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medieval community, this was the monastery's role and responsibility. The paternalistic power of ecclesiastical authority over the care of the community cemented the larger institutional church's moral supremacy and authority, and ensured its own continual protection in the form of economic sustenance and political influence. 7 The ecclesiastical response to need in the early Middle Ages took the form of small, rural monastic facilities that functioned as nascent hospitals scattered throughout Europe. There is evidence, although scarce, of
elaboration of new identities of the type described above is arguably a symptom of the authority-crisis which characterizes late modern societies. Today, communication and information make for innovation rather than transmission. In the context of distrust in institutional churches, better education, increased affluence, regular foreign holidays, the media and the internet bring exotic or archaic creeds to the attention of people in need of answers to their existential questions and who have put the past behind them. The Celtic Tiger turned Ireland into one of the most
paragraph. Inglis writes that ‘the bonds of censorship which the Church had tied around sex were shattered’, that ‘since the 1980s the Church’s monopoly on discourse about sex has been broken’ (Inglis 1998, p. 157), that ‘decline in practice has been dramatic’ (Inglis 1988, p. 209) and that ‘the institutional Church is literally dying off’ (Inglis 1998, p. 213) (my italics). Mary Kenny has written articles with titles such as ‘The End of Catholic Ireland’ (Kenny 2012) and ‘Is Ireland Divorcing from the Catholic Church?’ (Kenny 2011). She asks if Irish Catholicism is
in the political arena under the influence of a commitment to the defence of human dignity. 7 At the same time Pope John Paul II was an astute political actor and, as we shall see, once democracy had been achieved in his own country and elsewhere, was more than capable of standing up for the interests of the institutional Church as well as pursuing his broader concern with human dignity as understood by that Church. In this sense Weigel reinforced an explanatory framework that stressed both theological change and the role of a religious leadership now convinced
private losses, the sense of injustice is compounded by the abject failure to hold anyone to account. This, in turn, leads to an understandable and widespread discrediting of authority, whether it be vested in banks, institutional churches or the legal and medical professions. The crisis in authority can, of course, be addressed in two ways. One way is to render authority more authoritarian by making the State and its agents more coercive in their response to forms of criticism and dissent (for examples of this response in the Irish case see Cronin 2009
institutional Church, and also among lay Catholics, is abhorrent to him because he finds it contrary to the message of the Gospel and the spirit of the Second Vatican Council. In the same way, he is extremely critical of the place held by church tradition in the Catholic doctrine. He repeatedly demonstrates that the Vatican’s eternal truth is in large part a historical construct and that many of its aspects have no sound foundation in the Scriptures. He exposes the age-old misogyny of the Church, the well-attested medieval origin of mandatory clerical celibacy, the
, squares), of transit (streets) and institutions (churches, schools, hospitals, prisons) where people gathered. The industrial spaces that encompassed great portions of the city were privately owned, but they could also be ‘lived’ as public spaces – as by the workers during a strike for example. This, in turn, caused spatial and social disruption, thereby placing the distribution of public and private into question. For Torino’s punks, this had clear ramifications: [As the city] decayed, so the perspective changed from one of seemingly eternal development to reveal the
independent Irish state and the entrenchment of a post-colonial ethos enhanced devotion to the Virgin and more firmly linked both her and Irish mothers to the idea of the nation.26 By the early twentieth century, Irish Catholics across the island, in both urban and rural areas, made her the centre of their devotions. What was the intended goal of this veneration of Mary for the institutional Church, and what did her ascent mean for lay Irish Catholic women? The Irish Church hierarchy viewed the Blessed Virgin as a figure who could bolster, not challenge, existing gender
’s attempts to reform Catholicism included eliminating private, home-based masses altogether. According to Cullen and some of his allies, holding the sacraments outside of the chapel represented problems for a Church whose goals included containing and controlling parishioners, enforcing priestly and male domination, and moulding devotion into a mechanism for peace and order. Particularly troubling to the institutional Church was the practice of confessions at the stations. Beginning in the late the holy household 159 nineteenth century, as the legislation of the Synod
the pragmatic, progressive civil society that was developing and the tradition-bound institutional church that sought to retain its authority. One of the central concerns over the practices of physicians revolved around the inequities suffered by patients. Episcopal leaders, feeling that charity toward the poor and ill was essential, worried that the appeal of compensation from wealthier patients would drive physicians to neglect the needs of the poor. However, they also worried that poor patients would then seek out the services of ‘folk