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Catholic Church was in no position to voice its concern about these developments at the time, in the wake of the child- abuse and Magdalene laundry revelations. Moreover, the response in the public forum to the litany of Church-related offences has been to reject the institutional Church and, consequently, impede the creation of a space for the evaluation of the cultural legacy of Irish Catholicism. As a result, attempting to explore aspects of the Catholic Church without falling into outright condemnation of the entire institution and of its members is deemed insular
era of the Colonial Bishoprics’ Fund. Anderson’s history was founded on the assumption that there was such a thing as a unified ‘colonial Church’. 1 The establishment of a coherent and unified institutional church was an enduring preoccupation of Anglican clergymen in the first half of the nineteenth century. Chapter Four showed that efforts to tie the disparate colonial Anglican establishments together
’s metaphor for ‘the Church’, the Church that is so described is not (thanks to the confusion of the heavenly and earthly citizenries in this life) necessarily identifiable with the institution known as such on earth. While the latter is, according to Augustine, a figure of the indiscernible community of the redeemed, and while it should harbour and foster true Christians, the degree of contiguity between it and the City of God is variable.10 Indeed, Augustine’s system implies that it would be possible for the membership of the earthly (i.e., institutional) Church to be
high-profile converts also such as Charles Moore, former editor of the Daily and Sunday Telegraph and of The Spectator magazine. For this reason, Catholicism has won greater respect from the media and would-be critics of Catholicism than that accorded it in Ireland. This disparity is still evident. Throughout most of the twentieth century in Ireland, Catholicism was not questioned except in media and literary circles. It lay embedded in a comfort zone that led to conformity between the institutional Church and the State, and this contributed to passiveness among
The church as sacred space places the reader at the heart of medieval religious life, standing inside the church with the medieval laity in order to ask what the church meant to them and why. It examines the church as a building, idea, and community, and explores the ways in which the sanctity of the church was crucial to its place at the centre of lay devotion and parish life. At a time when the parish church was facing competition for lay attention, and dissenting movements such as Lollardy were challenging the relevance of the material church, the book examines what was at stake in discussions of sanctity and its manifestations. Exploring a range of Middle English literature alongside liturgy, architecture, and material culture, the book explores the ways in which the sanctity of the church was constructed and maintained for the edification of the laity. Drawing on a wide range of contemporary theoretical approaches, the book offers a reading of the church as continually produced and negotiated by the rituals, performances, and practices of its lay communities, who were constantly being asked to attend to its material form, visual decorations, and significance. The meaning of the church was a dominant question in late-medieval religious culture and this book provides an invaluable context for students and academics working on lay religious experience and canonical Middle English texts.
feminised landscape in Irish history was an effort to constrain the female body in space and place. In the nineteenth century, people in Ireland and in the Irish Diaspora called on long-standing beliefs and oral traditions to map bodies and landscapes. Before the advent of a strong institutional Church, they also used beliefs about the landscape to regulate female sexuality. Fairy belief was one of the strongest oral traditions upholding gender norms and dictating female behaviour. Popular subjects in storytelling, the fairies were mischievous beings that took human form
challenge some prevailing conventions by analysing religion as an empowering belief system. The ambiguity that existed in the relationship between women and the institutional church is recognised. Women’s involvement within any religious hierarchy is a problematic paradigm in the nineteenth century. Apologetic and promotional church histories are an intrinsic part of the chronicles of ecclesiastical scholarship, particularly in the early part of the twentieth century. Their partisan content and lack of self-criticism have made it difficult to assess critically the
practice – of dealing with an institutional church largely out of step with godly priorities by equipping laypeople to do certain clerical activities: even preaching. Finally, as a sort of coda, I place this in conversation with an anonymous 1641 anti-episcopal pamphlet sometimes attributed to Bernard. I suggest that if one does make that attribution, any radical implications might
changed since the nineteenth century. The role of the institutional churches and public worship was diminished. The private and personal aspects of prayer was once more emphasised, though in a nod to the ancient tradition of ‘common prayer’, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation began each silent prayer session with a short invocation, agreed on by the Commonwealth’s religious leaders. 22 This book was completed as the world struggled to a contain a Covid-19 pandemic that had killed hundreds of thousands and sent billions of
possessed supernatural powers, sometimes using these powers to punish wayward parishioners; others, however, were bested by parishioners, their attempts at asserting authority mocked.38 Legends about priests and wise women are particularly revealing. A thorn in the side of the institutional Church, the wise woman or healer stood as the priest’s main parish enemy. In reality, both priests and wise women were traditional local authorities who sometimes competed for the loyalty of parishioners. In oral tradition, this struggle for power is displayed through a confrontation