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Papal primacy rests on a single line of scripture: Matthew 16:18, “You are Peter and on this rock I will build my church.” The question of whether or not Christ vested the full authority of the Christian Church to Peter alone allowed secular rulers and reformers alike to dispute the legitimacy of the papal institution. In the period leading up to the opening of the Council of Trent, papal primacy became a fundamental concern. Popes claimed that any threat to their plenitudo potestatis jeopardized the unity of the faith, while their opponents saw it as the main hurdle towards religious and civic autonomy. During this time, a series of ongoing papal commissions beginning with Paul III Farnese (1534-1549) and continuing through the pontificate of Gregory XIII Boncompagni (1572-1585) sourced pictorial content from the Acts of the Apostles and the Life of Peter. These pontiffs were able to legitimize and bolster their authority by investing in Petrine and Pauline imagery that promoted the Apostolic identity of the church at a crucial turning point when the very definition of doctrine was intensely debated. This project traces how a coherent and consistent program for leveraging cultural capital emerged across five decorative programs within the Apostolic Palace: the Pauline Chapel (1542-45/1573-76/1580-85), the Casino of Pius IV (1562-63), a previously unknown series of frescoes for the landings of the palace staircases (1572), the second loggia (c. 1574/75), and the area above the portico of Saint Peter’s Basilica (c. 1575/76). Over the course of forty years, the papacy employed artists such as Michelangelo Buonarroti, Perino del Vaga, Giorgio Vasari, Lorenzo Sabbatini, Federico Zuccaro, and many others to visually concretize these Apostolic-focused narratives. Besides painted programs, the larger visual strategy capitalized on a broader scope of media. This included cope decorations, carved marble reliefs, and papal medals, which helped circulate and solidify the thematic typological associations between the Apostolic age and the Tridentine era. By the end of the sixteenth century, the systematic development of the papacy’s Apostolic identity had taken such a firm hold that it continued with Clement VIII Aldobrandini (1592-1605) in the altarpieces chosen for the small nave of new St. Peter’s Basilica, and with Paul V Borghese (1605-1621) at his eponymously named Pauline Chapel. What emerges from this analysis is the collective organization of a papal identity built around the lived and witnessed experience of the disciples that predates the full expression of a Counter-Reformation ideology. / Art History

James Forman's Black Manifesto demanded $500 million in reparations from the nation's white churches and synagogues for their financial, moral, and spiritual complicity in the centuries of injustice carried out upon African Americans. Many African-American ministers in the North embraced the Black Power ideology and supported Forman's call for financial redress. These Northern clergymen had become exasperated with an interracial civil rights movement that neglected to confront the systemic racism that permeated the nation's culture. Black Manifesto activists attempted to compel the white churches into paying reparations by interrupting worship services and occupying church buildings throughout the urban North. While the vast majority of the American public believed that the Black Manifesto was simply an attempt to extort money from the white churches, there was a racially diverse contingent of clergymen who wholeheartedly supported the call for reparations. The primary reason that Philadelphia became one of the key arenas in the struggle for reparations was the presence of Muhammad Kenyatta, the local Black Economic Development Conference leader. Kenyatta implemented myriad confrontational tactics in an attempt to cajole the Philadelphia-area denominations into responding affirmatively to the Black Manifesto's demands. The young activist was able to form an alliance with influential leaders within the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania. Paul Washington, an African-American minister, and Bishop Robert DeWitt, a white clergyman, supported the Black Manifesto and encouraged their fellow Episcopalians to do likewise. The duo's support for the Black Manifesto encouraged the Episcopalians to become the first predominantly white denomination to pay reparations to the Black Economic Development Conference. Although the payment was just $200,000, the concept of supporting a militant African-American organization was more than many conservative Episcopalians could tolerate. The debate over the Black Manifesto at the denomination's 1969 Special General Convention also enabled many African-American ministers to express long-held grievances regarding racism in the Church. A detailed examination of the rancorous debate over the Black Manifesto in Philadelphia complicates any simplistic narrative of the struggle for racial justice in the North. While many historians have blamed Black Power activists for derailing the civil rights movement, this study reveals that the fight against structural racism in the North generated political unity among African Americans that has lasted to the present day. The conflict among Philadelphians over the Black Manifesto was in no way split along racial lines. Many of document's most vehement supporters were white while many of its greatest detractors were conservative African Americans. The dispute over the Black Manifesto in Philadelphia illuminates the intellectual diversity present within the African-American population as well as the Black Power movement itself. / History

This dissertation is a historical-cultural analysis of the popular enthusiasm for an artifact known as the Kensington Rune Stone (KRS). The verifiable history of the KRS begins in 1898, when a Swedish American immigrant unearthed a large stone from a western Minnesota farm field. On the stone was an inscription written in a runic alphabet telling the story of a party of Scandinavian explorers that had traversed the area in the fourteenth century. Most scholars have declared the stone to be a hoax, yet this has not deterred its ardent defenders from using it to generate cultural capital for several social groups in western Minnesota. Over time, the KRS has emerged as a sacred civic totem representing the region and proclaiming it as founded by Christian Norsemen. KRS enthusiasm developed as a sect of American civil religion that both affirms and challenges the central orthodoxies underlying the myths about the origin of the United States. The mythic narrative constructed around the KRS has been embraced by many Minnesotans for its legitimating power to justify the white settlement of the state. The theoretical orientation of this dissertation relies on several scholars of religion, including Emile Durkheim, Danièle Hervieu-Léger, Pierre Bourdieu, and Thomas A. Tweed. / Religion

This project follows recent scholarship that challenges an older paradigm of the social gospel tradition's demise after World War I. It undertakes a multifaceted analysis of Harry Emerson Fosdick, his local and national audiences, and his context of The Riverside Church--as building and as congregation--as a means of tracing the contours of the social gospel through the Great Depression. Fosdick was an internationally known liberal Protestant minister who was prominent in efforts to rearticulate the social gospel and maintain its relevance in the postwar period. He grounded his interpretation of the social gospel in personalist philosophy, which asserted individual personality as irreducible, yet also shaped within social networks. Personalism manifested liberal Protestantism's emphasis on experience, pairing well with the interest in psychology that burgeoned in the early twentieth century, and which was prominent in Fosdick's preaching and writing. I refer to this threefold convergence of liberal theology, social gospel critique and activism, and personalist philosophy as social gospel personalism. While social gospel personalism promoted activity to bring about social change, I find within it a rhetorical tendency to prioritize attention to the psychological development of personality as the primary means through which the aim of transforming society would be met. In this dissertation, I attend to the ways in which social gospel personalism as articulated by Fosdick and embodied in The Riverside Church was particularly classed, with attendant blind spots and limitations, while simultaneously serving to provide its white, middle class adherents with a religious grounding that helped them weather a period of acute social and economic upheaval. Recent scholarship on American religious liberalism seeks to move beyond the narratives of Protestantism, but I argue that Fosdick and Riverside, by virtue of their cultural prominence, represent an important attempt to find personal grounding amidst depersonalizing social currents, and a religious vocabulary for critiquing those social forces that diminished the person. To make this argument, I engage social gospel personalism from multiple angles. I begin with an analysis of Fosdick's preaching and writing, situating him within the social gospel tradition and tracing the presence of personalist thought throughout his message. I then consider Fosdick as a mediated phenomenon, allowing an examination of the ways in which his message was received and utilized by his multiple audiences, suggesting that the dynamics of mediation tended to heighten the individual, existential elements of Fosdick's message. In turning to the Riverside Church itself, I interpret the building as a site within which social gospel personalism was embodied and enabled, attending to the utilization of space as both reflective of and formative of religious practice. Finally, I analyze two of Riverside's programmatic responses to the vast unemployment engendered by the Great Depression as a means of illuminating the ways in which social gospel personalism was and was not prepared to meet the crisis. / Religion

This dissertation focuses on lay Catholic ministry to Puerto Ricans in Philadelphia when Frank Rizzo was mayor. Gramsci’s concept of “organic intellectuals” is employed to explain the praxis of the Philadelphia Young Lords, an organization formed in a Puerto Rican neighborhood during the confrontational politics of the 1970s. The dissertation advances previous scholarship on the Young Lords by offering reasons to consider these youthful leaders as lay Catholic advocates of social justice in Philadelphia and describes the role of faith convictions as they pursued social justice in the style of the biblical prophetic burden. Through interviews and textual analysis, the dissertation traces the evolution of lay volunteerism before the Second Vatican Council as foundational to the Young Lords’ application of liberation theology. The Young Lords in Philadelphia also followed the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party’s definition of the people’s multiracial identity and the Nationalists’ defense of Catholic principles. Their experiences are inserted into the general history of Philadelphia, a city which Quakers had founded as a cluster of urban villages, producing a distinctive pattern of ethnic enclaves of Philadelphia’s row house neighborhoods. The city’s Catholicism had structured parish life upon the civic culture, and initially extended this model to its Puerto Rican ministry. However, racial polarization at a time of municipal crisis under Rizzo invited new pastoral strategies towards civil right and the Vietnam War. Despite the Young Lords’ reliance on Marxist principles and the confrontational politics of the Black Panthers, local Catholic clergy supported many of their efforts. The dissertation explores the symbolic capital gained by the Young Lords which made them into a vanguard organization in the city’s fields of political and pastoral interaction. / Religion

Thesis advisor: Mark S. Massa, S.J. / Since the publication of Harvard Law School professor Adrian Vermeule’s now-infamous 2020 essay in The Atlantic, “Beyond Originalism,” American legal scholars have developed a renewed interest in natural law jurisprudence’s position in the American legal tradition. Although many of Vermeule’s critics have framed his jurisprudential method as foreign to the American legal tradition, American legal scholars likewise engaged in important debates about natural law jurisprudence nearly a century ago. During this earlier period, scholars debated whether natural law jurisprudence's reliance on deductive reasoning could withstand the inductive and socially scientific methods that became popular at elite American law schools during the 1920s and 1930s. To understand this earlier iteration of debate over natural law jurisprudence, this thesis turns to the life and legacy of William J. Kenealy—a Jesuit priest who served as dean of the Boston College Law School between 1939 and 1956. Although Kenealy has been almost entirely ignored in the historiography, he figured prominently in an attempted revival of natural law jurisprudence that occurred during the early/mid-twentieth century. Terming this movement the “Neo-Scholastic Legal Revival” because of its reliance on Neo-Scholastic understandings of natural law philosophy, this thesis uncovers how Kenealy's religious formation at the turn of the twentieth century, legal training at the Jesuit-run Georgetown University, and wartime leadership at Boston College positioned him well to contribute to the Revival. In doing so, this thesis reveals that leaders in the Revival, including Kenealy, exerted cognizable influence on twentieth-century American legal discourse. Thus, this thesis challenges dominant historical treatments of twentieth-century American legal development that have ignored an attempted revival of natural law jurisprudence that occurred almost a century before Vermeule emerged in the national legal consciousness. / Thesis (MA) — Boston College, 2023. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History.

This study explores the struggle of the Catholic Church to be true to itself and its mission in the midst of other religions, in the context of the non-Catholic American culture, and in relation to the modern world and its discontents. As milestones of the global interfaith movement, American religious freedom and pluralism, and of the relation of religion to modernity, the Chicago Parliaments of Religions offer a unique window through which to view this Catholic struggle at work in the religious public square created by the Parliaments and the evolution of that struggle over the course of the century framed by the two Chicago events. In relation to other religions, the Catholic Church stretched itself from an exclusivist position of being the only true and good religion to an inclusivist position of recognizing that truth and good can be present in other religions. Uniquely, Catholic involvement in the centennial Parliament made the Church stretch itself even further, beyond the exclusivist-inclusivist spectrum into a pluralist framework in which the Church acted humbly as one religion among many. In relation to American culture, the Catholic Church stretched itself from a Eurocentric and monarchic worldview with claims of Catholic supremacy to the American alternative of democracy, religious freedom, and the separation of church and state. In relation to modernity, the Church stretched itself from viewing the modern world as an enemy to be fought and conquered to befriending modernity and designing some specific accommodations to it. In these three relationships, there was indeed a shift, but not at all a clean break. Instead a stretch occurred, acknowledging a lived intra-Catholic tension between religious exclusivism and inclusivism, between a universal Catholic identity and Catholic inculturation in America (and in other cultures), and between the immutability of Catholic eternal truths and their translatability into the new languages offered by the modern world. In all this the Second Vatican Council was the major catalyst. For all three cases the Chicago Parliaments of Religions serve as environments conducive to the raising of important questions about Catholic identity, the Catholic understanding of non-Catholics, and Catholic interfaith relations.

This study explores the struggle of the Catholic Church to be true to itself and its mission in the midst of other religions, in the context of the non-Catholic American culture, and in relation to the modern world and its discontents. As milestones of the global interfaith movement, American religious freedom and pluralism, and of the relation of religion to modernity, the Chicago Parliaments of Religions offer a unique window through which to view this Catholic struggle at work in the religious public square created by the Parliaments and the evolution of that struggle over the course of the century framed by the two Chicago events. In relation to other religions, the Catholic Church stretched itself from an exclusivist position of being the only true and good religion to an inclusivist position of recognizing that truth and good can be present in other religions. Uniquely, Catholic involvement in the centennial Parliament made the Church stretch itself even further, beyond the exclusivist-inclusivist spectrum into a pluralist framework in which the Church acted humbly as one religion among many. In relation to American culture, the Catholic Church stretched itself from a Eurocentric and monarchic worldview with claims of Catholic supremacy to the American alternative of democracy, religious freedom, and the separation of church and state. In relation to modernity, the Church stretched itself from viewing the modern world as an enemy to be fought and conquered to befriending modernity and designing some specific accommodations to it. In these three relationships, there was indeed a shift, but not at all a clean break. Instead a stretch occurred, acknowledging a lived intra-Catholic tension between religious exclusivism and inclusivism, between a universal Catholic identity and Catholic inculturation in America (and in other cultures), and between the immutability of Catholic eternal truths and their translatability into the new languages offered by the modern world. In all this the Second Vatican Council was the major catalyst. For all three cases the Chicago Parliaments of Religions serve as environments conducive to the raising of important questions about Catholic identity, the Catholic understanding of non-Catholics, and Catholic interfaith relations.

After a two-decade hiatus, the English church courts were revived by an act of Parliament on 27 July 1661, to resume their traditional task of correcting spiritual and moral misdemeanours. Soon thereafter, parishioners across England's dioceses once more faced admonition, fines, excommunication, and even imprisonment if they failed to conform to the laws of the restored Church of England. Whether they were successful or not in maintaining orthodoxy has been the principal question guiding historians interested in these tribunals, and most have concluded that, at least compared to their antebellum predecessors, the restored church courts constituted little more than a paper tiger, whose censures did little to halt the spread of dissent, partial conformity and immoral behaviour. This thesis will, in part, question such conclusions. Its main purpose, however, is to make a methodological intervention in the study of ecclesiastical court records. Rejecting Geoffrey Elton's assertion that these records represent 'the most strikingly repulsive relics of the past', it argues that a closer, more creative study of the bureaucratic processes maintaining the church courts can considerably enhance not only our understanding of these rather enigmatic tribunals but also of the individuals and communities who interacted with them. Studying those in charge of the courts, the first half of this thesis will explore the considerable friction between the Church's ministry and the salaried bureaucrats and lawyers permanently staffing the courts. This, it argues, has important ramifications for our understanding of early modern office-holding, but it also sheds new light on the theological disposition of the Restoration Church. Using the same sources, coupled with substantial consultation of contemporary polemic, letters and diaries, the fourth and fifth chapters will argue that the sanctions of the restored church courts were often far from the 'empty threat' historians have tended to assume. Excommunication in particular could be profoundly distressing even for such radical dissenters as the Quakers, and this should cause us to reconsider how individuals and communities from various hues of the denominational spectrum related to the established Church.