In the present discussion within the Roman Catholic Church over the requirement of clerical celibacy, the arguments generally center on the ascetical value of the practice. Pope Paul VI speaks of celibacy as a “precious jewel” leading to a life of selflessness for the man who seeks to follow Jesus Christ in the priesthood. When priests themselves talk about the subject, it is often in terms of its symbolic value as a total commitment to the service of the Lord. It is further seen as a practical measure, following Saint Paul's view that the married state frees the ordained minister from the cares of personal family life so that he may devote himself entirely to the concerns of the whole Christian community.

The period from 1521 to 1529 marks the transition from the suppression of the personal Protestantism of Luther to the emergence of political Protestantism as a force to be reckoned with. Unavoidably, perhaps, this transition brought with it a change in the general attitude toward war and peace, indeed, in the self-understanding of Europe. The medieval model of a Christendom united under the cross and the papacy, ideally at peace within and at war only with the infidel, was becoming obsolete. Having entered upon its period of dominance with the simultaneous proclamation of the Peace of God and the First Crusade by Pope Urban II in 1095, it may be said to expire with the Peace of Cambrai of 1529. The modern model, of a community of independent states whose autonomy is grounded in natural law and whose bond of union is vaguely cultural rather than specifically religious, is already reflected in Luther's 1529 treatise, On War Against the Turk? The short-range effect of the transformation of 1521/29 was the desacralization of the Turkish war and the redirection of the crusading spirit against the Protestants. The long-range effect would seem to have been the rise of modern Europe—out of the throes of the Wars of Religion—as a system of more or less secular and national states.

Who was the prime mover in the English Reformation? Was it the sovereign, Henry VIII? Or was his minister, Thomas Cromwell, the originating force? According to G. R. Elton, Cromwell was the architect of English reform who spelled out the concept of national sovereignty, established royal supremacy over the church, set the locus of national sovereignty in Parliament, consolidated the national territory and reformed the central administration of government. Thus, Elton has credited Cromwell with the decisive role in creating the ecclesiastical revolution. J. J. Scarisbrick has sharply challenged Elton's thesis. His biography of Henry VIII, published in 1968, is a major contribution to the study of Tudor history. There Scarisbrick demonstrates that the king was committed to ecclesiastical reform well before Cromwell appeared on the political scene. Hence, there emerges a sharp conflict between two modern scholars regarding the role of Henry VIII in originating the reform of the English church.

The strain placed upon Anglo-Vatican relations as a result of the Archbishop of Canterbury's visit to the Holy Places in 1931 and the furor which that event provoked, although reported in part by the newspapers of the day, has remained undisclosed for nearly forty years. The British Parliament's Public Record Act of 1967, which reduced the waiting period on that country's official correspondence to thirty years, affords the student of the period with an invaluable, hitherto unattainable, view of the diplomatic involvement of the London Government with the Holy See in 1931. The aura of apprehension, suspicion and distrust which inhibited Anglo-Vatican relations at that time contrasts sharply with the spirit of benevolence and ecumenism manifested in the Holy See's contemporary contacts with both the English Government and the Anglican Church. Scenes like the one depicted in the widely published photograph of Pope Paul VI warmly receiving the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Reverend Arthur Michael Ramsey, highlight the progress which has been made since the none too distant past when relations were less cordial than today.

During the 1830s American society was swept by a reform movement that had as its goal the improvement and uplift of humanity and human institutions in all facets of personal and associated conduct. The antislavery cause was one of the most dynamic areas of reform, and by the 1840s the movement against human bondage became almost entirely a campaign of the northern advocates against the peculiar institution of the South. One of the basic sources of this antislavery sentiment was religious in its orientation, and the crusade against slavery secured its enduring strength from the revivalism of the Presbyterian, Congregational and Baptist churches, from the perfectionism which reinforced it among the Methodist and independent Congregationalists, and from the radicalism of the Unitarians and Quakers. After the Mexican War, the questions revolving around the sectional controversy became the all-absorbing preoccupation of a concerned nation, but while the slavery controversy was only one of the questions involved in the political arena, the morality of slavery was the total issue within religious circles and the churches.

Even historians and historically minded Sociologists with little sense or awareness of the current Roman Catholic scene have been stirred by the precipitous flow of events of the last dozen years to ask questions about the Catholic role in American society. Virtually without warning, the history of American Catholicism has been catapulted from specialized ecclesiastical history of interest to Catholics primarily into an ecumenical history of unprecedented general interest. After hovering backstage for centuries, the Catholic presence has erupted almost simultaneously from the secular and theological wings and burst onto centerstage. A convergence of public events dramatized and personalized for world Catholicism by the papacy of John XXIII and for American Catholicism by the presidency of John F. Kennedy ironically magnified a sense of supreme Catholic crisis and confusion that in its scope and implications dwarfed earlier American Catholic crises, making them appear parochial and intramural by comparison. The elevation to the papacy of the most saintly and humble of priests and the brief presidency of the first Catholic president of the United States turned an aged pope and a young president into symbols of a new public Catholicism, cosmopolitan and courageous in its vision and democratic in its thrust. Vatican II, the ecumenical movement, the race revolution, the general revolt against authority, the new ethnic succession, explosive social and geographic mobility, and the heightened self-consciousness of newer ethnics of European origin and largely Catholic religion, combined with the instant exposure of the mass media, synchronized with an era of American world hegemony and the emergence of an American Catholicism of appropriate dimensions.

The revival of interest in American Protestant missionary activity is a remarkable feature of current historical writing in the United States. Two generations ago mission history was a flourishing enterprise, but was closely tied to the missionary movement itself. And when the fire went out of the crusade to evangelize the world in a single generation, the study of mission history was thereby virtually extinguished. With the exception of the distinguished writings of the late Kenneth Scott Latourette, the history of Christian missions in the modern period has been generally disregarded by American historians for most of this century. The renascence of mission history in a new, more modern and ostensibly more objective form began around a decade ago. Whether the present generation of historians will produce greater understanding of the missionary movement than did the generation of their grandfathers is an open question; in any event, the history of missions is once again the latest thing.

William G.McLoughlin, professor of history, Brown University, has suceeded in producing a most extensive monograph on the struggle for religious liberty in New England and his most ambititious work to date. The author’s painstaking research has been exemplary. The result is a meticulous narrative of two–hundred years of religious dissent, told in thirteen chapters consuming some thirteen–hundred pages of text in two hefty volumes with copious footnotes. At the outset, McLoughlin asserts that he undertook this study to clarify the confusion in regard to the history of separation of church and state in America.

This confusion, he holds, is the result of two basic misunderstandings regarding the formation of the concept of separation during the colonial era: The first misunderstanding is based on the theory that separation as we know it today came primarily, if not entirely, from the rationalistic spirit of the Enlightenment and that it received its essential exposition from Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in Virginia. The second misunderstanding derives from the very different assumption that separation sprang principally, if not wholly from the radical wing of the Protestant Reformation (brought to America by the Baptists and the Quakers) and that it received its essential exposition from Roger Williams in Rhode Island in the 1630's. (p. xv) McLoughlin is quite sure that the vision of full religious liberty and complete separation of church and state only gradually emerged, since “the fight for religious liberty was primarily a neighborhood affair—a series of dialogues and face to face confrontations in church, parish, and town meetings which continued over two hundred years” (p.xvii).