Notes and Comments
- Notes and Comments
Association News
The American Catholic Historical Association invites paper and panel proposals for its annual Spring Meeting at The University of Scranton. Individual papers will be accepted for review although the submission of complete (or nearly complete) panels/roundtables greatly facilitate the process. Presenters must register for the spring meeting and are strongly encouraged to join the ACHA. Graduate students and younger scholars are especially encouraged to consider presenting papers.
Proposals are accepted via our online submission system, accessible via the green buttons at the bottom of this website: https://achahistory.org/scranton2022/. The deadline is January 10, 2022. For each panel or roundtable proposal, please provide the title of the panel, the names and titles of chairs/discussants and presenters, and the titles of the papers. For each paper proposal, please provide a 200-word prospectus (no prospectus is necessary for the panel as a whole) and a one-page CV (per presenter). Questions about the call for proposals should be addressed to Professor Robert Shaffern of the University of Scranton History Department at robert.shaffern@scranton.edu.
The American Catholic Historical Association invites submissions on any topic relevant to the study of Catholicism for its annual meeting in Philadelphia, PA, January 5–7, 2023. We are happy to return to Philadelphia, one of the earliest places in the United States to welcome Catholic worship and a city with a wide variety of Catholic immigrant groups, a vibrant parish life, and an efflorescent Catholic-built environment. It is also the site of one of the earlier and more detailed grand jury reports related to the sexual abuse crisis, and the site of considerable historical violence directed against Catholic churches, and against Black communities by Catholics. The organizers especially encourage individual paper and panel submissions that address the following: Catholicism in the Mid-Atlantic; Catholic Immigration; The Parish in Catholic History; Catholics in the Colonial Era and Early Republic; Art, Architecture, and Material Culture ; Transnational Catholicism; Women and Catholicism; Popular Movements; The clerical sexual abuse crisis; Communities Traditionally [End Page 640] Marginalized in the Field of Catholic History; and Antiquity, Medieval, and Pre-modern Catholicism. The ACHA encourages panelists to submit their proposals for co-sponsorship with the American Historical Association. This AHA deadline is February 15, 2022. The ACHA will continue to accept paper and panel proposals until March 15, 2022.
Causes of Saints
Pope Francis on August 30, 2021, has advanced the sainthood causes of a Franciscan friar who helped to rescue Jews during the Holocaust and a mother who sacrificed her life to save her unborn child.
Fr. Placido Cortese (1907–44) is remembered for using his confessional in the Basilica of St. Anthony in Padua to communicate clandestinely with an underground network that helped Jewish people and British prisoners of war escape the Nazi occupation of Italy. He was arrested and taken to a Gestapo bunker in Trieste, where he was brutally tortured. But he did not give away the names of any of his associates, according to Fr. Giorgio Laggioni, his vice-postulator. After weeks of torture, he died in Gestapo custody in November 1944 at the age of 37. His confessional in the Basilica of St. Anthony of Padua continues to be a place of prayer today. Known locally as "the Italian Fr. Kolbe," the priest is now considered "venerable" by the Catholic Church after the pope recognized him for living a life that was "heroic in virtue" on August 30. Like St. Maximilian Kolbe, Cortese was a Franciscan friar who directed a Catholic publication and was tortured and killed by the Nazis.
In the decree from the Vatican Congregation for the Causes of Saints that advanced Cortese's cause, two laywomen were also recognized for their heroic virtue.
Enrica Beltrame Quattrocchi (1914–2012), is also on her way to sainthood, along with her parents, Bl. Luigi and Maria Beltrame Quattrocchi, who were beatified together in October 2001. Pope Francis declared Enrica a "servant of God." Unlike her three older siblings who each followed vocations to religious life, Enrica lived out her Catholic faith as an unmarried lay Catholic who served as a high school...
