How have archives and archival practices shaped the writing of Catholic histories? Collectively, these scholars foreground their engagement with an array of archival documents or types of archives while also remaining attuned to ways historiographies have ignored religious aspects of archival sources. In highlighting both well-used and understudied archives, these papers showcase a variety of practices of finding “Catholic lives” in the archives across the globe. Uncovered here are overlooked records about Catholics under communist rule in Hungary; a 19th century religious confraternity in the Philippines that historiographies have routinely designated a “political” entity; and an unstudied Vatican collection of letters in which lay people expressed personal views about Vatican II reforms.
This paper examines three understudied archives of lay Catholic devotional life in 20th-century Hungary that challenge narratives of religious “privatization” under communism and raise theoretical questions about how archives capture religious life and the extent to which archiving practices can make visible or shield certain kinds of religious life from view. These archives, collections of prayer books, petitionary prayers, and ex votos, are often seen as irrelevant to larger questions of community and politics, but this paper shows how, taken together, a greater story emerges from them, one of lay Catholics living, praying, and moving together in order to enact a religio-political vision that takes Hungary to be, rightfully, Mary’s country. Ultimately, these archives reveal a complex vision of Hungarian futures that emerges not in state archives or institutional repositories but in the very cracks between church and state.
The Cofradía de San José, a pious association of lay Catholics in the colonial Philippines, was violently crushed by the Spanish state in 1841. This uprising is a standard event in Philippine history textbooks and the subject of a small but influential body of scholarly literature on Philippine religious movements. However, none of this work considers the history or significance of the confraternity form itself. Meanwhile, confraternities in Europe and Latin America have been the subject of extensive scholarly discussion, yet Philippine confraternities have been almost completely ignored in this literature. This paper is the first to interpret the Cofradía de San José as a confraternity, the most prominent organizational form in the early modern Catholic world. It attempts to fill gaps in literature on both Philippine Catholicism and early modern confraternities, and to consider the significance of this uprising in the context of global Catholicism’s turbulent entrance to modernity.
Despite increased scrutiny of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, abuse of Catholic women religious (CWR) remains under‑researched and under-acknowledged in existing histories. In 19th‑century Australia, CWR ministered amid sectarian hostility and imperial surveillance. In this climate, mere suggestions of impropriety were treated by church leaders as threats to ecclesial legitimacy. Anti‑Catholic publications spread sensationalised stories of clerical misconduct, while CWR were simultaneously targeted with rumours of sexual impropriety. This paper challenges the interpretation that indictments of CWR were sole products of sectarianism. It analyses key case studies, via archival records employing the hermeneutics of epistemic injustice to examine how sexualised gossip and defamatory accusations operated. It argues that many allegations involving CWR were strategically circulated by priests and bishops to undermine rival clerics, amplified by sectarian dynamics. The paper finds that CWR were subjected to direct sexualised abuse and secondary harms as collateral targets of ecclesial power struggles.
Based on personal correspondence sent by lay Catholics to their bishops and lay non-Christian to the Vatican, at the occasion of the council debates on other religions, this paper looks through the many self-definitions given to one's Catholic identity or to what Catholicity means in the eyes of others.
These unsolicited pieces challenged the role initially assigned to laity. As intimate sources, private correspondence conveys how individuals reflect on, stand for, mediate their faith to a representative of the Church authority. It epitomizes both ongoing ecclesiological changes and the globalization of debates, as spaces for discussion remultiply. Reclaiming agency for protagonists on the margins, it also raises issues of method: what representativeness for a mass of unrelated one-time letters, written by happy few? Why their study is nonetheless essential?