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The Catholic Historical Review 90.4 (2004) 837-856



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The Spring Meeting of the American Catholic Historical Association

The 2004 spring meeting of the American Catholic Historical Association convened at St. Thomas University, Miami, Florida, on April 16 and 17. Participants were housed at the Don Shula Hotel in nearby Miami Lakes. The conference opened with five morning sessions which began at half past nine o'clock.

In the first of these sessions James Conley of St. Thomas University, Miami, chaired a panel entitled "Councils, Popes, and Emperors: Unity and Fragmentation in Spain's Early Modern Period." Sister Madeleine Grace, C.V.I., of the University of St. Thomas in Houston, began with an examination of the life of Charles V. She explored his early education, his ascendancy to the Roman imperial throne, and his struggles with popes and fellow European leaders, especially Clement VII, Henry VIII, and Francis I. Sister Grace cited three great achievements of the Emperor: peace in Spain, security in Italy, and control of Turkish expansion. Charles, however, found little solace in these accomplishments. He deemed his inability to influence the Council of Trent as an instrument of church unity and his final acceptance of the reality of the split in Christianity as failures which motivated his abdication. The paper ended with a suggestion that perhaps Charles' failed attempt at unification could serve as an inspiration toward universalism efforts in Christianity today. The second paper of this session, presented by Anne Marie Wolf of the University of Portland, noted how Juan de Segovia cleverly negotiated the often difficult balance between papal and conciliar authority. Wolfe pointed out that in the end, Segovia's efforts may have been motivated by his desire to see more autonomy in the governance of his university at Salamanca. Wolfe concluded that, politics aside, Segovia's greatest contribution was in his scholarship, where he turned his extensive linguistic skills into a study of the relationship of Islam to Christianity. This work resulted in his collaboration on the creation of a tri-lingual Arabic, Latin, Castilian version of the Quran. The papers evoked numerous questions and comments. Among them were observations that the Reformation went far beyond religious issues and that political and personal concerns often influenced the debate over conciliarism in the fifteenth century.

Another morning session explored "Catholic Activism in the U.S. Civil Rights Movement." In her presentation on "Catholicism in Detroit: Black Protest in the [End Page 837] 1960's," Nancy M. Davis of DePaul University discussed her study of parish records and accounts of church participation in the civil rights protests of the 1960's in Detroit. Davis thus placed parish history into the larger context of Black/Catholic relations in the Detroit Archdiocese. In the paper "Journey to Selma, March, 1965: The Story of Sister Mary Ebo," Cornelia Sexauer of the University of Wisconsin, Marathon County, used oral interviews, newspapers, magazine articles, and church records to recreate the experience of an Afro-American Sister of St. Mary who accompanied a northern contingent of priests, rabbis, ministers, nuns, and laymen to Selma, Alabama, in March, 1965. This paper presented a biographical sketch of Sister Ebo, a Southern Baptist convert to Catholicism. Davis' paper emphasized the importance of race, class, gender, and religion in the Civil Rights struggle of the 1960's in the South. Finally, in her paper entitled "Catholic College Students and the Civil Rights Movement," Helen Ciernek of the Catholic University of America emphasized the significant role played by Catholic college students in the civil rights movement. The paper studied the student reaction at Catholic colleges in the San Francisco Bay area to the civil rights movement in light of the complex nature of the students' ongoing assimilation into American culture in that region. The session was chaired by James Carroll of Iona College, who led a lively discussion between the speakers and attendees.

Friday morning also saw a session on "The Application of Canon Law in Fifteenth Century Poland." Charles Reid of the Law School of the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, presented a paper entitled...

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