The Holy See and the United Nations, 1945-1995 by Edward J. Gratsch (review)

BOOK REVIEWS99 particular difficulties which the women religious faced were predicated on the gender-based policy of strict enclosure or claustration. This policy encouraged an institutional invisibility and inaccessibility: it had a deleterious effect on the nuns' ability to solicit donations or to promote the cult of saints. McNamara also discusses problems associated with the women religious' lack of sacramental power and gendered policies of patronage. A medieval historian, McNamara is especially qualified to undertake this rather daunting project. She has spent her career teaching and writing on women in early Christianity, medieval women and the Church, female sanctity, and women religious. Moreover, on a personal level, she was introduced by nuns into the world of learning and into the world of female religious. McNamara has noted: "I must concede that all I am I owe to my Catholic education" (p. x). Sisters inArms is an extremely accessible book,written for historians as well as for a broadly educated public interested in history, women's history, and the history of the Church. The author writes with great verve; she uses dramatic, colorful language and interesting words such as "monkery," "castimony," and "pornocrat." While the book contains a substantial bibliography on women religious , the abbreviated footnotes cause some difficulty for the reader who is interested in further pursuing some of the fascinating details described in the text. As a pioneering study, this work is truly an impressive achievement and will encourage further questions, debate, and additional research in this area. It is an amazingly comprehensive study and constitutes an invaluable contribution to the field of the history of women and religion. Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg University of Wisconsin-Madison The Holy See and the UnitedNations, 1945-1995. By EdwardJ. Grätsch. (New York: Vantage Press. 1997. Pp. xiii, 305. $19.95 cloth.) The aim of The Holy See and the United Nations is the documentation of the "collaboration of the Holy See and the United Nations," in order to make it "more understandable and promote the noble objectives of both." According to the author, Edward Grätsch, such co-operation can exist because "the objectives of the two international entities are, to a considerable degree, the same." To be sure, the author avers, the Holy See pursues another objective as well, "the eternal salvation of men and women as revealed byJesus Christ, the Founder of the Catholic Church." The term "Holy See" is defined by the author in a narrow, albeit perfectly accurate , sense. It refers to "the Pope,the Bishop of Rome, and his representatives in the Vatican and elsewhere who assist him in carrying out the mission of the universal Church." Gratsch's methodical book is, nonetheless, an invaluable reference work on the authoritative documents that comprise the corpus of the 100BOOK REVIEWS Church's explicit utterances on the work of the UN. The book scrutinizes the declarations made by the Holy See on tin: UN, both before 1964, the year of the establishment of the Office of Permanent Observer of the Holy See to the United Nations, and subsequently, and emphasizes certain recurrent ideas. Briefly, these are that the nations of the world should never again resort to war to settle their differences; that men and women of all nations should regard themselves as one family standing in solidarity with other human beings; that every plan and program put forth by the UN should aim at safeguarding and promoting human dignity; that human beings have both a material and spiritual dimension that includes a profound need for truth, love, justice, beauty, and brotherhood; that the resources of the earch belong to all men and women and should be used for the benefit of all; and finally, that all nations are becoming increasingly interdependent and one may not act without consideration for the rights of others. The volume is divided up informally into several sections: an introduction, in which terms such as Acta Apostolicae Sedis are explained. Also included in this section is the author's rationale for the selection of representative documents. The next section considers the teachings cfJesus and the establishment and development of the structures and canon law of the Roman Catholic Church. A survey of the...