The Laywoman Project

Author(s):  
Mary J. Henold

Summoning everyday Catholic laywomen to the forefront of twentieth-century Catholic history, Mary J. Henold considers how these committed parishioners experienced their religion in the wake of Vatican II (1962–1965). This era saw major changes within the heavily patriarchal religious faith—at the same time as an American feminist revolution caught fire. Who was the Catholic woman for a new era? Henold uncovers a vast archive of writing, both intimate and public facing, by hundreds of rank-and-file American laywomen active in national laywomen’s groups, including the National Council of Catholic Women, the Catholic Daughters of America, and the Daughters of Isabella. These records evoke a formative period when laywomen played publicly with a surprising variety of ideas about their own position in the Catholic Church. While marginalized near the bottom of the church hierarchy, laywomen quietly but purposefully engaged both their religious and gender roles as changing circumstances called them into question. Some eventually chose feminism while others rejected it, but most, Henold says, crafted a middle position: even conservative, nonfeminist laywomen came to reject the idea that the church could adapt to the modern world while keeping women’s status frozen in amber.

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 193-214
Author(s):  
Paul P. Mariani

In the 1950s, Shanghai witnessed a conflict between the Chinese Communist Party (ccp) and the Shanghai Catholic community. The ccp wanted this community to break ties with the pope and form an “independent” Catholic Church that would fall under the authority of the Chinese government. Many Catholics in Shanghai soon resisted what they perceived to be the unjust religious policies of the ccp. One of the “backbone elements” of Catholic resistance in Shanghai was young women. This study investigates how three young Catholic women dealt with the ccp’s encroaching religious policies. All three came from similar backgrounds and they all initially formed part of the Catholic resistance to ccp religious policies during the early 1950s. Afterward their trajectories differed dramatically due to the particular way in which the Communist revolution intervened in the life of each woman. This study thus illuminates the contested area of religious faith, state power, and gender in the early years of the People’s Republic of China. 上世纪五十年代,上海见证了中共与上海天主教会之间的冲突。中共命令上海天主教会断绝与教宗的联系,成为一个听命于中国政府的“独立”教会。上海的许多天主教徒很快就起来抵制这些他们视为不公正的宗教政策。反抗运动中的许多“骨干分子”是年轻女信徒。本文探究了三位年轻的女天主教信徒如何应对当时中共侵权的宗教政策。她们有相似的生活背景,并都在50年代初期参与了抵制中共宗教政策的运动。但是因为中共革命介入她们生命的不同方式,她们之后的人生轨迹大相径庭。这项研究因此阐述了在中华人民共和国初期,宗教信仰、国家政权与性别之间充满张力的互动。


2013 ◽  
Vol 43 ◽  
pp. 1-19

Charles de Gaulle famously called the Second Vatican Council the most important event in modern history. Many commentators at the time saw the Council as nothing short of revolutionary, and the later judgements of historians have upheld this view. The astonishing enterprise of a man who became, quite unexpectedly, Pope John XXIII in 1958, this purposeful aggiornamento of the Roman Catholic Church was almost at once a leviathan of papers, committees, commissions, and meetings. Scholars have been left to confront no less than twelve volumes of ‘ante-preparatory’ papers, seven volumes of preparatory papers, and thirty-two volumes of documents generated by the Council itself. A lasting impression of the impressiveness of the affair is often conveyed by photographs of the 2,200-odd bishops of the Church, drawn from around the world, sitting in the basilica of St Peter, a vast, orchestrated theatre of ecclesiastical intent. For this was the council to bring the Church into a new relationship with the modern world, one that was more creative and less defiant; a council to reconsider much – if not quite all – of the theological, liturgical, and ethical infrastructure in which Catholicism lived and breathed and had its being.


2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 71
Author(s):  
Paul Budi Kleden

Gaudium et Spes is a revolutionary document of Vatican II which can still inspire the Church now and in the future. This document is revolutionary in the sense that it deals with problems, issues and ideas that had never before become the agenda of any Council in the Catholic Church. Gaudium et Spes concretizes what John XXIII named aggiornamento, a process of contextualising the Christian heritage, through which the Church opens itself up to the modern world. This document is also revolutionary because it is entirely a product of the conciliar process of the Council itself. This article presents the process of drafting the document and discusses some issues that are relevant for the Church today and in the future. <b>Kata-kata kunci:</b> proses, Gereja, dunia modern, solidaritas, keadilan ekonomi, martabat manusia, perdamaian.


2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 144
Author(s):  
Kevin Burke

<p>This article seeks to build on recent movement in the fields of religion and gender studies in order to analyze and critically reflect on “the relation, confrontation and intersection of gender and religion” (Korte, 2011, p. 2). Here the author works to investigate the possibility that emerges in new forms of analysis that marry theological interventions with masculinities studies as a way to newly attend to patriarchy and fundamentalism. Utilizing feminist Catholic theology, the work addresses unique and recent problems that have emerged in the Church in the face of a new era that appears both more progressive and that has engendered conservative backlash.  Along the way the article addresses issues of gender and sexuality as they relate to the priesthood and Pope Francis’ recent assertions linking gender theory to ideological colonization and even nuclear armaments.</p>


Author(s):  
Margaret M. Scull

Individuals within the Church, rather than the institution as a whole, became the main negotiators for peace after the revelations of clerical child abuse in the early 1990s. Priests like Fathers Alec Reid, Gerry Reynolds, and Denis Faul worked privately to convince paramilitary groups to lay down their weapons. The Church hierarchy was forced into a defensive position in order to protect its reputation as a moral arbiter after the child abuse revelations. The institutional Catholic Church was no longer able to play a role in the peace process by this point. However, individual priests who fostered relationships with their Protestant counterparts continued to act as negotiators for an end to the conflict. The signing of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement marked one step in the peace process but after this point the Catholic Church had no influence on these policies.


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.


2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mateusz Kasiak

Kasiak Mateusz, Gender in educational and public discourse of the Church. Analysis of the Pastoral Letter on the Sunday of the Holy Family. Culture – Society – Education no 2(16) 2019, Poznań 2019, pp. 289–312, Adam Mickiewicz University Press. ISSN 2300-0422. DOI 10.14746/kse.2019.16.19. Gender as a category of cultural gender and gender identity appears not only in scientific discourse as a topic of research, but also in public discourse, as a subject of various debates and disputes. This concept was also included into the discourse of the Catholic Church. Its creators – church leaders – embarked upon a public reinterpretation of the concept of gender, thus inserting their point of view into the broader political and ideological dispute. The aim of this paper is to review the postulates of the church concerning gender in the Pastoral Letter on the Feast of the Holy Family, which seems to be a leading programme paper concerning this issue. In this paper, gender as a research and scientific category is isolated from the scientific discourse and appropriatedby the educational discourse of the church, where it functions as a scare tactic. Structural modifications in the text and style of the letter, stylistic and rhetorical tricks, as well as pragmatic mechanisms, make the text of the pastoral letter a persuasive political argument.


Open Theology ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 368-387
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Laddach

Abstract One of the most important questions in the Roman Catholic Church is the question of sexual and gender diversity. Therefore, the article presents the results of qualitative and quantitative content analysis of the Catholic sociocultural periodical Więź (Bond) from 2007 to 2020, which is the leading forum for liberal Catholic debates in Poland. The goal was to analyze the period’s narration toward current Church’s instructions on sexuality and gender diversity. Five dominant postulates were identified in Więź: (1) a discussion about people with the need to revise their or the Church’s narration on and experience of sex and gender; (2) a reevaluation of the significance and consequence of sexual revolution in Poland; (3) an organization of the understanding of body, sex, sexuality, and gender; (4) a promotion of the idea of encounter; and (5) a settlement of cases of sexual abuse in the Church. The article concludes that the presence of social dialogue on sexuality and gender diversity in the current pastoral approach of the Church in Poland requires a suspension of moral judgment and an openness from Church with a strong traditional, and rigid viewpoint to better understand the difficult spiritual and social situation of people who live contrary to the moral teachings of the Church or whose views go against these teachings.


2020 ◽  
pp. 73-95
Author(s):  
Stanislav Přibyl

The Code of Canon Law of 1983 came up with a list of obligations and duties of the Catholic faithful. This list is analogical to those of the charters of fundamental rights and freedoms found in the documents of international law and in the constitutions of democratic countries. the inspiration of church law by civilian law was a reality from the very beginnings of the development of Canon Law: first by Roman Law, in the modern world by complex codifications of civil law, and after Vatican II also the idea of universal human rights. The specifics of the Catholic Church in relation to a democratic state is the incorporation of the subject of law into the Church through baptism which brings, above all, duties and obligations. Thus the catalogue which may now be seen in the Code contains first and foremost a list of duties, not rights, which are not stressed in the modern state. In fact, the modern state has very few demands; often just the payment of taxes and compulsory school attendance. The article deals with the individual obligations and rights found in the Code of Canon Law and compares them with their analogies in constitutions. The concept of civil and canonical norms tends to get closer primarily in the case of inspiration by natural law, whereas the obligations of the faithful represent a specifically ecclesiastical goals, for which no analogy in civil law can be found. After all, the supreme law of the Church is the salvation of souls, indeed, the state does not have such a supernatural goal.


2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 144
Author(s):  
Kevin Burke

<p>This article seeks to build on recent movement in the fields of religion and gender studies in order to analyze and critically reflect on “the relation, confrontation and intersection of gender and religion” (Korte, 2011, p. 2). Here the author works to investigate the possibility that emerges in new forms of analysis that marry theological interventions with masculinities studies as a way to newly attend to patriarchy and fundamentalism. Utilizing feminist Catholic theology, the work addresses unique and recent problems that have emerged in the Church in the face of a new era that appears both more progressive and that has engendered conservative backlash.  Along the way the article addresses issues of gender and sexuality as they relate to the priesthood and Pope Francis’ recent assertions linking gender theory to ideological colonization and even nuclear armaments.</p>


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