Browsing by Subject "Catholic Church"
Now showing 1 - 13 of 13
Results Per Page
Sort Options
Item Building opportunity : disaster response and recovery after the 1773 earthquake in Antigua Guatemala(2013-08) Pajon, Mauricio A.; Deans-Smith, Susan, 1953-Building Opportunity centers on disaster response and recovery after a 7.5-magnitude earthquake destroyed the city of Antigua Guatemala, the capital of colonial Guatemala, on July 29, 1773. It also concentrates on the colonial government’s decision to relocate Antigua Guatemala and establish a new capital, New Guatemala. This dissertation examines how the cultural, economic, political, and social views of inhabitants -- bureaucrats, clerics, Indians, architects, and the poor -- shaped their reactions to the tremor. Furthermore, it contends that the migration from Antigua Guatemala to New Guatemala created socioeconomic opportunities through which individuals made strong efforts to rebuild their lives. Debates on natural catastrophe in colonial Latin America have emphasized the ability of calamity to ignite power struggles over competing ideas about emergency management. However, in addition to an analysis of such disputes, this dissertation advances new understandings of the ways in which the earthquake gave victims chances to reshape their world. How did individuals' beliefs influence their attitudes toward the cataclysm? How did the effort to create a new city forge openings for survivors to refashion their identities? This study shows that individual groups' notions of fear, hazard mitigation, history, and socioeconomics defined arguments about whether or not to move. It also demonstrates that the tragedy produced spaces in which officials, ecclesiastics, indigenous peoples, and the impoverished worked to improve their lives. In various ways, administrators and victims turned adversity into an opportunity to become disaster managers and survivors, respectively.Item Built upon the Tower of Babel : language policy and the clergy in Bourbon Mexico(2016-05) Zakaib, Susan Blue; Deans-Smith, Susan, 1953-; Twinam, Ann; Butler, Matthew; Garrard-Burnett, Virginia; McDonough, KellyThis dissertation provides the first in-depth analysis of the “Bourbon language reforms”—a series of royal and ecclesiastical policies aimed at spreading the Spanish language in New Spain (now Mexico), enacted primarily between the 1750s and 1770s under the rule of the Bourbon dynasty. The limited scholarship on these reforms has assumed that a monolithic Bourbon state sought to mold a monolingual, Spanish-speaking empire. It has also suggested that creoles (American-born Spaniards), mendicants (Franciscan, Dominican and Augustinian friars), indigenous peoples, or some combination thereof responded by uniformly opposing the Bourbon state’s oppressive measures. I challenge both of these arguments by analyzing the central Mexican Catholic Church’s “language regime”—not only official policies, but also their historical context, and predominant ideologies about indigenous languages and their speakers—between 1700 and 1821. I demonstrate that indigenous languages were deeply integrated into the inner workings of the Church—not only its religious services, but also its bureaucracy and hierarchy. Native language competency helped to determine clerics’ career paths, forge socioeconomic hierarchies within the Church, and shape political disputes between warring royal and ecclesiastical factions. This key role of native languages in the Church helped induce the Bourbon language reforms. In spite of the reform effort, however, native languages continued to play a critical role in ecclesiastical administration through the end of the colonial period. This was due in large part to the fact that the Bourbon state did not seek uniformly to eradicate these languages; indeed, royal and ecclesiastical authorities could not even agree on precisely what their language policy should entail. Few priests (creole or not) felt the need to resist a reform effort that was contradictory, piecemeal, and of limited consequence for the Church. Contrary to many scholars’ assumptions, these findings indicate that modern Mexico’s linguistic inequality is not a persistent vestige of colonial policy. Instead, 18th-century language policy was only an early step in a centuries-long process leading to today’s particular brand of linguistic discrimination.Item The Chilean Catholic Church and the social question : changes and continuities in Catholic thought in Chile, 1891-1935(2010-12) Sanchez Manriquez, Karin Andrea; Garrard-Burnett, Virginia, 1957-; Butler, MatthewThe goal of this report is to analyze what was going on about Catholic social teaching in Chile between 1891 and 1935, having as milestones the two main Encyclical about the Social Question, Rerum Novarum (1891) and Quadragesimo Anno (1931). This study will explore and analyze the lives and thoughts of four Chilean priests who were deeply concerned with the Social Question: Mariano Casanova (1833-1908), Archbishop of Santiago between 1886 and 1908; Juan Ignacio González (1844-1918), Archbishop of Santiago between 1908 and 1918; Martín Rücker (1867-1935), Bishop of Chillán between 1923 and 1935; and the Jesuit Fernando Vives (1871-1935), who, although he was never appointed to a higher level of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, had a polemical role in public opinion about the Social question that cost him two long exiles. The argument of this report is that between 1891 and 1935 the Chilean Catholic thought about the Social Question had changes and continuities. Among the first, there are the change of the focus of catholic action from charity to justice, or about the role of the State. The permanencies had to do with the traditional concept that the Catholic Church held, despite its efforts for having a more active role in the modern world. The main examples are the paternalistic attitude towards the workers and the consequent rejection of social mobility. The condition of the poor could be improved, but they always, and their children, would belong to the working class. It was a hierarchical vision of a class society. This contradiction, finally, explains why one of the main purposes of the Catholic social teaching did not succeed: stopping the spread of socialism. Even more, although it had an active goal about the Social Question, the Catholic Church could not stop secularization either.Item The Cristero Rebellion : ideologies of revolutionary Mexico versus Catholic Mexico(2007-05) Luna, Sergio S.; Garrard-Burnett, Virginia, 1957-"In a country 96% Catholic, how can one speak of a religious war?" The purpose of this thesis is to prove that the Cristero Rebellion, fought in Mexico between the years 1926 and 1929, was exactly that - a religious war. Using primary and secondary sources, I will make clear how anti-Catholicism and anti-clericalism was used by the political and military elite in the Revolutionary government to attempt to remove, once and for all, the power and influence of the Catholic Church in Mexico, despite the religious devotion of those who supported it. I will also examine how religiosity, and the concept of martyrdom, was ingrained in the Cristeros and their supporters, and how these notions affected their decisions to fight and die for Cristo Rey.Item Educating Lyon’s poor : children, charity, and commerce in the seventeenth century(2011-05) Gossard, Julia Morrow; Hardwick, Julie, 1962-; Frazier, AlisonThough the establishment of educational institutions is not necessarily surprising in Counter Reformation France as the church was obliged to foster education, what was innovative about Lyon’s écoles de charité is that “professional education” was stressed alongside Catholic doctrine in the seventeenth century. Catering to Lyon’s poor youth, these schools taught proper Catholic comportment, reading, writing, counting, and the acquisition of craft skills. Official and unofficial records reveal the charity schools’ daily practices and pedagogical exercises as well as the goals of the state, church, and local elite in fostering and supporting these institutions. The schools molded children into “moral, productive workers and faithful subjects” who could act as agents of the state, church, and community. Students had the responsibility of “elevating the morality, Christianity, and education” of their families, improving the “lower sorts” literally from the bottom-up. This thesis also addresses parents’ incentives in sending their children to these institutions. This projects spans several historiographies including that of early modern education, childhood, and the Catholic Reformation. Though other studies have mentioned the establishment of écoles de charité as part of a wider impulse of charitable giving spurred by the Catholic Reformation, little work exists on the schools’ specific dynamics or on the relationship to the state and community embedded in the routine life of these schools. Additionally, this project uses “childhood” as a category of historical analysis, investigating how different early modern social groups used children to change society. Finally, this project engages the Catholic Reformation as these schools were part of a larger project to expand knowledge of Catholic beliefs onto the people propelled by local as well as elite interests.Item An empirical measurement of the option for the poor(2012-12) Esparza Ochoa, Juan Carlos; Woodberry, Robert Dudley; Powers, Daniel A.; Pullum, Thomas W.; Roberts, Bryan R.; Villarreal, Andres; Garrard-Burnett, VirginiaThis study links both census and religious service data, aggregating them at significant geographical levels. This makes it possible to test (1) if there is empirical evidence of the Catholic Church prioritizing the pastoral service to the poorest population of Mexico, and (2) if the results at different levels of analysis are consistent. To answer these questions, I will introduce the analysis by an overview of the research and the conceptualization of poverty and the way the Catholic Church has faced this social condition, particularly in Latin America and Mexico. Following the overview, the research design is presented specifying research questions, hypotheses, data, and the procedures followed to process and analyze such data. In my analysis I will present the geographical distribution of five dimensions of poverty in Mexico (deprivation of material goods, lack of running water, limited access to health services, illiteracy, and ethnicity) and the main indicator of pastoral services offered by the Catholic Church (number of parishes). Data from different sources will be linked and aggregated at different geographical levels through statistical and GIS platforms. Two main innovative tools to achieve this are the Areas of Direct Pastoral Influence (ADPI) and the Maximum Historically Consistent Geographical Units (MxHCGUs). These resources help to distribute and link socio-demographic and pastoral data. ADPIs facilitate focusing on the detailed relationships whereas MxHCGUs can be re-aggregated to higher-level units of analysis. The analysis includes descriptive geo-statistical tools to identify geographic patterns and test for spatial autocorrelation. Negative binomial regressions test the correlation of poverty and pastoral services at different levels of aggregation of the data. Besides identifying the levels and dimensions of poverty where there is empirical evidence of the priorities of pastoral service, I address the consistency of the different geographical aggregations and explain the differences. I emphasize the analysis of the levels of geographical aggregation directly relevant to the organizational structure of the Catholic Church: the ecclesiastical circumscriptions and the parishes. I will explain in detail the characteristics of both administrative-territorial levels and their importance in order to understand the provision of pastoral care. Although former sociological studies have never considered these levels in the study of poverty, they are the very units of aggregation used by the Catholic Church in pastoral strategies and decisions. Therefore, these are the most pertinent levels of analysis for a study about the priorities of pastoral services. It should be noted that the main limitation of this research is the lack of longitudinal data that would be necessary to test causality. However, this study links these kinds of data for the first time and there is no source of more complete information: the data presented here are actually the basis for the official maps of the Mexican Catholic Church. Therefore this means a major advance in this kind of research. On the one hand, the dataset that I put together sets the basic structure to organize historical censuses and ecclesiastical data; on the other hand, although the results are limited to cross-sectional data, this exploratory step is crucial for my broader research agenda because this study will evaluate basic procedures that will enable the later incorporation and analysis of longitudinal data from more than 120 years.Item Guatemalan Kairos : Catholic social thought, liberation, and the course of history, 1965-1976(2013-12) Chandler, Creighton; Garrard-Burnett, Virginia, 1957-Guatemalan Kairos chronicles the rise of the discourse of liberation in Guatemala’s Catholic Church in the decade following the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). In these years, as this study reveals, faith and human history comprised a double helix, constituting two interdependent and mutually supporting sides of the same soteriological vision. Rooted in Vatican II’s call to read the “signs of the times,” this historically conscious theological framework not only propelled Guatemala’s burgeoning progressive Catholic Church to redirect its pastoral practices toward the poor and the marginalized, especially Guatemala’s indigenous majority through an indigenized Catholicism. That new approach also sought to reshape the nation’s history by redrawing its socioeconomic, epistemological, and cultural landscape, in part through the formation of socially engaged lay leaders (catechists). Scholarship on the liberationist church has largely focused on how, as Guatemala’s Cold War civil war (1960-1996) sunk to its nadir in the late 1970s, state repression targeted the church as “subversive.” This dissertation, by contrast, seeks to step back from this prevailing attention on later repression to reconstruct the social and cultural liberative imagination prior to this religious revolution and state counterrevolution. In so doing, it cautions against historical interpretations that have ineluctably connected liberationist praxis in the decade after Vatican II to the—often catechist-led—armed or covert revolutionary activity of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Moreover, intensified by the defeat of the Guatemalan Left, the post-Peace Accords (December 1996) entrenchment of neoliberalism has brought hard times for critical historical consciousness. Indeed, as this study’s concluding chapter outlines, how to read the signs of the current historically fragmented times and craft a narrative for liberation amid today’s deep structural injustice remains a formidable obstacle. Perhaps the most daunting hurdle in this endeavor is to raise awareness of the need itself, particularly given that Guatemala’s historical record remains confronted by the perils inherent in harnessing faith and history in order to shape contemporary circumstances.Item "Our Lady of Perpetual Help" Catholic Church for Selma, Texas(Texas Tech University, 1987-05) Smith, Lee HardinAn understanding of the Liturgical Process and the nature of religious experience is a useful basis for meaningful Catholic Church design.Item Our Lady of the Valley Catholic Church, El Paso, Texas(Texas Tech University, 1982-05) Navarro, SamuelNoneItem Preventing heresy : censorship and privilege in sixteenth-century Mexican publishing(2012-12) Palacios, Albert Anthony; Twinam, Ann, 1946-; Wade, MariaPrevailing Catholic thought in the sixteenth century perceived heresy as a cancer on society and the printed word an effective carrier. Acceptance of this view throughout the Spanish kingdom resulted in the vigilant scrutiny of printed works, in particular those imported or produced in the Americas. Who reviewed manuscript works destined for or written in Mexico before the printing block hit the paper? Did the New Spanish bureaucracy repress colonial authors intellectually or financially? This thesis examines preventive censorship, or the inspection and licensing of manuscripts considered for publishing, and printing privilege in sixteenth-century Mexico. Mexican books printed 1540-1612 and official correspondence form the basis of this thesis. The overarching analysis is diachronic-bibliographic in nature. It starts with the origins of preventing censorship in Spain, its transference to New Spain, and its administration during the first decade of the American printing press (1487-1550). Thrusting ahead, it then delves into the bureaucratic, political, and economic nuances of the mature publishing practice at the turn of the century (1590-1612). The conclusion compares the bookend phases, defines factors, and looks at prevailing practices in Europe to contextualize Mexico’s unique publishing industry. In the Americas, religious authors established, financed, and developed the publishing economy to facilitate indigenous indoctrination and enculturation, enforce Christian hegemony, and promote higher education. As these authors came to dominate in the writing, censorship, and production of Mexican printed books throughout the sixteenth century, printers increasingly assumed a subordinate role. In the European printing industry, non-cleric officials predominantly censored manuscripts and printers assumed primary ownership of intellectual work. Inversing European practice, published authors in Mexico enjoyed significant influence over the censorship, printing, and economic potential of their intellectual fruits from the onset of colonization to the remainder of the sixteenth century and beyond.Item Roman Catholic Church in De Soto, Texas(Texas Tech University, 1985-12) Adamcik, Marcia JNot Available.Item Sacred Heart of Mary Church, Weirton, West Virginia(Texas Tech University, 1977-05) Pszczolkowski, Stanley JNot Available.Item Sangre de Cristo Catholic Church, Twining, New Mexico: a study of space, form, and emotion(Texas Tech University, 1974-12) Bausch, MikeNot available