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001-031 FaithFamily Ch 1 Intro.indd 2 24/04/2013 15:43 Introduction3 the broader cultural context of changes within British society during this period, and the scale and importance of these shifts, for the institutional church and the laity, are evaluated. While acknowledging that there were important changes and marked shifts in practice during these years, one of the central arguments of this book – in contrast to much of the existing historiography – is its evaluation of little-appreciated elements of continuity within English Catholic culture and popular
-Judaism and as such had failed to respond adequately to Nazi persecution of the Jews. At the same time it was kind both to Christianity as a whole and especially both to the institutional Church and its leader. Although the Church was besmirched by an historic anti-Judaism, We Remember suggested that this set of religious prejudices, while mistaken, had been quite different to the political antisemitism which gave rise to the Holocaust. Those Christians who confused racial and religious anti-Judaism had therefore been acting despite rather than because of their Church
a violent event in the past, but by ‘the reality of the way in which its violence has not yet been fully known’.7 O’Connor’s voice registers such violence everywhere – in the relationship between mother and child, man and woman, the artist and the music industry, the individual and the institutional Church. In Caruth’s terms, O’Connor’s singing testifies to the inescapability of the belated impact of trauma, in its persistent witness to the voice that ‘cries out from the wound’. The modulations of her voice between the melodic smoothness of its purity and the
.S. Bosher, The making of the Restoration settlement: the influence of the Laudians 1649–1662 (Dacre Press, 1951); I. Green, The re-establishment of the Church of England, 1660–1663 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), and the many learned articles by the most expert scholar of the institutional church, Robert Beddard. 2 M. Goldie
and 1960s, hitchhiking could sometimes be found alongside other forms of ‘resistance’ to forms of authority. This was particularly true of studies of young offenders institutions, church or special education schools, many of whose own histories are now blighted with abuse scandals (raising questions as to why so many young women tried to abscond). 3 One clinical psychology report from 1978 noted that female hitchhikers were more likely to be unconventional and non-conformist than non-hitchhiking women, which raises
repentance, conversion and salvation.1 Whatever perspective lay contemporaries took on the role of religion, they began with the idea that God existed and was at work in the world. How they gave meaning to that conviction was shaped by their own experiences of the world and their cultural backgrounds, including their reading.2 There were various tools for forging religious belief. In some cases the formularies of the institutional churches satisfied, although clergy were often needed to explain them, but in other cases the process was a more complex one. The world of print
its primacy continued to diminish, ecclesiastical entities persisted in playing a role in the origins of many institutions. Church officials as founders According to the foundation charters, many of the twelfth- and thirteenth-century founders of hospitals followed an older, ecclesiastical tradition, at least in part. They recognized the regional bishop in his role as ‘padre dei poveri’ and looked to traditional Benedictine or Augustinian examples, and their rules as models, for their new institutions. Also, there
institutional Church did not just have a responsibility to condemn but also quite explicitly to take the side of the poor and the marginalised, even if on occasions this might necessitate supporting the use of violence against oppressors. Of course, in this context we cannot do the complexities of liberation theology full justice, but whilst critics clearly exaggerated the role of Marxism and the ambiguity about violence in order to undermine the wider critique, with hindsight it is clear that at least parts of the liberationist critique were inadequate. In particular it
they were joined by a handful of priests and lay activists, with some support from public intellectuals who dressed their support in terms of campaigns on behalf of national culture, but the institutional Church remained silent, especially when religious dissenters began to link up with other human rights activists during the 1970s. 24 Similar situations prevailed in Bulgaria and Romania, where if anything the Orthodox churches were even more quiescent. In both countries a few individual priests and laymen occasionally launched protests on behalf of the Church or
discipline to its two enveloping contexts –the somewhat amorphous Catholic social movement with its key Christus Rex Society and Muintir na Tire later stage embodiments and the hierarchical structures of the institutional Church, where appearances of unified command and control were not necessarily matched by the ways in which things actually worked. In the case of Christus Rex, for instance, Bryan Fanning and Andreas Hess (2014: 32–35) single out the society’s eponymous journal, which they subject to content analysis and critical comparison, while Sean L’Estrange (2007b