Reacionarismo católico ontem, hoje e sempre... Os “vencidos” do

O presente artigo analisa o reacionarismo entre os católicos no século XX. Baseado em uma metodologia ensaístico-bibliográfica, argumenta que as organizações contemporâneas que defendem um catolicismo e uma Igreja voltados para a ênfase em guerras da moral e da cultura (campanha antiaborto e contra o casamento LGBTQIA+), podem ser vistas como complexas heranças conservadoras mescladas às linguagens midiáticas modernas que articulam a fé religiosa reacionária num passado idolátrico e a ação público-política em uma finalidade: apontar o futuro como hierofania do modus vivendi reacionário. Abstract: This paper analyses the presence of reactionarism among Catholics on the twentieth century. Based on a bibliographic-essayist methodology, one proposes the premise that contemporary Catholicism-advocating organizations, with an emphasis on the cultural and moral Catholic wars – i.e. anti-abortion campaigning, anti-LGBTQIA+ marriage campaigning; can be perceived as complex conservative inheritances mixed with contemporary media languages that articulate reactionary religious belief in an idolatrous past and public and political actions with a specific purpose, pointing to the future as a hierophany of the reactionary modus vivendi.Keywords: Catholic reactionarism; Catholic moral war; Contemporaneity and Catholicism.

Religious practice versus subjective religiosity: Catholics and those with ‘no religion’ in the French 2017 presidential election

Since the 1930s, the frequency of mass attendance has been the most widely used indicator of involvement in Catholicism in France. Yet its validity is sometimes debated: to what extent can subjective religiosity constitute an alternative measure? Both indicators seem closely related. However, the social distributions they perform diverge at the margin. And the large sample on which this research is based reveals changes in contemporary Catholicism – particularly with regard to the urban rather than rural character of today’s practitioners. Electoral behaviour is also used in this article as a touchstone for the comparison of the two indicators. Previous research has established the strong link between Catholic religious practice and right-wing – but not far-right – voting. Despite the singularity of the 2017 election, the analysis establishes that this still holds true – and that the combination of these two indicators allows for subtler insight into this link.

Contrite Modernity, Contrite Catholicism

This chapter explains the book’s objective in probing how contemporary Catholicism grapples with the challenge of maintaining relevance amid increased secularization. It discusses the theoretical and empirical context for the book’s inquiry and its anchoring in American Catholicism and society. The chapter explains why Jurgen Habermas’s construct of contrite modernity opens up new lines of dialogue and action for the Church in light of contemporary societal problems of economic inequality and related ills, and it outlines what is entailed in postsecular expectations of reflexive dialogue between moderate religious and secular actors. It also discusses the book’s working assumption that the postsecular expectations Habermas outlines for religious–secular engagement, including issues of language and authority, are the same expectations required of Catholicism as it negotiates both its public societal role and the array of doctrinal issues of particular relevance to Catholics. The chapter also briefly introduces the data and subsequent chapters.

Spurensuche?

On the occasion of the upcoming 2017 quincentenary celebrations of the reformation, the Protestant Churches in Germany face the difficult task of avoiding the confessionalistic and nationalist mistakes of earlier centenaries. This essay argues for a celebration which does not fall behind the progress of historical research on the reformation of the past decades: This applies first to the postulate of confessional equity brought up by the paradigm of confessionalization and second to the revocation of an all-encompassing socio-political prerogative of interpretation, upheld by church and theology in the past, within the sociological model of secularization. This contribution considers the danger of a continued neglect of contemporary Catholicism, Judaism and secularism as regards the development of modern society, which would lead to Protestantism’s aggrandized claim of modernity in the style of cultural Protestantism, and of a reduction of modern religious and church history to a mere Protestant culture of remembrance.