. The end of Arabic teaching during World War One coincided with the emergence of the belief, pushed by Lord Gerald Strickland, that the Maltese descended from the Phoenicians. It was believed that the Maltese had preserved ancient Phoenician, rather than Arabic, over the millennia. By associating the Maltese with the ancient Phoenicians Strickland was simply saying that the Maltese might have had Semitic origins but that did not mean they were Arabs.


1995 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 319-349 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antony F. Allison

THE writings of the seventeenth-century English theologian, Henry Holden, played a small but significant part in the development of western religious thought in the centuries following his death. His most important work, Divinae fidei analysis, first printed in Latin at Paris in 1652 and afterwards translated and published in English, was several times reprinted in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and was later incorporated in two theological collections, J. P. Migne's Theologiae cursus completus (tom.6, 1839), and Josef Braun's Bibliotheca regularum fidei (tom.2, 1844). It influenced the thinking, in the nineteenth century, not only of avowed liberals such as Dôllinger and Acton, but also, in some degree, of moderate progressives like Newman. In recent years, specialist studies on different aspects of Holden's thought have appeared in English and in French. So far, however, no serious attempt has been made to revise his bibliography: we still have to rely, in large measure, on that published by Joseph Gillow more than a century ago. In this article I want to bring together material that has come to light since Gillow's time and to examine Holden's works afresh against the background of his life and the religious and political developments in England and France at that period. I shall devote particular attention to two themes that run through all his work. One is gallicanism, that amalgam of mediaeval theories limiting the authority of the papacy in relation to secular states and their rulers and national churches and their bishops. It will be seen that plans which Holden advanced in the 1640s for the reform of the Catholic Church in England along gallican lines are based largely on ideas developed in his Divinaefidei analysis published a few years later. The other is his analytical and critical approach to doctrine, aiming always to distinguish truths solidly based on Scripture and tradition from the mere speculations of theologians. It is an approach that had been made popular in France by the Catholic controversialist, François Véron, whose Régula fidei catholicae was first published at Paris in 1644 when Holden was probably already at work on his Divinae fidei analysis. It reveals itself in all Holden's writings and distinguishes him from many of the other Catholic apologists who were drawn into controversy with the Anglican divines of the post-Chillingworth era.


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