Patrizio Foresta

Pope Pius XI canonized the Dutch Jesuit Peter Canisius on 21 May 1925 and proclaimed him as "Germany's second apostle." This canonisation occurred during a sensitive and controversial period in modern Church history, justafter the First World War and just before the ascendancy of totalitarian systems throughout Europe. Interestingly, the Italian historian Francesco Malgeri had put into relation the Quas primas and the idea of a "Catholic totalitarianism," which is at the same time a suggestive but problematic interpretation of Pius XI's pontificate.

With his encyclical Quas primas issued on the 11 t h of December, 1925, Pio XI instituted the Feast of Jesus Christ the King, with which he sought to emphasize the absolute sovereignty of Jesus Christ at the same time as condemning Western Society's movement away from official Catholic doctrine. The monograph by Joosten under consideration here analyzes the emergence, the liturgical content and the political implications of this papal decree from a long term perspective, spanning the period from the end of the 19 t h century to the second Vatican Council.

Over the past three decades there has been a remarkable increase in historiographical interest in the Society of Jesus. Particularly in France and Italy during the 80s and 90s, many historians contributed to a fundamental re-examination of the way in which Jesuit history had previously been viewed, thus overcoming the tendency towards apology or controversy that had been typical of many traditional articles on the topic. However, precisely because of this openness to recent historiographical approaches, Jesuits have sometimes been considered not so much as a subject of research in themselves but more as a kind of research laboratory and a tool for providing an adequate answer to the questions of modernity. On the other hand, the question of whether the Jesuits can actually provide a matrix for interpreting modernity – with all its implications – has not always been asked. This article aims to address these issues, which have emerged in international scientific debate, firstly through analysis of the Jesuit concept of obedience as it occurs in some basic texts of the Society of Jesus, and secondly by examining the role played by obedience within the pastoral and institutional strategies of the Order.

This article examines interdependence between the process of European expansion in the New World and confessional conflicts in the Old. It is within this context that two of the most important early Jesuits worked: Francis Xavier and Peter Canisius. Moreover, the article investigates the formation of a heuristic structure by which the increase of Catholicism within the New World was considered as a type of compensation for the loss of so many faithful in the Old. In both considerations, the author raises a central problem of the historiography of the missions: its frequent Eurocentrism.

This article will explore what might be called the transregional scope and outreach of early modern Reformed synods in a theological as well as ecclesial sense, examining some very few but important moments between the sixteenth and seventeenth century that marked a turning point in the history of the European Reformed Churches and show some particular aspects of the constitutive link between synods and consensus. A transregional level implies a methodological shift towards a more complex and many-sided view of synods, according to which a supposedly unyielding and confessionally adamant institution was affected by the social, geographical, cultural, theological and political stratifications within a wide range of mediating factors and conditions: different local Churches were linked together and crossed the political and ecclesiastical borders through the channels along which persons and ideas passed from region to region, thus creating a mutual exchange through which political, institutional and theological communication took place.

The contribution analyzes how the Catholic culture and mentality, especially those of the Bavarian episcopate, faced the fall of the German Reich, the outbreak of the so called November Revolution and the establishment of the Conciliar Republic in the aftermath of the Great War. It outlines the role played by the Catholic hierarchy within the relationship between the Church and the Bavarian society analyzing the religious, social and political message of the pastoral letter the Episcopal Conference of Bavaria addressed to both clergy and laity in October 1919 that drew its inspiration from the encyclical In hac tanta, dedicated to the 1200th anniversary of saint Boniface’s apostolate to the Germans.

The paper examines a peculiar form of religious and ecclesiastical topography, namely the synodal one, which of course has a very rich past within all Christian Churches. The paper 1. treats the Waldensian synod of Chanforan of 1532 and the Anabaptist synod of Venice of 1550, 2. evaluates their place in the history and, of course, in the topography of the Italian and European Reformation, and 3. vindicates their importance for the synodal history of the European Reformation through their introduction into the critical edition Conciliorum Oecumenicorum Generaliumque Decreta.

The paper analyzes one of the arguments used in the political communication of the time, that of a «general, free and Christian council», to which the Protestant estates repeatedly appealed following Luther’s example; the council was seen as a legal and political means to legitimate the possible resistance of the Protestant estates to the Habsburg and their Catholic allies. The future council became thus a last judicial authority, grounded in the natural right of self-defense and in the legal tradition of the Middle Ages.

Nach dem Auftreten der Reformation und besonders nach der Verhärtung der konfessionellen Fronten im Anschluss an den Augsburger Reichstag 1555 wurden die Territorien des Alten Reichs in den Augen vieler Zeitgenossen das Haupteinsatzfeld der so genannten katholischen Reform und Gegenreformation bzw. des frühneuzeitlichen Katholizismus. Dies galt auch für diejenigen Jesuiten, die bereits ab 1540-1541 in Deutschland eingesetzt worden waren. Ihnen trat eine Situation entgegen, die wegen der extremen Vielfalt der religiösen, politischen und sozialen Gegebenheiten sehr schwer zu bewältigen war und worauf sie anfangs unvorbereitet waren. Das war der Hauptgrund, weswegen sie ein möglichst breites Spektrum an Strategien entwickeln mussten, welche die vor ihnen stehenden religionspolitischen Fragen hätten lösen können. Die Jesuiten erkannten in der Erfüllung ihrer Aufgaben den apostolischen, i. e. den heilsgeschichtlichen und zugleich seelsorglichen Charakter ihrer Societas Jesu. Er wurde in der Natur und Berufung des Ordens in dem Maße gesehen, wie sich die Patres selbst als »Apostel« wahrnahmen. In diesem Zusammenhang wird das Selbst- und Apostolatsverständnis des Jesuiten Petrus Canisius (1521-1597) und derjenigen Patres (unter anderen Jerónimo Claude Jay, Pierre Favre, Alfonso Salmerón, Nicolas Bobadilla, Paul Hoffaeus), die als erste nach Deutschland gesandt wurden, dort tätig waren und die Anfangsjahre der deutschen Ordensprovinzen prägten, unter besonderer Berücksichtigung ihres Verhältnisses zur Obrigkeit untersucht.