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The article analyses the development of political laicization, as an aspect of the process of secularization understood in the institutional form of autonomy and distance between Church and Politics. Political laicization is analysed with regard to the stages of its historical development: as the initial authoritarian and anti-clerical laicization, as a secondary laicization of open pluralism and as a »fluid«, because it largely deviates from rigid and anticlerical opposition to dominant churches in the forms of public-legal institutionalization of separation of religious communities and the state, and from anticlerical patterns of political and public activity. The article relies heavily on the research of Marcel Gauchet, Jean Baubérot, Micheline Millot, Martin Rohnheimer, Jean Picq, Neil MacCormick, Michel Foucault and others, and it seeks to explore how much the change and transformation of the role of identities has contributed to the changed role of political and public action, described as an era of acceptance of identities, and which has its repercussions on the formats of political laicization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What we are called to respect in each person is first of all his life, his physical integrity, his dignity and the rights deriving from that dignity, his reputation, his property, his ethnic and cultural identity, his ideas and his political choices. We are therefore called to think, speak and write respectfully of the other, not only in his presence, but always and everywhere, avoiding unfair criticism or defamation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Around 1900, the Catholic Church in Belgium and France started to systematically use the magic lantern for religious education, but also as a propaganda tool in their fight against their laic opponents in both countries. In the course of the nineteenth century, the magic lantern had become a major visual mass medium in Europe and the United States. The light beam of the lantern was seen as a powerful means to sustain faith and disseminate the views of the Church. While numerous members of the Catholic clergy embraced the projections lumineuses as a continuation of the long-standing tradition to teach the gospel through images, from glass windows to paintings, they had to face opposition by those who thought the magic lantern unfit to be used to lecture on religious matters. Despite such resistance, the projected image became an important medium used throughout the first decades of the twentieth century by the Catholic Church. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During its first decades the Third Republic's relationship with the Catholic Church soured. While the Republic notoriously recast itself as a secular regime through removing clerics from the classroom, laicization also drove the development of public welfare. By examining the case of ouvroirs, charitable ateliers run by female religious orders to train and employ young women, this article explores the consequences of new ideas about welfare for working-class girlhood. In the context of rising anticlericalism, the Republic mobilized labor law and sent labor inspectors to scrutinize the nuns' treatment of their charges. The Republic's efforts to regulate these spaces represent a transformation in its treatment of girlhood, a recognition that girls' care could not be left to the private sphere. Instead, not only was it the Republic's responsibility to protect these girls, but this protection had a larger, societal imperative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

El artículo discurre sobre el fenómeno de la pérdida del estado clerical, cuando se remueve un miembro de su estatus en la iglesia católica. El autor comenta sobre el rescripto de la Sede Apostólica y examina el rol del Concilio Vaticano II en el desarrollo y la implementación de normas relacionadas con este tema.

The history of twentieth-century Russian Orthodoxy has been written largely in terms of the Church and state, martyr and oppressor, all within the traditional paradigm of ineluctable, ubiquitous secularization. This article shifts the focus from Bolshevik and bishop to believer, framed within the more recent model that emphasizes "believing without belonging". While that new paradigm fits the Russian case, the latter certainly had unique specifics: it was precisely the coercive disestablishment of the Church that empowered parishioners and inadvertently laid the foundations for the post-Soviet religious revival. While the depth and meaning of that revival is open to dispute and calibration, it has unquestionably posed a dramatic contrast to contemporary Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents commentary on a circular letter dated April 18th, 2009 from cardinal Claudio Hummes, Prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy of the Holy See, to all ordinaries of the Catholic Church, describing special powers granted to the congregation by the Pope to intervene in certain cases regarding the defrocking of priests. These powers include expulsion from the clergy by extrajudicial decree, waiver of celibacy, and application of "ex officio" procedures for the deprivation of clerical status, according to the article. The powers question both the mandatory application of the judicial process in imposing perpetual sanctions and the characterization of crimes punishable by expulsion, as stipulated in the Code of Canon Law, the article asserts.

With the objective of making an appreciation of the insertion of the Protestantism in Brazil, the present article makes an analysis of the relia- ble facts and a historicity of the most important factors that contributed to the identity of this people. A search for their identity develops in a very peculiar manner, starting from the principle that in order for this to be reached there is a participation of the other, here symbolized by the Roman Catholic Church. Therefore, the Protestantism accomplishes its role as a participant in the construction of the Brazilian society and their values. In spite of the adversities encountered on its beginnings those have served as a means to create the protestant character instead of suppressing it. A look into laicization of the contemporaneous society opens space for the Protestants, conferring them equal freedom as that of the Roman Catholics. Through out the time the adversities serve to forge the character of the protestant instead of mitigating it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]