Search results
When members of that oft-maligned institution, the Anglican Church – the 'Tory Party at prayer' – encountered the far-flung settler empire, they found it a strange and intimidating place. Anglicanism's conservative credentials seemed to have little place in developing colonies; its established status, secure in England, would crumble in Ireland and was destined never to be adopted in the 'White Dominions'. By 1850, however, a global ‘Anglican Communion’ was taking shape. This book explains why Anglican clergymen started to feel at home in the empire. Between 1790 and 1860 the Church of England put in place structures that enabled it to sustain a common institutional structure and common set of beliefs across a rapidly-expanding ‘British world’. Though Church expansion was far from being a regulated and coordinated affair, the book argues that churchmen did find ways to accommodate Anglicans of different ethnic backgrounds and party attachments in a single broad-based ‘national’ colonial Church. The book details the array of institutions, voluntary societies and inter-colonial networks that furnished the men and money that facilitated Church expansion; it also sheds light on how this institutional context contributed to the formation of colonial Churches with distinctive features and identities. The colonial Church that is presented in this book will be of interest to more than just scholars and students of religious and Church history. The book shows how the colonial Church played a vital role in the formation of political publics and ethnic communities in a settler empire that was being remoulded by the advent of mass migration, democracy and the separation of Church and state.
end of the 1960s, many congregations and orders were accepting (though perhaps not really celebrating) the critical faculties of their new entrants, proposing that her personal attributes would be necessary to address the needs of the secular age. These shifts over the 1940s to the 1960s demonstrate how understandings of the Modern Girl influenced the training of female religious in British congregations and orders. The institutional Church and female religious reacted to this discourse and took steps to restructure the lived experience of religious life to
practice – of dealing with an institutional church largely out of step with godly priorities by equipping laypeople to do certain clerical activities: even preaching. Finally, as a sort of coda, I place this in conversation with an anonymous 1641 anti-episcopal pamphlet sometimes attributed to Bernard. I suggest that if one does make that attribution, any radical implications might
content in ways that might be acceptable to the those within the institutional church. In any event, only in the 1640s would the circumstances for publication change dramatically. With, and perhaps because of, his remaining circumspect in his arguments, with careful couching of his content, Article gained John Hansley’s imprimatur in 1640. Conclusion
Irish Women and the Creation of Modern Catholicism is the only book-length study of lay Catholic women in modern Irish history. Focusing on the pivotal century from 1850 to 1950, it analyses the roles that middle-class, working-class, and rural poor lay women played in the evolution of Irish Catholicism and thus the creation of modern Irish identities. This project demonstrates that in an age of Church growth and renewal stretching from the aftermath of the Great Famine through the early years of the Irish Republic, lay women were essential to all aspects of Catholic devotional life, including both home-based religion and public Catholic rituals. It also reveals that women, by rejecting, negotiating, and reworking Church dictates, complicated Church and clerical authority. Irish Women and the Creation of Modern Catholicism re-evaluates the relationship between the institutional Church, the clergy, and women, positioning lay Catholic women as central actors in the making of modern Ireland. It also contests views that the increasing power of the Catholic Church caused a uniform decline in Irish women’s status after the Great Famine of the 1840s, revealing that middle-class, working-class, and rural poor lay women fought with their priests, dominated household religion, and led parish rituals, thus proving integral to the development of a modern Irish Catholic ethos and culture.
Catholic Church was in no position to voice its concern about these developments at the time, in the wake of the child- abuse and Magdalene laundry revelations. Moreover, the response in the public forum to the litany of Church-related offences has been to reject the institutional Church and, consequently, impede the creation of a space for the evaluation of the cultural legacy of Irish Catholicism. As a result, attempting to explore aspects of the Catholic Church without falling into outright condemnation of the entire institution and of its members is deemed insular
high-profile converts also such as Charles Moore, former editor of the Daily and Sunday Telegraph and of The Spectator magazine. For this reason, Catholicism has won greater respect from the media and would-be critics of Catholicism than that accorded it in Ireland. This disparity is still evident. Throughout most of the twentieth century in Ireland, Catholicism was not questioned except in media and literary circles. It lay embedded in a comfort zone that led to conformity between the institutional Church and the State, and this contributed to passiveness among
feminised landscape in Irish history was an effort to constrain the female body in space and place. In the nineteenth century, people in Ireland and in the Irish Diaspora called on long-standing beliefs and oral traditions to map bodies and landscapes. Before the advent of a strong institutional Church, they also used beliefs about the landscape to regulate female sexuality. Fairy belief was one of the strongest oral traditions upholding gender norms and dictating female behaviour. Popular subjects in storytelling, the fairies were mischievous beings that took human form
challenge some prevailing conventions by analysing religion as an empowering belief system. The ambiguity that existed in the relationship between women and the institutional church is recognised. Women’s involvement within any religious hierarchy is a problematic paradigm in the nineteenth century. Apologetic and promotional church histories are an intrinsic part of the chronicles of ecclesiastical scholarship, particularly in the early part of the twentieth century. Their partisan content and lack of self-criticism have made it difficult to assess critically the
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