Rock in a Hard Place: Black Catholics in the Era of Vatican II — A Case Study
Historians of American Catholicism are divided on their interpretation of the Second Vatican Council. At one end of the spectrum are those who maintain that the Council did not generate the "piety void" decried by contemporary traditionalists, but simply removed from the books a devotional...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | |
| Interlibrary Loan: | Interlibrary Loan for the Fachinformationsdienste (Specialized Information Services in Germany) |
| Published: |
2009
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| In: |
American catholic studies
Year: 2009, Volume: 120, Issue: 3, Pages: 1-20 |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | Historians of American Catholicism are divided on their interpretation of the Second Vatican Council. At one end of the spectrum are those who maintain that the Council did not generate the "piety void" decried by contemporary traditionalists, but simply removed from the books a devotional and material culture that had already become moribund. The opposite view holds that traditional practices persisted among rank-and-file Catholics despite the Council's liturgical reforms. This essay looks at a non-traditional Catholic community in a Virginia parish before and after the Council, and finds that it does not fit anywhere on the continuum suggested by these extremes. While the African-American Catholics in this study seem to have abandoned popular piety following Vatican II, they remained as attached as ever to the traditional iconography associated with such practices. The reason may lie both in the imperfect enculturation of devotional practices in a nontraditional Catholic community, and the importance of traditional icons to black Catholics as instruments of cultural delineation in the mainly Protestant Southern Piedmont. |
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| ISSN: | 2161-8534 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: American catholic studies
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