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Beyond Priests

Author: Paul Collins

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2025-02-18

Total Pages: 145

ISBN-13:

Beyond Priests contends that the requirements of the clerical priesthood of the Catholic Church—that all priests must be male, and that all priests must be celibate—is a gross distortion of scripture and the church’s early history that must be changed. While the roots of the modern priesthood go back to the fourth century and even more remotely to the presbyters or elders who advised local bishops in the early church, the contemporary priestly model is very much the product of seventeenth-century French reformers acting to apply a 1563 decree on the priesthood of the Council of Trent. The present-day priestly model has increasingly become harmful, even toxic, not only to priests themselves, but to the ministry and the Catholic community. Based on the historical analysis, Beyond Priests outlines a whole new way of approaching ministry and leadership that is in tune with contemporary needs, is inclusive of women and men, and is more authentically derived from the New Testament and the early church.

Beyond the Limits of Thought

Author: Graham Priest

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 9780199254057

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Graham Priest presents an expanded edition of his exploration of the nature and limits of thought. Embracing contradiction and challenging traditional logic, he engages with issues across philosophical borders, from the historical to the modern, Eastern to Western, continental to analytic.

Beyond Betrayal

Author: Patricia Ewick

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2019-08-21

Total Pages: 182

ISBN-13: 022664443X

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In 2002, the national spotlight fell on Boston’s archdiocese, where decades of rampant sexual misconduct from priests—and the church’s systematic cover-ups—were exposed by reporters from the Boston Globe. The sordid and tragic stories of abuse and secrecy led many to leave the church outright and others to rekindle their faith and deny any suggestions of institutional wrongdoing. But a number of Catholics vowed to find a middle ground between these two extremes: keeping their faith while simultaneously working to change the church for the better. Beyond Betrayal charts a nationwide identity shift through the story of one chapter of Voice of the Faithful (VOTF), an organization founded in the scandal’s aftermath. VOTF had three goals: helping survivors of abuse; supporting priests who were either innocent or took risky public stands against the wrongdoers; and pursuing a broad set of structural changes in the church. Patricia Ewick and Marc W. Steinberg follow two years in the life of one of the longest-lived and most active chapters of VOTF, whose thwarted early efforts at ecclesiastical reform led them to realize that before they could change the Catholic Church, they had to change themselves. The shaping of their collective identity is at the heart of Beyond Betrayal, an ethnographic portrait of how one group reimagined their place within an institutional order and forged new ideas of faith in the wake of widespread distrust.

Priests of the French Revolution

Author: Joseph F. Byrnes

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2015-02-05

Total Pages: 342

ISBN-13: 0271060980

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The 115,000 priests on French territory in 1789 belonged to an evolving tradition of priesthood. The challenge of making sense of the Christian tradition can be formidable in any era, but this was especially true for those priests required at the very beginning of 1791 to take an oath of loyalty to the new government—and thereby accept the religious reforms promoted in a new Civil Constitution of the Clergy. More than half did so at the beginning, and those who were subsequently consecrated bishops became the new official hierarchy of France. In Priests of the French Revolution, Joseph Byrnes shows how these priests and bishops who embraced the Revolution creatively followed or destructively rejected traditional versions of priestly ministry. Their writings, public testimony, and recorded private confidences furnish the story of a national Catholic church. This is a history of the religious attitudes and psychological experiences underpinning the behavior of representative bishops and priests. Byrnes plays individual ideologies against group action, and religious teachings against political action, to produce a balanced story of saints and renegades within a Catholic tradition.

Cities and Priests

Author: Marietta Horster

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter

Published: 2013-10-29

Total Pages: 380

ISBN-13: 3110318482

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Cultural records such as dedications, honorific statues and decrees are keys to understanding the manifold and diverse social roles and religious functions of priesthoods in the cities of Asia Minor and the Aegean islands from the classical period to late antiquity. These texts and images indicate how the priests and priestesses saw themselves and were viewed by others. The approaches in this volume are historical, religious, and archaeological, and they elucidate the religious functions that the cult personnel fulfilled for the city, and the perception of priests and priestesses as citizens of the polis. The volume focuses on developments from the Hellenistic period into Imperial times. Subjects include: gendered priesthoods and family traditions, the topography of honorary statues and the presentation of funerary monuments, federal and civic priesthoods as well as priests of private cult-foundations, benefactions and social pressure, and the religious, social and political functions of priests and priestesses within cities.

Nuns' Priests' Tales

Author: Fiona J. Griffiths

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2018-02-01

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 0812294629

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During the Middle Ages, female monasteries relied on priests to provide for their spiritual care, chiefly to celebrate Mass in their chapels but also to hear the confessions of their nuns and give last rites to their sick and dying. These men were essential to the flourishing of female monasticism during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, yet they rarely appear in scholarly accounts of the period. Medieval sources are hardly more forthcoming. Although medieval churchmen consistently acknowledged the necessity of male spiritual supervision in female monasteries, they also warned against the dangers to men of association with women. Nuns' Priests' Tales investigates gendered spiritual hierarchies from the perspective of nuns' priests—ordained men (often local monks) who served the spiritual needs of monastic women. Celibacy, misogyny, and the presumption of men's withdrawal from women within the religious life have often been seen as markers of male spirituality during the period of church reform. Yet, as Fiona J. Griffiths illustrates, men's support and care for religious women could be central to male spirituality and pious practice. Nuns' priests frequently turned to women for prayer and intercession, viewing women's prayers as superior to their own, since they were the prayers of Christ's "brides." Casting nuns as the brides of Christ and adopting for themselves the role of paranymphus (bridesman, or friend of the bridegroom), these men constructed a triangular spiritual relationship in which service to nuns was part of their dedication to Christ. Focusing on men's spiritual ideas about women and their spiritual service to them, Nuns' Priests' Tales reveals a clerical counter-discourse in which spiritual care for women was depicted as a holy service and an act of devotion and obedience to Christ.