Abstract
“The Catholic” is arguably any of a number of qualities of mind, theological insights, faith conditions, and institutional arrangements in the world. The distinctively Catholic might legitimately be taken, for instance, to be a stance of mercy toward the poor and disenfranchised—a generosity toward the socially vulnerable supported by New Testament records of Jesus’ own life of service. Or the religion might be taken to have a defining devotional ethos that recurrently highlights the worship of Christ’s many manifestations in the material and familial world. Such an understanding makes Catholicism a faith of lived experience, approachable through the world’s bounty: via festive foods, ornate altars, and concrete life passage events embedded in kinship networks uniting actual persons, in history. Or “the Catholic” might also be seen to lie in the historical church’s particular hierarchical power structure, with lines of authority extending “downward” from the Roman papacy through layers of male priestly officials and teaching offices. Or—no surprise for a messianic religion— Catholicism might also justifiably be seen as a religion of revolt, where faith-inspired critique takes on some of those same systems of male, ordained authority. Such a Catholicism would be made manifest through such means as popular faith traditions focused on the sort of holy mystics and women ecstatics who were so prominent in the European Middle Ages.
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Notes
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© 2006 Bruce T. Morrill, Joanna E. Ziegler, and Susan Rodgers
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Morrill, B.T., Rodgers, S., Ziegler, J.E. (2006). Introduction. In: Morrill, B.T., Ziegler, J.E., Rodgers, S. (eds) Practicing Catholic. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403982964_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403982964_1
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