Elizabeth Seton, American Saint

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine O'Donnell
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Women Religious ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
The United States ◽  
Female Friendship ◽  
Intellectual Inquiry ◽  
Catholic Women ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Local Leaders

Elizabeth Bayley Seton is the first native-born US citizen to be made a Roman Catholic saint. Canonized in 1975, Seton founded the Sisters of Charity of St. Joseph, the first vowed community of Catholic women religious created in the United States. Seton’s sainthood marked the culmination of a role she first served during her life: a respectable, benevolent face for a church whose local leaders were eager to demonstrate its compatibility with American culture. Seton’s founding of the American Sisters of Charity was a more practical achievement and one that shaped the Catholic Church in the United States in tangible ways. Starting in 1809, when Seton began a school and vowed community in Emmitsburg, Maryland, the Sisters of Charity expanded throughout the United States, eventually running hundreds of schools and orphanages and offering both a spiritual home and a career path for women who chose it. Seton’s life is expressive for what it reveals about her era as well as for her distinctive achievements. Her prominence led to the preservation of decades of correspondence and spiritual writings. Through them it is possible to see with unusual clarity the ways in which the Age of Revolutions and the rise of Napoleon variously disrupted, reinvigorated, and transformed Catholic traditions; to observe the possibilities and constraints Catholicism offered a spiritually ambitious woman; and to witness changes in the relationship between Protestants and Catholics in the United States. Finally, Seton’s rich archive also renders visible one woman’s experience of intellectual inquiry, marriage, widowhood, motherhood, spiritual ambition, and female friendship.

scholarly journals Superior–Subordinate Aggressive Communication Among Catholic Priests and Sisters in the United States

2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-31
Author(s):  
Rebecca M. Chory ◽  
Sean M. Horan ◽  
Peter J. C. Raposo
Keyword(s):  
Organizational Commitment ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
The United States ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
Verbal Aggressiveness ◽  
Job Motivation ◽  
Aggressive Communication ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Diocesan Priests

The Roman Catholic Church is one of the world’s largest and oldest organizations, yet communication among its members serving in ecclesiastical occupations (e.g., priests) remains relatively unexplored. The present study addresses this paucity of research by examining the relationship between 145 U.S. priests’ and sisters’ perceptions of their religious superiors’ aggressive communication and perceptions of the superiors’ credibility, as well as their own experiences of job and vocational satisfaction, motivation, and organizational commitment. Results indicated that superior verbal aggressiveness was associated with priests’ and sisters’ job motivation, organizational commitment, and perceptions of superior credibility, whereas superior argumentativeness only predicted perceptions of superior competence. The pattern of findings also suggests that superior aggressive communication functions differently across the ecclesiastical occupations studied, with diocesan priests appearing to be most influenced by their superiors’ aggressive communication and sisters seemingly the least influenced. Implications for management and organizational communication research and the Catholic Church are discussed.

The Search for Chinese Christianity in the Republican Period (1912–1949)

2004 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 851-898 ◽  
Author(s):  
LIAN XI
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
The United States ◽  
Christian Community ◽  
Republican Period ◽  
Opium War ◽  
Imperial Court ◽  
Protestant Christianity ◽  
Qing Government

For more than a century after its introduction into China in 1807, Protestant Christianity remained an alien religion preached and presided over by Western missionaries. In fact the Christian enterprise, both Protestant and Roman Catholic, was given protection as Western interests by the Qing court after China's defeat in the Opium War of 1839–42. According to the treaty signed with the United States in 1858, for instance, the Qing government was to shield from molestation ‘any persons, whether citizen of the United States or Chinese convert, [who] peaceably teach and practise the principles of Christianity.’ In the Convention of 1860 signed with France, the imperial court promised that in addition to the toleration of Roman Catholicism throughout China, all Catholic properties previously seized should be ‘handed over to the French representative at Beijing’ to be forwarded to the Catholics in the localities concerned. By the time of the Boxer Uprising of 1900, Protestant converts numbered about 80,000 and the Catholic Church (whose modern missions to China had begun in the late sixteenth century) claimed a membership of some 720,000—a following that was perhaps disappointing to the Western missions yet aggravating to those who saw both the Confucian tradition and Chinese sovereignty eroded by the coming of the West. As a perceived foreign menace the Christian community became the target of the bloody rampage by famished North China peasants known as the Boxers. Before the revolt was quelled in August by the eight-power expedition forces, it had visited death on more than 200 Westerners and untold thousands of native converts.

Patterns of Ecclesiastical Authority: The Problem of Chicago Succession, 1865–1881

1973 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 257-270
Author(s):  
James P. Gaffey
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
The United States ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
Ecclesiastical Authority

The inevitable tension between freedom and order within the Roman Catholic Church has ever been an attractive and rich subject of comment. Perhaps nowhere can this issue be studied with more seriousness and clarity than in the fragile equilibrium between American bishops and priests. The balance within clerical ranks in the United States has long represented a singular combination of authority and obedience which has sought to reconcile itself in a society historically egalitarian and devoid of feudal relationships.

The Security Forces and Polish Communism: Reclaiming History from Myth

2007 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Szporer
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Critical Review ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
The United States ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
Communist Regime ◽  
Secret Police ◽  
Security Forces ◽  
Security Service

This article provides a critical review of Oczami Bezpieki (Through the Eyes of the Security Service), an overview of post-1945 Poland based on secret police files by Slawomir Cenckiewicz. The essay sheds light on the ongoing controversies surrounding the secret police files that still can cause turmoil in Polish politics. The article discusses the aggressive strategies of the Communist-era security apparatus in three areas considered in the volume: penetration of émigré communities in the United States; attempts to neutralize opposition to the Communist regime from 1968 through the 1980s; and the manipulation of the Roman Catholic Church. The documents demonstrate how obsessively the security forces kept track of opposition activities.

scholarly journals Christian W. Troll - Dialogue and Difference: Clarity in Christian-Muslim Relations

ICR Journal ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 205-207
Author(s):  
Christoph Marcinkowski
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Developing World ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
The United States ◽  
Compensation Claims ◽  
Name Of God

It is certainly not easy these days to break a lance for dialogue with the scandal-ridden Catholic Church: ...paedophile ‘predator priests’, seemingly roaming freely through the Western (and developing) world; rampant moral decay among large segments of the Roman Catholic priesthood, while - at the same time - continuous preaching to other cultures and civilisations of the merits of Christian virtues; the alleged beating up of innocent orphan children, sometimes to unconsciousness, by a certain former German bishop who had been accused of lying under oath and invoking the name of God when questioned by legal authorities; the attempts to hush up such crimes; the financial (not to mention moral) bankruptcy of entire dioceses throughout the United States due to the compensation claims running into millions of US dollars by tens of thousands of victims - the list could be continued endlessly...

The Formation of the Catholic Minority in the United States 1820–1860

1948 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas T. McAvoy
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
New World ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Minority Group ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
The United States ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
Secret Societies ◽  
Papal Infallibility

No minority group in the United States is probably as formless and yet at the same time as rigid as the American membership of the Roman Catholic Church. The rigidity of the Catholic organization arises from the fact that there has never been a real heresy during the three centuries and more of Catholic life within the boundaries of the present United States. Even the so-called heresy of Americanism existed more in the minds of European theologians than in the Catholics of the new world. There have been divergencies among American Catholics on such questions as the application of Gregory XVI's condemnation of the slave trade, the timeliness of die declaration of papal infallibility or the extent of the papal condemnation of secret societies, but there has been no difference on the essential doctrines involved in these disputes.

The Scalabrini Fathers, the Italian Emigrant Church, and Ethnic Nationalism in America

1997 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-159 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter R. D'Agostino
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
The United States ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
Ethnic Nationalism ◽  
American Catholicism ◽  
Normative Significance ◽  
Generational Transition

Philip Gleason has observed that the Roman Catholic church in the United States has been an “institutional immigrant” for much of its history. The idea of an “institutional immigrant,” posed in the Singular and distinguished from “the immigrant peoples who comprised the Catholic population,” presupposes a basic if undefined unity to American Catholicism. The nature of that unity has always been a highly contested issue. Gleason's formulation also suggests that the experience of the Catholic church is illuminated by considering its history in light of the processes that have occupied students of immigration—Americanization, generational transition, assimilation, the invention of ethnicity, and the like. The nature of these processes has also given rise to debates as Americans grapple to understand their cultural identity. In short, Gleason's idea lends itself to debate about the normative significance of American Catholicism, American culture, and their relationship to one another. In the interest of enriching this debate, I would suggest that the Roman Catholic church in the United States has also been an institutional emigrant.

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