Envisioning Catholic Colonial Order

2020 ◽  
pp. 171-201
Author(s):  
Katherine D. Moran

This chapter explores how American writers described the Spanish friars as imperial models. Like Jacques Marquette and Junípero Serra, the friars were cast as benevolent civilizers but were particularly lauded for what many Americans believed to be their ability to maintain social order. It describes how the Spanish friars preserved existing state of affairs by upholding orthodoxy against Philippine transformations of Roman Catholicism, religiously inspired anticolonial rebellions, and establishing the Iglesia Filipina Independiente, a nationalist Catholic church. The chapter also talks about the many Americans that embraced the idea of Americanist Catholicism, which was embodied by U.S.-trained priests, as a tool for ensuring order while promoting religious liberty. It points out the lessons American writers and officials imagined the Catholic history of the Philippines might provide for the advancement of the U.S. colonial state.

Author(s):  
Oliver Charbonneau

This book reveals the little-known history of the United States' colonization of the Philippines' Muslim South in the early twentieth century. Often referred to as Moroland, the Sulu Archipelago and the island of Mindanao were sites of intense US engagement and laboratories of colonial modernity during an age of global imperialism. Exploring the complex relationship between colonizer and colonized from the late nineteenth century until the eve of the Second World War, the book argues that American power in the Islamic Philippines rested upon a transformative vision of colonial rule. Civilization, protection, and instruction became watchwords for U.S. military officers and civilian administrators, who enacted fantasies of racial reform among the diverse societies of the region. Violence saturated their efforts to remake indigenous politics and culture, embedding itself into governance strategies used across four decades. Although it took place on the edges of the Philippine colonial state, this fraught civilizing mission did not occur in isolation. It shared structural and ideological connections to U.S. settler conquest in North America and also borrowed liberally from European and Islamic empires. These circuits of cultural, political, and institutional exchange — accessed by colonial and anticolonial actors alike — gave empire in the Southern Philippines its hybrid character. This book is a story of colonization and connection, reaching across nations and empires in its examination of a Southeast Asian space under US sovereignty. It presents an innovative new portrait of the American empire's global dimensions and the many ways they shaped the colonial encounter in the Southern Philippines.


Religions ◽  
2022 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 56
Author(s):  
Jeane C. Peracullo ◽  
Rosa Bella M. Quindoza

Extensive open-pit mining activities in the Philippines since the 1970s up to the present confront the meaning of the “Church of the Poor”, a description that the Catholic Church in the Philippines uses to visualize its prophetic mission. Alongside mining, many more environmentally destructive industries are present in the poorest areas in the country, even though the Philippines is disaster-prone and one of the world’s most vulnerable countries to the devastating effects of the climate crisis. The environmental degradation has prompted many Filipino Catholic organizations and communities to act together through various campaigns to address the problem. The article examines a case of a faith-based community that rose to the challenge to address various environmental issues their community was and continues to experience. The community’s environmental activism presents a viable model for a re-imagined ecological care towards the “flourishing of all” as a response to Pamela McCarroll’s call to action to continue conversations on the many ways practical theology can move beyond anthropocentrism while focusing on social justice.


2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (50) ◽  
pp. 131-168
Author(s):  
Ekaterina Khonineva

This article discusses how the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) and the liturgical reform in the Catholic Church enhanced critical reflexivity on ritual semiotics and the boundaries of ritualism and anti-ritualism in British social anthropology (namely, in the works of Victor Turner and Mary Douglas) and in the protest movement of Catholic Traditionalism, and furnished the conditions for their discursive convergence. Since Turner and Douglas were Catholics, the similarities in the logic and rhetoric of academic and “folk” anthropology of ritual inevitably raise questions commonly labeled as the problem of belief, focusing on the risks and benefits of the anthropologist's religious commitments for ethnographic work. A close analysis of statements on liturgical reform by British anthropologists and Traditionalist Catholics shows that they share a common, Durkheimian view of ritual and social order; at the same time, intellectual and spiritual biographies of Turner and Douglas demonstrate that sometimes anthropology can influence anthropologists' belief as much as their belief influences their anthropology. These observations provide grounds for a revision of the problem of belief with a Protestant bias. The association of belief with the inner life and creeds is one of the many ways of conceptualizing the mediation of religious experience. In some cultures, such as traditional Catholicism, no lesser emphasis is placed on ritual performance. Thus, an exploration of the proximity of anthropological and Traditionalist “languages” of ritual description opens up prospects for a discussion of the place of attitudes toward ritual in anthropological epistemology and its historical roots.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Grace T. Betsayda

This paper investigates the role that the Roman Catholic church has played in the socialization of Filipinos in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). The research is based on scholarly acknowledgment of the important place of social institutions—such as churches, synagogues, mosques, temples and other places for religious and faith-based gatherings—in the settlement and integration experiences of immigrants. The paper argues that Roman Catholicism, first introduced into the Philippines via Spanish colonization, has become an important marker of identity for many Filipinos and has functioned—aided by their facility in the English language (a result of American colonization of the Philippines)—as a means of easing the barriers to Filipinos’ integration into Canada. To better analyze the role the Roman Catholic church has played in Filipino-Canadian immigrant life, the study provides an overview of the history of migration to Canada and discusses the place of the church as seen from the perspective of representatives of diasporic, transnational and second generation communities of Filipinos in Canada. As such, the main data for the study is drawn primary material comprising interviews with Filipino-Canadians from each of these community groups.


Author(s):  
Jesse Swan

Elizabeth Cary, Viscountess Falkland, was born in 1585 or 1586 to Elizabeth (née Symondes) and Lawrence Tanfield in Burford close to Woodstock, where the Lady Tanfield’s relations were prominent, notably Queen Elizabeth’s Champion, Sir Henry Lee. The Lord Tanfield was an upwardly mobile lawyer of the Inner Temple, eventually becoming Lord Chief Justice of the Exchequer and extensive landlord in and around Burford, including famously, because of his grandson, Lucius Cary, the second Viscount Falkland, owning the estate known as Great Tew. Cary was an only child and was married into the Cary family, notable for its close kinship relations to Queen Elizabeth. Eventually having eleven children, with one dying in infancy, Cary is remarkable in Catholic history as a powerful and effective champion of Catholicism in the Caroline court and for bringing six of her children into the Catholic Church, while she is remarkable in English literary history for authoring the first original play in English by a woman to be published in print (the play is The Tragedy of Mariam, the Fair Queen of Jewry) and being the first woman to author a modern-style history in English (that of the reign of Edward II). Exactly who and what kind of person Elizabeth Tanfield Cary, Viscountess Falkland, could be or should be has been and continues to be the most characteristic feature of the contemplations of Cary, from the time of her life to the present. Cary herself wondered who she could and should be as did many of the people of her life, including the daughter who was her first biographer, and the speculations and consideration of various possibilities continued, through the 19th century, when Cary was made into a champion of Anglo-Catholics, both masculine and feminine, and the 20th century, when Cary drew the interest of literary historians concerned with the development of modern biography and drama and then feminists concerned to correct masculinist literary history by reviving knowledge of the many quelled women writers. She should be gaining further interest as the centrality of translation in the early modern period is better integrated into emergent literary historiography. Some interest more recently has been expressed in departing from thinking about Cary as an individual and in various biographical ways in favor of using her works as touchstones for other matter, especially social and cultural, yet there continues to be interest in Cary as a woman and in her works as the expressions of a woman when modernity was still inchoate.


2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 323-339
Author(s):  
Cezary Zalewski

Roman Ingarden (1893–1970) was a prominent Polish philosopher, phenomenologist, and student of Edmund Husserl. A characteristic feature of his works was the almost complete absence of analyzes from the history of philosophy. That is why it is so surprising that right after the end of World War II, the first text analyzed when Ingarden started working at the Jagiellonian University was Aristotle’s “Poetics.” Ingarden published the results of his research in Polish in 1948 in “Kwartalnik Filozoficzny” and in the early 1960s his essay was translated and published in the renowned American magazine “The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism” as “A Marginal Commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics.” As far as I know today, this text does not arouse much interest among the many commentators and followers of Ingarden’s philosophy. Perhaps this state of affairs is justified: Ingarden’s own ideas are only repeated here, and their usefulness in the meaning of “Poetics” remains far from obvious. However, I think that this relative obscurity is worth considering now, because it shows how modern reason tries to control ancient concepts. The main purpose of this article is therefore to recon- struct the strategy by which philosophy tames the text of “Poetics,” especially its concepts such as catharsis and mimesis. The discovery and presentation of these treatments would not have been possible were it not for the mimetic theory of René Girad, which provides anthropological foundations for a critique of philosophical discourse.


2015 ◽  
Vol 84 (4) ◽  
pp. 746-767 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Keenan

Two of the most famous Catholic histories written during the early modern period were the Annales ecclesiastici of Caesar Baronius (d. 1607), a year-by-year chronicle of the Catholic Church from the birth of Christ to the twelfth century, and the Istoria del concilio tridentino of Paolo Sarpi (d. 1623), a scathing critique of the Council of Trent that argued the famous council had only made religious problems worse. Rather than comparing either of these works with similar histories written by protestants—thereby investigating inter-confessional Reformation debates—this article sets Baronius's Annales and Sarpi's Istoria side by side to explore disputes within Catholicism itself. By analyzing how the authors examine four topics in their histories (Peter and the papal primacy, the relationship between the local and universal church, the history of ecumenical councils, and the relationship between secular and ecclesiastical authorities), as well as considering both historians' actions during the Venetian interdict crisis of 1606, this essay argues that Sarpi and Baronius fundamentally disagreed about the origins and exercise of both secular and ecclesiastical authority. These two modes of Catholic history-writing reveal how Sarpi and Baronius drew from contemporary political models, such that “ecclesiastical history” could have significant political ramifications.


1964 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 149-156 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert M. Kingdon

In this age of growing ecumenicism, many scholars are turning to the history of the sixteenth century for a fresh examination of the origins of those ideas and institutions which continue to divide the Christian community. During these years of the widely publicized meetings of an ecumenical council sponsored by the Roman Catholic Church, many are turning specifically to the canons and decrees drafted by the Council of Trent for a fresh study of the extent to which they do or must divide Christians. But fully to understand these Tridentine decisions from an ecumenical perspective requires not only a knowledge of their texts and of the debates from which they emerged. It requires also a knowledge of the hostile reactions which they aroused among the many Christians who would not accept these decisions or the authority of those who promulgated them. An interesting spectrum of such reactions can be found among French criticisms of Trent published during the sixteenth century. Of these publications, three semto me to demonstrate this proposition neatly: one by a distinguished French theologian, John Calvin; a second by a dustinguished French Jurisconsult, Charles Dumoulin; a third by a prominent French lawyer and historian, Innocent Gentillet. These works have not been ignored by such experts on the historiography of Trent as professor Jedin. But I feel they merit a more detailed and more considered examination than they have as yet received. This paper sketches some of the lines upon which such an examination might proceed.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Grace T. Betsayda

This paper investigates the role that the Roman Catholic church has played in the socialization of Filipinos in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). The research is based on scholarly acknowledgment of the important place of social institutions—such as churches, synagogues, mosques, temples and other places for religious and faith-based gatherings—in the settlement and integration experiences of immigrants. The paper argues that Roman Catholicism, first introduced into the Philippines via Spanish colonization, has become an important marker of identity for many Filipinos and has functioned—aided by their facility in the English language (a result of American colonization of the Philippines)—as a means of easing the barriers to Filipinos’ integration into Canada. To better analyze the role the Roman Catholic church has played in Filipino-Canadian immigrant life, the study provides an overview of the history of migration to Canada and discusses the place of the church as seen from the perspective of representatives of diasporic, transnational and second generation communities of Filipinos in Canada. As such, the main data for the study is drawn primary material comprising interviews with Filipino-Canadians from each of these community groups.


Author(s):  
Wen-Qing Ngoei

This book recasts the history of American empire in Southeast and East Asia from the Pacific War through the end of U.S. intervention in Vietnam. It argues that anticommunist nationalism in Southeast Asia intersected with pre-existing local antipathy toward China and the Chinese diaspora to usher the region from European-dominated colonialism into U.S. hegemony. Between the late 1940s and 1960s, Britain and its indigenous collaborators in Malaya and Singapore overcame the mostly Chinese communist parties of both countries by crafting a pro-West nationalism that was anticommunist by virtue of its anti-Chinese bent. London’s neocolonial schemes in Malaya and Singapore prolonged its influence in the region. But as British power waned, Malaya and Singapore’s anticommunist leaders cast their lot with the United States, mirroring developments in the Philippines, Thailand and, in the late 1960s, Indonesia. In effect, these five anticommunist states established, with U.S. support, a geostrategic arc of containment that encircled China and its regional allies. Southeast Asia’s imperial transition from colonial order to U.S. empire, through the tumult of decolonization and the Cold War, was more characteristic of the region’s history after 1945 than Indochina’s embrace of communism.


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