Preliminary Programme

From the second half of the 19th century onwards, Roman Catholicism became ultramontanized, i.e. more and more orientated towards “the other side of the ” (ultra montes), on the Pope and on Rome. The doctrine of papal infallibilty which was made dogma at the First Vatican Council on 18 June 1870 was the climax of this development. But not everybody agreed with these new developments. This paper focusses on female opponents against the doctrines of the First Vatican Council and their coping strategies with a church where they became marginalized and homeless. The paper concentrates on two women who both observed carefully what happened at the First Vatican council in Rome and who reported in their – yet unpublished – letters and ego-documents about these events which had quite an impact on their own spiritual lives as Catholics.

These women intellectuals were part of networks of liberal Catholics. They took the pen, described the situation in a well-observed way and told their corresponding partner how the Roman Catholic church developed in the years after 1870 until the death of Pope Pius IX in 1878. Significant are the – yet unpublished – letters by the Bavarian Baroness Augusta von Eichthal (1835–1932) to the renowned German church historian Ignaz von Döllinger (1799–1890), one of the leading opponents against the new papal dogma’s, and also her correspondence with the Hungarian bishop Lajos Haynold (1816-1891).

Another female intellectual, the American convert to Catholicism Emilie Meriman (1833-1909) chose another path: she married the former monk Père Hyacinthe Loyson and interpreted this marriage as part of a fundamental reform of Catholicism. In their marriage and partnership the couple turned traditional 'patriarchal' marriage into a liberating reform project in their fight for 'another' Catholic church.

The paper will compare the lives of these women and the way they found through their writings and their way of life spiritual fulfillment on the margins. (Show less)

The story of the French Jew Alphonse Ratisbonne’s conversion to Roman Catholicism upends many assumptions that shape current scholarship on gender and religion in the nineteenth century. In 1842 Ratisbonne, a tourist in Rome, encountered a vision of the Virgin Mary that led him to convert and dedicate the rest of his life to the conversion of others, especially Jews. Ratisbonne was a well-educated bourgeois man, and in his narrative of his conversion, he presented himself as a flâneur, the privileged, detached, male observer of city life and quintessential figure of urban modernity. Most Roman converts at the time, in contrast, were poor women and children, as were nearly all nineteenth-century visionaries. Ratisbonne’s was thus an unusual story, but its originality did not raise clerical suspicion – indeed, quite the opposite, as his baptism and the official inquiry into his vision proceeded with a haste that violated Roman rules for the catechism of converts. Ratisbonne’s later career as a catechist similarly upsets historians’ gendered expectations. He teamed up with the Parisian cult of Notre Dame des Victoires to build a movement of converts whose stories featured what historians might interpret as “feminine” features: on the one hand, the purchase of souvenir trinkets, and, on the other, the abnegation of the individual will. Ratisbonne’s conversion instructs historians to be attentive to the ways that religious devotion shaped -- and sometimes inverted -- gendered divisions between production and consumption, reason and emotion, and religious and secular understandings of the public. (Show less)

The 1901 papal document Normae forbade women religious from performing surgical and obstetric work. This social regulation of women religious reflected centuries old ideas about women’s sexuality and, in particular, the sexual purity of women religious. This canonical prescription became a source of tension for some women’s congregations in both the domestic and foreign mission fields. By the early twentieth century, women religious were managing and working in numerous hospitals in North America, Australia and Ireland where maternity and surgical cases were the norm yet they were required to avoid any involvement with these types of cases. In the foreign mission fields, Catholic missioners were at a disadvantage when compared to their Protestant counterparts who had professionally trade women doctors, nurses and midwives involved in mission work.
Women religious reacted to this ban in a number of ways. Many complied with the ban, some worked around the ban and others actively attempted to reverse the ban. This paper shall examine first, how the Roman Catholic Church constructed the identity of women religious and why their social regulation was considered necessary. It will look in detail at the response of English and Irish women’s congregations to the ban. How and why did some religious congregations circumvent the ban to meet the needs of their patients? What were the tactics and arguments they used to argue for the reversal of the ban? How influential were they in the eventual reversal of the ban in 1936 when the decree Constans ac sedula not only allowed women to perform surgical and obstetric work but also encouraged women religious to obtain medical and nursing degrees. (Show less)

Up to the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, which led to a theological reorientation within the Catholic Church, Catholicism was not only a religion; it was also a worldview with clearly political aims. This was due to the breakthrough of the Ultramontane movement in the mid-nineteenth century, which contributed to a renewal of Counter-Reformation con-fessionalism and led to an upswing for Catholic missionary work across the world. Catholicism thus evolved into a counter-culture with clearly anti-modern traits, characterised by a strict hierarchical order, a broad popular footing, and triumphalism. The religious were to the fore of this Catholic system, and monastic life was regarded as the most accomplished expression of Catholic piety. Prior to the reforms of Vatican II the superiority of monastic life was more accentuated than today.

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 in-stitutions. Catholic orders and congregations played a significant role in this missionary work. Male religious often took over responsibility for the parishes, whereas the female religious mainly dedicated themselves to education, health care, and other social work. 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. Of the male orders, the Jesuits were the most important. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Jesuits had five residences in Denmark and Sweden, as well as a Jesuit college in Ordrup, outside Copenhagen.

These religious had professed to live according to the evangelical counsels of chastity, poverty, and obedience, which meant that they lived in a religious community and were subject to a specific rule, marked by religious virtues such as humility, obedience, piety and self-sacrifice. Women religious sometimes had a great influence on the mission work, and the ‘ultramontanisation’ of Catholic culture contributed to give the Catholic concept of manhood a weak and gentle touch that was contradictory to the prevailing secular masculinity ideals. The beloning to a religious order, the ‘estate of perfection’, in many ways transcended socially constructed gender differences as well as the subordinate role of woman stressed by the classic theology of Creation.

Were Catholic women religious working as missionaries in Scandinavia around 1900 representing an alternative form of feminism? And were the male missionaries sticking to feminine ideals? Catholicism was indeed a counter-culture in modern society, and in Protestant Scandinavia with its strong anti-Catholic traditions in a double sense. Yet, in what way did this effect the gender ideals and constructions? In this paper I will try to respond to these questions in analysing the missionary work of members of religious orders in Scandinavia as reflected in their letters and reports. I will also reflect on the relationship between Nordic and foreign, Catholic and Protestant, and how these categorisations were freighted with manliness and womanliness respectively. (Show less)