Abstract: The history of the Anglican Communion indicates that North America has been a peculiar laboratory for developments the entire Communion has come to embrace. Contrary to the assertions made in the Windsor Report, the colonial churches in North America were not the object of Canterbury's special concern, and no contact between the churches can be found for thirty years after the new church's launch. The movement for what became the Lambeth Conference began in the General Convention of 1853, and was later echoed by the Canadians. Much of what the churches of the Communion value in governance and ecclesiology originated in North America, as both Anglo-Catholic and Evangelical voices in England testify. Purely spiritual episcopacy, synodical government, and the sending of missionary bishops lead North American contributions to Anglican life. While history does not guarantee the rightness of the Canadian and Episcopal decisions, it suggests that they continue to be of significance for the evolution of the Communion. It is impossible not to respect the care and thoroughness with which the Windsor Report was prepared. Its point of view is consistently and thoroughly applied to the task the committee understood itself to have. At the same time, it is possible to have reservations about some aspects of the Report, and I have expressed my own theological concerns elsewhere,1 as has Professor Andrew Linzey of Oxford in a similar vein.2 We both see in its recommendations the seeds of a curial church of a kind foreign to Anglican tradition. We both stand amazed that the Report does not examine the entire sweep of the scriptural story to contemplate the phenomena of prophecy and conscience, denial and resistance. The present reflection, however, is concerned with how we in North America may understand our own story as a part of the Communion. Given the Anglican emphasis on precedent, the Windsor Report's reading of history is more critical than the comparative heat of the current sexuality debate may suggest. Linzey has shared his observations on the Report's history of the ordination of women, pointing out that purported methods of consultation and procedure were established after ordination of women was already here to stay. Others have emphasized the Report's silence on whether or not a woman bishop could be elected, as she would not be acceptable to all members of the Communion.3 Further, the Windsor Report nowhere reveals that the Virginia Report, to which it so often appeals, was denied recognition by the Anglican Consultative Council, so it is in reality nothing other than a very interesting proposal from the previous century. The Windsor Report suggests the development of canon law for the whole Anglican Communion, but Norman Doe has already pointed out that in present structures there is no group or individual competent to impose law on the membership.4 What has not received much attention is how the Report reads Anglican history on its way to proposing a new relationship among member churches and a new role for the Archbishop of Canterbury. The Report begins its proposal with the suggestion that because the Archbishop of Canterbury has actively cared for the entire Anglican world throughout its history, he or she therefore ought to be its chief magistrate, and the spirit of the English church ought to shape the life of the Communion worldwide. From the beginning, the Archbishop of Canterbury, both in his person and his office, has been the pivotal instrument and focus of unity; and relationship to him became a touchstone of what it was to be Anglican. It was to the Archbishop of Canterbury that American Anglicans first turned to seek consecration of new bishops after the American War of Independence. Thereafter it was successive Archbishops of Canterbury who consecrated bishops for Canada, the West Indies, India and the developing English colonial territories, and it was to Archbishops of Canterbury that these churches tended to turn for assistance both in spiritual and political matters when problems arose (para. …

Abstract: In this article, evidence is put forward for a new editorial prologue by the ninth-century scholar and poet Walafrid Strabo. Long thought to be a short preface composed and printed by the sixteenth-century French jurist Pierre Pithou, the text’s appearance in a manuscript from 1508 (Wroclaw, Biblioteka Uniwersytecka Akc. 1949/397) demonstrates an earlier origin. Through a close examination of this manuscript’s contents, together with independent evidence provided by marginalia from Pithou himself, the text is shown to have come from Walafrid’s pen. Written as a didactic prologue to the Episcoporum de poenitentia ... relatio Compendiensis, the two texts were conjoined with Thegan’s Gesta Hludowici in 841–842 both to expose the fraudulence of the rebellion against Emperor Louis the Pious in 833, and to underscore the cruel cunning of Archbishop Ebbo of Reims. This small compilation by Walafrid was incorporated soon thereafter by the famous librarian of Reichenau, Reginbert, within a larger compilation of hi...

Abstract: The popular account of Thomas Becket's murder as a likely influence on Shakespeare's Richard II, as well as on the entire second Henriad, is compelling in view of the substantial changes the playwright makes in Richard's death and the events subsequent to it so that they reflect similar events surrounding the martyr's death. The history of Shakespeare's hometown parish, its reverence for the martyr, and the life of its founder, John of Stratford, himself an Archbishop of Canterbury, both inform the ennobling that Richard's character undergoes in the play and illuminate the political tension the story provoked regarding the Tudor throne.

Abstract: Preface by Archbishop Rowan Williams Wisdom for Life I am the Truth On the Bible 'Come live with me and be my love' Anglicans and Suffering Why medical ethics needs the Church A Vocation of Presence Church and State Anglicanism: the only answer to modernity.

Abstract: In the second half of the nineteenth century, most European nations experienced a period of state-sponsored anti-Catholic legislation that has come to be known by the German term Kulturkampf. The question that this article seeks to address is whether or not the United Kingdom, and specifically Ireland, can be said to have experienced such a phenomenon. By examining the case of Robert O'Keeffe, a Roman Catholic parish priest who sued the cardinal archbishop of Dublin in the civil courts, it is possible to determine both whether Britain experienced a Kulturkampf, and to offer some suggestions as to why the United Kingdom appears to have been different in this regard from its European neighbours.

Abstract: The Vie Seinte Osith is a little-known Anglo-Norman verse life of an early English virgin martyr. The saint commemorated in this life is a pseudo-historical composite made up of three Anglo-Saxon holy women connected to the seventh and tenth centuries. (1) Little is known about the pre-Conquest history of this saint's cult, (2) but a church dedicated to Osyth, dependent on the See of London and served by a small community of chaplains, existed at Chich in Essex at the time of the Conquest. The cult of St. Osyth rose to prominence under the Norman encouragement of Anglo-Saxon saints. In 1076, her relics were translated by Bishop Hugh, and again in 1186 by Maurice, but the real promotion of Osyth came under Bishop Richard Belmeis I of London, who founded a house of black canons there whom he endowed with the manor of Chich and other churches. The canons who settled at Chich came from the house of the Holy Trinity Aldgate in London, which had been founded about 1107 by Queen Matilda on the advice of St. Anselm. (3) The house, richly gifted by Bishop Richard, an intimate of Henry I, as well as by the king himself and the Archbishop of Canterbury, early achieved a reputation as a center of learning in the social and intellectual milieu of the Anglo-Norman royalty. William of Malmesbury mentions its reputation for letters in his Gesta Pontificum: "There were and there are there clerks distinguished in letters, so that it may be said that the countryside blossoms with their happy example." (4) At least four lives of Osyth were composed in the twelfth century. One of these, now lost, was written by William de Vere, who grew up in the court of Henry I and his second wife, Adelaide of Louvain, and who was the patron of Walter Map, Gerald of Wales, and Robert Grosseteste. (5) In the reign of Henry II, John of Salisbury was an ardent advocate of the house, defending its rights against the attempts to expropriate certain of its churches by Richard II of Belmeis, Bishop of London (1152-62). The prominence of the cult of St. Osyth at the heart of the intellectual circles close to the Norman and Angevin kings makes her Anglo-Norman life, by far the longest and most complete of the extant lives, especially important to a study of the development of vernacular literature in the twelfth century. On both the secular and the ecclesiastical level, Anglo-Norman England was marked by a struggle between an institutional hierarchy and a subject population that was struggling for independence and self-determination, a struggle inscribed in secular and ecclesiastical writings alike. Political and ecclesiastical interests expressed through well-recognized genres such as history, law, and hagiography created expectations that could be manipulated by authors, sometimes transgressively. In the context of a complex network of colliding interests, authors with different institutional allegiances and social purposes exploited genre conventions to present their audiences with different constructions of the role institutional authority played in the realization of individuals' goals. (6) Official histories written for Norman and Angevin monarchs in the first two generations after the Conquest promote the belief that submission and obedience to an idealized monarch result in a transfer of his qualities--noble origins, natural superiority, and divinely favored success--from the ruler to the subject almost in the same way that hereditary traits are passed from father to son. (7) They offer obedient subjects a subsumed participation in the national authority from which they would otherwise be excluded. (8) Likewise, from the twelfth century, but especially from the thirteenth, competition with an increasingly hegemonic and centralized monarchy led the church to encourage the reorientation of devotional practices away from the direct and personal spirituality advocated by an Anselm or a Bernard, and towards a piety contained within the liturgy. The religious didactic literature that promotes a sacramental program of salvation, in which the church plays an indispensable role in mediating the relationship between God and individual, views the relationship between institution and individual in much the same way as the official histories: these works teach patience and obedient submission to the institutional church, of which the submission and obedience the individual owes to secular authority is an analogue. …

Abstract: History The Christianization of Denmark began with Ansgar (801-865), missionary and archbishop. It was, however, a king, Harald Blatand (d. 986) who, according to the text written by himself on a runic stone, "made the Danes Christians". Though the proud statement of King Bluetooth must be read more as a demonstrative than a descriptive statement, Christianity, enforced by the church, a series of kings and later by the state, has influenced Denmark some 1000 years. With the Reformation (1536), the old type of Christianity, now the Roman-Catholic Church, was forbidden, and the Lutheran-Evangelical type became the one and only. During the 17th and 18th centuries, the Roman-Catholic Church, the Reformed Church (with a French, Dutch as well as a German congregation), and a Jewish community, were given, by Royal Decree, certain rights equal to the Lutheran-Evangelical church: The right to perform their rituals, not least marriage with legal validity, to have buildings and burial places of their own, and to register births and deaths. It was not until 1849, though, with the Constitution of that year, that freedom of religion became a legal right. The same Constitution, however, in § 3 (today § 4) states: "The Evangelical-Lutheran Church is the Danish Folk Church (or: ’The Church of The People’’=’Folkekirken’) and as such to be supported by the state". But more Christian churches or denominations have entered into the Kingdom of Denmark since then. Today, besides the churches mentioned above, there are Russian, Greek, Romanian, Macedonian, and Serbian Christian Orthodox religious communities. There is a Swedish, Norwegian, and an Anglican church, as well as a great number of so-called Protestant Free

Abstract: (2005). Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop. The Explicator: Vol. 63, No. 2, pp. 90-93.

Abstract: The passage was not illustrated in the art of either Byzantium or western Chris tendom until the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and it fell into an equal obscurity thereafter. As Todor Petev has noted, \"Here in fact we witness an interesting paradox: though the Song of Songs is one of the most widely commented upon texts in the High Middle Ages, it very rarely became a subject of visual represen tation.\"2 Rare examples in Byzantine art as well as what seems to be the first appearance in the West, in the Hortus deliciarum of Herrad of Landsberg, asso ciate the scene of the well-guarded bed of Solomon with the Virgin as part of the developing Marian iconography of the twelfth century.3 In two unique cases in thirteenth-century Gothic art that have been mentioned in scholarly literature, other meanings are implied. It is hardly surprising that the first comprises the extravagantly illustrated Moralized Bibles associated with Louis IX; there the scene's commentary relates the sixty guardians to preachers who bring peace to the church by combating enemies visible and invisible. The second case is quite different hough also understandable, as it was the personal selection of a king: Henry III's choice of the guardians (sans Solomon) for paintings near his own beds in both Winchester Castle and the Painted Chamber of the Palace of Westminster. A third Gothic example, which has escaped general notice, is less easily ex plained and is the subject of the present study. The scene of Solomon in bed appears in stained glass in one of the tracery rosettes of the great nave clerestories

Abstract: After new research excluded the likelihood of the frescoes in St. Demetrios in Pec having been painted in the period around 1345/1346, as they are usually dated, one should revert to the view held by the initial research workers, who believed that Archbishop Nikodim (1317-1324) not only built but also had the church decorated. Well-educated after having been a student in Hilandar, and one of the most meritorious Serbian archbishops, Nikodim created a program of frescoes in which one can clearly distinguish these personal traits. Nikodim's experience on Mount Athos, of which we learn from his writings, preserved in the preamble of the two charters granted to the Karyes Cell, is reflected in the Church of St. Demetrios in the arrangement of the scenes of The Birth of the Virgin and The Presentation of the Virgin m the Temple on the opposite walls of the altar (in the churches of Mount Athos, they are painted on the eastern walls of the choir which does not exist in the church in Pec), and in the painting of the warrior saints and holy monks in the area of the naos beneath the dome, which is also characteristic of the churches on Mount Athos and of those decorated under the influence of this monastery. Nikodim erected the Church of St. Demetrios as his burial place. Therefore, he prepared a tomb for himself in the form of a sarcophagus in the western bay. beside the northern wall, and had it decorated with relief of a highly eschatological nature. During the painting of the church, he surrounded the tomb with presentations of a similar content. On the western wall, one can see The Lamentation (with the distinct figure of St. Nikodemus), the women bearing ointments and spices at the tomb of Christ, and Zechariah the Prophet with a Sickle and the prophecy about Him, written on a scroll. Directly above the tomb, however, there are the images of the donor's patrons and mediators (the warriors, St. Theodore Teron and St. Theodore Stratelates, and the anargyroi, SS Cosmas and Damianos. Fig. 1). while the place of St. Panteleimon ( who was relocated to the area beneath the dome) is occupied by a desert anchorite (Fig. 2) which was in keeping with Nikodim's ideals as a monk. Nikodim's example was followed by his successor, Archbishop Danilo II, in his mausoleum church dedicated to the Mother of God (around 1330): he too placed his tomb next to the northern wall of the western bay, a sarcophagus decorated with motives similar to those of Nikodim, surrounding it with images of the saintly physicians and warrior saints, a d placing the warrior saints and the holy monks opposite each other in the central part of the church. More than other Serbian archbishops, Nikodim revered St. Sava. He wrote about him with great love and viewed his own work as the hegoumenos of Hilandar. as an anchorite in the Karyes Cell and as the Serbian archbishop, as the continuation of Sava's deed. If, in his day. it was already believed that St. Sava was the patron of the Church of the Holy Apostles in Pec, then the fact that Nikodim erected St. Demetrios next to it should be interpreted as his desire to propagate St. Sava's ideas. However, Nikodim fulfilled this intention with the frescoes around his tomb. With the paintings of The Descent of the Holy Spirit and the first two Ecumenical Councils (Fig. 3) he expressed the idea about the beginnings of Christ's church on Earth, its establishment and its nature of communion. The first Serbian archbishop, as a new apostle educated his people, strengthened their faith and laid the path for the successors to his throne, which is illustrated in the painting, The Council of St. Sava (Fig. 4). Nikodim was Sava's successor and the executor of his legacy, as he pointed out in his writings, especially in the preface to the translation of the Jerusalem Typikon. The ideas about the unity of spiritual and temporal authority in the country embodied from the very beginning in Simeon and Sava, right until Stefan Decanski and Archbishop Nikodim, are harmoniously interwoven on the frescoes in the Church of St Demetrios. Namely, on the opposite side of the vault, beside the scene of The Council of St. Sava, we see the painting of The Council of St. Simeon Nemanja and King Mi lutin (Fig. 5). In accordance with the old ideological and iconographical templates and especially with the program painted in the narthex of the Sopocani monastery, half a century earlier, the purpose of this painting was to demonstrate that Simeon Nemanja was the source of temporal authority in Serbia and that he passed it on to his successors by the will of God and by his own decision. It was no mere coincidence that his "grandson". King Milutin, the father of Stefan Decanski, was chosen to be his successor. Accorded by God, legitimate authority was transferred from St. Simeon, through Milutin, to the new king. Thus, Stefan Decanski 1322-1331) with his son Dusan, the young king, was painted in the same area on the southern wall, surrounded by the portraits of St. Sava and Archbishop Nikodim (Fig. 6). thus indicating that he did not rule by right of inheritance alone, but also in the Orthodox Christian spirit, with the blessing of the Church. Since it is known that Stefan Decanski came to the throne under extraordinary circumstances, it is understandable that he wished to emphasise the legitimacy of his rule, which he legally inherited from his father, in the See of the archbishop. He did the same in his charters, especially in the Decani Chrysobull. Such ideologically intoned painting may have been produced soon after Stefan's coronation, so the frescoes in the Church of St. Demetrios in Pec should be dated between 1322 and 1324. At that time. King Stefan Decanski and young King Dusan were certainly still under the influence of their seven-year sojourn in Constantinople. This is why their official portraits on the southern wall (Figs 8 and 9), painted against a red, almost purple background, surrounded by the images of Archbishop Nikodim (Fig. 7) and St. Sava (Fig. 10), are imbued with the spirit and tastes of the court in Constantinople consequently they bear little similarity with the earlier images of rulers in Serbia. However, certain insignia and robes, worn here for the first time by King Stefan Decanski, young King Dusan and Archbishop Nikodim. would occasionally appear on their portraits and those of other people almost until the end of the 14th century.

Abstract: In the century following the death of St Francis, the Franciscan order underwent enormously rapid changes. As Franciscans became university masters, inquisitors, royal councillors and bishops, some confronted dilemmas in reconciling their religious vows with the duties of their offices. Yet whereas some friar-bishops and archbishops might have shied away from involving themselves in their churches' finances, Eudes Rigaud, the first Franciscan archbishop of Rouen, made significant investments in landed property, seigneurial rights and rents on behalf of his archdiocese. The Franciscan archbishop's commitment to ecclesiastical reform, evident in his meticulous visitations of his clergy as recorded in his episcopal register, is also visible in his efforts to augment his archdiocese's temporalities.

Abstract: Perceptions of the Church of England as a traditional stronghold of Freemasonry persist. Periodically, allegations have erupted alleging that membership of the brotherhood and of the church are incompatible. The compatibility of Freemasonry and Christianity became an issue most recently when the new archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, expressed his own unease about the question shortly before his enthronement. This article uses primary sources from Lambeth Palace to explore in detail a previous episode during the 1950s when the compatibility question created a furore within the ranks of church and brotherhood that involved leading members of the British establishment, including His Majesty King George VI and the archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher. Addressed by Parliament and the Foreign Office, as well as the popular media, the affair, implicating the Crown and the church, seemed to threaten disestablishment. An examination is made of the difficulties that the question raised for Anglicans at all levels and the way in which the controversy was handled by leading Freemasons and churchmen. The article goes on to address subsequent incidents that raised the compatibility question, looking at changing attitudes and behaviour over time and the implications for the nature of both institutions.

Abstract: edited by Alan L. Berger, Harry J. Cargas, and Susan Nowak. Academic Studies in the History of Judaism. Binghamton: Global Publications, SUNY at Binghamton, 2002. 327 pp. $25.00. The aim of this anthology is to further dialogue between Jews and Christians, particularly between Polish Catholicism and Judaism, in light of the controversies over the establishment of the Carmelite convent and the appearances of religious symbols at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp complex. Although some of the issues were eventually resolved (the Carmelite nuns moved to a different building further away from the main camp and the Auschwitz Museum set a new policy in 1997 to remove all religious symbols from the grounds within the barbed wire fences), these events had severely strained the Jewish-Christians relations of the 1980s and still require our attention and some mending. Too many prejudices, religious polemics, insensitive comments, impulsive actions, and uncaring judgments had transpired during those years, poisoning the climate and escalating traditional misconceptions of the respective "Other." At the root of the problem, the editors of Continuing Agony maintain, lies the anti-Jewish legacy of Christianity. But insensitive portrayals of and generalization about Polish people have contributed their share and did not soothe the politically and religiously volatile situation. Whereas "on the Jewish side, there has been a tendency to view all Poles as murderers, as if they not the German Nazis had built the death camps," (p. 10) on the Christian side, there must be a commitment to identify and eliminate "antisemitic elements of Christian theologies" (p. 9). Berger, Cargas, and Nowak set themselves the task of countering the distorted views of the "Other" through unflinching analysis and a commitment to search for constructive theological alternatives. The idea behind the book is noble. In many ways, it recalls the fairly comprehensive volume on the same subject, Memory Offended: The Auschwitz Convent Controversy (edited by Carol Rittner and John K. Roth, 1991). Continuing Agony seems to have been conceived of as an augmentation and appendage rather than a revision or refutation of Rittner's and Roth's earlier work. Inevitably, it goes over some of the same grounds but benefits from looking at an additional ten years of continued public debates between and among theologians, church officials and the general populace, as well as Jewish thinkers and Polish clergy, intellectuals and journalists. The Continuing Agony is more of a collection of resources than a book with a cohesive intellectual, political, or theological agenda. Its strength is that it brings together a variety of voices and documents (a total of 26 entries), ranging from critical reflections by religious scholars known in the dialogue community in North America (like John Pawlikowski, Jacob Neusner, Harry James Cargas, and Eugene Fisher), to translated documents and letters from significant voices in Poland (Cardinal Josef Glemp, Archbishop Henryle Muszynski, and Stanislaw Musial, S.J.), and official statements, such as the Papal letter to the Carmelite nuns, the declaration of a dialogue committee of German Catholics, or the announcement by the National Polish American-Jewish Council concerning the placement of crosses at Auschwitz. The book's strength is also its major weakness. It is virtually impossible to read straight through because of its repetitiveness. …

Abstract: Contents: Introduction Exiles and Appellants The Quest for Catholic Emancipation John Lingard and the Cause of Catholicism The Jesuits and Mark Tierney The Restoration of the Middle Ages and Monasticism Archbishop Cranmer and the Anglican Liturgy The Church of England and the Papacy Conclusion Bibliography Index.

Abstract: It was Andreas Hesselius, pastor at Holy Trinity Church in Wilmington from 1713-23 who asserted: Among these many sects and religions the English and the Swedish Church sit quite healthy and lively like twin roses among the thorns.1 He saw clearly that the mission of the church catholic was the same whether it was proclaimed by missionaries of the Church of Sweden or priests of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. For him as for the other thirty-two Swedish priests who served from 1697-1831, a church that celebrated the sacraments, had a university-trained clergy, and an experience of being a national reformed organization was a natural ally in a land that was highly unchurched, skeptical, and anti-sacramental. The Church of Sweden mission began in 1640 with the arrival of Torkil Reorus2 as chaplain to the garrison at Fort Christina. The colony was then two years old and would last until 1655 when Peter Stuyvesant sensed too much competition for the fur trade and eliminated the competition. The colony had had the services of seven clergymen during its seventeen years of existence, including Johan Campanius, whose translation of Martin Luther's Small Catechism is one of the first books produced in an Algonquin language. Only three hundred persons and one priest remained when the colony surrendered to the Dutch. Yet the following twenty-six years saw the continuation of the "Swedish Nation" as a self-governing entity in which Swedish was the lingua franca and the two original congregations built edifices at Tranhuk on the Christina River (Wilmington) and Vicaco on the South or Delaware River (Philadelphia). When Lars Lock, the last Swedish pastor died, and the Silesian Jacob Fabritius became incapacitated, the colonists crafted a letter to the King of Sweden asking for new priests. Their famous letter and its appended census of the two parishes petitioned for: ...two Swedish priests that are well learned in the Holy Scriptures and that may be able to defend them and us against all false opposers, who can or may oppose any of us, and also one that may defend the true Lutheran faith which we do confess, that if tribulation should come amongst us, and we should suffer for our faith, that we are ready to seal it with our blood.3 The letter was sent in 1693 and it was June 1697 when the three priests who answered the call of the archbishop and the king landed on American soil. The delay was intentional. The renewal of the mission of the Church of Sweden on the Delaware was something new in the history of Protestant foreign missions. Previously clergy followed the flag, but now an indigenous group of Christians were asking for assistance in a land that was neither a colony nor a trading post. A unique cast of characters were on hand for the drama. The king of Sweden, Carl XI, was a diligent and pious autocrat who read the scriptures daily, published a new church ordinance, a new hymnal, missal and catechism and whose wife, Hedvig EIeanora, was in correspondence with Philip Jacob Spener, the father of Pietism in Germany.4 Carl XI had approved the use of the Book of Common Prayer for Englishmen residing in Narva, in the province of Ingermanland in what is the first official document (1684) outlining similarities between the churches of England and Sweden.5 The aging archbishop, Olavus Svebelius, turned over the America project to the dynamic dean of Uppsala Cathedral, Jesper Svedberg. Svedberg was one of the few churchmen who had been to England, where he met Bishop John Fell at Oxford in 1684, and had a positive and intimate knowledge of the Church of England. He was a good friend of John Robinson (1650-1723), English embassy priest and diplomat in Sweden for over thirty years who accompanied King Carl XII on many of his military adventures.6 Later this same John Robinson would become bishop of London and be in a position to further Swedish cooperation even more. …

Abstract: Spain under Philip II was a country at war with its political and religious enemies—both real and imagined—on every side. To the north the French Huguenots and especially the Dutch Calvinists threatened the rule of this most Catholic king. To the south and east the Moslem Moors, Berbers, and Ottoman Turks were a constant thorn in the side, not just of Spain but of its Christian neighbors as well. Within the country proper, the presence of a Morisco majority in Andalucia made Christian control of the region tenuous at best, a threat made palpable by the Alpujarras uprising of 1568. Equally unnerving to the clerics of the Inquisition was the perceived threat to orthodoxy posed by the presence of conversos and alumbrados within the very hierarchy, as the deposing and imprisionment of Archbishop Carranza, the primate of Spain, suggested. As a result, the Spanish monarch increasingly saw himself and his mission in Messianic terms, and, by extension, the Spanish people as the new chosen race ordained by God to protect and extend Catholic orthodoxy in the world. 1 This perception of Spain and Philip influences two of the heroic canciones of Fernando de Herrera. In each poem, Herrera recalls the historical battles of Lepanto and Alcazarquivir in turn, addressing Philip, first in celebration of the great victory over the Ottoman Turks in 1571 and then to lament the destruction of the Portuguese expedition led by his nephew, the impetuous young King Sebastian, in 1578. By combining Biblical imagery and geographic references with the form of the heroic ode, the poet creates works which “ocupa[n] la mas alta

Abstract: Los papeles perdidos del cardenal Segura, 1880-1957. By Santiago Martinez Sanchez. (Pamplona: Ediciones Universidad de Navarra. 2004. Pp. 838.) The "lost papers" in the title of this impressively documented study of one of the most controversial figures in the history of the twentieth-century Spanish Church refers to the disappearance of key documents from the cardinal's personal archive. Expelled from Spain by the second Republic and later forced by the Vatican to resign as archbishop of Toledo and primate of Spain in 1931, Segura returned to Spain in 1937 as archbishop of Seville. In spite of his conservative views, the cardinal remained a thorn in the side of the Franco regime. He mistrusted its totalitarian tendencies, especially as far as church organizations were concerned, and for being too lax, if that can be imagined, with enforcing strict moral standards and curbing what he saw as the Protestant threat in his diocese. The author has established that Segura withdrew certain documents with a view to writing a justification of his career before its abrupt end in 1955, when the pope, supported by the Franco regime weary of his anti-Protestant tirades and their effect on Spain's new American ally, appointed a coadjutor archbishop with the right of succession. After Segura's death in 1957, the papers in question passed to a nephew who allowed the cardinal's first biographer, Ramon Garriga,to consult some of them during the 1970's. Thereafter, the paper trail goes cold, although the author has some grounds for believing that the documents now rest in a Parisian safe-deposit box. This study, in spite of its title, is not based on information from the "lost papers," which are still lost as far as historical research is concerned. But the author has surmounted this obstacle through extensive research in a wide variety of public, ecclesiastical, and private archives including, for example, the remaining papers in the Segura archive, as well as those of his secretary and a prominent Carlist politican, Manuel Fal Conde, with whom the cardinal maintained close contacts during the 1930's and 1940's. Two previous biographies of Segura by Ramon Garriga (1977) and Francisco Delgado (2001) have certain merits, but the extent and quality of the research evident in this study makes it the definitive work on Segura published until now. It is not a full-blown biography in that it deals primarily with what might be called the cardinal's "political" role in the period following the proclamation of the second Republic, his sympathy for the cause of authoritarian monarchy in the form of Carlism during the mid and later 1930's, and his frequent jousts with the Franco regime over nearly two decades. Previous studies of Segura have emphasized his commitment to the monarchy and King Alfonso XIII, who promoted his appointment to the archbishopric of Toledo in 1927. The author has taken this traditional view further by arguing that Segura's monarchist sympathies rested on more than a vague, romantic notion of the royal institution and appreciation of the contribution Alfonso XIII had made to his career. Segura idealized the monarchy of Ferdinand and Isabella, Charles Y and Philip II in an era which, in his view, had seen Church and Crown work together to secure the triumph of religion. Segura believed that nineteenth-century liberal governments had undermined this happy arrangement even though they maintained the Church as the established church. Why Segura imagined that Alfonso XIII would be able to realize this chimera is not entirely clear, but during the political crisis of 1930 and early 1931, the cardinal provided unabashed support to a monarchy under threat from resurgent republicanism. …

Abstract: [Cardinal Martini, archbishop emeritus of Milan, and currently scholar in residence in Jerusalem, delivered this inaugural address on November 17, 2004, during a three-day international congress he...

Abstract: The Highland policies of the Society in Scotland for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge (SSPCK) have been much discussed. In light of subsequent efforts of Royal Bounty catechists directed to areas where ‘Popery and Ignorance do mostly prevail’, it is worth considering how questions of education and faith were regarded within the Catholic Highlands of Scotland. The geographical scope of what Archbishop Mario Conti, chairman of the Scottish Catholic Heritage Commission, has described as a ‘broad swathe’ from east to west can be seen in the Historic Catholic Sites brochure which accompanies this issue of Recusant History. ‘Popery’ was routinely linked with ignorance by Established Church ministers who sent reports, but these same reports emphasised ‘the number of small schools, which apparently were established, and the existence of women catechists, trained by the clergy as their own fore-runners, in early eighteenth-century Scotland.’

Abstract: Archbishop James Ussher's fabled date of 4004 BC for the Creation of the World was not his, and was not introduced to English Bibles by him. Long before Ussher, the number 4004 had arisen from the period of Adam's captivity, four thousand years, to which had been added a four-year adjustment to the early Christian calendar. These two component numbers were wholly unrelated. Ussher's famous work Annals of the World cited dates in three ways: (1) according to the Julian Period, (2) as ‘Years of the World’ beginning at the Creation, and (3) as years Before Christ, or BC. Printing of dates BC in English Bibles, for example 4004 BC, was introduced in 1701, almost fifty years after Ussher's death, by William Lloyd, chronologer, scholar, politician and, at that time, Bishop of Worcester.

Abstract: Abstract Vanini’s heterodoxy was recognized in his own lifetime. Ascanio Spinola, for example, the minister of the London Italian Church, who met him in 1612, believed him ‘to bee of no religion, but a profane person, a filthy speaker and a grosse fornicatour ‘, and he prohibited Vanini from preaching in his Church. His books were swiftly condemned too: the Sorbonne repudiated his De admirandis on I October 1616, just a month after its publication. His execution as an atheist and blasphemer on the orders of the Parlement of Toulouse at the tender age of 34 confirmed this reputation. The earliest surviving report of his death described his beliefs as diabolical and scandalous, and the vicar-general of the archbishop of Toulouse issued a condemnation of his two published books in the summer of 1620. The De admirandis was added to the Catholic Church’s official Index of Prohibited Books in 1623.

Abstract: These are some of Gibran's unpublished letters to Archbishop Antonious Bashīr. They were unknown and unpublished until November 11, 2004, when they appeared in the original Arabic in the Lebanese daily newspaper, Al-Nahār (Almulhaq). According to Al-Nahār, these letters remained hidden among the archives of the Greek Orthodox Diocese in North America. It appears that Archbishop Philip Salība one day was searching in the old files of his predecessor, Antonious Bashīr, when he accidentally found these letters. Apparently, Gibran had written them to his friend, Antonious Bash¬r, who was also the translator of the Prophet into Arabic. The Lebanese newspaper adds that these letters acquire great importance as they constitute, on the one hand, a dialogue between the author and his translator, and on the other, they form part of Gibran's great literary heritage of which many hidden treasures have not yet been discovered.

Abstract: In 2003, as the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) opened its June meeting in St. Louis, Missouri, the clergy sexual abuse scandal was obviously at the top of the list of continuing concerns. The President of the Conference, Bishop Wilton D. Gregory, musing, perhaps lamenting, his leadership role at such a uniquely difficult time, told a Washington Post reporter that he wished his mentor, the late Joseph Cardinal Bernardin, "or the late John Cardinal Dearden were around to help guide the church."1 Gregory might as easily have added one more name to his wish list: Alexander Zaleski, Bishop of Lansing from 1965 to 1975, confidant of Dearden and admirer of Bernardin. For four crucial years (1966-1970), he was also the first chairman of the singularly important Bishops' Committee on Doctrine (COD), one of the busiest and most essential of some two dozen standing committees for what was then the National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB). As chairman, Zaleski was an insightful and highly respected leader of the American hierarchy. He was also an effective conciliator between the bishops' conference and the American Catholic Theological Society. Together with bishops like Dearden and Bernardin, he was a moderate and cautiously optimistic proponent of aggiornamento (renewal or updating) and the principles of collegiality and subsidiarity endorsed by Vatican Council II (1962-1965). In cases of internal dissent from church doctrine, he proved a staunch supporter of due process during the heady and critical half-decade that followed the Council. Zaleski was a highly competent, fair-minded, and collegial chair of an extremely active committee that confronted and worked through a myriad of often daunting internal controversies and crises that shook the American church in the late 1960's.2 Among those controversies, several reflected the era's preoccupation with the limits of authority and dissent. Most significant were challenges to the nature and scope of the Magisterium, the Church's teaching authority on matters of faith and morals. Two episodes, in particular, had lasting consequences for the study of theology and for Catholic higher education. In both instances the key protagonist was Father Charles E. Curran, a young moral theologian at The Catholic University of America. He is best remembered for the lead role he played in the second controversy that began at a press conference in late July, 1968. There, on behalf of eighty-seven theologians, he read a statement of dissent from Pope Paul VTs encyclical, Humanae Vitae (On the Proper Regulation of the Propagation of Offspring), in which the pontiff reaffirmed the Church's proscription of artificial contraception. Within weeks, more than six hundred individuals "qualified in the sacred sciences" had personally endorsed the dissent. Curran's leadership role in asserting that a Catholic theologian had a right to disagree with the Church's non-infallible teachings helped lay the groundwork for decades of controversy over the moral authority of the Magisterium.3 Eighteen years later, during the summer of 1986, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, prefect of the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), sent Curran a letter that would end his career at the Catholic University of America. After at least seven years of investigating his teaching and writing, and after failing to get Curran to agree to change his stance on contraception and other issues related to sexual morality, CDF declared that he was "no longer . . . suitable nor eligible" to teach Catholic theology. Ratzinger mailed a similarly worded directive to the Chancellor of the university and Archbishop of Washington, James Hickey. Hickey wasted no time initiating "the withdrawal of [his] . . . ecclesiastical license," but it was not until the winter of 1987 that he was able to suspend Curran.4 A year later, in the spring of 1988, the Board of Trustees formally withdrew Curran's canonical mission. …