Creating a greater partnership: analysing partnership in the Catholic Church development chain

This paper presents results from a project designed to explore the meaning and function of partnership within the Catholic Church development chain. The geography literature has had little to say about such aid chains, especially those founded on faith-based groups. The relationships between three Catholic Church-based donors - referred to as A, B and C - with development personnel of the diocese of the Abuja Ecclesiastical Province (AEP) as well as other Catholic Church structures in Nigeria were analysed. The aim was to explore the forces behind the relationships and how 'patchy' these relationships were in AEP. Respondents were asked to give each of the donors a score in relation to four questions covering their relationship with the donors. Results suggest that the modus operandi of donor 'A' allows it to be perceived as the 'best' partner, while 'B' was scored less favourably because of a perception that it attempts to act independently of existing structures in Nigeria rather than work through them. There was significant variation between diocese in this regard, as well as between the diocese and other structures of the Church (Provinces, Inter-Provinces and National Secretariat). Thus 'partnership' in the Catholic Church aid chain is a highly complex, contested and 'visioned' term and the development of an analytical framework has to take account of these fundamentals.

‘The Apostolate of the Pen’: Mgr De Ségur and the mobilization of Catholic opinion in Second Empire France

This article contends that the papacy and ultramontane Catholicism played a pivotal role in the democratization of culture in Second Empire France. Drawing upon recent scholarship, which argues that religion played an important role in the constitution of mass democracies in modern Europe, this article revisits the pamphlet campaign led by Mgr Gaston de Ségur at the height of the Italian question in February 1860. Ségur made the most of the freedom of expression enjoyed by the Catholic Church in France in an attempt to direct Catholic opinion, and place pressure on the French government over its diplomatic relations with the pope. New archive material, notably Ségur’s correspondence with the leading Catholic journalist of the time, Louis Veuillot, sheds further light on Rome’s interventions in French culture and politics and its consequences. The article demonstrates that one of the most important, if unintended, results of the ultramontane campaign was to trigger reforms to the cultural sphere, and the granting of freedoms to their political enemies: the Republicans and freethinkers.

Graceful remedies: understanding grace in the Catholic Church's treatment of clerical child sexual abuse

This article examines advocacy of Catholic restorative justice for clerical child sexual abuse from the standpoint of feminist criminological critiques of the use of restorative mediation in sexual offence cases. In particular, it questions the Catholic invocation of grace and forgiveness of survivors of abuse in light of critical feminist concerns about the exploitation of emotions in restorative practices, especially in regard to sexual and other gender-based offences. In the context of sexual abuse, the Catholic appeal to grace has the potential for turning into an extraordinary demand made of victims not only to rehabilitate offenders and the church in the eyes of the community, but also to work towards the spiritual absolution of the abuser. This unique feature of Catholic-oriented restorative justice raises important concerns in terms of feminist critiques of the risk of abuses of power within mediation, and is also incompatible with orthodox restorative justice theory, which, although it advocates a ‘spiritual’ response to crime, is concerned foremost with the rights, needs and experiences of victims.

Analysing institutional partnerships in development: a contract between equals or a loaded process?

Partnerships are complex, diverse and subtle relationships, the nature of which changes with time, but they are vital for the functioning of the development chain. This paper reviews the meaning of partnership between development institutions as well as some of the main approaches taken to analyse the relationships. The latter typically revolve around analyses based on power, discourse, interdependence and functionality. The paper makes the case for taking a multianalytical approach to understanding partnership but points out three problem areas: identifying acceptable/unacceptable trade-offs between characteristics of partnership, the analysis of multicomponent partnerships (where one partner has a number of other partners) and the analysis of long-term partnership. The latter is especially problematic for long-term partnerships between donors and field agencies that share an underlying commitment based on religious beliefs. These problems with current methods of analysing partnership are highlighted by focusing upon the Catholic Church-based development chain, linking donors in the North (Europe) and their field partners in the South (Abuja Ecclesiastical Province, Nigeria). It explores a narrated history of a relationship with a single donor spanning 35 years from the perspective of one partner (the field agency).

The Universal Common Good: Faith-Based Partnerships and Sustainable Development

Partnership is increasingly espoused as the best relationship between members of the sustainable development aid chain, and implies a respect for the position of all and a desire to avoid a situation where one group dominates another. It also implies a form of relationship that is not just 'better' for the sake of it but that is more able to help achieve sustainable development. However, given the inevitable inequalities in power between donors that have the resources and field partners that do not it can be hard to put this ideal into practice. This paper explores the function of partnership within a group of closely related institutions that comprise the Catholic Church development chain. The research focussed on three Catholic Church based donors (one from the USA and two from Europe) and their partners in Abuja Ecclesiastical Province, Nigeria. Relationships between and within various strata of the Church in Nigeria were also examined. Relationships were 'patchy' at all levels. One of the donors had a significant operational presence in Nigeria and this was regarded by some respondents as a parallel structure that seriously undermined local bodies. However, while problems existed, there was a sense of inter-dependence arising from a shared sense of values and Catholic Social Teaching, which allowed partners to work through their stresses and conflicts. It is the innate sustainability of the aid chain itself founded upon a set of shared values that provided the space and time for problems to be addressed. Copyright (C) 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.

It was never good world sence minister must have wyves”: clerical celibacy, clerical marriage, and anticlericalism in Reformation England

The impact of the Reformation was felt strongly in the nature and character of the priesthood, and in the function and reputation of the priest. A shift in the understanding of the priesthood was one of the most tangible manifestations of doctrinal change, evident in the physical arrangement of the church, in the language of the liturgy, and in the relaxation of the discipline of celibacy, which had for centuries bound priests in the Latin tradition to a life of perpetual continence. Clerical celibacy, and accusations of clerical incontinence, featured prominently in evangelical criticisms of the Catholic church and priesthood, which made a good deal of polemical capital out of the perceived relationship of the priest and the efficacy of his sacred function. Citing St Paul, Protestant polemicists presented clerical marriage as the only, and appropriate remedy, for priestly immorality. But did the advent of a married priesthood create more problems than it solved? The polemical certainties that informed evangelical writing on sacerdotal celibacy did not guarantee the immediate acceptance of a married priesthood, and the vocabulary that had been used to denounce clergy who failed in their obligation to celibacy was all too readily turned against the married clergy. The anti-clerical lexicon, and its usage, remained remarkably static despite the substantial doctrinal and practical challenges posed to the traditional model of priesthood by the Protestant Reformation.

Femininity, feminism and the terrorist

This chapter aims to discuss the relationship between femininity and representations of women involved in violence, focussing on visual representations. Miranda Alison has made the point that the repeated necessity to qualify the term 'combatant' with the descriptor 'female' draws attention to how women soldiers, female freedom fighters, female suicide bombers and female terrorists are exceptional figures. That the female combatant or the female terrorist is an aberration or a deviation from a masculine norm is undermined by the lengthy history of women as warriors, fighters, and terrorists. In that sense it is not so much that fighting women are rare but that there is amnesia within cultural memories concerning the woman fighter. However, in representations of conflict, the dominant image associated with femininity is passive; that is as the defenceless and the defended, or as the allegory of peace. Moreover, representations of men in wars as defeated or wounded means feminising such figures. Miriam Cooke, in her Women and the War Story, 1996, points out how a mythic war story provides men with political roles, in the politikon or public arena, whereas women are domesticated in the space of the oikon. In the mythic war story women may function as Mater Dolorosa, Patriotic Mother or Spartan Mother. It follows then that there are conditions in which it is permissible to represent women fighting on behalf of their children or in defence of the home, and in the absence of men. These images are also found in wider culture: Sarah Connor in Terminator or Ripley in Alien, for example. Images of the female terrorist raise new issues but I want to argue that it is also the case that discussing femininity and the terrorist must involve relating such imagery to representations of the female warrior over a longer timespan. Some questions have shifted since the late twentieth century. Dating from the early 1990s, most Western nations increasingly incorporated women into combat roles within their armed forces. This paper will aim to unpick some of the intricate connections between the increasing presence of women in the armed forces, what relationship this has to emancipation and the participation of women in violence classed as terrorist.

Missionary children: The French Holy Childhood Association in European context, 1843-c.1914

In the mid-nineteenth century, thousands of children in Europe and beyond were organized into battalions of fundraisers for overseas missions. By the end of the century these juvenile missionary organizations had become a global movement, generating millions of pounds in revenue each year. While the transnational nature of the children’s missions and publications has been well-documented by historians, the focus has tended to be on the connections that were established by encounters between the young western donors, missionaries overseas and the non-western ‘other’ constructed by their work. A full exploration of the European political, social and cultural concerns that produced the juvenile missionaries movement and the trans-European networks that sustained it are currently missing from historical accounts of the phenomenon. This article looks at the largest of these organizations, the Catholic mission for children, the French Holy Childhood Association (L’Œuvre de la sainte enfance), to understand how the principles this mission sought to impose abroad were above all an expression of anxieties at home about the role of religion in the family, childhood and in civil society as western polities were modernizing and secularizing in the nineteenth century.