In late nineteenth-century Rome the synergies and contrasts between past and present, antiquity and the Bible, were vexed. Occasionally, the tensions spawned by these dualities erupted on to the surface of the city as material excrescence. Perhaps the most conspicuous manifestation of this was architecture. The case of St Paul’s Within-the-Walls – the spectacular High Victorian church designed for the American Episcopal Church in Rome by the famous English architect George Edmund Street – is a prime example. The church’s incumbent, the Rev. Robert Jenkins Nevin, sought to mark the building as a symbol of liberty and modernity in what he and his congregation perceived as the ancient corruptions of Papal Rome. Themes concerning history, religious politics, architecture, and the city were marshalled and mingled in an effort to make plain the distinction between conservative and progressive culture in the ‘new’ Italy. In this contested milieu the historic figure of St Paul was appealed to as a precursor to the inherent liberalism of bible-oriented Protestantism, with the religious liberty it enshrined posited as the only possible future for religious order. This essay explores these themes and their concomitant tensions and contradictions through the politics surrounding Nevin’s vision for this landmark building in the city of ‘Popes and Caesars’.

The Politics of Religious Party Change addresses the timely question of ideological change and secularization of religious political parties and asks, when and why do religious parties become less anti-system? In a comparative analysis, this book traces the striking similarities in the historical origins of Islamist and Catholic parties in the Middle East and Western Europe, chronicles their conflicts with existing religious authorities, and analyzes the subsequently divergent trajectories of Islamist and Catholic parties. Religious parties are embedded in distinct religious institutional structures that shape their actions as they chart their paths in electoral politics. Counterintuitively, the book finds that centralized and hierarchical religious authority structures – such as the Vatican – incentivize religious parties to move in a more pro-system, secular, and democratic direction. By contrast, less centralized religious authority structures such as in Sunni Islam create a more permissive environment for religious parties to operate as anti-system parties hostile to democracy and secularism.

Religion and politics are connected. They have been used at various times to promote ethnic sentiments and provincial agendas, all of which end up tearing apart the country's economy and political stability. Religion remains a vibrant tool for political manipulation and the mobilization of electorates. The chapter argues that politics must not be over-determined by religion if the country wants to live in peace and develop.

Chapter 1 examines recruitment, looking at questions surrounding a postulant’s choice of convent and how they managed to travel there. The very foundation of each exile convent was based on national identity: these were, after all, English convents. Yet this insistence on Englishness did not only emanate from the women religious themselves but was fundamental to their gaining permission to establish convents in the first place. Nevertheless, it is argued that particular religious identities affected the process of joining a convent. It takes as its case study convent recruitment from the county of Essex to argue that women chose particular convents based on an interplay between home and abroad, as well as clerical and familial patronage. It highlights the effect of one clerical movement – the Jesuits – on convent recruitment patterns, yet these issues of competing spiritualities were not, despite first appearances, solely products of particular national contexts but part of wider developments in Catholic Europe. They show the formation of the English convents as part of the European – and even global – Catholic Reformation rather than presenting them as isolated national enclaves.