scholarly journals Experiencing Uncommon Faithfulness:

Lumen et Vita ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 20-28
Author(s):  
Stephen Nicholson, SJ
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Holy Spirit ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
The United States ◽  
Systemic Racism ◽  
Black Catholics ◽  
God's People ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Holy Spirit ◽  
The Church

The challenges confronting the church in the 21st century, especially that of persistent systemic racism, call for a methodological shift in ecclesiology.  This paper explores the meaning and benefits of Natalia’s Imperatori-Lee’s narrative ecclesiology within the context of race in the United States Catholic Church.  By turning to the story of God’s people, especially the silenced and oppressed, ecclesiology is empowered to challenge false histories and overturn theologies which justify oppression.  Furthermore, the work of the Holy Spirit and the responses of the faithful are made evident in lives of “uncommon faithfulness,” such as those of Black Catholics in the US.  To be guided by narrative ecclesiology today, members of the church must engage in an embodied struggle for liberation and so hear the story of God’s people anew.

scholarly journals A Complicated ‘Denominator’ of the Beginnings of the History of the Charismatic Renewal in the Roman Catholic Church

2021 ◽  
pp. 57-88
Author(s):  
Artur Antoni Kasprzak
Keyword(s):  
Holy Spirit ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
The United States ◽  
Essential Elements ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
The Holy Spirit ◽  
History Of ◽  
Charismatic Renewal ◽  
The Church

Every story has its beginning. Most stories have their end. An attempt at a synthetic analysis of the history of the beginning of the Charismatic Renewal in the Roman Catholic Church turns out to be confronted with a  certain initial reality: not only does this history not have a specific beginning, but it also has no end. It is a story that is still open. In celebrating its fiftieth birthday in the Roman Catholic Church recently (2017), a symbolic experience was taken as the original reference date. The receipt of charisms by members of a small group of American students on 18 February 1967, in Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania) in the United States, is a date and place that is in a sense only symbolic. Neither that moment nor that event exhausts the vast and much broader charismatic experience of the Holy Spirit in the Church, which can be seen in various and numerous moments in the history of the Church. This study efforts to explain this singular experience from the perspective of analysing the essential elements of the first structuring of the Charismatic Renewal in the Roman Catholic Church in the 20th century. The study is also an attempt at a synthetic look at the history, but also at its authors, including Ralph Martin, Steve Clark, Gerry Rauch, Veronica O'Brien, Cardinal Léon-Joseph Suenens and Pope Paul VI.

scholarly journals Officialization and linguistic acculturation of Spanish in the United States Catholic Church

2012 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 149-165
Author(s):  
Antonio Medina-Rivera
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Final Section ◽  
The United States ◽  
Spanish Language ◽  
Inclusive Language ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Church

The present investigation brings to light some of the changes associated with the use of English and Spanish in the US Catholic Church. The first part is an examination of the process of officialization from a historical perspective, acknowledging the impact of some groups or associations in the use of vernacular languages within the Church. The second part examines the role of acculturation during this process of officialization; and the final section analyzes the use of inclusive language in the Church, as an attempt to have a more gender-balanced institution. These three elements serve to provide a more complete perspective of the reality, expansion, revitalization and maintenance of the Spanish language in the United States. The article also reveals some of the language planning policies (direct and indirect) that have made an impact on the use of Spanish within US Catholicism.

“How Can We Catch Fire?”

2021 ◽  
pp. 119-143
Author(s):  
Melanie C. Ross
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
Pacific Northwest ◽  
Holy Spirit ◽  
The United States ◽  
Kingdom Of God ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
The Holy Spirit ◽  
Influence At Work ◽  
Vineyard Movement

Chapter 5 explores the Vineyard movement, one of the fastest-growing church movements in the United States, which is committed to holding together the “already” and “not yet” of the Kingdom of God in worship. In addition to looking for a dramatic, miraculous inbreaking of the Holy Spirit, there is a less dramatic but equally formative influence at work in worship: the Quaker notion of “gospel order” and its accompanying understanding of ethics. These commitments are tested at “Koinonia Vineyard,” a congregation located in the Pacific Northwest, where one African American member wrestles with her vision of activism and her Caucasian pastor’s desire for the congregation to remain politically neutral during a time of national racial unrest.

scholarly journals Leitourgia: The Missing Link in Evangelii Gaudium

2018 ◽  
Vol 84 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-76
Author(s):  
Peter John McGregor
Keyword(s):  
New Testament ◽  
Holy Spirit ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Missing Link ◽  
Popular Piety ◽  
Lumen Gentium ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
The Holy Spirit ◽  
The Church ◽  
Missing Element

Some especially insightful and challenging passages in Evangelii Gaudium are those on the importance of a personal encounter with Jesus, the evangelizing power of popular piety, person to person witness, and the need for the power of the Holy Spirit. However, in order to do full justice to the mission of the Church, the document requires more on the priestly aspect of this mission. This element is substantially absent, in part, because of Francis’s veneration of Evangelii Nuntiandi. However, this absent element can be obtained from the missiology of Lumen Gentium, John Paul II, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Based on an analysis of the meaning of leitourgia in the New Testament, this article concludes that this missing element can serve as a link between Pope Francis’s kerygma and diakonia, enabling a harmony which has been missing, to greater or lesser degrees, from the Church’s mission in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Parish and Place

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tricia Colleen Bruce
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Local Level ◽  
The United States ◽  
Organizational Form ◽  
Black Catholics ◽  
Perceived Need ◽  
Latin Mass ◽  
The Us ◽  
Structural Responses ◽  
Depth Interviews

The Catholic Church stands at the forefront of an emergent majority-minority America. Parish and Place tells the story of how the largest US religion is responding at the local level to unprecedented cultural, racial, linguistic, ideological, and political diversification among American Catholics. Specifically, it explores bishops’ use of personal parishes—parishes formally established not on the basis of territory, but purpose. Today’s personal parishes serve an array of Catholics drawn together by shared identities and preferences rather than shared neighborhoods. Their contemporary application permits Catholic leaders to act upon the perceived need for named, specialist organizations alongside the more common territorial parish, designed to serve all in its midst. Parish and Place documents the US Catholic Church’s earlier move away from national parishes and more recent renewal of the personal parish as an organizational form. In-depth interviews and national survey data detail the rise and rationale behind new parishes for the Traditional Latin Mass, for Vietnamese Catholics, for Black Catholics, and more. Featuring insights from bishops, priests, and diocesan leaders throughout the United States, chapters offer a rare view of institutional decision-making from the top. The book is at once a demonstration of structural responses to diversity across wider conceptions of space, and a look at just how far fragmentation can go before it challenges cohesion and unity.

The Mother of God's People: The Adoration of the Holy Spirit in the Eighteenth-Century Brüdergemeine

1999 ◽  
Vol 68 (4) ◽  
pp. 886-909 ◽  
Author(s):  
Craig Atwood
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Holy Spirit ◽  
Religious Community ◽  
Time Range ◽  
Essential Point ◽  
The Past ◽  
Moravian Church ◽  
God's People ◽  
The Holy Spirit ◽  
The Church

“Lord God, now we praise you, you worthy Holy Spirit! The church in unity honors you, the mother of Christendom. All the angels and the host of heaven and whoever serves the honor of the Son; also the cherubim and seraphim, sing with a clear voice: ‘Divine majesty, who proceeds from the Father, who praises the Son as the creator and points to his suffering.’ … Daily O Mother! whoever knows you and the Savior glorifies you because you bring the gospel to all the world.” These lines are from the Te Matrem, a prayer to the Holy Spirit that for nearly thirty years was a regular part of worship for a German Protestant group known as the Brüdergemeine. The Brüdergemeine, commonly called the Moravian Church today, was an international religious community that developed an elaborate and creative liturgical life for its carefully regulated communities. The Brethren's intense devotion to the suffering of Christ is the most famous aspect of their worship, but in the mid-eighteenth century their leader, Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf, actively encouraged the Brüdergemeine to worship the Holy Spirit as the mother of the church. Surprisingly, though, this aspect of Zinzendorf's theology has been largely overlooked or downplayed by historians and theologians in the past two hundred years. When it has been discussed, it has been dismissed as a brief aberration or experiment that was discarded after the so-called Sifting Time (Sichtungzeit.) The Sifting Time was a period of liturgical and social excess in the community, the details of which remain quite obscure. The Brethren used the word Sichtungzeit to refer to a time when the community was in danger of becoming a fanatical sect. Dates for the Sifting Time range from a high of 1736–52 to a low of 1746–49, but the most common dating is 1743–50. This article will show that the use of maternal imagery for the Holy Spirit was not a tangential or quixotic aspect of Zinzendorf's theology, but thrived for more than thirty years and was, in Zinzendorf's words, “an extremely important and essential point … and all our Gemeine and praxis hangs on this point.”

A Saint of Our Own

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen Sprows Cummings
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
American Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
Panoramic View ◽  
Pope Francis ◽  
Heaven And Earth ◽  
The Church ◽  
The U.S ◽  
Over Time

Canonization, the process by which the Catholic Church names saints, may be fundamentally about holiness, but it is never only about holiness. In the United States, it was often about the ways in which Catholics defined, defended, and celebrated their identities as Americans. This book traces saint-seeking in the United States from the 1880s, the decade in which U.S. Catholics nominated their first candidates for canonization, to 2015, the year Pope Francis named the twelfth American saint in the first such ceremony held on U.S. soil. It argues that U.S. Catholics’ search for a saint of their own sprung from a desire to persuade the Vatican to recognize their country’s holy heroes. But Rome was not U.S. saint-seekers only audience. For the U.S. Catholic faithful, saints served not only as mediators between heaven and earth, but also between the faith they professed and the American culture in which they lived. This panoramic view of American sanctity, focused on figures at the nexus of holiness and U.S. history, this book explores U.S. Catholics’ understanding of themselves both as members of the church and as citizens of the nation—and reveals how those identities converged, diverged, and changed over time.

A Brief History of the Sociology of Parishes in the United States

2019 ◽  
pp. 25-46
Author(s):  
Tricia C. Bruce
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
The United States ◽  
Sociological Research ◽  
Sociological Literature ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
Good For ◽  
Sociological Studies ◽  
The Church

Exploring sociological literature across almost three-quarters of a century, this chapter maps the origins and trajectory of sociologists’ exploration of the parish from the 1950s to today. From its contentious start to its largely applied orientation today, the chapter highlights several eras of parish research and argues that our current lack of sociological research on Catholic parishes can be traced to the tenuous relationship between the academy and the institutional Catholic Church. The chapter concludes by asserting that parish studies can be simultaneously good for the academy and good for the church. The future of sociological studies of the parish rest upon the willingness of both the academy and the church to accept this proposition.

A Realignment of the Catholic Church in the United States

2021 ◽  
Vol 78 (3) ◽  
pp. 267-275
Author(s):  
Jonathon L. Wiggins ◽  
Mary L. Gautier ◽  
Thomas P. Gaunt
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
The United States ◽  
Faith Communities ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Us ◽  
Challenges And Opportunities ◽  
Using Data ◽  
Us Census ◽  
The Catholic Church

The official, parish-identified, Catholic population in the United States over the past forty years (1980 to 2019) has grown 40 percent, from about 48 million to over 67 million. Such a hearty rate of growth might lead one to assume that the Catholic population is increasing across all parts of the country. This growth, however, has been anything but uniform. From 1980 to the present, the Catholic population in some US Census regions—mostly in the South and in the West of the country—has experienced a boom, while in others—mostly in the Northeast and Midwest—it has experienced a bust. In this article, the growth or decline in the number of Catholics in each of the four US Census regions is explored, using data from the 2020 Faith Communities Today survey as well as data submitted by Catholic dioceses. These analyses give a more nuanced portrait of the Catholic Church in the United States, shedding light on both the challenges and opportunities the US Catholic Church is experiencing in 2021.

Comments on “The Crisis in Church-state Relationships in the U.S.A.”

1999 ◽  
Vol 61 (4) ◽  
pp. 710-714
Author(s):  
Francis J. Connell
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Effective Means ◽  
The United States ◽  
The State ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Catholic Church

The author seems to have no regard for the supernatural life and vigor of the Catholic Church. He proposes as the most necessary means of protecting the Church from grave harm in the United States something natural—the “adaptation” of a traditional Catholic doctrine to a naturalistic concept of the State. The truth is that the most effective means toward preserving the Church from harm and promoting its apostolic activity will be found in a more ardent zeal on the part of bishops and priests and in a more faithful observance of God's law by Catholics. It should not be forgotten that Christ has promised to abide with His Church and to sustain it, so that the gates of hell shall never prevail against it. The author does not take this promise into consideration.

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