Catholics in the Vatican II Era: Local Histories of a Global Event

Description

Debates about the meaning of Vatican II and its role in modern Catholic and global history have largely focused on close theological study of its authoritative documents. This volume of newly commissioned essays contends that the historical significance of the council is best examined where these messages encountered the particular circumstances of the modern world: in local dioceses around the world. Each author examines the social, political, and domestic circumstances of a diocese, asking how they produced a distinctive lived experience of the Council and its aftermath. How did the Council change relationships and institutions? What was it like for laymen and women, for clergy, for nuns, for powerful first-world dioceses and for those in what we now know as the global south? A comparative reading of these chapters affords insights into these dimensions of Vatican II, and will spark a new generation of research into the history of twentieth-century Catholicism as both international and local.

Kathleen Sprows Cummings is Associate Professor of American Studies and History and Director of the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. Her research focuses on the history of women and American religion, particularly US Catholicism. She is the author of New Women of the Old Faith: Gender and American Catholicism in the Progressive Era (2009). Timothy Matovina is Professor of Theology and Co-Director of the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. He specializes in US Catholic and US Latino theology and religion. Among his most recent books are Latino Catholicism: Transformation in America's Largest Church (2012), and the edited volume Virgilio Elizondo: Spiritual Writings (2010). Robert A. Orsi is Professor of Religious Studies and History and Grace Craddock Nagle Chair in Catholic Studies at Northwestern University, Illinois. He studies religion in the US, with a focus on American Catholicism in both historical and ethnographic perspective. Orsi's most recent book is History and Presence (2016).

'... an important and timely volume ... Cummings, Matovina, and Orsi have brought together a valuable resource for historians of global Catholicism.' Mary Beth Fraser Connolly, British Catholic History