Preliminary Programme

Many authors have demostrated that priests’ bad intellectual training, their laxed discipline and their unacurate accomplishment of their pastoral mission, partly caused the failure of the restoration and renewal of the Spanish Church. This paper attempts to show how the family was also a factor that contributed to limit the success of the Tridentine decrees on the clergy reform. The reason was that kinship was a very poweful strength that influenced on their ecclesiastical duties. The present paper aims to examine the contents of treaties and at the same time analyse different questions concerning the clergy of the Early Modern Spain. In the first place it shall reflect on the transmission of ecclesiastic income as one of the points of friction that existed between the family and the Church, two of the most important social institutions of the Ancien Regime. It will be studied to what extent the worries of the texts were real and what they were based on. At the same time, it will be investigated to what extent the reforms established by the Council of Trent were actually achieved with regards to clergymen. (Show less)

During the nineteenth century the religious landscape of Sweden changed dramatically. A predominantly rural society, with a state supported Lutheran church, was giving way to a situation where different denominations lived side by side. In this situation the leading theologians of the Lund High Church Movement appeared as defenders of the established order. The theologians were firmly rooted in the Lutheran teachings of the three estates (the family, the church and the state). In response to what they considered to be subversive tendencies, the theologians accentuated the need for a re-implementation of this Lutheran ideology to safeguard the order of society (cf. the German neuluthertum). The leading figures of this conservative movement are central to my Ph.D.-project, which focuses on masculinities and religion.

Since the theologians of the movement ended up as bishops in the Church of Sweden, I’ve found it interesting to focus on the clerical ideals that these front figures expressed. I consider their ideals of how a pastor should live his life as examples of Christian manliness. According to the theologians of the Lund High Church Movement, a good Lutheran pastor should be a person of true Christian faith with an impeccable character. He should be truly faithful towards God, the Church and the order of society created by God and accentuated in the Lutheran teachings of the three estates. Furthermore, the exemplary pastor should be a good example to his parish and able to live according to the teachings of the Gospel and the Lutheran confession. The good pastor was a prayerful man who read the Gospel on a daily basis.

In this paper I would like to present how one of the theologians within the movement (E. G. Bring, 1814-1884) put this Lutheran ideology into practice. Using what we know about Bring, I would like to give some examples of how a Lutheran pastor within the Church of Sweden could relate to members of his parish, family and friends. Thus, I will focus on pastoral care and the pastor as husband, father and friend. At the end of my paper I also ask whether or not an investigation of the household of the pastor can provide some answers to the elusive question of Christian manliness. (Show less)

The Catholic Church strongly emphasised its claim to be the only true Church, and as a consequence, all non-Catholic regions were regarded as missionary fields and thus fell under the authority of the Roman Congregation of Mission, . Hence the Catholic missionary offensive started in the mid-nineteenth century was also aimed at the Nordic countries where, protected by the liberal religious laws passed in this period, they could build up a network of parishes and missions with schools, hospitals, and other social institutions. Those Catholic schools and hospitals were used as missionary tools, and most pupils and patients were Protestants. In Denmark, where the new constitution of 1849 instituted virtually full religious freedom, Catholic advances were particular noticeable, and at the turn of the 20th century, the number of Danish converts averaged 230 per year.

Catholic orders and congregations played a significant role in the missionary work in Scandinavia. Most of these religious institutes were female congregations, and at the beginning of the 1930s, there were more than 1.300 Catholic sisters working in Scandinavia. In my paper, I will however focus on the male religious institutes and discuss their missionary work in a gender perspective. I will discuss the construction of Catholic manliness within male orders working in Scandinavia, and how manly identity was demonstrated in tangible forms, the way in which manliness was construed in relation to womanliness, and the role played by confessional and ethnically cultural elements in this respect.

Many of the Catholic priests at work in the Nordic area were members of religious orders or congregations. My focus will be on the German Jesuits, who long held a dominant position in the Danish and Swedish missions, but I will also discuss the activities of the Italian Barn-abites, and the French Dominicans. The Jesuits, who established themselves in the Nordic countries in the wake of the cultural wars in Germany in the 1870s, were the prime representatives of Ultramontane confessionalism. In a Nordic perspective, the Jesuits were by tradition viewed as the ultimate representatives of the "Catholic peril", and of all the evil that customarily was associated with Catholicism. It is therefore interesting to note that it was the self-same Jesuits who attracted most converts, and the Jesuit boy’s school (collegium) outside Copenhagen was attended by a large number of Protestant pupils. This makes the Jesuits to a fruitful object of analysis in illuminating the relationship between confessional identity and the construction of manliness. Italian Barnabites were important in the initial phase of the Nordic Catholic mission. Some of the Barnabite fathers were active at the University of Uppsala for a time, and one of them served for several years as Court Chaplain to the Swedish Queen Dowager Josefina, a Catholic. The Dominicans, who established themselves in the Nordic countries during the 1920s, embodied an ascetic and learned tradition, while at the same time representing the French culture so cherished by the Scandinavian upper classes.

In my paper, I will pay close attention to the relationship between Nordic and foreign, Catho-lic and Protestant, and how these categorisations were freighted with manliness and womanliness respectively. In Lutheran Scandinavia, many people regarded Catholicism as a threat to Nordic national and cultural unity and integrity. Nationalistic tendencies also gave rise to conflicts between different ethnical groups within the Catholic communities, not least between born Scandinavian secular clergy and the German Jesuits, but also between regular clergy and between German priests and French sister. These conflicts were partly due to different views on the relationship between religious belief and its cultural expressions. I am thus focusing on ideals and anti ideals or, to speak with George L. Mosse, types and counter-types of Catholic manliness reflected in the letters and reports analysed. So, what were these "Catholic" ideals of manliness? How were they related to ideas about manliness, evident within Nordic Protestantism? And in what way did they differ from middle-class liberal masculinity constructions? (Show less)

This contribution studies the stereotypes with which female sanctity and the ideas of Thérèse of Lisieux are told, with the intent to analyse the constitution of female identity through religion. Saints personify key qualities of Catholic identity and the history of sainthood charts the evolution of the models of saintliness through time. These models differ in accordance to gender and female saints are described with recurrent stereotypes.
Sanctity is determined by three agents, which are the individual’s life choices, the church’s sanction and the community’s perception of these exceptional figures. The saint’s “construction” of his sanctity, the pontiffs exclusive control over canonizations, expressing a pontifical policy, and the choice by emerging social strata of their “own” saints contribute to the selection. But new models are also the sign of changes in mentality and express the society’s ideas on which criteria a saint must have and which are its new heroes.
Female holiness is told with a limited range of forms and exceptional figures are fitted into this tight “shirt”, especially if they differ from the standard. Sanctity can constitute a form of emancipation, as it allows women to refuse their traditional role for an alternative way of life. The models used for women are mainly the martyr, the virgin, the redeemed sinner and the mystic. Female consecrated life changes with the coming of the orders assisting the poor in the street and with the growth of the congregations dedicated to education, which grant women a social consideration. A recent democratization of sanctity has transformed religious gender identities and new ideas, like Thérèse’s, have broken traditional models.
Born in 1873, Thérèse Martin lived in the Carmelite Convent of Lisieux, as “Teresa of the Child Jesus and of the Holy Face”, until she died of tuberculosis in 1897, at only 24 years. Canonized in 1925, in 1997 she was designated a “Doctor of the Universal Church” by John Paul II, a title reserved to writers which offer a specific teaching on spiritual life. There are 33 Doctors of the Church, of whom only three women. Thérèse’s doctrine of the “little way”, discarding the idea of exceptional saints, introduces a “democratic” saintliness for all. During her short life she repeatedly refused the stereotypes used to describe her and did not allow to be stylized to an ideal. Nevertheless she is often represented as the sweet little saint of the roses. In the attempt to adapt her to an ideal model, her sister “corrected” her biography, witnesses wondered why she was considered a saint, as she “didn’t do anything special”, while the cultural world (psychoanalysts, feminists) aligned its judgements to its own models. But even if Thérèse’s denial of great deeds and her “ordinary” perfection, do not correspond to the “ideal” of a saint, her ideas, which will grant her the title of Doctor, broke the current stereotype, accomplishing her “revolution” of sanctity. (Show less)