Owen Chadwick

Owen Chadwick analyzes the causes and consequences of the end of the historic Papal State, exploring pressures on old Rome from Italy and across Europe, which caused popes to resist the world rather than to try to influence it.

This is a collection of Owen Chadwick's principal writings on Lord Acton, the distinguished Victorian historian and founder of The Cambridge Modern History, in which an historian of our own times expounds the life and work of a great predecessor. This book explains the important aspects of Acton's complex mind and his great contribution to historical studies.

From the end of the Second World War until the rise of Gorbachev the division of Europe was the central fact in world politics - for individuals, nations and the different Christian Churches. Amid the ferocious polemics of the Cold War era neutrality was impossible. The pressures of modernity led to the Second Vatican Council and affected Churches on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Almost all had to adapt to declining congregations, concerns about human rights and women's role in religion, and new attitudes to abortion, contraception and divorce. Yet day-to-day problems in the East and West were utterly different. In Eastern Europe, the Churches were victims of state control, savage ideological attacks, show trials and occasional physical violence. Critics dwelt on their sometimes inglorious record of compromise and collaboration under fascist regimes, despite the crucial role of the religious resistance in fighting Nazism. Later Church leaders - Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox - often continued to tread a delicate path, but Polish priests helped to oversee the birth of Solidarity, and oppressed nations drew hope from the symbols and ceremonies of their Christian past. Successive Popes, meanwhile, were torn between hatred for Marxism's militant atheism and a pragmatic desire not to endanger the Catholics of Eastern Europe. The post-war West, by contrast, has seen different countries adapting their own complex arrangements about relations between Church and State. Traditional practices in the great monastic orders, the language of the liturgy and pilgrimages to saints' shrines came under fresh scrutiny, although the charismatic movement proved astonishingly successful. Yet how deeply have the churches come to terms with the fierce winds of modernity? Where religion is tolerated, and even encouraged, do people truly believe what East Europeans know from bitter experience - that 'the religious conscience is an ultimate safeguard of human freedom'? Owen Chadwick is General Editor of Penguin's scholarly and comprehensive series The History of the Church and contributed an earlier book, The Reformation. The series starts with the first Disciples. This volume concludes in the late twentieth century - as the Churches struggle to face new global challenges and opportunities.

In this collection of new and revised essays Owen Chadwick, perhaps the most distinguished living historian of religion, writes on various aspects of the Oxford Movement and the English Church in the Victorian era. Along with studies of Newman, Liddon, Edward King and Henri Bremond are included more general essays surveying the reaction of the Established Church and on the nature of Catholicism. In particular, the revision of the long-unobtainable introductory essay, The Mind of the Oxford Movement, illustrates once again the profound contribution Owen Chadwick has made to our understanding of religion in Britain in the nineteenth century.

This book describes the change from the Catholic Church of the ancien regime to the church of the early nineteenth century as it affected the institution of the Papacy and through it the Church at large.

Chadwick discusses secularism as a social and intellectual problem in nineteenth-century European life. Issues such as liberalism, anticlericalism, and scientific principles take root in the European mind. Individuals such as Karl Marx and Voltaire influence the transformation.