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Seventeenth-century reformers had developed rigorist approaches to vocational discernment and the choice of a state of life (marriage, religion, or the priesthood) that endured in western Catholic religious culture. The author argues that, during the nineteenth-century Catholic revival, clerical leaders adapted this tradition in a manner that strengthened the culture of clericalism. While maintaining the principle that one's salvation depended on choosing the state of life to which one was called, they downplayed the concept of lay vocation, since the revival of Catholic institutions demanded that large numbers of youth voluntarily enter religious life and the priesthood. This strengthened the perception, in the pre-Vatican-II era, that vocation was not a concept relevant to the laity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In For the Life of the World: Toward a Social Ethos of the Orthodox Church, there is a clear preference for the "democratic genius of the modern age." This preference for democracy is due, in part, to the long experience of the Orthodox Church with other governmental forms, especially autocratic and authoritarian states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article examines one of Marie de Gournay’s forays into religious controversy in her short text “Advis à quelques gens d’Église.” First published in L’Ombre de la damoiselle de Gournay (1626), the text is an indictment of the abuse of the sacrament of confession by both penitents and confessors, and points to a rigorist stance on the part of the author nearly twenty years before it became the dominant position of the church once again. Tackling a range of thorny questions such as the aim of confession, deferred absolution, and the nature of sin, Gournay examines confession as a societal institution, outlining how it fails utterly to reduce the daily experience of petty injustices and wrongdoing. Placing that failure squarely at the feet of the clergy, Gournay includes advice for the confessors, making of the text a secular “manuel des confesseurs”—an extraordinary undertaking for a laywoman at the time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]