Exploring the shifting realities of missionary experience during the course of imperialist ventures and the Reformation, this collection provides a fresh assessment of the missionary challenges that the Catholic Church encountered at the frontiers of mission in the early modern era. Even before the Council of Trent's conclusion in 1563, large portions of the Catholic church lay in mission territories in Europe and beyond. Within Europe, these included regions lost to or under threat from Protestantism, and those in which remaining Catholics were deemed to require re-evangelisation according to the principles of Catholic 'reform'. Outside Europe, colonial expansion offered the church a vast population of potential converts to the faith. Both the Reformation and colonial expansion altered the geographical and cultural boundaries of the church irredeemably, creating frontiers where Catholic missionaries grappled with new and complex problems of evangelisation and conversion, as well as with rivalries in the competition for souls and in the positioning of authority in a globalising church. Bringing together leading international scholars, this collection offers a coherent and nuanced consideration of the meaning of 'missionary Catholicism' and its evolving relationship with newly discovered cultures and political and ecclesiastical authorities. Focusing squarely on the missionaries themselves, the essays draw upon history, theology, religious studies, and cultural theory to illuminate the expansion of Christianity, and Catholicism in particular, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century.
| ISBN: | 9781472448453 |
| Publication date: | 28th October 2016 |
| Author: | Alison Forrestal, Seán Alexander Smith |
| Publisher: | Routledge an imprint of Taylor & Francis |
| Format: | Hardback |
| Pagination: | 210 pages |
| Series: | Catholic Christendom, 1300-1700 |
| Genres: |
Religion: general Colonialism and imperialism History of religion Christianity History of the Americas History and Archaeology |