No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
Hearts and Nations: Apparitions of Mary in 20th-Century Catholic Europe
... Marian apparition came with a strong political message. In the context of an ongoing secularization process, the Virgin Mary appeared in order to warn public and politics to return to God, flee sin, pray the rosary and do penitence in order to avoid the threatening chastisement of God for the sacrileges of the times (Di Stefano and Solans 2018;Hermkens et al. 2009a;Margry 2020;Maunder 2018;Zimdars-Swartz 2014). ...
... Of course, these prejudices of researches cannot be taken as a proof for the attitude of all Marian pilgrims. However, scholars such as Charlene Spretnak (2004) or Robert A. Orsi (2009) and also several more recent studies (Di Stefano and Solans 2018;Margry 2020;Maunder 2018;Zimdars-Swartz 2014) who show a certain spectrum of piety and creed among Marian pilgrims cannot deny that a rift emerged within the Catholic Church after the Second Vatican Council concerning the Virgin Mary. Or in the words of Charlene Spretnak: "Most 'progressive' intellectuals in the Church, in fact, tend to consider any glorification of the Nazarene village woman as 'Queen of Heaven' to be theologically regressive and even dangerously reactionary-or, at least, in poor taste" (Spretnak 2004, p. 1). ...
Marian apparitions attract modern masses since the 19th century. The radical message of the apparition asking for penitence and the return of public and politics to God resonated well within major parts of Catholicism. While popes kept promoting Marian pilgrimages in order to secure their public and political standing throughout the 20th and 21st century, they tried to control the masses and to attenuate the messages. Particularly since the Second Vatican Council, the popes tamed mobilization. Instead of stirring up the masses, popes kept modest at Marian apparitions sites. A quantitative analysis of the papal documents issued during papal journeys to Fatima, the most political apparition of the 20th century, shows that a modest religious discourse about God and world had been presented instead of promoting the critical messages of the apparition. Following the methodological ideal of parsimony, the analysis concentrates on the most uttered words during the journeys and compares the four pontificates since Paul VI. Instead of stressing the radical message of Fatima, which is introduced in the discussion of the findings, the pontificates share a modest Catholic discourse.
... 58 Our Lady Weeps for Trinidad, Catholic Herald, June 28, 1957. New West Indian Guide 94 (2020) 211-244 was recognized by the Church as an actual manifestation in the early 1940s (Fox 1982;Maunder 2016). Nevertheless, in Trinidad, behind the rise of Our Lady of Fátima was an agony of desire among the Catholic authorities, caused by unrequited love for the Madonna at Siparia, La Divin/Sipari Mai, who was expected to serve their Coolie Mission by converting a mass of Hindus to Catholicism through her intercessory power. ...
Based on archival research supplemented by ethnographic observations, this article critically revisits the history of La Divina Pastora, the Spanish-origin Madonna, in colonial Trinidad, focusing on how the spirituality and materiality of the two statues of this Marian image intersected, competed, and reinforced each other: a fair-complexioned La Divina Pastora in northern Trinidad, created and patronized by the Catholic central authorities; and a dark-skinned, miracle-working La Divin/Sipari Mai in Siparia, formerly a peripheral Spanish mission in southern Trinidad. Tracing the trajectory of their lives and relations reveals the complexities of the ecclesiastical history of Trinidad, unearthing contradictions and tensions between the patriarchal making and remaking of religious orthodoxy and popular praxis of faith for day-to-day substantive issues needing medico-spiritual solutions. Unlike extant studies, addressing the two distinct statues representing the same Marian image, this article demonstrates a holistic approach to appreciate why and how the Madonna at Siparia emerged, survived, and thrived as a shared empowering object, despite a colonial obsession with racial-cultural purity and regimes of the boundaries of belonging. The conflicts among the Christian communities were intertwined and thwarted the Catholic central authority’s attempts to exploit La Divin/Sipari Mai’s transgressive power in order to attract Hindus to the Church. The tangled conflicts also created conditions where Hindu supplications for miraculous cures could persist and thrive, despite discrimination and repression by the Catholic authorities. The incessant interactions of Catholics vis-à-vis Hindu devotees in Siparia led to combining of their originally divergent practices and worldviews and the transformation of dark-colored Madonna from La Divina Pastora to La Divin/Sipari Mai, an alternative spiritual construction that represented various maternal/female bodies, each conforming to distinct religious traditions.
La antropología ha atendido más a la eficacia ritual que a aquellos ritos cuyo efecto no es el esperado o su resultado no es bienvenido; sin embargo, «el fracaso ritual» (Geertz, 1957) ocurre todo el tiempo y es un buen indicador del cambio cultural, tanto en cuanto al cambio de valores como a los mecanismos concretos de las innovaciones religiosas (Hüsken, 2007; Koutrafouri y Sanders, 2013). Este enfoque resulta clarificador en alguna casuística en la que los casos fallidos son la norma, en vez de la excepción, como es el caso de las apariciones marianas (Christian, 2009). El objetivo de este artículo es proponer y explorar el fracaso ritual como problemática de investigación y como estrategia teórico-metodológica para dar cuenta del cambio social y cultural, sugiriendo un modelo de análisis posible para futuras investigaciones. Para ello, se empieza describiendo el caso de José, un joven visionario que quiso reformar el culto público en su pueblo a partir de la recepción de un mensaje de la Virgen María. A continuación, se exploran cuestiones de alcance más amplio que atañen al valor heurístico de los episodios fallidos, a la tensión entre creatividad y poder en la innovación religiosa, y a las posibilidades de la pragmática austiniana (Austin, 1978) en la sistematización analítica de los casos fallidos.
Apparitions of the Virgin Mary during the Cold War Era and their apocalyptic and anti-communist themes.
In the early and medieval Christian tradition, the gendered body was understood as both an obstacle to the cultivation of virtues and a potential medium of transgression. The contemporary Catholic anthropology has another view of the subject's body and its senses and desires. This article is concerned with the pastoral project of encouraging priestly and monastic callings in the Russian Catholic parishes. It also specifically looks at its rhetoric, placing significant emphasis on gendered embodiment. Based on participant observation materials and interviews with Catholics, who are "called", the author analyzes the strategies of making a calling to celibacy genuine and persuasive. By including gender and sexuality within the concept of vocation, such rhetoric allows not only to show the consecrated life as something attractive, more intelligible and real but also to raise awareness of what true masculinity and femininity are. Despite the fact that Church discipline prescribes solitude, in this new rhetoric celibacy does not require one to become a disembodied and asexual angel. Conversely, by applying gendered embodiment religious specialists emphasize its utmost importance for the vocation, which presupposes celibacy, thereby confronting both early Christian perspective on the sinful body and secular views on the constructed gender. © 2018 Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration. All rights reserved.
In this chapter, I explore the religious change in a rural parish in Toledo. Even if popular contributions are always under the surveillance of the churchmen in this context, those contributions are endlessly fertile and syncretic. To explore this popular reformism, I study a case of Marian apparitions, where the Virgin Mary contacted a visionary in order to change the traditional celebrations of the Holy Week. Even though the episode lasted several years, parishioners rejected both the changes proposed and the claims of apparitional occurrences. Failure depends on the social capital of the reformers, the struggle to control the definition of what is religiously appropriate, and on symbolic consistency. I conclude that syncretism occurs in the tension between creativity, social capital and symbolic plausibility.
For over half a century now, the profession of social work has ignored calls to develop critical infrastructures for strengthening and expanding historical research in schools of social work. Since World War II, for example, doctoral dissertations involving significant historical research in schools of social work have become virtually extinct. The vanishing of these dissertations represents a simultaneous vanishing of social work's capacity to detect historical figures who are indigenous to and yet have remained undetected in social work history. As a result, and unintentionally, social work scholars have been seemingly unable to detect Louise de Marillac as the patron saint of social workers or Ellen Gates Starr as a popular folk saint among social workers in Catholic religious orders. The study includes the rare, post-mortem photograph of Ellen Gates Starr, dressed in the full habit of a Catholic Benedictine nun.
Wie viele Divisionen hat der Papst? Stalins Frage nach der päpstlichen Macht wurde von Churchill mit Verweis auf die unsichtbaren Legionen der heute mehr als einer Milliarde Katholiken beantwortet. Die aktuelle Debatte ergänzt diese Antwort mit dem Verweis auf die kurial-päpstliche Elite, der es gelingt, diese versteckte Macht in Fortsetzung der historischen Rolle als Völkerrechtssubjekt in Weltöffentlichkeit und Weltpolitik als Soft Power einfließen zu lassen. Gegen Churchill wird hier die These vertreten, dass die Legionen sichtbar werden müssen, um die Mobilisierungsfähigkeit des Papsttums zu demonstrieren. Die päpstliche Politik der Pilgerzüge, die in Rom und weltweit Pilgermassen um den Papst schart, lässt die Legionen sichtbar werden. Sie stellt den Mechanismus dar, der gesellschaftliche Kräfte in politischen Status umwandelt, der als Grundlage der päpstlichen Soft Power dient. Mit einem konstruktivistisch-realistischen Ansatz der Identitätskonstruktion und Machtdemonstration wird vor dem Hintergrund soziologischer Annahmen weltgesellschaftlicher Transformation, wie sie die Englische Schule vertritt, die Wirkung der Pilgermobilisierung untersucht. Die Zunahme der öffentlichen und politischen Präsenz bei Papsttoden und der päpstlichen Präsenz in Parlamenten werden als empirische Beispiele zur Entwicklung des Status in enger Verbindung zur Pilgermobilisierung herangezogen.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any references for this publication.