Five contexts conditioned papal relations to enslavement 1500–1800. (1) From Roman times, Christians understood enslavement as morally licit, and Christian thought was necessarily conservative when it came to social action. (2) Centuries of Christian–Muslim military conflict and mutual enslavement in the Mediterranean – and thus religious and not racial concerns – underwrote bulls authorizing Portuguese slaving in Africa. (3) While popes could make recommendations and excommunicate transgressors, the forces of state power and creeping secularism were infinitely greater. Thus, when popes called to cease or modify terms of enslavement, burgeoning capitalist goals often led colonial settlers and individual merchant opportunists to ignore these directives. (4) In Rome, the Papal States, and the early modern Mediterranean, popes employed slaves of various ethnicities to labor throughout their realms. (5) Both at home and overseas, papal will was extended, mediated, and at times altered by a broad universe of agents such as cardinals, nuncios, and missionaries.

Papal ceremonial acted as a language through which the pope and clergy described Catholic identity, history, and moral ideals, establishing a liturgy and ceremonial practice that could be adapted to changing circumstances in Rome and beyond. Topography did not restrict papal ceremonial but enhanced it. Rather than seeing the pope as a prisoner of his ceremonial, as some stereotypes do, this chapter explores papal ceremonial as a language that articulated narratives of authority, responded to crises, and bridged gaps. From late antiquity through the twenty-first century, liturgy, politics, urban administration, and pilgrimage/tourism grew together in cities across the Christian world. As technology has eased communication and travel, the pope has sought more direct ways to speak to Catholics, yet the public maintains an interest in the papacy that grew out of fascination with its premodern ceremonial character.

Building upon the previous themes, the book’s last chapter highlights the development of Spanish imperial cosmopolitanism, which enabled officials and subjects to make sense of and subsume the heterogeneous societies and regions they encountered and think of the world as one coherent unity. This cosmopolitanism was demarcated by imperial rivalries and officials’ self-perception as Catholic soldiers. Their actions and interactions with other people were read through the lenses of their Catholic identity, which also fostered a sense of Spanish exceptionalism. Moreover, most global interactions and imaginings occurred in areas usually deemed "peripheral," expressing the unity and coherence of the polity despite its dispersion and diversity.

The chapter focuses on five disparate exercises of power spanning the global empire: the rebellions of the Araucanians, the Sangleys of Manila in the Philippines, the peasants of Córdoba in Andalusia, the Indians of Oaxaca in New Spain, and the expulsion of the moriscos from the Iberian Peninsula. Different scenarios of opposition to royal authority and their concomitant repression are analyzed to contrast how officials acted and thought, incorporating and rejecting subjects, and to study how the same official could perform in two very distinct circumstances and locales. More importantly, close attention is paid to the circulation of political ideas. Practices of government were transmitted worldwide, as well as the tropes and stereotypes on which royal officials relied for assessing imperial subjects and imposing royal authority on them.

The Introduction begins with a fax which Seamus Heaney sent to Professor Eamon Duffy (Cambridge University) in 2001. The fax was a response to Duffy’s book The Voices of Morebath, in which he tells the story of the desacralising of a small Catholic community during the English Reformation. Heaney’s response to the book draws parallels between the medieval world of Morebath and the world of Mossbawn, where he grew up and which was foundational to his experience of Catholicism and his growth as a poet. I draw attention, in particular, to the centrality of Marian devotion for the parishioners of Morebath and for Heaney as a child. What Heaney’s fax shows is the emotional purchase which Catholicism continued to exert upon him long after he had moved away from adherence to religious orthodoxy or practice. By placing Heaney’s engagement with Catholicism in a broader historical context than has been the case up until now, I show how it operates in ways other than social and political, concluding that Catholicism remains foundational to Heaney’s work at the level of what I call a felt sense.

The phenomenon of ‘Ireland’s spiritual empire’, denoting the influence that Irish churches had on the world through lay and clerical migration in the (very) long nineteenth century, has attracted considerable attention from both contemporary commentators and historians. Yet the converse reality that national churches so embroiled in the global growth of their religions must also have undergone far-reaching changes themselves in the process has been much less studied. Focusing on both Catholic and Protestant churches, this chapter will address a number of modes of religious ‘Americanisation’ that can be detected in Ireland between 1841 and 1925. These will include: the backflow of a ‘cosmopolitan clergy’ who frequently spent long periods in North America and returned to Ireland as potential agents of a religiously inflected Americanisation; the visits of Irish-American and ‘Scotch-Irish’ clergy to Ireland; and the material role that a much-vaunted American religious ‘freedom’ played in the imaginaries of both Catholic and Protestant Irish people, enhanced by both media portrayals and discussion in personal correspondence.

This chapter shows that constitutional intolerance is not only about religion or ethnoreligious identities. Much like ethnic and religious identities, LGBT identities have been subject to the regulation of their visibility in public space. This chapter discusses the anti-genderism of the Law and Justice party in relation to the hyphenation of Polish-Catholic identity and the historical role of the Catholic Church in promoting Polish independence, as well as the instrumentalisation thereof towards political polarisation in its domestic and European context. This chapter does not focus on the toolkit of illiberalism per se, but on the pseudo-constitutional anti-LGBT resolutions, declarations, and Family Charters targeting LGBT identities. A collaboration between the Law and Justice party and a think-tank called the Ordo Iuris Institute accounts for the first wave of this backlash, which invoked the constitution and legal language to allude to a semblance of constitutionalism.

Hopkins centred his life on the Gospel and the Incarnation from the time of his conversion to Catholicism in 1866 onwards, and the exposition of the faith in the Mass became his life’s central activity when he joined the Jesuits in 1868. His sermons deserve to be read as ardent yet stylish examples of the genre as well as for their relevance to Hopkins as poet and to Hopkins as original thinker. This chapter examines the liturgical context of the sermons and ways in which they relate to the context of Victorian preaching and Jesuit homiletics. Hopkins’s sometimes baroque preaching style was not always orthodox, running counter to the simple language advised by Jesuit preaching manuals. In the texts of his sermons, it is nevertheless possible to find moving autobiographical testimony to Hopkins’s psycho-spiritual struggles, as well as his desire to empathize with his congregants’ lives and work.

This chapter covers regional loyalties and religious institutions, focusing on the Kulturkampf, the state’s attack on Catholicism.

Chapter 4 examines in detail a Christian crusade called Rwanda Shima Imana or Rwanda Thanksgiving Day. It explores the controversies that arose from it, in particular a conflict between a well-known Pentecostal pastor and the Catholic singer Kizito Mihigo. The conflict was in part about power: who has the right, ability, and authority to interpret the Bible and, by extension, Rwanda’s history and collective memory. This chapter also complicates the process of transformation, as some hearts were considered unable to transform, a situation which was often related to ethnic identity.

Take a broad look at American family and friendhip ntworks, examining marriage, child-rearing, and other family and personal relations among the consuls and members of the American community in the Mediterranean.

The work of modernist poet and visual artist David Jones provides a retrospective vantage of the central claims of Liturgy, Ritual, and Secularization in Nineteenth-Century British Literature. Jones saw the nineteenth century as a moment of breakage with the past. This rupture, according to Jones, threatens the work of the artist by depleting the sacramental meaning of reality – that is, the ability of concrete things to signify unseen spiritual depths. In both a dramatic biographical encounter with the Mass during his time on the front lines of World War I and in his subsequent art and poetry, Jones turns to liturgical forms to confront the breakage that began in the nineteenth century. Viewed from Jones’s perspective, the Romantic and Victorian interest in liturgy takes on new significance for the overarching genealogy of modernity and secularization. These liturgical fascinations intervene in – and resist – the long story of modernity’s separation of the material and spiritual, the natural and supernatural.

Walter Pater also anticipates Oscar Wilde’s liturgical moves. Pater depicts Marius the Epicurean as a liturgical subject – that is, Marius relishes the forms of liturgy and yet those forms do not become rigid structures but rather gateways into mystery. Wilde pushes this liturgical subjectivity still further. For him, the porosity of the liturgical subject leads to a full-blown liturgical constructivism: If the self remains open before the mystery of ever further aesthetic experience, then perhaps all things – not just the human self – are malleable. In his critical writings, Wilde denounces the mechanistically closed world of the realist novel, which he sees as slavishly imitating nature. By contrast, Wilde argues that art can reshape nature. Liturgical language and ritual action especially reveal how words remake reality: The priest’s Words of Institution and the drama of the Mass transform – even transubstantiate – the bread and wine. As it did for Wordsworth, liturgy helps Wilde imagine nature not as self-enclosed but rather as participating in a higher, transcendent reality.

This chapter explores Kerouac’s rich understanding of literary history as manifested in his Duluoz Legend, focusing in particular on two mechanisms by which this understanding turns up in his work. The first mechanism was his deep desire to seek and speak the truth, as he wrestled with his need to lead a godly life, a product of his Catholic upbringing, while simultaneously recognizing the almost requisite demand that a great novelist experience the darkness of the human soul. The second is the confession, which was not the legal confession of a court room or the spiritual confession of the church, but the broader truth of any human being who follows a path to forgiveness and wholeness by repeatedly purging themselves of sin, guilt, or embarrassment. Kerouac consistently worked truth and confession together – often to the dismay of some readers – twinning and twining them as he grappled with his spiritual and bodily identity as an American writer living in two conflicting Americas, the “the essential and everlasting America” of the ethereal beauty and mysticism, and the post–World War II triumphalist America of materialism and militarization.