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White Eagle, Black Madonna offers one of the first English-language treatments of the Polish Catholic tradition across more than a thousand years of history. Written for fellow scholars, students, and general readers alike, the book charts the remarkable journey of the Polish Catholic community from its humble origins on the margins of medieval Christendom to the twenty-first century, when a Pole occupied the See of Peter. The church in Poland has passed through a number of distinct phases as it has adapted to changing conditions. Throughout this long and often tumultuous history, however, one constant has been the profound influence Catholicism has exercised over Poland’s political, social, and cultural life. Church historians commonly have assumed that Catholicism in Poland has been somehow insignificant or peripheral to the larger story of the faith. In fact, throughout much of its history Poland has been a large and powerful country, and the church there has been more integral to global Catholic affairs than is often understood. At the same time, owing to geography, the diversity of the region’s inhabitants, and the unique cluster of forces that have shaped them, the Polish Catholic experience has been quite distinctive. A fuller appreciation of this experience has the potential to nuance how we understand the history of Christianity in general.

This book examines the response of the Church of Greece to enemy occupation during World War II. Historically the Greek people looked to the church to help them preserve faith and culture and expected the leader of the church to serve as an ethnarch. In some instances, church policy played an important role in the very physical survival of the Greek nation. During the Axis occupation, the Greek church, under the leadership of Archbishop Damaskinos, intervened to mitigate the harshest of Axis policies, although these interventions had limitedeffects and required distasteful compromises.Drawing upon contemporary official sources as well as pertinent published primary and secondary literature, the book explores attempts by the church leadership to maintain a precarious balance between capitalizing on opportunistic moments to gain concessions from the enemy occupiers and opposing policies deemed detrimental to the wellbeing of state and society. Church leadership also utilized more imaginative forms of passive resistance against Axis policies on vital issues such as the Holocaust and ethnic policies in the Bulgarian-occupied territories of the country. Other clerics (Ioakeim of Kozane, Germanos Demakos) chose the path of active resistance and joined the National Liberation Front (EAM). Despite significant differences between the Greek case and those of other territories in Axis-occupied Europe, the response of the Greek church is instructive in understanding the conditions under which collaboration and resistance occur as well as the challenges of drawing clear-cut distinctions between the two.

In 1964, a little-noticed albeit pioneering encounter in the Holy Land between the heads of the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church spawned numerous contacts and diverse openings between the two “sister churches,” which had not communicated with each other for centuries. Fifty years later, Pope Francis and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew met in Jerusalem to commemorate that historical event and celebrate the close relations that have developed through mutual exchanges of formal visits and an official theological dialogue that began in 1980. This book contains three chapters. The first is a sketch of the behind-the-scenes challenges and negotiations that accompanied the meeting in 1964, detailing the immediate consequences of the event and setting the tone for the volume. The second is an inspirational account, interwoven with a scholarly evaluation of the work of the North American Standing Council on Orthodox/Catholic relations over the past decades. The third chapter presents a recently discovered reflection on the meeting that took place fifty years ago by one of the most important Orthodox theologians of the twentieth century, expressing cautious optimism about the future of Christian unity.

Women of Faith: The Chicago Sisters of Mercy and the Evolution of a Religious Community examines the history of the Sisters of Mercy of the Chicago Regional Community, the first congregation of Catholic sisters in Chicago from its establishment in 1846, its expansion into Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin, and development through the twentieth century to 2008. Women of Faith is a history of the sisters themselves, their spirituality, their ministries, and of their relationships to one another. It examines the living charism or founding spirituality, of Catherine McAuley and how the Sisters of Mercy from the nineteenth to twentieth centuries reinterpreted it for themselves. Women of Faith considers the historical context of the Mercys’ spirituality and examines the everyday lives of the congregation, with a special focus on the process of formation and identity building, the connection between belief and action, and how women religious confronted the realities of their secular and religious worlds. While Women of Faith encompasses all of the Chicago Regional Community’s history beginning in 1846, the bulk of the work focuses on the developments within the Mercy congregation, the Catholic Church, and American society in the twentieth century, particularly influential movements like the Sister Formation Conference, the renewal of Vatican II, and the civil rights and feminist movements.

In the decades that separated the Roaring Twenties from Vatican II, Catholic Action inspired laypeople to participate in the work of the Church’s hierarchy. In endeavors that ranged from religious education and liturgical renewal to labor activism and immigrant outreach, this movement permitted the Church to maintain its distinctiveness while simultaneously engaging with the wider American culture. In the aftermath of the Second World War, however, a new generation of Catholics increasingly chafed against the hierarchical ideal of Catholic Action and found in the Second Vatican Council’s definition of the Church as the “People of God” a blueprint for more autonomous lay apostolates. For laypeople – and laywomen especially – the call to democratize church structures at parochial, diocesan, and national levels in the years immediately following Vatican II, led to an increasing detachment from the structures of hierarchy and authority. The resulting apostolates were all too often defined as much by their defiance of authority as by their supposed commitment to the “Spirit of Vatican II.” This book provides readers with an appreciation of how American Catholics at the grassroots experienced the evolving pattern of social and religious activism. In its profiles of Catholic apostolates in New York City, Boston, Washington DC, Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Atlanta, and San Francisco, this collection of essays explores the fate of a diverse array of groups, including recent immigrants and middle-class college women. Empowering the People of God demonstrates the pattern both of historical continuity and transformation within the contemporary Catholic Church in America.

In 1539, Cardinal Jacopo Sadoleto, Bishop of Carpentras, addressed a letter to the magistrates and citizens of Geneva, asking them to return to the Roman Catholic faith. John Calvin replied to Sadoleto, defending the adoption of the Protestant reforms. Sadoleto's letter and Calvin's reply constitute one of the most interesting exchanges of Roman Catholic/Protestant views during the Reformation and an excellent introduction to the great religious controversy of the 16th century. These statements are not in vacuo of a Roman Catholic and Protestant position. They were drafted in the midst of the religious conflict that was then dividing Europe. And they reflect too the temperaments and personal histories of the men who wrote them. Sadoleto's letter has an irenic approach, an emphasis on the unity and peace of the Church, highly characteristic of the Christian Humanism he represented. Calvin's reply is in part a personal defense, an apologia pro vita sua, that records his own religious experience. Its taut, comprehensive argument is characteristic of the disciplined and logical mind of the author of The Institutes of the Christian Religion.