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by any attempt of the church to veto this. We will here be appealing directly to the people … There may be scope here for using the Peace People.’26 This was part of a bigger and grander strategy of the government in relation to the church and the Catholic community. Not only did the government decide it needed to enlist the hierarchy’s good offices in its propaganda war against the IRA, but it also saw the need to reduce the institutional church’s hold over the Catholic community for altogether other reasons. As one Northern Ireland Office official put it: The
pastoral and social support. Some, such as Fr. Bobby Gilmore, engaged in political lobbying regarding miscarriage of justice cases, in particular the Birmingham Six case, using extensive institutional church and political networks globally, but particularly in the USA. Again in this decade, individuals such as Fr. Gilmore, criticized the absence of Irish state support for a new generation of emigrants (ibid.). By 1999 it was estimated that the Irish Chaplaincy in Britain (ICB) employed 150 full-time and 20 part-time staff, and had 659 lay volunteers (Harvey, 1999). The
’ hit full stride; and second, in the 1920s and 1930s, as the Irish Catholic nation-state came into being. During both of these eras, the institutional Church and, in the latter case, the new state intensified pressure on women to conform to Catholic gender introduction 3 norms. In the 1870s and 1880s, increased centralisation of the Catholic Church inspired abundant literature urging Irish lay women to confine themselves to the home and thus isolate themselves from the enormous political, economic, and cultural changes of the post-famine era. In the 1920s and
important to remember that Irish Catholics became devoted to the institutional Church and its rituals. Many family homes became Catholic spaces festooned with crucifixes, statues, pictures and other religious imagery. Daily life and the calendar year were marked by Catholic rituals and events. People knelt to pray. There was a litany of saints to which people made petitions. Many of the devotional practices were magical in orientation, with prayers being said, novenas being made and pilgrimages being undertaken in the hope that God, Jesus, Our Lady or one the saints would
of the Irish War of Independence. If church historians’ main concern in the past was the functioning of the institutional church and the official formulation of its theology, nowadays it is ‘the place of religion within the community, … facets of daily Christian life and the impact of social and cultural factors upon pious practice’.14 Examining the attempts of priests to shape social and political behaviour can contribute to this approach. And in a comparable development, the attention of historians of the War 11 Joost Augusteijn, From Public Defiance to
colonial territories where clergy were few the authorities had to rely on a culture of lay-led ‘informal family worship’. It has already been noted that civil officials in early nineteenth-century Quebec delivered forms of prayer to heads of families if a district had no clergyman. Here, perhaps, is evidence that the patriarchal family ‘functioned in symbiosis with the institutional church’. 40 Clergy remained important figures, however, and it was they who delivered the sermons that made sense of the causes of fasts and
nineteenth century read Chaucer ‘straight’ as a medieval Catholic poet. Instead, there grew up a wide range of critical strategies to put Chaucer off-side with medieval Catholicism, creating interpretations in which he features in almost every conceivable non-orthodox role: zealous proto-Protestant; undoctrinal nature-worshipper; Chaucer as Catholic child 173 trifler in belief; ‘manly’ figure of English liberty, with a religion independent of the institutional church of the day; Laodicean; and a ‘child’ at heart. In what follows here, while risking over
thoroughness with institutional, political and social history. Studies of Huntingdon, Godmanchester and St Neots all appeared 1820–31. the parish and the town—65 Robert Carruthers’s History of Huntingdon (1824) covered institutions, churches, historical events, and the usual material on eminent people, MPs and mayors. James Thompson’s History of Leicester from the Time of the Romans to the End of the Seventeenth Century (1849) is regarded as the best of several histories of the town because it was based on extensive documentary research.41 William Hutton’s History of Derby
’s blessings to the community. Similarly, pastors spoke of church leaders as people who would develop a strong institutional church structure that would channel God’s anointing to an obedient congregation. The church structure could then be ‘branded’ and exported overseas to bring further prosperity to Fiji. Entrepreneurial pastors, in short, were making use of bridge-actions to create
opposed? This question also arises in other ways: is sovereignty merely an assertion of control over ordinary political matters, or does it also assert control over non-political groups or institutions – churches, guilds, professions, landholders and so on? I will now