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Author: David Carlin
Publisher: Sophia Institute Press
Published: 2013-06
Total Pages: 423
ISBN-13: 1622821696
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Behind the lurid headlines: why the Church in America declined. Forty years ago, three powerful forces capsized the Catholic Church in America. These pages detail those forces, and map the path that you and I - and our priests and bishops - must walk if we are to make the Church in America vigorous again.
Author: Paul L. Williams
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Published: 2017
Total Pages: 368
ISBN-13: 1633883035
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This critical review of the Roman Catholic Church since the pivotal changes initiated in the 1960s by Vatican II paints a disturbing picture of decline and corruption. Dr. Paul L. Williams, a self-professed Tridentine or traditionalist Catholic, traces the various factors that have caused the Church to suffer cataclysmic losses in all aspects of its life and worship in recent decades. Williams illustrates the decline with telling statistics showing the stark difference between the robust number of clergy members, parishes, schools, and active church-going Catholics in 1965 versus the comparatively paltry number today. The author is highly critical of Popes Paul VI, John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis for steering the church so far away from its traditional teachings and for a lack of oversight that allowed corruption to fester. Symptomatic of this failure of leadership are the recent pedophilia scandals, the ongoing financial corruption, a gay prostitution ring inside the Vatican, and criminal investigations of connections between the Holy See and organized crime. This unflinching critique from a devoted, lifelong Catholic is a wakeup call to all Catholics to restore their church to its former levels of moral leadership and influence.
Author: Malachi Martin
Publisher: Putnam Publishing Group
Published: 1981
Total Pages: 320
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →History of the Roman Catholic Church and the papacy, discussing how the Church dealt with the tensions between its political power and its spiritual mission and the crisis the Church faces in the late 20th century.
Author: Charles Morris
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2011-08-24
Total Pages: 529
ISBN-13: 0307797910
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →"A cracking good story with a wonderful cast of rogues, ruffians and some remarkably holy and sensible people." --Los Angeles Times Book Review Before the potato famine ravaged Ireland in the 1840s, the Roman Catholic Church was barely a thread in the American cloth. Twenty years later, New York City was home to more Irish Catholics than Dublin. Today, the United States boasts some sixty million members of the Catholic Church, which has become one of this country's most influential cultural forces. In American Catholic: The Saints and Sinners Who Built America's Most Powerful Church, Charles R. Morris recounts the rich story of the rise of the Catholic Church in America, bringing to life the personalities that transformed an urban Irish subculture into a dominant presence nationwide. Here are the stories of rogues and ruffians, heroes and martyrs--from Dorothy Day, a convert from Greenwich Village Marxism who opened shelters for thousands, to Cardinal William O'Connell, who ran the Church in Boston from a Renaissance palazzo, complete with golf course. Morris also reveals the Church's continuing struggle to come to terms with secular, pluralist America and the theological, sexual, authority, and gender issues that keep tearing it apart. As comprehensive as it is provocative, American Catholic is a tour de force, a fascinating cultural history that will engage and inform both Catholics and non-Catholics alike. "The best one-volume history of the last hundred years of American Catholicism that it has ever been my pleasure to read. What's appealing in this remarkable book is its delicate sense of balance and its soundly grounded judgments." --Andrew Greeley
Author: Peter Steinfels
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2013-01-29
Total Pages: 454
ISBN-13: 1439128413
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →In A People Adrift, a prominent Catholic thinker states bluntly that the Catholic Church in the United States must transform itself or suffer irreversible decline. Peter Steinfels shows how even before the recent revelations about sexual abuse by priests, the explosive combination of generational change and the thinning ranks of priests and nuns was creating a grave crisis of leadership and identity. This groundbreaking book offers an analysis not just of the church's immediate troubles but of less visible, more powerful forces working below the surface of an institution that provides a spiritual identity for 65 million Americans and spans the nation with its parishes, schools, colleges and universities, hospitals, clinics, and social service agencies. In A People Adrift, Steinfels warns that entrenched liberals and conservatives are trapped in a "theo-logical gridlock" that often ignores what in fact goes on in families, parishes, classrooms, voting booths, and Catholic organizations of all types. Above all, he insists, the altered Catholic landscape demands a new agenda for leadership, from the selection of bishops and the rethinking of the priesthood to the thorough preparation and genuine incorporation of a lay leadership that is already taking over key responsibilities in Catholic institutions. Catholicism exerts an enormous cultural and political presence in American life. No one interested in the nation's moral, intellectual, and political future can be indifferent to the fate of what has been one of the world's most vigorous churches -- a church now severely challenged.
Author: Russell Shaw
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Published: 2013-02-22
Total Pages: 235
ISBN-13: 1681490358
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Has the Americanization of American Catholics-their cultural assimilation, that is-been a blessing or a curse for the Church in the United States? Or has it been a bit of both? In American Church Russell Shaw takes a searching look at that question and reaches a disturbing conclusion. Cultural assimilation, which was ardently championed by churchmen like the great Cardinal James Gibbons of Baltimore around the turn of the last century, has undoubtedly conferred many benefits on Catholics. Their absorption into the secular culture of America, however, now threatens the Catholic identity of millions of faithful and of their institutions, such as schools, universities, and hospitals. Shaw does not offer this conclusion as an unsupported generalization. American Church is a richly documented analysis of a process extending over two centuries. Colorful characters and dramatic incidents abound, including the nineteenth-century intellectual feud between Orestes Brownson and the Transcendentalist convert to Catholicism Isaac Hecker, Pope Leo XIII's condemnation of Americanism, the anti-Catholicism that greeted the presidential campaigns of Al Smith and John F. Kennedy, and the numerous intra-Church conflicts that have divided American Catholics since the Second Vatican Council. In concluding his study, Shaw offers a number of thought-provoking suggestions about what the Church in America needs to do now in the face of an ongoing decline that is sapping its strength and may threaten its very survival.
Author: Marian E. Crowe
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2007
Total Pages: 424
ISBN-13: 9780739116418
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →"Although many literary critics assert that the Catholic novel is in decline, Aiming at Heaven, Getting the Earth: The English Catholic Novel Today argues that there is still vitality in the English Catholic novel at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Marian Crowe relates this fiction to recent developments in the post-Vatican II Church and elucidates intriguing possibilities for future Catholic fiction. In addition to discussing the theory and history of the Catholic novel, the book provides an in-depth study of four contemporary English Catholic novelists."--BOOK JACKET.
Author: Edward Gibbon
Publisher:
Published: 2015-12-08
Total Pages: 444
ISBN-13: 9781347884102
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Author: David R. Carlin
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
Published: 2013-11-27
Total Pages: 207
ISBN-13: 1493118609
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →David R. Carlin is the author of two previous books: The Decline and Fall of the Catholic Church in America and Can a Catholic Be a Democrat? During the past 30 years he has written well over a hundred political and cultural opinion pieces in a number of national periodicals, including Commonweal, America, First Things, and The New York Times. He is a former Democratic Majority Leader of the Rhode Island Senate, and is currently a professor of sociology and philosophy at the Community College of Rhode Island.
Author: Mark A. Noll
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2007
Total Pages: 521
ISBN-13: 0195317157
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →These essays examine how religious beliefs and practices have shaped political thought and behaviour (and vice versa), and how in certain periods religious and political thought has coincided or moved in opposition, and how minority perspectives have challenged majority views.
