Thesis (M.S.)--Boston University. Missing page 164, 220. / Statement of the problem. It was the purpose of this study (1) to analyze elementary school music objectives and practices specifically recommended by leading music educators, (2) to investigate current music education practices and materials used in the elementary schools of the Archdiocese of Boston, and (3) to evaluate these music practices in their approximation to the recommendations of authoritative writers in music education. Sources of data. The sources of data used in this study included research into the professional writings of leading music educators, learned publications on music education, yearbooks and bulletins of music education associations, as well as periodicals, manuals, guide books, and many unpublished writings including Master's theses and Doctoral dissertations. For the collection of factual data relative to music practices and materials used in the elementary schools of the Archdiocese of Boston, the questionnaire technique was undertaken. Questionnaire forms were distributed to 231 elementary schools of the Boston Archdiocese. A letter addressed to the principal of each school requested her to present one questionnaire to a teacher of grade one or two, one questionnaire to a teacher of grades three or four, and one questionnaire to a teacher of grades five or six. A total of 634 classroom teachers received questionnaires. Two hundred twenty-two schools responded to the questionnaire with a 96.1 percent response. Tabulated forms were improvised for recording the cumulative data according to the respective degree of frequency.[TRUNCATED]

This dissertation studies one of the new ministries for women in the Catholic Church that developed after the Second Vatican Council. It is a historical, critical, descriptive, and evaluative study. While professional roles for women in the Church had become limited and privatized through the centuries, there are precedents in the early Church and even in the Middle Ages for more public and official roles for women. Vatican II renewed and broadened the definitions of "minister" and of "ministry" and called upon all Christians to participate actively in the work of the Church. We have sought to discover the degree. to which women have been able to achieve a professional ministerial role for themselves in campus ministry. Many primary sources were available to answer this question, the most important being the testimony of the women themselves. One chapter of the dissertation traces the history of women's roles in the Catholic Church. Another follows the history of Catholic campus ministry and shows why this was a ministry open to women more than many others in the Church. A third chapter traces the efforts of women in the American Catholic Church as a whole as they made a transition from being assistants of priest chaplains to chaplains themselves, a movement requiring changes in concepts of ministry and of minister held by the women themselves as well as those held by their colleagues and constituencies. The women, numbering nearly three hundred by 1972 were able, within limits, to win the title chaplain, to prove their value as ministers in individual situations, and to increase their own self-confidence as ministers. Their experiences give insights into job descriptions, models, procedures, and criteria that have developed over a twelve-year period. The fourth, and longest, chapter is in effect a case study of the larger movement as it developed in the Archdiocese of Boston. This diocese was chosen as a case study because of its comprehensive and varied academic community and because of the representative character of the 18 women chaplains who have served within its boundaries. Conclusions of the study are: 1. Since 1962 campus ministry has provided a situation in which Catholic women have been able to realize a ministerial identity and reveal the potentialities of women as ministers. 2. Experiences of the women have varied from very positive to very negative. Factors contributing to negative experiences were: a. Women, denied the sacramental-cultic forms of ministry, are marginal to a ministry that has itself been marginal to both the Church and the university. b. Catholic ministry was so identified with priestly functions that women had no models to follow. c. The changes in attitudes and practices in the Catholic Church after Vatican II often left the women anxious and without adequate support systems. Factors contributing to positive experiences were: a. The personal character of the individual woman. b. Effective team-work situations. c. Support from Church officials, colleagues, and religious communities. 3. Issues related to the positive or negative experiences of women are a woman's feminist consciousness, the attitudes of people toward women as public ministers, and the question of ordination of women in the Catholic Church. 4. Even when and where women are accepted and find success as campus ministers, two other problems arise: the relationship of women religious to their communities, and the prejudices lay women encounter. The broad significance of the experience of these women lies in the way attention has been called to women's capacities, when given a chance, to exercise ministry and to their unequal position in the Church. A direction has been set by women campus ministers that will not easily be reversed. These women may be creating models that recall the origins of Christian ministry as well as suggest its future.

with Walter Robinson, Stephen Kurkjian, Michael Rezendes, Sacha Pfeiffer, and Matt Carroll / Robsham Theater

Thesis advisor: Thomas E. Wangler / The story of the transformation of St. Benedict Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, originally a small Catholic student center, into a controversial and socially disruptive religious community is little known today even by most Bostonians. Some sixty-five years ago, however, the Center's public activities under the leadership of its chaplain, Leonard Feeney, S.J., were the focus of intense controversy and publicity, nationally and internationally as well as locally. In the 1940s, there was no clear theological consensus on the possibility of salvation for non-Catholics. Although there seems to have been a notable hesitation on the part of theologians and hierarchy alike in Boston to issue an official pronouncement on the Church's theology of salvation, there was at the same time an unhesitating consensus among them that Fr. Feeney's rigorist interpretation of the Catholic doctrine extra ecclesiam nulla salus ("no salvation outside the Church") was not that of the Church in the modern age. Complex social and cultural factors were at play in the controversy. Ultimately, though, any historian attempting to make sense of the ideas and actions of Fr. Feeney and the members of the Center is confronted with the fact that they took theology seriously, and so also must the historian who hopes to understand them. My thesis in this dissertation is that a uniquely explosive combination of theological developments, social flux, and intersecting personalities led to the eruptions at St. Benedict Center. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2014. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Theology.

Thesis advisor: Richard Lennan / Thesis advisor: Margaret E. Guider / As the Archdiocese of Boston continues to heal from the clergy sexual abuse crisis, it is engaged in a pastoral planning process designed to prepare parishes for the task of evangelization. According to the 2012 Synod of Bishops on the New Evangelization, the goal of evangelization is to “create the possibility” for an encounter and relationship with Jesus. To create the possibility for people to encounter Jesus Christ in faith, the implementation of the New Evangelization in the Archdiocese of Boston at this point in its history must focus on two aspects: healing the inner life of the Church, its communio, through a process of conversion and reconciliation and engaging the Church in the missio given it by Jesus by becoming a church of the poor. This paper begins with a presentation of the New Evangelization as described in papal and other ecclesial documents highlighting several principal themes: the context and content of the New Evangelization, the Church and the poor, Christian witness, conversion, reconciliation, Christian hope, and apologetics. Following a brief overview of the North American context in which evangelization must take place, the third chapter focuses on conversion as a response in love to God’s invitation to live in the love of the triune God and on reconciliation as the healing of relationships through celebrations of reconciliation and through the work of the church community. The fourth chapter presents the challenge of becoming a Church of the poor by which the Church comes into closer relationship with Jesus who is present in the suffering poor. Finally, the hope to which God calls us is eternal life in the loving communion of the Father, Son, and Spirit in the Kingdom of God. Christian hope is the virtue that sustains us on our way to the fulfillment of God’s Kingdom while in the midst of its non-fulfillment. / Thesis (STL) — Boston College, 2015. / Submitted to: Boston College. School of Theology and Ministry. / Discipline: Sacred Theology.