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). This is in spite of the very public failures of the institutional Church over the past few decades. Irish Catholics have historically demonstrated the ability to act independently of the institution when they see fit. Equally, in spite of what many have seen as a scandalous betrayal of ideals by the Church authorities in recent decades, there is much evidence that Catholics at parish level remain loyal to their local clergy. At a time when many might apply the term ‘post-Catholic’ to Irish society, the Church and its clergy can take some comfort from the fact that
world where you will not find Irish men and women, religious and lay, deeply involved in relief efforts from Outer Mongolia to South Sudan. Is the Catholic Church in Ireland viable today? The institutional Church is eternally viable, in so far as it is sacramental by nature. And it is important to recall this, since it is too easy to reduce the Church to a merely human institution dependent on human effort. The Church as the primordial sacrament, as taught by Vatican II, also works ex opero operato, that is to say, by the grace of God. This means that the weakness of
Catholicism. 119 120 120 Going against the tide While such assertions are certainly valid and need to be voiced, they do not hide the glaring disparity that appears occasionally between the actual words and example of Christ and what the institutional Church has done with them. In his memoir, Anticipate Every Goodbye, Sulivan wondered at the extent to which the Church of his native Brittany sought to deprive people of their individuality: The priests at this time tended to preach about laws and obligations. In this way they had succeeded in transforming Christianity
hand, these were men and women of strong religious commitment, and (one must assume) a deep sense of engagement with questions of faith, who nevertheless had not found what they were looking for in the established forms of living that the mainstream institutional church offered them. So perhaps it is not entirely surprising that one of the early preachers of Wycliffite heresy in Leicester should have been the hermit William Swinderby [ 60 ]. A few
understanding of the term ‘mission’ as something tied fundamentally to conversion. 5 Though these works have made valuable contributions to our understanding of emigration’s place in nineteenth-century mission, a number of issues remain unaddressed. One is the nature of the connections between the expansion of the institutional Church overseas and the reform and revival of the Church in mainland Britain. We know
University Press, 2013). Chibnall, M. (ed.), The Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis , 6 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968–80). Cubitt, C., ‘Pastoral care and religious belief’, in P. Stafford (ed.), A Companion to the Early Middle Ages: Britain and Ireland c. 500 – c. 1100 (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), pp. 395–413. Cubitt, C., ‘Review article: the tenth-century Benedictine reform in England’, Early Medieval Europe 6 (1997), 77–94. Cubitt, C., ‘The institutional Church’, in P. Stafford (ed.), A Companion to the Early Middle Ages: Britain
English Catholic literati were particularly susceptible to fascism. This may not lie in their tendency to think and question, as Kevin Morris has suggested, but in the information channels available and supported by Catholic organisations, which did not challenge their pro-fascist views. Finally, the institutional Church helped to confirm Catholics in their pro-fascist attitude by what it did and did not say. Notes 1 2 John Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope, Harmondsworth, 1999; Daniel J. Goldhagen, A Moral Reckoning, New York, 2002. For a very positive account of Pius XII see
were the new problems resolved? The emergence of the new religion led to disorder, which made day-to-day administration more difficult for the urban authorities, while royal religious policy strained the city government’s relations with the crown. The resolution of these tensions forms the core of the first half of this work. Secondly, what was the impact of confessional change and conflict upon the religious and cultural life of the majority of Nantes’ inhabitants, particularly the practice of Catholicism? Changes within the institutional church and devotional
, Wimbledon assigns the task of pruning, whereby they cut away branches destroyed by sin through preaching ‘wiþ þe swerd of here tonge’. Railing, assigned to knights, involves a greater variety of tasks for protecting both the institutional church and the realm, including preventing theft, maintaining God’s law and those who teach it, and protecting the land from foreign enemies. Finally, labourers should work in a way that recalls the physical labour in the vineyard, as ‘wiþ here sore swet [labourers] geten out of þe erþe bodily liflode for hem and for oþer parties’.42
influenced this attraction.97 A moral and devotional culture fired up by Christian evangelism flourished in nineteenth-century England. Women were an integral part of this culture and an important part of this renewed growth of institutional churches. Their evangelicalism was tangible and extended outside the home. Benevolence became more than just a moral obligation. For many women, it was a mission to spread their own middleclass ideological values of moral fervour, social piety and other virtues associated with womanhood and family life. These women came in many forms