Abstract: The Alexandrian patriarchs of the fourth and fifth centuries advanced their religious and political interests in the eastern Mediterranean world with vigor and belligerence. This zealous diplomacy presents an inviting object for study 1). Its success seems to have been due in part to their firm control of Egyptian Christianity. Their power also had a material basis. Until the Arab conquest Egypt was the main resource of the emperors for feeding the population of Constantinople, and the army and imperial bureaucracy as well ). The maintenance of regular grain shipments from Alexandria was essential to their stability. No more fatal allegation could be made against a bishop than that he was meddling with the grain supply, and Alexandria's fractious Christians were not reluctant to use such an effective polemical weapon. The plausibility of the charge depends in part on what influence the bishops actually had on the movement of grain. This paper collects notices associating the bishops with the grain trade, and correlates them with what is otherwise known about grain transport in late Roman Egypt. The evidence is found in quite disparate sources ranging from the fourth to the early seventh centuries, a period which saw the emergence of an extensive patriarchal commercial activity. An important concern

Abstract: The conference between James i, some of the bishops and representatives of the puritans at Hampton Court palace in January 1604 was one of the most significant events in the political and religious history of England. But at the present time its significance is not clearly understood. The king's puritan policy did not begin or end there, but even in 1604 the conference was understood as a chance for the puritans to gain a measure of toleration or to begin a further reformation of the Church of England. As things turned out neither was the case. The classic accounts of Gardiner and Usher assumed that the conference was a failure for the puritan cause, but in 1961 Mark Curtis, in a widely accepted article, claimed that the king was more sympathetic to the puritans than Gardiner and Usher had allowed. Professor Curtis analysed the creation of the proclamation of October 1603 which announced the conference and claimed that its genesis showed a measure of serious criticism of the Established Church which has never been acknowledged by historians. He pointed out the episcopal bias of the official account of the conference, William Barlow's The Summe and Substance of the Conference… at Hampton Court, and noted the importance of what he felt was a neglected source, an ‘Anonymous Account’, which he believed showed marked differences between the king and the bishops, and emphasised the common ground between the king and the puritans. By considering the decisions made at the conference - whether they were put into effect or not - Professor Curtis was convinced that the conference itself was a puritan success in which the king made important concessions to them.

Abstract: Most people in Gaul in the centuries after the barbarian invasions belonged to a community wider than nation, city or family, a community with its own initiation ceremonies and meeting-places, membership of which gave people a sure knowledge of the world, both visible and invisible, and a chance of eternal happiness. The initiation ceremony was baptism, involving triple immersion in sunken pits or fonts in specially built baptisteries (both fonts and baptisteries often octagonal in shape, for the number 8 signified eternity and rebirth), and was usually performed by a bishop, at Easter, Christmas or on another suitable day such as the feast of St John the Baptist. Already by 500, child, rather than adult, baptism was the norm; in Carolin-gian times the child might be one or two years old. By then it had become much easier for parents to obtain the sacrament for their children: parish priests would perform the ceremony, using a small font inside their parish church. In theory, continuing membership of the community required fulfilment of the oaths sworn at baptism; in practice it required only a minimum participation in the sacraments. The Council of Agde in 506 laid down that every Christian should take communion at Christmas, Easter and Pentecost; Carolingian bishops decreed that every Christian should make confession of sins once a year, before Lent (hence Shrove Tuesday, from ‘to shrive’, meaning both to hear and to make confession).

Abstract: Part of the “common core” of ideas that make up dependency theory is the importance of elite relationships, yet few empirical studies in the dependency literature focus on elite behavior. This arti...

Abstract: FOR most of the inhabitants of England and Wales the Civil Wars were an experience unlike anything they had known before. The Bishops’ Wars had provided some alarming foretastes, not only in the parts of the north occupied by the Scots, but along the routes of the marching English soldiers and in the areas of intensive recruitment. Then, in 1642, life changed. The next four years brought to some places utter disaster; to others, perhaps not far away, little more than heavy taxation and alarming changes in the sources of authority and justice. Everywhere the lord of the manor might be proclaimed a criminal to whom no rents must be paid, and the parson removed as idle, ill-affected, and ‘scandalous’. Trade and industry became unsure; some men were persuaded, some were compelled, to serve in one force or another. Most of all there was fear — the new and inescapable fear that the soldiers would come. They could descend on a town, a village, or a house. They could stay for a day, or for weeks, or for years. They could take a few household possessions, or destroy the means of livelihood. Places from small country houses to large cities could become garrisons. In the end there were a few who fled from their homes, and a few who had on balance done well out of warfare.

Abstract: In the history of the invasions which marked the end of the Roman empire in the west, the Armorican peninsula of northwestern Gaul holds a distinctive place. It witnessed the only substantial settlements by people whose homeland lay within the Roman empire, and who had been subject to Roman civil government for several centuries. These settlers crossed the English Channel probably between the late fourth and early seventh centuries. Establishing new communities in the sparsely populated areas of western Armorica, they brought with them their own language, social patterns and Christian organisation, and a strong sense of affinity with the Celts of Wales and Cornwall from whom they derived.’ Whilst the Britons were establishing themselves as Bretons, the Franks were asserting their hold over the remainder of northern Gaul. A few of them settled in the eastern approaches to the peninsula, in the Roman civitates of Rennes and Nantes. Culturally and politically, only this part of Armorica was attached to Merovingian Gaul, having as its kings the descendants of Clovis, and as its bishops members of the Gallo-Roman aristocracy.

Abstract: THE MORAL problem to be considered here has roused considerable public interest in the past year, during which numerous American Catholic bishops have addressed the problem of nuclear weapons. Many of them have spoken out against what they perceived to be the attitudes and policies of the Reagan administration on the development of new weapons systems and the possible use of nuclear weapons. Public interest has also been heightened by the decision of the U.S. Catholic Conference to prepare a statement on peace and war with special reference to nuclear weapons. This statement was to be issued at the annual meeting of the bishops in November. Both political commentators and government officials have been struck by the readiness of members of the Catholic hierarchy to raise difficult questions and to take controversial stands on a complex and divisive issue of crucial importance to both the future security of the United States and the peace of the world. The way in which the moral issues raised by nuclear weapons are formulated in the current debate in the Catholic community reflects both the general public debate in American society over defense policy and the special concerns of Christian faith and Catholic tradition. The central questions about the moral justifiability of producing, possessing, deploying, and using nuclear weapons are thus considered both within the context of the special responsibilities of the United States as nuclear superpower with its own distinctive history, interests, treaty obligations, resources, and vulnerabilities and within the context of the Catholic tradition with its special forms of church teaching and its preferred patterns of moral argument and reflection. The complex task of reflecting on these questions in the American Catholic context is in a special way the responsibility of the ad hoc committee chaired by Archbishop Joseph Bernardin of Cincinnati, which has drawn on numerous consultants from different disciplines and viewpoints. But many other bishops have also chosen to address the problem on their own initiative. It is not my intention here to review in a

Abstract: What circumstances permit churches to organize for innovative social change? A recent example of a clergy-led social movement following an industrial crisis in Youngstown, Ohio is examined utilizing a resource mobilization perspective. In this case the local community was mobilized against a predatory conglomerate, using resources from the federal government, the churches and Washington-based economic planners. The movement was able effectively to neutralize possible sources of opposition within the community and within the constituent church organizations.

Abstract: Summary Seventeen years after the promulgation of the Pastoral Constitution, Gaudium, et spes, there exist distinctive ways of interpreting that document, especially its chapter “On Fostering the Nobility of Marriage and the Family”. The different interpretations have grown increasingly apart, almost to the point where they have become irreconcilable. That fact might be overlooked, were it not for the importance of this text in the teaching of the Church. The 1980 Synod of Bishops, on “The Role of the Christian Family in the Modern World”, has occasioned reflection upon the conciliar document and the “received teaching” as it is now present, almost subliminally, in the sensus of the Church: bishops, theologians, and especially the faithful. This exposition attempts to articulate the principle points of doctrine present in GS, 47–52, which have been isolated under the heading of twenty propositions. The purpose is twofold: to expose theological reflection upon the teaching of GS; and to prepare the way for...

Abstract: The papal bull Universalis Ecclesiae of 1850 set up a hierarchy of bishops with ordinary power to replace the vicars apostolic who had ruled the catholic church in England since 1688. It stated explicitly that the new bishops were to have all the necessary powers to rule their dioceses in the same way as titular bishops elsewhere, and it spoke clearly about the resumption of the ‘common law of the church’ in England. Yet the commitment of the Roman authorities to a fully independent hierarchy was not wholehearted. The church in England was to remain under the aegis of the Congregation of the Propagation of the Faith (Propaganda), whose normal brief was to look after missionary territories not stable enough to have properly constituted hierarchies. According to the bull, the English bishops were to send regular reports on the state of their dioceses to Rome, and were to be diligent in informing Propaganda ‘of everything which they shall think profitable for the spiritual good of their flocks’.

Abstract: TEN OF THE SIXTEEN CONSTITUTIONAL BISHOPS who sat in the republican National Convention in France from September 1792 to October 1795 remained priests at the end of their days. As constitutional bishops they aroused the papal wrath for claiming that liberty, equality, and fraternity were what the Gospel preached. The Pope's brief, Quod Aliquantum of 10 March 1791, denounced liberty and equality as unchristian. This frenzied liberty was insane, wrote the Pope, because it stifled the most precious gift nature gave man which distinguished him from the animals, while equality destroyed the subordination needed for social harmony.1 When the revolutionary bishops refuted the papal condemnation, they had no need to defend fraternity. The Gospel was fraternity itself, they claimed, and for verification one of them, Claude Fauchet, cited the opinion of Montesquieu.2 After the nation confiscated ecclesiastical property, it decreed in July 1790 the Civil Constitution of the Clergy which reorganized the dioceses and parishes, specified the salaries to be paid to the clergy, and regulated their popular election. To offset the resistance of the bishops of the ancien regime, the National Assembly also

Abstract: The Church of England had not long to wait for the ‘godly orders’ promised in March 1548.1 Some of the preparatory discussions have survived in the form of a set of questions put to the bishops, probably in connection with the meeting of Convocation in November 1547, and relating to different aspects of the Mass.2 Liturgical revision was certainly under discussion at this session, for the Lower House asked to see ‘certain books’ made by ‘certain prelates and other learned men’ in the previous reign, so that they might be ‘perused by them for a better expedition of Divine Service to be set forth accordingly’.3 This request no doubt referred to Cranmer’s reformed Breviary. Meanwhile ‘divers and sundry forms and fashions’ were being introduced all over the country.

Abstract: Ever since the Latin American bishops conference in Puebla, Mexico said that the church is called to have a “preferential option” for the poor, we have been grappling with what that means concretely for the Christian community. Here Dr. Hoesl shares important insights on this subject drawn from the experience of her religious community and her missionary service around the world.

Abstract: CATHOLIC IT is NOT. Kaleidoscopic would be a more apt description of the state of official Catholic teaching on the morality of nuclear deterrence as it is being formulated among the bishops in Europe and North America for the guidance of their respective peoples, who have long been associated in the political and military structures of the Atlantic community. For a comparison of the official statements of the concerned episcopal conferences in the U.S.A., Canada, the United Kingdom, France, the Federal Republic of Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands reveals a posture which is variegated and constantly changing. Since, however, this proliferation of magisterial initiatives is directly due to the renewed emphasis placed on episcopal collegiality by the Second Vatican Council, it would be most appropriate perhaps to describe the current state of church teaching on nuclear deterrence as conciliar and in that sense Catholic, if not catholic. The largely unnoticed tension presently being experienced between the national hierarchies of the nations of the Atlantic community is a result of the dynamics of a decentralized magisterium, which was one of the principal insights and achievements of Vatican II. It thus represents one of the first fruits of the Council in response to the central moral challenge of the era: nuclear deterrence and/or war. Since the potential fruitfulness of the present tension between the various hierarchies will depend to some extent on the ability of each national episcopal conference to understand and respond to the initiatives of all the others, it may be of service to offer here a catalogue of the official magisterial statements which will have appeared by midJune 1982. Following the survey of the present state of episcopal teaching on the topic, some brief explanatory hypotheses will be proposed as a possible contribution to mutual understanding among the episcopal bodies.

Abstract: There is ambiguity in both ‘Roman Catholic ethics’ and ‘beneficence’. The former can mean either the body of moral norms, both general and specific, authoritatively proposed by those who hold the teaching office or magisterium within the Roman Catholic Church, namely the pope and the bishops throughout the world in communion with him,1 or the diverse ethical theories, along with their substantive conclusions, that have been developed by various Roman Catholic moral theologians and philosophers. This paper will attempt to describe both the moral teachings authoritatively proposed by the magisterium, particularly with reference to issues relating to health care, and the debate currently taking place among Roman Catholic writers over normative ethical principles and the sorts of human choices and actions justifiable in terms of these principles, particularly with reference to health care questions.

Abstract: Why, at the Reformation in England, did the king rather than the archbishop of Canterbury become head of the church? Why, with so little distress, did the English accept an autonomous national church? To a medievalist such a development seems startling. Though late medieval kings might manipulate the appointment of bishops or regulate provisions they did not dictate to their subjects what constitutes Christian faith or practice. Late medieval churchmen did not believe in autonomous national churches but in a body whose visible institutional unity is linked with obedience to the pope, and in theory it was scandalous when in the Great Schism individual rulers decided for their subjects which pope was to be obeyed or became neutral. In late fourteenth century England only a tiny minority of lollards would have dispensed with the papacy and all other solutions to the schism intended to restore the system, not to abandon it.

Abstract: In retrospect, we may agree that the prayer book crisis of 1927 and 1928 was not as critical as it seemed at the time, but it did leave unfinished business for a future generation. The draft prayer book of the Church of England had been rejected by parliament, and if any saner revision of that church’s worship proved acceptable to the church it would still have to be approved by parliament. Gregory Dix, who worried about these things more than was good for him, expressed a common opinion in 1945. He felt that any return to parliament would be fatal, since ‘the debate would inevitably circle around’ the real presence in the eucharist, and instead he suggested that the church should ‘not directly challenge parliament at all’ but quietly institute a new book backed by about seven bishops at ‘a moment when parliament was pre-occupied’. This was not done. By the time the Church of England had some idea of how it wanted to pray, the debate about real presence was almost irrelevant. Furthermore, bishops were no longer the natural people to put forward a new book, though some of them did not know it. What was actually done was to slip in alternative series of eucharistic rites by liturgical scholars whose work was in fact revised at a more popular level. Their series 1, giving what so many were supposed to have wanted in 1927, was almost totally ignored. It proved something of a surprise to everyone that an overwhelming majority of parishes preferred series 2 and then series 3, despite or because of their uninspired prose. If the 1662 book of common prayer was almost totally abandoned in many areas, this was neither intended nor expected.

Abstract: A substantial proportion of the activity. of the ICF had to be concerned primarily with the survival and maintenance of the organisation itself. Preliminary episcopal endorsement brought with it no guarantee that it would be accepted within the Church as an agent of representative opinion, since many Churchmen were suspicious from the start and fresh criticism was provoked by various incidents, particularly by the intervention with which it was associated in the course of the crisis of 1926. On this occasion Kipling, an intimate friend both of Lady Bathurst, until 1924 Proprietor of the implacably hostile Morning Post, and also of H. A. Gwynne, its Editor, noted that ‘I see our accursed priests (who can no more keep out of the spotlight than actors) are loose already; and there will be the old dope about “leaving no bitter memories” etc’1. On 20 May, shortly after the Archbishop’s public appeal to the contestants, which he had discussed on 7 May with Kirk and Bishops Garbett and Burroughs, both employers and unions rejected the Government’s terms for a settlement of the Strike.

Abstract: One striking feature of the debates in the early stages of the Long Parliament was the universality with which the policies of the Caroline bishops were condemned. There is no more vivid evidence of how widespread lay disaffection from the episcopal bench had become by 1640 than the breadth of criticism leveled against it from all sides of the Commons. The new model Anglicanism erected by archbishop Laud and his supporters was shown to be a jerry built facade, a cadre of generals without battalions, a clerical elite without a lay following.Among those who most forcefully challenged the policies of the prelates was Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland, scholar, author, and host of the Tew circle, that discussion group of liberal laymen and clerics, immortalized by Clarendon, which met at Falkland's country seat in Oxfordshire during the 1630s.1 His views were particularly important, first because he was widely respected for his integrity and seriousness of purpose. As C.V. Wedgwood points out, for example, “Falkland was one of those men who carry in their faces and manner the unmistakable marks of extreme conscientiousness. When Falkland spoke, it was not from impulse, but conviction. …” Second, Falkland was known to be latitudinarian in his opinions, thus not affected by dogmatism on the one hand or zealotry on the other. His ideas would consequently be all the more significant, since they represented the results of considered examination rather than the fruits of doctrinaire sentiment.

Abstract: There is a general consensus among historians that there was something quite special about the church policy of the Ottoman and Salian rulers of Germany from Henry i to Henry m. The normal reliance of the medieval king on his prelates was here turned into a deliberate and systematic exploitation of the potential of the Church as an instrument of government. These rulers used bishops and abbots, whom they appointed, as a counterweight to a turbulent and unreliable lay nobility. Many historians have, so to speak, followed them in this, have turned from the Ottomans' and Salians' complex and seemingly unsatisfactory relations with their aristocracy to their church policy. Here they have seen plan, system and harmony, so much so that the Church has come to be regarded as the principal instrument of government available to these rulers. Our picture of the Ottoman and Salian 'imperial church system', the Reichskirchensystem of German historians, has been much refined by recent scholarship, but the essential outlines have not greatly altered since the time of Waitz and Giesebrecht. The purpose of what follows is to re-examine these outlines. The qualifications, doubts and re-interpretations offered are not all new; many have been expressed or at least hinted at in the existing literature. But they have never been fully articulated, and it seems worth looking again at the Reichskirchensystem as a whole to ask how far in fact it did or could have performed the functions usually attributed to it, and to ask also how far it was a system. The focus of attention will inevitably be on the German bishoprics (and to a lesser extent the royal abbeys) before the Investiture Contest, but it will also be necessary to look at the position elsewhere in Europe at this period, because an appearance of uniqueness and system has been fostered by considering conditions in the Reich in isolation