A comprehensive in-depth account of the religious and social changes in Catholic thinking, ritual and theology brought about during the reign of Pope Paul VI, and its dire effects on Catholic laity and clergy.
Love and Despair explores the multiple and mostly unknown ways progressive and conservative Catholic actors, such as priests, lay activists, journalists, intellectuals, and filmmakers, responded to the significant social and cultural shifts that formed competing notions of modernity in Cold War Mexico. Jaime M. Pensado demonstrates how the Catholic Church as a heterogeneous institution—with key transnational networks in Latin America and Western Europe—was invested in youth activism, state repression, and the counterculture from the postwar period to the more radical Sixties. Similar to their secular counterparts, progressive Catholics often saw themselves as revolutionary actors and nearly always framed their activism as an act of love. When their movements were repressed and their ideas were co-opted, marginalized, and commercialized at the end of the Sixties, the liberating hope of love often turned into a sense of despair.
Miguel Pro: Martyrdom and Politics in Twentieth-Century Mexico examines the complex relationship of modern martyrdom as preserved by memory and factual truth, and as retold through stories intended to impel political and religious aims. Martyr narratives depend on institutional affiliation to remain in the public memory, and are altered in order to maintain their ability to mobilize followers within changing social and political contexts. In order to examine the evolution of lasting martyr narratives, López-Menéndez scrutinizes the various renditions of the 1927 execution of Miguel Pro, a Jesuit priest caught in the bloody conflict between Catholics and the post-revolutionary state.
This book is a fascinating look into the history of the Catholic papacy. A devout Catholic will pull no punches as he describes the barbaric and ridiculous affairs found with some of the popes of the past and what it means for the Catholic Church today.
In the corridors of the Vatican on the eve of World War II, American Catholic priest Joseph Patrick Hurley found himself in the midst of secret diplomatic dealings and intense debate. Hurley’s deeply felt American patriotism and fixed ideas about confronting Nazism directly led to a mighty clash with Pope Pius XII. It was 1939, the earliest days of Pius’s papacy, and controversy within the Vatican over policy toward Nazi Germany was already heated. This groundbreaking book is both a biography of Joseph Hurley, the first American to achieve the rank of nuncio, or Vatican ambassador, and an insider’s view of the alleged silence of the pope on the Holocaust and Nazism. Drawing on Hurley’s unpublished archives, the book documents critical debates in Pope Pius’s Vatican, secret U.S.-Vatican dealings, the influence of Detroit’s flamboyant anti-Semitic priest Charles E. Coughlin, and the controversial case of Croatia’s Cardinal Stepinac. The book also sheds light on the powerful connections between religion and politics in the twentieth century.
The Struggle Over the Past contains essays on three facets of fundamentalist religion: its international character, its American Protestant form, and its appearance in Roman Catholicism. The papers range in methodological perspective from textual commentary, to history, to philosophical and theological argument. They are critical as well as descriptive. The papers that comprise this volume are written by leading scholars in the field: Islamicist John Esposito, R. Scott Appleby of the Fundamentalist Project, theologian Francis Fiorenza of Harvard Divinity School, William Dinges of Catholic University, Mary Jo Weaver of Indiana University, and Terrence Tilley of the Florida State University. Additional commentary by three noted scholars of American evangelical religionóSamuel Hill, Jr., E. Glenn Hinson, and Bernard Rammórounds out the examination of modern fundamentalism. Co-published with the College Theology Society.