Catholics In Cambridge

Provides a concise yet comprehensive guide to understanding the complexity and diversity of the American Catholic experience.

The Vatican. The Inquisition. Contraception. Celibacy. Apparitions and miracles. Plots and scandals. The Catholic Church is seldom out of the news. But what do its one billion adherents really believe, and how do they put their beliefs into practice in worship, the family, and society? This down-to-earth account goes back to the early Christian creeds to uncover the roots of modern Catholic thinking. It avoids getting bogged down in theological technicalities, and throws light on aspects of the Church's institutional structure and liturgical practice that even Catholics can find baffling: why go to confession? How are people made saints? What is 'infallible' about the Pope? Topics addressed include: • scripture and tradition • sacraments and prayer • popular piety • personal and social morality • reform, mission, and interreligious dialogue Lawrence Cunningham, a theologian, prize-winning writer and university teacher, provides an overview of Catholicism today which will be indispensable for undergraduates and lay study groups.

For the first time, this volume takes a global and comparative approach to the lived local history of Vatican II.

An important new perspective on this critical intellectual and religious community, and on the conflicted nature of religious change at the time.

This book surveys the relations between Catholics outside and inside the Ottoman Empire from 1453 to 1923. After the fall of Constantinople the only large Latin Catholic group to be incorporated into the sultan's domain were the Genoese who lived in Galata, across the Golden Horn from the Byzantine capital. Over the next few decades Turkish armies pushed into the Balkans, overrunning the Catholic population of Albania, Bosnia and Hungary. In the Orient, the sixteenth century saw the Maronites of Lebanon, the Latins of Palestine and most of the Greek islands, which once held Latin Catholic communities, come under Turkish rule. Papal response to the loss of these communities was initially a call to the crusade, but response from West European monarchs was disappointing. Their concerns were closer to home. French interest, however, lay in an alliance with the Turks against the Habsburgs. As a bonus, the Catholics of the Ottoman world received a protector at the Porte in the person of the French ambassador. The book traces the subsequent history of the Latin Catholics and each of the Eastern Catholic churches in the Ottoman Empire until its dissolution in 1923.

No other book offers such a detailed exploration of the encounter between Catholicism and liberalism in the USA.