Catholicism and Religious Freedom PDF Download

Author: Kenneth L. Grasso
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780742551930
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
The late Pope John Paul II frequently invoked Dignitatis Humanae as one of the foundational documents of contemporary Church social teaching. In this timely new edited collection, Catholicism and Religious Freedom: Contemporary Reflections on Vatican II's Declaration on Religious Liberty, Kenneth L. Grasso and Robert P. Hunt have assembled an impressive group of scholars to discuss the current meanings of one the Vatican's most important documents and its place in Catholic social thought. The theological issues brought forth in Dignitatis Humanae go to the heart of the contemporary debate about the nature, foundation, and scope of religious liberty. Here, the contributors to this volume give these considerations the serious and sustained attention they deserve.

Author: James Hitchcock
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
ISBN: 141286383X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
Throughout its history the Catholic Church has taken positions on many subjects that are in one sense political, but in another sense are primarily moral, such as contraception, homosexuality, and divorce. One such issue, abortion, has split not only the United States, but Catholics as well. Catholics had to confront these issues within the framework of a democratic society that had no official religion. Abortion, Religious Freedom, and Catholic Politics is a study of opposing American Catholic approaches to abortion, especially in terms of laws and government policies. After the ruling of Roe vs. Wade, many pro-life advocates no longer felt their sentiments and moral code aligned with Democrats. For the first time, Catholics, as an entire group, became involved in U.S. politics. Abortion became one of the principal points of division in American Catholicism: a widening split between liberal Catholic Democrats who sought to minimize the issue and other Catholics, many of them politically liberal, whose pro-life commitments caused them to support Republicans. James Hitchcock discusses the 2016 presidential campaign and how it altered an already changed political landscape. He also examines the Affordable Care Act, LGBT rights, and the questions they raise about religious liberty.

Author: Michael D. Breidenbach
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 067424723X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
How early American Catholics justified secularism and overcame suspicions of disloyalty, transforming ideas of religious liberty in the process. In colonial America, Catholics were presumed dangerous until proven loyal. Yet Catholics went on to sign the Declaration of Independence and helped to finalize the First Amendment to the Constitution. What explains this remarkable transformation? Michael Breidenbach shows how Catholic leaders emphasized their churchÕs own traditionsÑrather than Enlightenment liberalismÑto secure the religious liberty that enabled their incorporation in American life. Catholics responded to charges of disloyalty by denying papal infallibility and the popeÕs authority to intervene in civil affairs. Rome staunchly rejected such dissent, but reform-minded Catholics justified their stance by looking to conciliarism, an intellectual tradition rooted in medieval Catholic thought yet compatible with a republican view of temporal independence and church-state separation. Drawing on new archival material, Breidenbach finds that early American Catholic leaders, including Maryland founder Cecil Calvert and members of the prominent Carroll family, relied on the conciliarist tradition to help institute religious toleration, including the Maryland Toleration Act of 1649. The critical role of Catholics in establishing American churchÐstate separation enjoins us to revise not only our sense of who the American founders were, but also our understanding of the sources of secularism. ChurchÐstate separation in America, generally understood as the product of a Protestant-driven Enlightenment, was in key respects derived from Catholic thinking. Our Dear-Bought Liberty therefore offers a dramatic departure from received wisdom, suggesting that religious liberty in America was not bestowed by liberal consensus but partly defined through the ingenuity of a persecuted minority.

Author: Philip HAMBURGER
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674038185
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 529

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Book Description
In a powerful challenge to conventional wisdom, Philip Hamburger argues that the separation of church and state has no historical foundation in the First Amendment. The detailed evidence assembled here shows that eighteenth-century Americans almost never invoked this principle. Although Thomas Jefferson and others retrospectively claimed that the First Amendment separated church and state, separation became part of American constitutional law only much later. Hamburger shows that separation became a constitutional freedom largely through fear and prejudice. Jefferson supported separation out of hostility to the Federalist clergy of New England. Nativist Protestants (ranging from nineteenth-century Know Nothings to twentieth-century members of the K.K.K.) adopted the principle of separation to restrict the role of Catholics in public life. Gradually, these Protestants were joined by theologically liberal, anti-Christian secularists, who hoped that separation would limit Christianity and all other distinct religions. Eventually, a wide range of men and women called for separation. Almost all of these Americans feared ecclesiastical authority, particularly that of the Catholic Church, and, in response to their fears, they increasingly perceived religious liberty to require a separation of church from state. American religious liberty was thus redefined and even transformed. In the process, the First Amendment was often used as an instrument of intolerance and discrimination.

Author: James Chappel
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674972104
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
Catholic antimodern, 1920-1929 -- Anti-communism and paternal Catholicism, 1929-1944 -- Anti-fascism and fraternal Catholicism, 1929-1944 -- Rebuilding Christian Europe, 1944-1950 -- Christian democracy and Catholic innovation in the long 1950s -- The return of heresy in the global 1960s

Author: George P. Evans
Publisher: Paulist Press
ISBN: 9780809144426
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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Book Description
An informational and entertaining text, this work offers readers a deeper sense of why the saints and the honoring of them has been influential in the lives of Catholics and others who strive to follow Jesus Christ and experience his love. (Catholic)

Author: Antonia Fraser
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0525564837
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
In the eighteenth century, the Catholics of England lacked many basic freedoms under the law: they could not serve in political office, buy or inherit land, or be married by the rites of their own religion. So virulent was the sentiment against Catholics that, in 1780, violent riots erupted in London—incited by the anti-Papist Lord George Gordon—in response to the Act for Relief that had been passed to loosen some of these restrictions. The Gordon Riots marked a crucial turning point in the fight for Catholic emancipation. Over the next fifty years, factions battled to reform the laws of the land. Kings George III and George IV refused to address the “Catholic Question,” even when pressed by their prime ministers. But in 1829, through the dogged work of charismatic Irish lawyer Daniel O’Connell and the support of the great Duke of Wellington, the watershed Roman Catholic Relief Act finally passed, opening the door to the radical transformation of the Victorian age. Gripping, spirited, and incisive, The King and the Catholics is character-driven narrative history at its best, reflecting the dire consequences of state-sanctioned oppression—and showing how sustained political action can triumph over injustice.

Author: Elizabeth Fenton
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199838399
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Book Description
In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Catholicism was often presented in the U.S. not only as a threat to Protestantism but also as an enemy of democracy. Focusing on literary and cultural representations of Catholics as a political force, Elizabeth Fenton argues that the U.S. perception of religious freedom grew partly, and paradoxically, out of a sometimes virulent but often genteel anti-Catholicism. Depictions of Catholicism's imagined intolerance and cruelty allowed writers time and again to depict their nation as tolerant and free. As Religious Liberties shows, anti-Catholic sentiment particularly shaped U.S. conceptions of pluralism and its relationship to issues as diverse as religious privacy, territorial expansion, female citizenship, political representation, chattel slavery, and governmental partisanship. Drawing on a wide range of materials--from the Federalist Papers to antebellum biographies of Toussaint Louverture; from nativist treatises to Margaret Fuller's journalism; from convent exposés to novels by Catharine Sedgwick, Augusta J. Evans, Nathanial Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Herman Melville, and Mark Twain--Fenton's study excavates the influence of anti-Catholic sentiment on both the liberal tradition and early U.S. culture more generally. In concert, these texts suggest how the prejudice against Catholicism facilitated an alignment of U.S. nationalism with Protestantism, thus ensuring the mutual dependence, rather than the putative "separation" of church and state.

Author: Thomas Kselman
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 030023564X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
Religious liberty is usually examined within a larger discussion of church-state relations, but Thomas Kselman looks at several individuals in Restoration France whose high-profile conversions fascinated their contemporaries. Exploring their reasons and the repercussions they faced, Kselman demonstrates how this expanded sense of liberty informs our secular age.

Author: Robert Louis Wilken
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300226632
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
From one of the leading historians of Christianity comes this sweeping reassessment of religious freedom, from the church fathers to John Locke In the ancient world Christian apologists wrote in defense of their right to practice their faith in the cities of the Roman Empire. They argued that religious faith is an inward disposition of the mind and heart and cannot be coerced by external force, laying a foundation on which later generations would build. Chronicling the history of the struggle for religious freedom from the early Christian movement through the seventeenth century, Robert Louis Wilken shows that the origins of religious freedom and liberty of conscience are religious, not political, in origin. They took form before the Enlightenment through the labors of men and women of faith who believed there could be no justice in society without liberty in the things of God. This provocative book, drawing on writings from the early Church as well as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, reminds us of how "the meditations of the past were fitted to affairs of a later day."