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Catholic nuns and sisters in a secular age examines the changes in religious life for women religious in Britain from 1945 to 1990 identifying how community and individual lives were altered. This work is grounded in three core premises: women religious were influenced by and participated in the wider social movements of the long 1960s; women’s religious institutes were transnational entities and part of a larger global happening; and the struggles of renewal were linked to competing and contradictory ideas of collective, institutional identities. The work pivots on the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), but considers pre and post Vatican II social, cultural and religious events and social movements of the 1960s as influencers in these changes. It interrogates ‘lived experience’ by examining the day-to-day lives of women religious. Though rooted in the experiences of women religious in Britain, the book probes the relationships and interconnectivities between women religious within and across national divides as they move from institutions embedded in uniformity to the acceptance of cultural plurality. It also engages with the histories of the social movements of the long 1960s. For too long, religion has been relegated to its own silo, unlinked to the ‘radical sixties’ and depicted as ultimately obstructionist to its social movements. To contest this, female religious life is examined as a microcosm of change in the Catholic Church pointing to the ‘new thinking and freer lifestyles’ that allowed for the questioning of institutional cultures.
T HE CATHEDRAL’S INTERNAL FITTINGS include an important and growing collection of modern stained glass, all dating from the 1960s onwards. This chapter briefly sets the scene for the collection, describes each of the windows containing stained glass, and considers future opportunities. To understand the significance of the collection, it is important to see stained glass in the context of medieval places of worship, where stained glass took its place alongside stone sculptures, exquisite
existing accounts surrounding the ‘reception’ of the Second Vatican Council by these English Catholics, and explores the ways in which these histories diverge from the analysis adopted within this book. The final section contextualises English Catholicism within a broader ‘mainstream’ historiography of the post-war period, encompassing concerns about secularisation and religious diversity, and the fundamental shifts in morality and respect for authority and tradition associated with the 1960s, as well as shifting leisure cultures and social mobility. In 1936, David
173 6 Social research and state planning Introduction The First Programme for Economic Expansion was launched in 1958. By the early 1960s the scope of programming was widening as the stagnation prevailing for most of the 1950s gave way to a period of continuous economic growth. Initial crisis conditions had enabled increased social spending to be left off the programmers’ agenda. The changed politics of increasing prosperity, as well as their own expanding ambitions, meant that this could no longer be sustained. This chapter begins by sketching Ireland’s social
‘otherworldliness’ emphasised by the Archbishop of Liverpool, George Andrew Beck, in a 1950 collection of essays published to celebrate the centenary of the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy. 4 Others revelled in the idea that Catholicism was a ‘cultural force: a powerful critique of the modern world and all its errant ways’. 5 This credo appeared to be effective, given the demographic growth and cohesiveness of the English Catholic community during the 1950s and 1960s: it was not diminishing in the way that other religious denominations were at this time. 6 This same
modernity and to religious life through memoirs and vocation literature. Lastly, it identifies how religious congregations and orders reacted to the Modern Girl who entered religious life from the 1940s to the 1960s. In this analysis of memoirs and vocation literature, the representation and display of the Modern Girl is more relevant than her actual lived experience. This is a constructed Modern Girl, one that is less complicated than lived experience would highlight and one that is, in the sources at least, easily typecast. She is an object rather than an individual
latter report, the dominant purpose of schooling was seen as the ‘inculcation of religious ideals and values’ and ‘the preservation and transmission’ of the cultural heritage.15 As regards the Irish language, by the 1960s it was obvious that the aim of restoring Irish as the first language was not viable and the schools-based revival policy was discredited.16 However there were also more urgent practical educational issues to be faced. In the post-war era Ireland lagged behind Britain, America and mainland Europe in terms of social and economic development. The country
Personnel. The chapter begins with an account of the relationship between the US and Irish states during and after the Second World War –the broader context in which the specific developments of the period relating to Irish science infrastructure took shape. It concludes by relating the Irish scientific infrastructure changes that clustered in the late 1950s and the early 1960s to older scientific institutional configurations laid down under the union with Britain and modified by the advent of political independence. Ireland’s relations with the USA during the Second
-cycle stage varied from person to person, but in general seem to have run from the interviewees’ mid-thirties to sixties for those married in the immediate post-war years, beginning a little later for those married after the 1960s. Scholarly accounts of women and ageing tend to focus on the menopause. 3 However, the menopause did not represent a major topic of discussion in the interviews. This absence may have been
68 3 Facing facts: the empirical turn of Irish Catholic sociology in the 1950s Introduction This chapter examines the changing face of Catholic sociology in Ireland during the 1950s and 1960s. It has four principal strands. First, the joint action of the Maynooth professor and Muintir na Tire to secure European and US help in fostering rural sociology. Second, the use made by Archbishop McQuaid of his power within UCD to establish social science teaching in the state’s largest university.Third, the tension between useful and critical social science that emerged