Keeping,caring and claiming: O’odham Indians at Mission San Xavier del Bac

According to scholars, Native American Catholics live two parallel religious lives: ‘institutional’ Catholicism is juxtaposed to ‘popular religion.’ The Tohono O’odham of Southern Arizona seem to be a prominent example of this: the O’odham practice santo himdaq devotion to santos in small chapels. These devotions and indigenous practices contrast with the institutional church. Seemingly, ‘indigenised’ Catholicism is dearer to these Native groups than the central, official Church. However, this paper examines San Xavier Mission Church’s centrality both to Mission clergy and to O’odham Catholics as a place of mutual reverence. The historical examinations of the Mission Church have fixated on its Spanish origins without examining its importance to the O’odham. The church was left in the care of O’odham Indians for decades in the nineteenth century during the years of secularisation (1841–1912). I examine this care, the significance of the Mission Church to establishing the San Xavier Reservation, and the O’odham adoption of the church as their own, as well as comparing ‘institutional’ Catholicism with santo himdaq. The mission sheds light on the fluidity of missional power and social relations, the problems with essentialising Catholicism, and the changing nature of religious exchange, importance and practice over time.     

‘Familiar friends’: Catholic mother–daughter narratives

The main theoretical and practical focus of this paper is on the Catholic mother–daughter relationship, and how connections between women shape, and are shaped in, and through this nexus. It is contended that it is imperative that we begin to understand different representations of connections among, and between women, including that of mothers and daughters, as they compose part of the changing yet continual dialect of our (religious) feminine identities. The intent is to embrace the contradictions and polarities, which are apparent in these inter-generational relations. This article is set in middle class suburban Melbourne Australia, and spans the period from the early to late twentieth century. Conversations between an Anglo-Saxon Catholic mother and daughter act as a catalyst to discuss the matrilineal pedagogical dimensions that mark female relations within social and religious discourses.     

Laying down one's life for oneself.

Roman Catholicism has long opposed suicide. Although Scripture neither condones nor condemns suicide explicitly, cases in the Bible that are purported to be suicides fall into several different categories, and the Roman Catholic tradition can show why some of these should be considered morally wrong and some should not. While Christian martyrdom is praised, it is not correct to argue that this Christian outlook invites suicide, or that it recommends physician-assisted suicide for altruistic motives. Church Tradition, from its earliest days, has clearly distinguished martyrdom from suicide. The principles of double effect and cooperation, mainstays in Roman Catholic moral theology, enable one to see the moral difference between martyrdom and suicide, and to appreciate why physician-assisted suicide is wrong for both patient and physician.     

Is the Catholic Church in America Experiencing Internal Secularization? Priests’ Assessments of Pope Francis and the Condition of the Church

This study addressed internal secularization in the Catholic Church by testing the role of several factors in priests’ assessments of the state of the Church in the United States, priests’ views of whether the Church's situation is getting better or worse, and their attitudes toward Pope Francis. Comparisons with identical questions fielded in 2002 revealed a striking pessimistic turn among priests over the last two decades. In addition, regression analyses using the 2021 Survey of American Catholic Priests revealed that “in-house” factors—namely, attitudes toward Pope Francis and perceptions of how well bishops have restored confidence in the Catholic Church following the sexual abuse crisis—most powerfully predicted priests’ current pessimism. On top of this, politically conservative priests and priests ordained more recently tended to be most critical of how Francis is handling his duties, signaling a pronounced tension inside the Catholic Church over religious authority, a defining feature of internal secularization.     

Silent Disagreement: Microinteractional Solutions to Moral Dissent Among Catholic Converts

How do converts manage their disagreements with religious teachings? Previous literature on religious dissent has largely focused on church members advocating change or apostatizing, solutions largely unavailable to initiates. Based on six months of ethnographic observations in a Catholic conversion class and 21 in‐depth interviews with converts, sponsors, and teachers, I demonstrate how microinteractional norms encourage an atmosphere of silence around disagreement. I then show how initiates explain this conflict avoidant response by justifying their doubt, engaging in a process of hierarchical deference, in which initiates call upon the top‐down structure of the Catholic Church to defer control upward, and faulting human imperfection rather than the institution itself. While “culture wars” debates of the past two decades have investigated a purported moral polarization of the American public, this study contributes to a growing literature on how the moderate majority negotiates disagreements between their beliefs and religious teachings.     

天儒冲突——中西方家庭伦理的初次冲撞

明末清初,以利玛窦为首的西方传教士们以“学术传教”为手段,在中国社会进行化交流和传教活动,由于两种明中在对待父子、夫妻以及仪礼规制等的价值取向上的差异,从而导致了西方伦理同中国传统社会的家庭伦理的剧烈碰撞。中国传统家庭伦理中的父权至上、男尊女卑和祭祖孝亲等伦常规范同天主教的伦理要求格格不入,互不相容,最终导致了两种不同化交流的中断。     

“SERVING GOD,FATHERLAND, AND LANGUAGE”: ALCOVER,CATALAN, AND SCIENCE

This article intends to contribute to the science–religion historiography with two topics—philology and the construction of national identities—that can help provide a more complex picture of the relations between science and religion. We use the life and work of the Mallorcan Catholic priest Antoni Maria Alcover (1862–1932) as a case study that puts language, linguistics, and nationalism on the board of science and religion studies. Alcover was the main driving force of the Catalan Dictionary, a collective enterprise that set out to inventory the complete oral and literary lexicon of this language, and which mobilized thousands of people, many of which were clergymen, from all over the Catalan‐speaking territories. In the article, we will explore Alcover's education; the way he established a link between language, religion, and fatherland; the shaping of his identity as a philologist in the image mainly of new German notions and practices; as well as his role in the institutionalization process of the Catalan language as a scientific language, as a language for science and for religion.     

The Church in St Ambrose of Milan

Abstract

A brief account is given of the life of St Ambrose and of modern scholarly views on his work. The Church was favoured by the Emperor Constantine and Christianity established as the state religion by the Emperor Theodosius. Ambrose might have been expected to have been interested in promoting the interests of the Church as an institutional and juridical organisation but he was in fact overwhelmingly interested in its spiritual aspect, as von Campenhausen asserts, opposed by Morino. The Church is seen in Ambrose's writings as the City of God and as the Kingdom of God into which believers are received. His understanding of the Church is markedly christocentric and biblical and is closely linked with his thinking on the Holy Spirit. This article also examines his attitude to the see of Rome, of which he did not recognise a general supremacy. The relevance for Christians today of Ambrose's experience of the Church as a unique spiritual fellowship is touched on.     

Frank Weston,the Kikuyu Controversy,and the necessity of episcopacy

This article provides a historical and theological account of the controversy that erupted in 1913 when Frank Weston, Bishop of Zanzibar, appealed to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Randall Davidson, to try W.G. Peel, the Bishop of Mombasa, and J.J. Willis, the Bishop of Uganda, for ‘heresy and schism’ for their having participated in an interdenominational conference in Kikuyu in British East Africa. By agreeing to a Scheme of Federation with non-episcopal churches and holding a joint communion service at which non-conformists received communion from an Anglican Bishop, Peel and Willis had undermined the principle of episcopacy, thereby endangering the status of the Church of England as the English Section of the universal, Catholic Church. This article considers the theological arguments Weston advances for his condemnation of the Kikuyu Conference and examines his grounds for holding that episcopacy is an indispensable doctrine of the Christian faith.