Tomorrow S Catholics Yesterday S Church

Is the Church about to come apart? To the outsider looking in, it might seem so. On one side is "Culture One" - millions of devout Catholics who feel comfortable in the traditional Church & who resist changes that seem to accommodate modern secular culture. On the other side is "Culture Two" - millions more who seem engaged in their own personal spiritual pilgrimages, ignoring or even boldly challenging traditional control. The "two cultures of American Catholicism" exist everywhere. They're present in almost every family, in every parish, & at every level of the institutional Church. Kennedy writes of "Culture One" that it was "once so extraordinarily powerful & unified that everyone over a certain age has almost identical memories of it." In contrast, "Culture Two" believers "find their intellectual, religious, & artistic stimulation well beyond the tightly guarded borders of this quaint Catholic enclave... They no longer need 'Catholic' books or films... They are much more at home in the world in general than their parents were permitted to be." Kennedy - a perceptive observer who deeply identifies with what he sees as the best in both of these "Catholic cultures" - believes the outcome will not be schism. Instead, he envisions a Church that is enriched with more choices, more creativity, more appreciation for roots, & a greater vision for the future.

Staffing Tomorrow's Parishes presents the results of the October 1989 IPL symposium, "Parish Leadership in the Light of the Diminishing Number of Priests".

A concluding chapter examines the significance of the corpus of Catholic American writing in the years 1940 to 1980, considering it parallel in substance to the body of Jewish American literature of the same period.

At this point in my life, I decided to put life's memories together for my family. In 1922, I was born on a farm in the southwest corner of Mahaska County, Iowa. I am now 85 years old and have lived the BEST life! With this book I hope I can pass along some of the highlights of these 85 years! In my mind, all of it has been fun! World War II entered my life in December of 1942. After 30 hours of pilot training I washed out and went to airplane mechanics school in Biloxi, Mississippi. Out of the War in February of '46, on a Friday. Bought a restaurant on Saturday and went to work on Monday-my life has centered around it ever since. I met my wife of 56 years in 1950. Dorene and I had 4 great children and she has a great business sense. Along the way I was in numerous sidelines (wholesale route, bottling works, grocery store, Joe's Short Order in the Chicago Loop). All the way from Bussey, Iowa to Indianola, it's been great. I hope my family and friends will enjoy this story of my life.

Expanded and updated for the new millennium. Covering the life of Christ, the election of Pope Benedict XVI, and everything in between, A Concise History of the Catholic Church has been one of the bestselling religious histories of the past two decades and a mainstay for scholars, students, and others looking for a definitive, accessible history of Catholicism. With a clarity that will appeal to any reader, Thomas Bokenkotter divides his study into five parts that correspond to the major historical and epochal developments in Catholicism. His authoritative, thorough approach takes readers from the Church’s triumph over paganism, through "the sound and fury of renewal," to a new section devoted to such topics as dissent and current developments in the ecumenical movement. Informative illustrations throughout the book, new to this edition, enrich the reader's experience, and the addition of a wide-ranging bibliography increases its value as a sourcebook.

Reduced to its simplest form, The Dysfunctional Church maintains that: -The Catholic church is an addict, an institutional addict. - It's addicted to preserving the male, celibate, clerical model of the church. - Many Catholics exhibit patterns of classic codependency which reinforce this addiction. - The result is a dysfunctional church unable to confront a problem many members know is there. Michael Crosby breaks the silence to talk openly about the abuse of authority in the Catholic church. He does this in a way that offers comfort, hope, and challenge to the frustrated but caring members of its family. He traces the historical gathering of powers by the hierarchy into its own hands and its ramification for today. Applying the approach that Matthew's Jesus took to the church leaders of his day, Crosby brings the discerning light of scripture into the dark corners of growing addiction. The Dysfunctional Church is a clear, loving, and unequivocal intervention. The author calls on church leaders and all other codependents in the church to face their addiction and seek recovery through spiritual conversion. Acknowledging that he himself is a recovering codependent, he invites us all to turn to God to fill the "hole" in our wholeness. This involves coming under the authority of a higher power as well as finding support in prophetic communities modeled on the Twelve Steps. For those who left the church in anger, Crosby's analysis invites compassion; for those who remain in frustration, it offers hope; and for the many who feel condemned to the church's use of authority, if offers a way of recovery.

After purgatory was officially defined by the Catholic Church in the thirteenth century, its location became a topic of heated debate and philosophical speculation: Was purgatory located on the earth, or within it? Were its fires real or figurative? Diana Walsh Pasulka offers a groundbreaking historical exploration of spatial and material concepts of purgatory, beginning with scholastic theologians William of Auvergne and Thomas Aquinas, who wrote about the location of purgatory and questioned whether its torments were physical or solely spiritual. In the same period, writers of devotional literature located purgatory within the earth, near hell, and even in Ireland. In the early modern era, a counter-movement of theologians downplayed purgatory's spatial dimensions, preferring to depict it in abstract terms--a view strengthened during the French Enlightenment, when references to purgatory as a terrestrial location or a place of real fire were ridiculed by anti-Catholic polemicists and discouraged by the Church. The debate surrounding purgatory's materiality has never ended: even today members of post-millennial ''purgatory apostolates'' maintain that purgatory is an actual, physical place. Heaven Can Wait provides crucial insight into the theological problem of purgatory's materiality (or lack thereof) over the past seven hundred years.