Faithful Dissent

by Charles E. Curran and The Reverend Father Charles E. Curran

Book Overview

This is an older copy of this book, published in 1986 but it is in excellent condition. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 072203525X
• ISBN13: 9780722035252
• Release Date: January 1987
• Publisher: Continuum
• Length: 290 Pages

Customer Reviews

Men and Women Who Loved and Changed the Catholic Church

In Faithful Dissenters, Robert McClory has done a masterful job of bringing to light and to life the history of "faithful dissent" within the Catholic Church. He accomplishes this by focusing on the fascinating lives of seventeen men and women who were moved to dissent from a prevailing church doctrine or practice of their day, and whose efforts substantially contributed to effecting a significant change in that doctrine or practice. These men and women all shared a deep love for the Catholic Church, and remained faithful members,in the face of rejection and even persecution by church authorities. Sometimes the desired changes took place within the lifetime of the dissenter. John Courtney Murray, a Jesuit theologian who died in 1967, strongly supported religious freedom and the separation of Church and state. During the thirties and forties he was heavily criticized for his writings, and was ultimately silenced in the fifties for his opposition to Vatican doctrine on religious freedom and church-state relations. Before he died, however, his positions on these issues were essentially adopted as church doctrine by Vatican II. Ives Congar, a Dominican theologian who lived during the same period, but whose interest lay in promoting dialogue among the Christian churches also suffered rejection and silencing during the thirties, forties and early fifties, but lived to see his support of ecumenism adopted as church policy by Vatican II. Congar was even named a cardinal of the church shortly before his death. Others dissenters did not live to see the changes they sought for their church happen in their lifetimes. Mary Ward,for example, who lived in England shortly after the Protestant Reformation, sought freedom for women to form religious orders in active service to the poor and the uneducated. (Prior to her time, women religious were required to live in strictly cloistered, contemplative orders.) Without official permission from Rome, Mary founded an order, the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary, that served the poor and uneducated, both in England and on the Continent in the sixteen hundreds. For her trouble, she was formally accused by the Office of the Inquisition of being "a heretic, schismatic, and rebel to the Holy Church" and imprisoned in a Munich prison for an indeterminant term. A hundred and fifty years would pass before her order gained official approval from Rome. In the meantime, however, the door was opened for women to found active orders of religious. An even longer time, of course, elapsed after the death of Galileo before the official Church recognized the freedom he sought for scientific exploration. These and fourteen other stories of men and women who loved and changed the church are told in fascinating detail in Faithful Dissenters. Anyone who is interested in how individuals can effect change within an entrenched institution will want to read this book.