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enter the material church physically but lacking membership of the true spiritual church. This ties in to the dedication sermon in which the first definition of the church is ‘men þat shulen be saved’. While on earth, the predestined mingle with the damned in the material church which, rather than a sacred space, is merely a place where ‘boþe gode and yuel’ gather, as the dedication sermon states. There is a clear distinction, then, between the ‘visible, institutional church and the invisible community of those who will be saved’, as J. Patrick Hornbeck argues.37 And
that includes Jesuits, Franciscans, and various religious institutions (churches, chapels, orphanages, colleges, etc.), incites numerous acts of religious devotion among its public (including kissing, touching, shedding tears, singing hymns, performing Masses), is adapted to an Indian setting (native participation is encouraged, alongside the wearing of rose garlands and the carrying of palm branches
Catholics’ difficulties with the institutional church’s teachings on premarital sex prior to the 1960s have been underestimated, so too have their tacit but often unvoiced circumventions of traditional teaching on artificial means of contraception. Catholic commentaries belligerently sought to convince their readership that contraception was an attack on true motherhood,193 and a sin that deprived Catholic parents of the capacity to nurture their children’s spirituality and socialise them through their holy example.194 In mounting such arguments, church spokesmen sought
fifteenth-century ballads – consisting in particular of a strong devotion to the Mass and the Virgin Mary – and the antagonism he displays towards monasteries. 158 It is argued that we should draw a distinction between lay attachment to the practices and devotions of late medieval religion on the one hand, and more negative perceptions of the institutional Church, particularly religious houses, on the other