#The Catholic Church

[racefortheironthrone]

Having just recently attended a "shotgun wedding" myself, just curious in the Medieval Ages did it matter for inheritance for royals or high nobility if it was clear the precious little heir-to-be was obviously conceived before the wedding ceremony?

That's an excellent question!

The medieval Catholic Church often gets a bad rap on matters of marriage and sexuality, but the historical record often shows them to be more moderate and reasonable (if still profoundly premodern and often quite weird) than their reputation would suggest.

Specifically on the topic of bastardy, the medieval Catholic Church was not nearly as harsh and unforgiving in its canon law as the Westerosi. The Church's attitude was that, while sex out of wedlock was a sin, it was a sin that belonged to the parents and not to the child, so punishing the child would be unjust.

So what about the in-between area of a bride-to-be with a premarital pregnancy? Well, as far as canon law is concerned, a true shotgun wedding wouldn't be valid because the consent of the people getting married has been coerced - and to their credit, the medieval Catholic Church really cared about consent in marriage to the extent possible in a patriarchal society where marriage alliances were absolutely central to the acquisition and transfer of landed property and political power.

However, if the couple was just merely enthusiastic about their engagement and genuinely consented to be married, premarital pregnancy is not considered a canonical impediment to marriage and the marriage would be considered valid.

Likewise, because the Catholic Church saw it as its mission to encourage marriage and birth within wedlock and that punishing a child for the sins of the father was unjust, the Church was (and is) pretty liberal in how it treats the legitimacy of children. So for example, a child born but not concieved in wedlock is considered legitimate in canon law and thus would be entitled to baptism, confirmation, marriage, and other sacraments and would be treated like any other legitimate child in so far as their inheritance rights were concerned.

[shinobicyrus]

Reblog if you're a threat to humanity.

[coochiequeens]

If the Catholic Church was going to allow men who identify as women into a woman only college would they eventually allow women who identified as men into thepriesthood? No because the they have too many centuries worth of traditions based on biological sex.

INDIANA

Catholic women's college in Indiana reverses policy change allowing applicants who ‘identify as women’

Saint Mary's College president wrote, 'We lost people’s trust and unintentionally created division where we had hoped for unity... For this, we are deeply sorry'

Published December 21, 2023 7:38pm EST

Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana, reversed a recent decision to allow biological males to attend the university if they have a history of identifying as a woman.

Last month, President Katie Conboy told the faculty about the policy change in an email obtained by Fox News Digital.

"Saint Mary’s will consider undergraduate applicants whose sex assigned at birth is female or who consistently live and identify as women," Conboy emailed.

The school’s policy change drew harsh criticism from people like Fort Wayne-South Bend Bishop Kevin Rhoades, who reportedly urged the school to reverse course because the policy went against Catholic teachings.

On Wednesday, Conboy and the chair of the school’s board of trustees, Maureen Smith, emailed the Saint Mary's College community saying the school would return to its previous admission policy.

"When the board approved this update, we viewed it as a reflection of our college’s commitment to live our Catholic values as a loving and just community," the letter read. "We believed it affirmed our identity as an inclusive, Catholic, women’s college."

The two acknowledged in the letter that not all members of the community took the same position, with some worried it was more than a policy decision. Instead, some saw the move as "a dilution" of the school’s mission or even a threat to the school’s Catholic identity.

"As this last month unfolded, we lost people’s trust and unintentionally created division where we had hoped for unity," the letter read. "For this, we are deeply sorry.

"Taking all these factors into consideration, the Board has decided that we will return to our previous admission policy," the president and chairperson added.

The school was opened by four Sisters of the Holy Cross in 1844.

Earlier this year, Pope Francis told journalist Elisabetta Piqué for the Argentine daily newspaper La Nación, that "Gender ideology, today, is one of the most dangerous ideological colonizations."

"Why is it dangerous? Because it blurs differences and the value of men and women," he added.

He also noted that there is a major difference between caring for people who identify as transgender versus actually endorsing their values, noting the contrast "between what pastoral care is for people who have a different sexual orientation and what gender ideology is."

Fox News Digital's Alexander Hall contributed to this report.

I can't believe that not only am I posting from Fox, I still refuse to call it news, and agreeing with the Pope

If the Catholic Chuch wants to be inclusive in a meaningful way they can continue to provide shelter to speak up for refugees in Palestine and other war torn reigns

[the-gayestidiot]

Hi my question is should I be gay for the bit

like it would be so funny if the Catholic Church was gay

but I’m not irl and I don’t want to like

misrepresent y’all

Go ahead, I think it's a good idea! :D

[ausetkmt]

Dum Diversas or how the Catholic Church created slavery for its funding

Many people don't understand the direct connection between the Catholic church and slavery. what we all need to know is that dum(b) diversas was never intended to rule the world. just create unlimited fundage for a select group of privileged Europeans.

The very fact that you think you should be paid for something simply because you discovered it was there; even though it was there all the time - is absolute nonsense

[fretbored34]

Don't forget the priests 😬

[doylewesleywalls]

[notwhatiam]

Both of my two favorite pieces of media now include an element of “fuck around with the Catholic Church” 🤔

[jameslmartello]

Not Woke, but Catholic.

#livingdivinemercy #frchrisalar #socialjustice #jesus #marx #nietzsche" on YouTube

[mysticalblizzardcolor]

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A post shared by ॐ Most Enlightening Knowledgeॐ (@golokavrindavana)

God is ONE

Yesterday I had a conversation with a Catholic woman. After discussing Hare Krishna and Christianity, she asked me "which is the true God?" I answered that God is the true God. What other answer is there?

[thoughtportal]

The final Magdalene Laundry was shut down in 1996. As The Woman in the Wall notes, these are a more modern injustice than some viewers may realise.

Series creator Joe Murtagh added: "Outside of Ireland, in my experience, this isn't really known about, and with the people who do tend to know about it, it's because they've seen films including the Magdalene Sisters or Philomena.

"When you read into it, you see how harrowing it was, the scale of it, and how many tens of thousands of lives it's touched. It was a bit of history that interested me and engaged me emotionally, but the driving factor was just people not knowing about it enough."

[blueiscoool]

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The Simpsons

The Catholic Church. We've made a Few... Changes!

'The power of Christ compels you!!'

'The time for talk has passed. The Lord's work must be done.'

'Prayers through the front door deliveries through the back.'

[mitigatingchaos]

On The Church

“The Church is dying because Her pastors are afraid to speak in all truth and clarity. We are afraid of the media, afraid of public opinion, afraid of our own brethren! The good shepherd gives his life for his sheep” –Robert Cardinal Sarah, (one of the good ones.) Thanks to Bradley Bardon for sharing this. As a casual student of theology and different churches, it is my observation that the…

[coochiequeens]

An older article but worth sharing in light of an overrated white man who thinks his opinion means something because he's good at sports

By Kate Stringer March 25, 2018

March is National Women’s History Month. In recognition, The 74 is sharing stories of remarkable women who transformed U.S. education.

A self-described young, stuttering child, Joe Biden credits a group of women for building his confidence and giving him 12 years of education that would lead him to become vice president of the United States. “You have no idea of the impact that you have on others,” Biden told a group of Catholic nuns on a social justice tour of the United States in 2014.

Biden is just one of millions of Americans, many of them underprivileged, educated in Catholic schools, a system that would have been impossible if not for the generations of dedicated religious female educators. Working for very low wages, these women changed lives, moving large immigrant communities into the middle class and — though too often given short shrift by the male-dominated Catholic Church — opened doors to higher education for women.

“Teaching is a critical part of the sisters’ mission of education because we believe, in short, that education can save the world,” said Sister Teresa Maya, president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious. “It empowers people, it broadens horizons, it deepens values, it engages conversation between faith and culture.”

Catholic schooling in the U.S. dates back as far as the early 1600s, as priests and nuns arrived in the colonies and established schools, orphanages, and hospitals. John Carroll — elected the first U.S. bishop in 1789 — pushed for religious schools to educate American Catholic children living in a predominantly Protestant country. As priests and brothers began creating schools for boys, it was left to the nuns to teach girls.

Elizabeth Ann Seton, recognized in the Catholic Church as the first native-born U.S. saint, started the Sisters of Charity, an order that opened separate parochial schools for families of poor and wealthy girls, in the early 1800s. Some consider these the first Catholic parochial schools in the U.S.

By the middle of the century, Catholics from Ireland, Italy, and Poland began immigrating to the United States and swelling the ranks of local churches, and in the early 1900s, bishops called for every parish to educate its children — a response to widespread anti-Catholic sentiment, a need to help Americanize the new arrivals, and a desire for an alternative to public schools where children prayed the Protestant version of the Lord’s Prayer and read the King James version of the Bible.

Most of this work was carried out by the nuns, who took vows of poverty and could teach children for very low wages.

“Without the nuns, you could not have had the parochial school system that this country has had,” said Maggie McGuinness, professor of religion at La Salle University.

Catholic schools were also invaluable in alleviating overcrowded public schools as populations surged in major cities, and giving immigrants a boost up the economic ladder, said Ann Marie Ryan, associate professor of education at Loyola University Chicago.

“(The nuns) moved entire groups of people into the middle class, which is a substantial feat in and of itself,” she said.

Still, anti-Catholic sentiment proved pervasive. As Catholic groups tried to obtain public funding for their schools in the late 1800s, states began passing Blaine amendments, which restricted state legislatures from using funds for religious schools. Today, 37 states have these laws.

Oregon even instituted a law, backed by the Ku Klux Klan, that prohibited students from attending Catholic school. The U.S. Supreme Court struck this down in Pierce vs. The Society of Sisters in 1925.

As the sisters fought for their students’ rights to be educated in Catholic schools, they also found themselves fighting against the church patriarchy for their own pursuit of higher education. As Ryan wrote, “The Catholic Church’s hierarchy in the USA was worried about the movement toward increased independence for women in this era.” To fill a need for higher education among Catholic-educated girls, more nuns began seeking Ph.D.s so they could lead Catholic colleges for women. But this pursuit of independence didn’t sit well with their governing bishops, and they pushed back.

For example, in the 1930s and ’40s, the archdiocesan board of Chicago mandated that nuns could not travel outside a convent or school without being accompanied by another woman, and even went so far as to tell the president of a neighboring college that nuns should not show up to their classes without a female companion. They were also not to go outside after sunset.

Mission statements of all-girls Catholic schools reflected the sisters’ challenge of balancing what the church considered the natural role of women with many young women’s desires for independence, Ryan wrote. When the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary established Mundelein College in 1930 in Chicago, they crafted goals that showed these dual perspectives: “(Mundelein education is) practical, preparing the student for successful achievement in the economic world,” but also “conservative, holding fast to the time-honored traditions that go to the fashioning of charming and gracious womanhood.”

“(The nuns) highlighted and equally lauded their graduates’ choices to marry, seek employment, enter a religious community, or attend college,” Ryan wrote.

In her research, Ryan found Catholic high school yearbooks that revealed what this opportunity meant to young women. At Chicago’s Catholic Mercy High School in 1927, the students published quotes from Tennyson’s poem The Princess: “Here might we learn whatever men are taught…knowledge is now no more a fountain sealed.” Sixty percent of Mercy’s graduates around this time attended college (nationally, female enrollment in higher education was 44 percent).

At a time when women were barred from many universities, nuns became their advocates. Catholic sisters established 150 religious colleges for women in the United States, starting in the late 1800s. Before coeducation of men and women became the norm, more women were earning degrees from Catholic colleges than those run by other religious groups, according to The Boston Globe. And the nuns’ own pursuit of higher education broke glass ceilings: The first woman to obtain a Ph.D. in computer science was a nun: Sister Mary Kenneth Keller, in 1965.

“They were role models,” McGuinness said. “If you went to Trinity University in D.C. in 1897 and had teachers who had doctorates, maybe you think, ‘I could do that, too.’”

Maya certainly experienced that when an older nun, Sister Rosa Maria Icaza, told her what she had to go through to earn her doctorate from Catholic University. Because enrollment was limited to men, the nun had to sit outside the classroom, near the door, rather than inside with her male classmates. “I thought, ‘Thanks to a woman like this, I could get a Ph.D.,’” Maya said.

Today, however, the number of religious leaders in the Catholic Church is declining, including nuns. From 1965 to 2017, the number of sisters decreased from 179,000 to 45,000, according to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate. And even in the face of this decline, the women who join the religious life are still finding themselves under fire from within their own church. As recently as 2012, American nuns were accused by the Vatican for being radical feminists.

The loss of nuns as a teaching force is one reason running Catholic schools is more financially challenging than ever before, Maya said. Catholic school enrollment peaked in the 1960s and has dropped significantly since then. In 1965, about 5 million children attended Catholic elementary and secondary schools. In 2017, enrollment was just under 2 million. The number of Catholic schools was cut in half, from 11,000 to 6,000, during that same time period.

Catholic schools today have been experimenting with different business models to survive, from the Cristo Rey schools that utilize student work study to help pay for tuition to Philadelphia Catholic schools that have been using tax-credit scholarships and voucher programs to pay tuition for poor families.

And their students no longer come primarily from their local church — many see Catholic schools as a better alternative to poor-performing urban schools. “In many major cities, Catholic schools are a parent’s best hope for both Catholic and non-Catholic kids,” McGuinness said.

Maya said she is proud of the work Catholic schools are continuing to do to reach the children who need it most.

“The sisters were always teaching the populations in the margins,” Maya said. Without these women, “I don’t think the U.S. Catholic education system would exist the way we know it.”

[cantquitu]

Podcast recommendation: I never do this, but I recommend listening to anything by Connie Walker. She's a journalist from the Okanese First Nation in Saskatchewan, working originally with CBC and now Gimlet Media. Her podcasts focus on Indigenous stories.

I've listened to everything I can find of hers over the past few years. The stories she chooses to illuminate, and how she blends investigative reporting with a personal perspective, make for really gripping and moving podcasts. So when she won a Pulitzer and a Peabody last week, I felt personally invested and proud!

She won for Stolen: Surviving St Michael's, about the abuse suffered by her family and generations of Indigenous children in Canada's residential schools at the hands of the Catholic Church in collusion with the Canadian government.

As an Irish person, the horror of the residential schools is depressingly familiar, but coupled with the racism and cultural genocide suffered by Indigenous kids in Canada, it's almost too much to bear. That's what's so amazing about this podcast - despite the unbearable subject matter, you feel you have to listen, and there's hope there.

Anyway, this is a random post but I felt so glad to hear that Connie Walker's work and her family's story is being recognised!

[lildoodlenoodle]

The priest forgot to bring holy water to a grave site and just took my sisters half drank water bottle to use instead.