Conclusion: Dissent in the Roman Catholic Church: A Response

Horizons ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 155-159
Author(s):  
Judith Gruber
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Church History ◽  
Raw Material ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
Master Narrative ◽  
History Of ◽  
Catholic Tradition ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Church

The contributions to this roundtable weave a rich tapestry of dissent in the Roman Catholic Church. Together, they expose some of the divergent voices within the church—voices that resist easy reconciliation and unification. Dissent, this roundtable shows, takes many forms; it can be directed ad intra (Willard) or ad extra (Gonzalez Maldonado), it can be geared toward the justification of hegemonic structures (Slattery) or aim at their subversion (Steidl). Moreover, these contributions do not just highlight the multiplicity of voices within the church. Indeed, each of them points to conflict and contestation between the diverse Catholicisms they discuss: each of these sometimes-contradictory Catholicisms claims to be authentically and normatively Catholic. This indicates that a discourse about plurality within the church is at the same time a discourse about the struggle for sovereignty of interpretation over the church. Further, the contributions also show that these contestations over the right to define orthodoxy take place under asymmetrical relations of authority and power. The struggle over right belief and right practice is first and foremost a struggle over who has a voice to define Catholic orthodoxy in the first place—who can participate, from which position, in this struggle? Ultimately, therefore, this roundtable demonstrates that questions of normativity by no means become arbitrary or sidelined once we reveal the silent and silenced voices underneath the established master narrative of the church about itself as one and stable. Yet, at the same time, it also becomes obvious that established theological approaches to this inner-ecclesial plurality no longer hold. The dominant theological readings of Catholic tradition have always reckoned with a history of plural, deviant Catholicisms, but they have subjected this inner-ecclesial plurality to the theological ideal and a historical construction of unity and consensus. However, as Gaillardetz and Slattery point out, this narrative of unity has lost both its innocence and its self-evidence as the only legitimate framework for organizing the “raw material” of Catholic tradition. Rereadings of church history through the lens of power-critical studies make visible that Catholic tradition, too, is a power/knowledge regime. They reveal that orthodoxy is, in a literal sense, “heresy”: it takes its shape through epistemopolitical choices (αἵρεσις); it is forged through the exclusion of alternative theological narratives. Where do we stand after this destabilization of tradition, after this loss of innocence? Once stability and consensus have been problematized as the normative organizing principles of Catholic tradition, how else should we think of the church? Can we develop alternative models that take conflict and contestation into account as constitutive moments in our understanding of the church, rather than an afterthought to be eradicated?

The Wound in the Right Foot: A Second Opinion

1995 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 274-290
Author(s):  
John Hill
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Vatican Ii ◽  
Current Mode ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Church History ◽  
The Self ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
The Times ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Church

Antonio Rosmini and Garrett Sweeney have each contributed to the debate on the appointment of bishops in the Roman Catholic Church. Revisiting their arguments reminds us of the changes in the mode of appointment in the course of church history, and of the comparative recency of the current mode. The vigour of the debate in recent years may be traced to a shift in the self-perception of the church since Vatican II. This shift seems to demand a re-examination of the mode of appointment, and its adaptation to the times.

The Modification of the Anti-Clerical Nationalism of the Mexican Revolution by General Lázaro Cárdenas and Its Relationship to the Church-State Detente in Mexico

1969 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-53 ◽  
Author(s):  
Albert L. Michaels
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Mexican Revolution ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
The Other ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Government ◽  
Lazaro Cardenas ◽  
The Church

The man of the Revolution disputed the very nature of Mexico with the Roman Catholic. The revolutionary, whether Callista or Cardenista, believed that the church had had a pernicious influence on the history of Mexico. He claimed that Mexico could not become a modern nation until the government had eradicated all the influence of the Roman Catholic Church. The Catholic, on the other hand, was convinced that his religion was the basis of Mexico's nationality. Above all, the Catholic believed that Mexico needed a system of order. He was convinced that his faith had brought order and peace to Mexico in the colonial period, and as the faith declined, Mexico degenerated into anarchy.

scholarly journals Church Land Reform through a Combination of Examples and Theology of Spatial Justice

2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ntandoyenkosi Mlambo
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
South African ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Land Reform ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
Spatial Justice ◽  
History Of ◽  
Economic Imbalances ◽  
Catholic Tradition

Land was one of the ways the colonialist venture as well as the apartheid regime used to divide people, as well as being a catalyst for superiority. Over hundreds of years, from the beginning of colonial rule until the end of apartheid in 1994, the indigenous people of South Africa were dispossessed from the land. With the end of the Truth and Reconciliation proceedings, it was clear from suggested actions that there should be restitution in South Africa to begin to correct the spatial and resultant economic imbalances. Churches in South Africa embarked on setting declarations on land reform ecumenically and within their own walls. However, little information is available on final reform measures that churches have taken after several ecumenical meetings in the 1990s. Additionally, there is little development in South African theology circles on a theology of land justice. Moreover, a praxis on land justice for churches has not been openly developed or discussed post-1994. This study aims to look at the history of the land issue in South Africa, particularly from 1948–1994, and will include the history of land ownership in the Roman Catholic tradition. In addition, it will look at examples of land reform in the Roman Catholic Church from 1999 until the present in the Diocese of Mariannhill. Furthermore, the article will consider the emerging praxis of spatial justice based on a hermeneutic view taken from black liberation and contextual theology. The article concludes with a look at how these examples and new praxis can develop the ecumenical church’s quest for a prophetic voice and actions in land South African land reform.

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 The ‘enemy within’ the post-Vatican II Roman Catholic Church

2013 ◽  
Vol 69 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Graham A. Duncan
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Vatican Ii ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Church History ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
Second Vatican Council ◽  
Church Hierarchy ◽  
Vatican Council ◽  
History Of

The Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) is regarded as one of the most significant processes in the ecumenical church history of the 20th century. At that time, a younger generation of Roman Catholic theologians began to make their mark in the church and within the ecumenical theological scene. Their work provided an ecumenical bridge between the Reforming and the Roman Catholic ecclesiastical traditions, notwithstanding the subsequent negative response of the Roman church hierarchy. Despite important advances, recent pontificates significantly altered the theological landscape and undermined much of the enthusiasm and commitment to unity. Roman Catholic theological dissent provided common ground for theological reflection. Those regarded as the ‘enemy within’ have become respected colleagues in the search for truth in global ecclesiastical perspective. This article will use the distinction between the history and the narratives of Vatican II.

Catholic Revival in the Eighteenth Century

1990 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 99-108
Author(s):  
Sheridan Gilley
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
The United States ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
American Scholar ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Church

In his famous essay on von Ranke‘s history of the Popes, Thomas Babington Macaulay remarked that the ‘ignorant enthusiast whom the Anglican Church makes an enemy… the Catholic Church makes a champion’. ‘Place Ignatius Loyola at Oxford. He is certain to become the head of a formidable secession. Place John Wesley at Rome. He is certain to be the first General of a new Society devoted to the interests and honour of the Church.’ Macaulay’s general argument that Roman Catholicism ‘unites in herself all the strength of establishment, and all the strength of dissent’, depends for its force on his comparison of the Catholic Regular Orders with the popular preachers of Nonconformity. As the son of a leader of the Clapham Sect, his witness in the matter has its interest for scholars of the Evangelical Revival, and has been echoed by Ronald Knox in his parallel between Wesley and the seventeenth-century Jesuit, Paolo Segneri, who walked barefoot 800 miles a year to preach missions in the dioceses of northern Italy. More recently the comparison has been drawn again by Owen Chadwick, with the judgement that the ‘heirs of the Counter-Reformation sometimes astound by likeness of behaviour to that found in the heirs of the Reformation’, and Chadwick’s volume on the eighteenth-century Popes contains some fascinating material on the resemblances between the religion of the peoples of England and of Italy. An historian of Spanish Catholicism has compared the Moravians and the mission preachers of eighteenth-century Spain, not least in their rejection of modern commercialism, while an American scholar has traced some of the parallels between nineteenth-century Protestant and Catholic revivalism in the United States. Not that Wesleyan historians have been attracted to study the great movements of revival religion in the Catholic countries in Wesley’s lifetime—a neglect which is hardly surprising. One point of origin of the Evangelical revival was among refugees from Roman Catholic persecution, and for all the popular confusion, encouraged by men like Bishop Lavington, between Methodists and Papists, and for all Wesley’s belief in religious toleration and tenderness for certain Catholic saints and devotional classics, he was deeply hostile to the Roman Catholic Church, as David Hempton has recently shown. Yet there are many points of likeness as well as difference between the enthusiasts of Protestant and Catholic Europe, and both these need to be declared if Catholics and Protestants are ever to attempt to write an ecumenical history.

Socialism and Catholicism in Ireland

1964 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 462-483 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emmet Larkin
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
Main Difficulty ◽  
Labour Movement ◽  
Irish History ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Church

There is no man or movement in modern Irish history that can be intelligibly discussed apart from the Roman Catholic church in Ireland. That Church had for centuries been intimately bound up with nearly every phase of Irish life. Taking the measure of so complex and venerable an institution is an enormous task. Since there is no general history of the Church in Ireland, the main difficulty is in maintaining perspective. In confining the discussion to the narrower limits of the relations between the Irish Labour movement and the Church, an obvious distortion is attendent. Seeing the Church in microcosm is not seeing it whole and constant, if indeed such a thing is possible. Examining it with regard to Irish Labour is actually taking liberties with its historical context. Two unequal figures are in contention on the Irish stage, and the Church, which is certainly the larger of the two, suffers proportionately by having to play so limited a role.

New Perspectives on Twentieth-Century Catholicism

2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 581-595
Author(s):  
Rosario Forlenza
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
North American ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Church History ◽  
Review Article ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
History Of ◽  
Catholic History

Until the 1980s the history of the Roman Catholic Church and Catholicism in modern Europe was mostly the preserve of the theologically and confessionally defined field of ‘church history’ or ‘ecclesiastic history’. Catholic historiography was sealed off from mainstream (North American and British) historiography, with nineteenth- and twentieth-century Catholicism seemingly little more than a backward-looking footnote in the dominant narrative of secular modernity and progress. In a 1991 review article David Blackbourn pointed out that ‘historians in the mainstream have commonly considered Catholicism, if they considered it at all, as a hopelessly obscurantist force at odds with the more serious isms that have shaped the modern age’. Within the same review, however, Blackbourn signaled the emergence of timid but nevertheless clear ‘signs of a change’ in the historiographical direction and a new interest in Catholic history.

The Politicization of the Brazilian Catholic Church: The Catholic Electoral League

1974 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 301-325
Author(s):  
Margaret Todaro Williams
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Church History ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Campaign ◽  
National Scale ◽  
The Church

One of the most curious phenomena ever to be recorded in the annals of Latin American church history was a peculiarly Brazilian institution known as the Catholic Electoral League. Lofty in its ideals but confused in their practice, disclaiming political party status yet directly involving the Church in every political campaign of the day, the League functioned between 1932 and 1937 as a political pressure group under the direct auspices of the Roman Catholic Church. It operated on a more national scale than the political parties themselves, which were still basically regional.

scholarly journals CATHOLIC COUNTER-REFORMATION: A HISTORY OF THE JESUITS’ MISSION TO ETHIOPIA 1557-1635

2016 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 105-116
Author(s):  
Elias Kiptoo Ngetich
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Church History ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
Educational Institutions ◽  
Catholic Reformation ◽  
History Of Christianity ◽  
Long Time ◽  
History Of

The Jesuits or ‘The Society of Jesus’ holds a significant place in the wide area of church history. Mark Noll cites John Olin notes that the founding of the Jesuits was ‘the most powerful instrument of Catholic revival and resurgence in this era of religious crisis’.[1] In histories of Europe to the Reformation of the sixteenth century, the Jesuits appear with notable frequency. The Jesuits were the finest expression of the Catholic Reformation shortly after the Protestant reform began. The Society is attributed to its founder, Ignatius of Loyola. As a layman, Ignatius viewed Christendom in his context as a society under siege. It was Christian duty to therefore defend it. The Society was formed at a time that nationalism was growing and papal prestige was falling. As Christopher Hollis observed: ‘Long before the outbreak of the great Reformation there were signs that the unity of the Catholic Christendom was breaking up.’[2] The Jesuits, as a missionary movement at a critical period in the Roman Catholic Church, used creative strategies that later symbolised the strength of what would become the traditional Roman Catholic Church for a long time in history. The strategies involved included, but were not limited to: reviving and nurturing faith among Catholics, winning back those who had become Protestants, converting those who had not been baptised, training of the members for social service and missionary work and also establishing educational institutions.[1]       Mark A. Noll. Turning points: Decisive moments in the history of Christianity. (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Books, 1997), 201.[2]       Christopher Hollis. The Jesuits: A history. (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1968), 6.

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