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 story of the peopling of America has not yet been written. We do not understand ourselves,” complained Frederick Jackson Turner in 1891. Subsequent immigration history contributed to national self-understanding. Eighty years later historians have turned their attention to a second chapter in the halftold tale of the peopling of America. They have begun to concentrate on the story of the regrouping of citizens along racial, ethnic and religious lines, and of their relations to each other in movements of what have come to be called “peoplehood.”

A new feature at the December 1971 meeting of the American Society of Church History in New York was a series of historiographical seminars. These seminars (in early church history, Reformation history and American church history) were designed to give members of the society an opportunity to meet in a somewhat less formal setting than the customary paper-response session and to discuss areas of mutual interest and concern in their respective fields. Each seminar took a different form. In the section on early church, three panelists were asked to present brief statements on recent works in the field.

Around the time of Innocent III (1198–1216), the appetite for justice was providing the popes with an opportunity to expand their authority. The popes responded to the need and to the opportunity primarily by encouraging appeals to the papal court, where the cases were commonly delegated to clergymen near the origin of the case, clergymen who acted as papal judges delegate. The use of this procedure expanded rapidly in the second half of the twelfth century and was especially encouraged by Innocent himself. The need and the opportunity were there, but how good was the response? The purpose of this article is to see how and how well papal justice worked in France around the time of Innocent III and, in the process, to compare it with alternative forms of judicial procedure available at the time.

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.

The recent resurgence of scholarly interest in the Venetian Gasparo Contarini (1483–1542), stimulated in general by the growing interest in Italian religious history and in particular by the discovery of new material, has resulted in the partial emergence of the young patrician from the obscurity which has heretofore enveloped his early years. A succession of studies in the last decade or so have now enabled us to visualize the young Contarini more clearly and have given firmer substance to a once shadowy figure. Viewing his early life from the vantage point of different interests, a number of scholars in various countries have placed Contarini more intelligibly within his milieu, illuminating not merely the individual himself but also the group with which he was associated and the institutions within which he grew to manhood.

Conciliarism at the Fifth Lateran Council? Despite the current interest in things conciliar this is a strange and, no doubt to some, a rather forced juxta position. For what, after all, is there to be said about it? The council may indeed have been a great non-event in the religious history of the sixteenth century but it was surely a highly papalist non-event. Was it not, in form and procedure, a faithful copy of the papal general councils of the pre-Conciliar era—of Lateran IV (1215), of Lyons (1274), of Vienne (1311)? To what did it owe its convocation if not the desire of Julius II to cut the ground from under the feet of the dissident conciliabulum of Pisa (1511–12)—itself, of course, summoned by the cardinals of the opposition with the support of the French king and very much a conciliarist's council? Were not the first half-dozen sessions occupied almost exclusively with the condemnation of the activities of that council, the proscription of those who persisted in adhering to it and the reconciliation of those who had abandoned it? Did not the eleventh session witness the definitive rejection of the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges, the base from which for so long conciliarist thinkers had been able to operate with impunity? Did it not witness also the unambiguous assertion of the superiority of pope to council, and was not this principle underlined in practice by the craven responsiveness of the council fathers to papal demands? And so on. It is easy enough to envisage the questions, the queries, the dissents.1

One of the more active historical controversies centers around the precise relationship of religion to politics during the period of the English Civil War. While all historians recognize the crucial role played by Puritans in the rebellion against Charles I, the extent to which religious considerations influenced political activity within the Long Parliament remains open to question. A major reason for the dispute is that terms used by contemporaries tend to be misleading. Thus, the two parties which are said to have dominated the Long Parliament during the 1640s are known by descriptive names (“the Presbyterians” and “the Independents”) that the bear little resemblance to their actual platforms.

When the citizens of seventeenth-century Leiden spoke of “the English church here,” they referred in most cases to the English Reformed Church, not to the historically-famous church of the Pilgrim Fathers. In the first decades of the seventeenth century, the Dutch city of Leiden included a sizable English and Scottish community, but one divided into two distinct religious factions, namely the Separatist Pilgrims and the non-separating Reformed Church. The enthusiasm to celebrate the deeds of the Mayflower Pilgrims may obscure Leiden's larger community of British strangers and sojourners; and not Leiden alone, for the English churches of Leiden were but two of more than two dozen such churches in early seventeenth-century Netherlands. John Robinson and his congregation arrived at Leiden in 1609, two years after the older English-Scottish community of the city had begun its own church life.

Ecclesiastical discipline is the one area of church order in which Johannes Brenz, one of the most important architects of the sixteenth-century Lutheran territorial state church, signally failed to achieve his purposes.1 During his career in Schwäbisch Hall (1522–1548) and later in Württemberg (1550–1570) Brenz tried repeatedly, but ultimately without success, to establish an order of ecclesiastical discipline which would include effective use of the penalty of excommunication. An examination of the reasons for this failure may throw some light on the limits of what could be achieved within the context of the state church.

The attempt to arrive at a balanced and objective understanding of the relationship between the German Protestant church, which is predominantly Lutheran, and the rise of National Socialism is an almost impossible task today. For what we now hear about the Protestant church of the thirties tends to be written by those who were vindicated by the turn of events, while those who supported Hitler and National Socialism have tended to remain silent, understandably enough. The flood of books and articles by the Confessing Church gives the misleading impression that the stand of the church toward the Nazi state was one of resistance and opposition. Instead, the main Protestant response to Hitler and to the nationalistic forces he represented ranged from inactive indifference to over-whelming support. The Confessing Church, which did display a courageous though not always consistent opposition, at best never spoke for more than about one tenth of all Protestant Christians.

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.

Newman's famous poem “Lead, Kindly Light” (originally titled “The Pillar of the Cloud”) was written on his return trip to England from Italy in 1833. He had been touring the Mediterranean countries for eight months, the last three of which were spent battling a near-fatal illness in Sicily. On recovering from this illness, he returned to England rejuvenated by his trip and eager for some pending ecclesiastical project. Immediately on his return to Oxford he became involved in the early organizational discussions from which the Oxford Movement evolved. In light of this intensified engagement in reform activities on his return to England, his poem “Lead, Kindly Light” has impressed his biographers as a revealing statement of his resolve to engage in those activities from which he had shrunk only months before. The lines “I was not ever thus, nor prayed that thou shouldst lead me on” and “Pride ruled my will; remember not past years” seem especially to express this shift in resolve. The autobiographical thrust of the poem has therefore seemed quite unmistakable.1

Charles Hector de St. Georges, Marquis de Marsay (1688–1753), lived for the greater part of his life in the small and obscure principality of Wittgenstein in the upper Eder valley between the Rhineland and Hesse-Kassel. In his earlier years he was a disciple of the Flemish mystic, Antoinette Bourignon, and later came under the influence of the works of Madame Guyon. In Wittgenstein he attempted to put their teachings into practice by following an ascetic pattern of life. He attracted a number of followers, not only from the sectarian groups which had taken refuge in Wittgenstein, but also farther afield, notably in Switzerland, which he visited on a number of occasions. The fact that he was known in Britain to John Wesley and William Law, as well as by the group of mystically inclined gentry in north-east Scotland, is an indication of the contacts that existed between pietistic groups in different parts of Europe. The details of Marsay's life are not without interest is a considered attempt to practice the quietist spirituality of Madame Guyon in a Protestant context.

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.

Delegates to a special meeting of the Federal Council of Churches in Columbus Ohio, in March, 1946, adopted a report which committed the Council to work for a non-segregated church in a non-segregated society and called upon its constituent communions to do likewise. The statement represented a new departure, but its timing—coming at the end of the Second World War—was also significant. Although the position of the Federal Council was in advance of any positain yet taken by the major protestant denominations individually, it indicated that American protestantism was beginng to be challenged in a new way by the question of race. In the yers immediately prior to 1939 the denominations paid little attention to race as a social issue: by 1945 it was frequently the subject of denominational pronouncements and editorials in the church press. This contrast in the reponse of the churches suggests that the years of the Second World War had been crucial in placing new pressures upon white attitudes toward black Americans.

English Roman Catholic reactions to the issues presented by Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859) were as varied as the elements which made up the English Catholic community itself. Any reading of the Catholic periodical press in England during the years immediately after Darwin's epochal publication will bear this out. These reactions ranged from a simple reaffirmation of childhood formulations of the account of creation in “Genesis,” to rather disingenuous allegorical reinterpretations of the meaning of what “Moses”—and Darwin—had said.

Adolf Christian Stoecker (1835–1909) has been remembered as a court preacher in Berlin (1874–1890), the founder of the Christian Socialist Workers' Party in 1878, a conservative member of the Reichstag for most of the last thirty years of his life, an ardent nationalist, an early anti-Semitic voice, a prime mover in the Berlin City Mission, a prolific journalist, a powerful preacher and a leader in the freie Volkskirche movement. One significant aspect of this controversial political pastor that has been neglected is his critique of Marxist socialism.1 It should be noted that the significance of this critique is due as much to the fact that it was among the first to be formulated from within an explicitly Christian perspective as to the content of the critique itself.2

In the 1860s Walt Whitman described New York as a “city of spires and masts” with “the flags of all nations … duly lowered at sunset.” To this celebrator or urban life New York was a “city of the world! For all races are here; all the lands of the earth make contributions here.” The cosmopolitan character of New York was especially reflected in the city's Roman Catholic community. In the words of John Hughes, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of New York at mid-century, his “people were composed of representatives from almost all nations.” There were Italian and French Catholics, German and Irish Catholics as well as white and black American-born Catholics. And if one looked long enough, he would come across Catholic merchants from Spain and Catholic chefs from Switzerland. But within this polyglot community the two most significant ethnic groups in ante-bellum New York were the Irish and German immigrants.

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.