Latin American Bishops of the First Vatican Council, 1869–1870

1969 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 265-280 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles J. Beirne

In the summer of 1870, Napoleon III desperately withdrew his troops from the stronghold where they had been staving off Italian patriots from the greatest prize of the drive for unification, the city of Rome. Bismarck’s armies were sweeping west, a thrust which would end in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. This Franco-Prussian War also emptied the Roman Catholic bishops out of St. Peter’s Basilica where they had been meeting since the previous December at the First Vatican Council.The parents of most of the Council fathers were born in the decades before the French Revolution. The sons grew up during the Age of Metternich when the firemen of Europe, the Concert Powers, tried to stamp out the embers of the Revolution. Many of these men had just been ordained, a few already wore episcopal mitres when most of Europe exploded in 1848. As they assumed leadership in the Church, Garibaldi and Cavour were evicting Pope Pius IX from most of the Papal States.

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 162-166
Author(s):  
Hans Knippenberg

In 1853 an important step in the development of the Roman Catholic Church in the Netherlands was set. On initiative of the Vatican and despite vehement resistance of the orthodox Protestant part of the population (known as the April-movement), the episcopal hierarchy in the church was restored. By choosing Utrecht in the heart of the protestant Netherlands and not Den Bosch in the Catholic South of the country as the seat of the new archbishop, the Vatican practised an offensive, national strategy. Unintendedly, the Papal choice for Utrecht contributed to the later on development of the non-territorial, personalistic solution for the Dutch multicultural society at that time: the verzuiling.


2013 ◽  
Vol 54 (4-5) ◽  
pp. 405-424
Author(s):  
Alina Nowicka -Jeżowa

Summary The article tries to outline the position of Piotr Skarga in the Jesuit debates about the legacy of humanist Renaissance. The author argues that Skarga was fully committed to the adaptation of humanist and even medieval ideas into the revitalized post-Tridentine Catholicism. Skarga’s aim was to reformulate the humanist worldview, its idea of man, system of values and political views so that they would fit the doctrine of the Roman Catholic church. In effect, though, it meant supplanting the pluralist and open humanist culture by a construct as solidly Catholic as possible. He sifted through, verified, and re-interpreted the humanist material: as a result the humanist myth of the City of the Sun was eclipsed by reminders of the transience of all earthly goods and pursuits; elements of the Greek and Roman tradition were reconnected with the authoritative Biblical account of world history; and man was reinscribed into the theocentric perspective. Skarga brought back the dogmas of the original sin and sanctifying grace, reiterated the importance of asceticism and self-discipline, redefined the ideas of human dignity and freedom, and, in consequence, came up with a clear-cut, integrist view of the meaning and goal of the good life as well as the proper mission of the citizen and the nation. The polemical edge of Piotr Skarga’s cultural project was aimed both at Protestantism and the Erasmian tendency within the Catholic church. While strongly coloured by the Ignatian spirituality with its insistence on rigorous discipline, a sense of responsibility for the lives of other people and the culture of the community, and a commitment to the heroic ideal of a miles Christi, taking headon the challenges of the flesh, the world, Satan, and the enemies of the patria and the Church, it also went a long way to adapt the Jesuit model to Poland’s socio-cultural conditions and the mentality of its inhabitants.


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.


Exchange ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 50 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 209-237
Author(s):  
Stan Chu Ilo

Abstract This essay argues for a participatory synodal Church and the possible contributions of the African palaver as a model for participatory dialogue in the Roman Catholic Church. The African palaver is the art of conversation, dialogue, and consensus-building in traditional society that can be appropriated in the current search for a more inclusive and expansive participatory dialogue at all levels of the life of the Church. I will develop this essay first by briefly exploring some theological developments on synodality between the Second Vatican Council and Pope Francis and some of the contributions of the reforms of Pope Francis to synodality in the Church. Secondly, I will identify how the African palaver functions through examples taken from two African ethnic groups. I will proceed to show how the African palaver could enter into dialogue with other new approaches to participatory dialogue for a synodal Church.


2021 ◽  
Vol 90 (5) ◽  
pp. 553-584
Author(s):  
Michał Chaberek

This paper elaborates upon the Catholic Church’s teaching on religious freedom in the period from The French Revolution to The Second Vatican Council. Based on quotations from the original documents, the author presents the evolution of the Church’s position that switched from the initial rejection to the final acceptance of the religious freedom over past two centuries. The fact of this dramatic change begs the question about the continuity of tradition and credibility of the contemporary position of the Church. Based on the document by the International Theological Commission, “Memory and Reconciliation: The Church and the Faults of the Past,” as well as the teaching of Pope Benedict XVI, the author demonstrates that – in contrast to some contemporary interpretations – the hermeneutics of continuity is possible regarding Church’s teaching on religious freedom.


2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 39
Author(s):  
Daniela Concas

At the beginning of the first half of the twentieth century the bond between ars-venustas and cultus-pietas has produced many churches of Roman Catholic cult.It’s between the 20s and 60s of the twentieth century that the experiments of the Liturgical Movement in Germany lead to the evolution of the liturgical space, which, even today, we see engraving in modern churches in Rome (Italy).The Council of Trent (1545-1563) constitutes the precedent historical moment, in which the Church recognised the need for major liturgical renovation of its churches. In comparison with this, the Second Vatican Council (1959-65) introduced some radical changes within the church architectural spaces.The observations come from the direct reading of the present architectural space and the interventions already realised in modern churches in Rome. The most significant churches from an historical-artistic point of view were selected (1924-1965). Significantly, although every single architecture is unique for dimensions, architectural language and used materials, a comparison, in order to gather the discovered characteristics and to compare the restrictions regarding the different operations, would extremely effective, as demonstrated below.Since the matter is considerably vast, in this work, only some brief notes regarding the liturgical renovation of the Presbytery area will be outlined.


2018 ◽  
Vol 75 (2) ◽  
pp. 291-324 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Stauffer

In the fall of 1874, in the midst a particularly severe round of Church-state conflict, Mexico's archbishop, Pelagio Antonio Labastida y Dávalos, introduced a novel weapon in the Catholic Church's struggle against liberal anticlericalism. He had sought and obtained a special dispensation from Pope Pius IX for all Mexicans to participate in a “spiritual pilgrimage,” a month-long exercise of mental travel, prayer, and contemplation that would figuratively transport the faithful out of Mexico's anticlerical milieu and into the purified air of Jerusalem, Rome, and other Old World holy sites, where they would pray for divine intercession on behalf of the embattled Church. The practice had been inaugurated a year earlier by lay Catholics in Bologna, as a response to the prohibition of mass pilgrimages in the flesh in the former Papal States. Labastida y Dávalos felt that spiritual pilgrimage could be especially effective in Mexico, where the anticlerical government of Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada had embarked on a radical program of secularization. In fact, the recently codified Laws of Reform had likewise prohibited acts of public religiosity in Mexico, attempting thus to suppress the myriad local processions and mass pilgrimages that helped to define Mexican Catholicism.


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.


Author(s):  
Edward T. Brett

Following the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), over a thousand priests and religious sisters and brothers were exiled, imprisoned, tortured, or murdered in Latin America by authoritarian governments. A much larger number of lay Church workers were also incarcerated, brutalized, or killed. Most suffered or died because, following the ideals of Vatican II and the Second Latin American Bishops Conference at Medellín, Colombia (1968), they committed themselves to the amelioration of the marginalized in their countries, even though they were fully aware that to do so placed their lives in great peril. This chapter treats a select number—mostly priests and nuns—who were killed because of their prophetic devotion to the poor. It is limited to the nations of Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, and Central America. It also touches on the bitter divisions that resulted in the Church as a consequence of this new religious activism. Finally, it demonstrates why the deaths of so many religious-based social justice activists forced the institutional Catholic Church to reexamine its outdated criteria for martyrdom.


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.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document