scholarly journals THE LEGITIMACY OF THE PAPACY

Author(s):  
Jose Fernandez Vega

Since he became pope, Jorge Mario Bergoglio seems to have started a new era in the Vatican. As is usually said, he is the first Jesuit and the first South American in history to govern the Catholic Church. Francis, as it will be argued here, raises many interesting questions to political theory. His figure is now globally accepted in a world where politicians lack of popularity or loose it very soon. ¿Will he solve the deep legitimation crisis of the Church he received? Besides, his critics from within and fro outside the Church, accused him of being a populist. They say he comes from a country with a deep inclination to populism. ¿How much has Argentine political culture, and recent history, influenced Francis’s political strategy? Francis has also changed the bulk of the Church discourse towards society, insisting in subjects like social inequality, motivating priests to go with joy where the people are an denouncing the tragedies of migrants as well as the sadness and solitude of those living in contemporary world, even if they are not poor. This article will address those topics and offer an answer to the theoretical questions they pose.

Author(s):  
Hiermonk Ioann ( Bulyko) ◽  

The Second Vatican Council was a unique event in the history of the Roman Catholic Church. Initiated by Pope John XXIII, it was intended to make the Roman Catholic Church more open to the contemporary society and bring it closer to the people. The principal aim of the council was the so called aggiornamento (updating). The phenomenon of updating the ecclesiastical life consisted in the following: on the one hand, modernization of the life of the Church and closer relations with the secular world; on the other hand, preserving all the traditions upon which the ecclesiastical life was founded. Hence in the Council’s documents we find another, French word ressourcement meaning ‘return to the origins’ based on the Holy Scripture and the works of the Church Fathers. The aggiornamento phenomenon emerged during the Second Vatican Council due to the movement within the Catholic Church called nouvelle theologie (French for “new theology”). Its representatives advanced the ideas that became fundamental in the Council’s decisions. The nouvelle theologie was often associated with modernism as some of the ideas of its representatives seemed to be very similar to those of modernism. However, what made the greatest difference between the two movements was their attitude towards the tradition. For the nouvelle theologie it was very important to revive Christianity in its initial version, hence their striving for returning to the sources, for the oecumenical movement, for better relations with non-Catholics and for liturgical renewal. All these ideas can be traced in the documents of the Second Vatican Council, and all this is characterized by the word aggiornamento.


1989 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 363-381
Author(s):  
Arthur R. Liebscher

To the dismay of today's social progressives, the Argentine Catholic church addresses the moral situation of its people but also shies away from specific political positions or other hint of secular involvement. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the church set out to secure its place in national leadership by strengthening religious institutions and withdrawing clergy from politics. The church struggled to overcome a heritage of organizational weakness in order to promote evangelization, that is, to extend its spiritual influence within Argentina. The bishop of the central city of Córdoba, Franciscan Friar Zenón Bustos y Ferreyra (1905-1925), reinforced pastoral care, catechesis, and education. After 1912, as politics became more heated, Bustos insisted that priests abstain from partisan activities and dedicate themselves to ministry. The church casts itself in the role of national guardian, not of the government, but of the faith and morals of the people.


2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 111-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nadia Urbinati

Populism is the name of a global phenomenon whose definitional precariousness is proverbial. It resists generalizations and makes scholars of politics comparativist by necessity, as its language and content are imbued with the political culture of the society in which it arises. A rich body of socio-historical analyses allows us to situate populism within the global phenomenon called democracy, as its ideological core is nourished by the two main entities—the nation and the people—that have fleshed out popular sovereignty in the age of democratization. Populism consists in a transmutation of the democratic principles of the majority and the people in a way that is meant to celebrate one subset of the people as opposed to another, through a leader embodying it and an audience legitimizing it. This may make populism collide with constitutional democracy, even if its main tenets are embedded in the democratic universe of meanings and language. In this article, I illustrate the context-based character of populism and how its cyclical appearances reflect the forms of representative government. I review the main contemporary interpretations of the concept and argue that some basic agreement now exists on populism's rhetorical character and its strategy for achieving power in democratic societies. Finally, I sketch the main characteristics of populism in power and explain how it tends to transform the fundamentals of democracy: the people and the majority, elections, and representation.


1966 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 69-90
Author(s):  
Torben Christensen

In 1838 Frederick Denison Maurice introduced himself to the English public through his great work, The Kingdom of Christ; or, Hints on the Principles, Ordinances, and Constitution of the Catholic Church. In this book he attempted to show that all men’s searchings, yearnings, and longings would be satisfied in the Church of England, by its ordinances, worship, and doctrinal standards. The Established Church represented the solution to all the enigmas of human existence.In many ways The Kingdom of Christ was a difficult book to master. To all appearances there was an indistinctness in the argument and an obscurity of language. But it had the touch of originality. Above all, whether Maurice could be clearly understood or not, it was evident that he spoke with passion and authority, as a man entrusted with a message from God to the contemporary world. He was convinced that he had been given the task to call back to the truth the religious world, which had not grasped it.


MELINTAS ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 206-227
Author(s):  
Agustinus Wimbodo Purnomo

The Catholic Church provides occasions for funeral rites so as to illuminate the death of the faithful within the paschal mystery of Christ. The Church administers the funeral and offers prayers for its departing members to escort them to the afterlife. Funeral ceremonies are held to comfort the bereaved family, but also to strengthen the faith of the people. Therefore, the funeral ceremony could be seen as a pastoral means to foster the faith of the believers and at the same time to evangelise the gospel. Inculturation could be seen as a process to help the faithful experience God’s saving presence in the liturgy from their respective cultures. In this article, the author views the funeral of the faithful as an entrance for inculturation, bringing Christian liturgy towards the local culture, which in this paper is the Javanese culture, and vice versa. The Javanese culture has its own philosophy in escorting the departing souls through its rituals. This article attempts to integrate what has been a ritual of death in the Javanese culture, i. e. brobosan, which shows a gesture of giving respect to the departed, in the Catholic funeral liturgy, particularly in the last part of the rite.


2009 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 541-552
Author(s):  
Canon John Tyers

While still a novice, the English Jesuit Charles Plater (1875–1921), through his energy, brilliance, enthusiasm and attractive personality was influential in the foundation of the Catholic Social Guild and other social projects. In particular, he motivated the establishment of retreat houses for working men within the Catholic Church in England, work which he described in his book Retreats for the People. This volume attracted the attention of many within the Church of England, encouraging a number of initiatives which, among other things, led to a significant growth in the numbers of Anglicans who made a retreat and to the establishment of diocesan retreat houses.


1948 ◽  
Vol 6 (22) ◽  
pp. 83-100
Author(s):  
Patrick J. Corish

Europe in the seventeenth century was a land of mar and confusion because the great political problems raised by the religious disruption of the preceding century had not yet been solved. Chief among these was the problem of the relations between the Roman catholic church and a protestant state. The teaching of the pope's indirect power in temporal matters in any problem involving a breach of the moral order (ratione peccati) had been strongly re-stated by Bellarmine, and was the official attitude of the church. A protestant prince had committed a grave sin, that of heresy, and so it was the pope's right and duty to depose him and absolve his Catholic subjects from their allegiance. But this political theory was becoming impractical as the seventeenth century progressively demonstrated that Europe was permanently divided. As might be expected, juridical forms lagged behind the development of events; but by the middle of the century the Roman curia, while not prepared to give antecedent approval to a peace with protestants, might be said to be ready to acquiesce once it had been concluded, if the position and rights of the Catholic church could be assured. Yet this assurance was, in the circumstances, almost impossible. The Catholic church could not rest satisfied with toleration as a sect, but demanded recognition as an organised society with a source of jurisdiction illdependent of the state.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Doyle ◽  
Sarah Roddy

Abstract Between the end of the Great Famine and the end of the union with Britain, the Irish Catholic Church was almost exclusively funded by ordinary lay people. This article examines the financial relationship between clergy and laity, focusing on payments related to death. In doing so, it argues three main points. First, it suggests that previous conceptions of lay people coerced into giving their money to the church are too simplistic and deny the complex agency of the people of many social classes who gave the money. Second, it argues that using the financial transactions of ordinary people gives historians a much-needed methodology for recovering lives about which the archives are otherwise silent. Third, it posits that the mediation of faith through money, specifically, must be added to the growing body of work on “material religion.”


Horizons ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-53
Author(s):  
Brian P. Flanagan

ABSTRACTThis article looks at two major metaphors used in contemporary ecclesiology, the church as “the People of God” and as “the Bride of Christ,” which have functioned in some of the polarizing debates within the Catholic Church in North America. It then suggests some methodological reasons why reliance upon metaphors in ecclesiology, either through the balancing of different metaphors or the promotion of a dominant metaphor, is inadequate to the task of understanding the church systematically. It then suggests some avenues for future ecclesiological method that may help to understand the church better and so to respond better to contemporary ecclesiological debates.


Author(s):  
Ormond Rush

For 400 years after the Council of Trent, a juridical model of the church dominated Roman Catholicism. Shifts towards a broader ecclesiology began to emerge in the nineteenth century. Despite the attempts to repress any deviations from the official theology after the crisis of Roman Catholic Modernism in the early twentieth century, various renewal movements, known as ressourcement, in the decades between the world wars brought forth a period of rich ecclesiological research, with emphasis given to notions such as the Mystical Body, the People of God, the church as mystery, as sacrament, and as communio. The Second Vatican Council incorporated many of these developments into its vision for renewal and reform of the Roman Catholic Church. Over half a century after Vatican II, a new phase in its reception is emerging with the pontificate of Pope Francis.


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