A Catholic Atlantic?

American Catholic Studies, 2019

Puritans and Catholics in the Atlantic World, 2015

Scholarship on the presence of Catholics in the early modern British Atlantic has tended to emphasise their experiences of marginalisation, exclusion or victimisation. This study seeks to reevaluate the role of Catholics as essential and valuable place holders at the frontier of empire and explores the ways in which the British Atlantic world could offer greater prospects for advancement than those available in Britain and Ireland.

In this book Napolitano shows the rendering of migration present at the heart of the 21C Roman Catholic Church and why this is a key battleground for a changing Europe. She shows how Catholic Latin American lay and religious migrants and their histories in Rome point to an Atlantic Return from the Americas that challenges an Euro-centric, Roman Catholic identity. She queries national, municipal histories and Vatican pastoral teachings through documented and undocumented migrants' experiences and devotions and shows how multiple forms of being Catholic inform gender, labour and sexuality at the heart of Catholicism in Europe. By studying present celebrations of the Virgin of Guadalupe and El Señor de los Milagros, Papal Encyclicals, the Latin American Catholic Mission and the order of the Legionaries of Christ in Rome she bridges the long-standing divide between the study of popular and institutional Catholicism, and between current circulations of affects around migration in Italy and the Catholic Church's historical anxieties and hopes of conversion since the early missionization of the Americas. Through an Atlantic and transnational perspective Napolitano shows how the Roman Catholic Church is a passionate machine, an ethical and political subject that reignites a passion for Catholicism based on one hand on Papal liturgy and the importance of the moral truth, and on the other on how diverse Catholic migrants can become an apostolic vessel for new blood in a Europe perceived as having cooled to the Catholic faith.

History Compass, 2007

Recent scholarship makes a case for examining the Atlantic world as a Catholic space throughout the Early Modern period. The Catholic Church was the most expansive and broadly flung of the different religious institutions in the West throughout the Early Modern period. For better or worse, the Catholic spiritual tradition was also a critical force in shaping cultures on both sides of the ocean, and it was also itself informed by the many cultures it encountered. While historians on both sides of the Atlantic remain region-centric in their focus, this article will suggest that a comparative examination of the Catholic tradition in a broader cultural context will best shed light on the resiliency of this tradition in an age of spiritual upheaval.

Natalia NÚÑEZ BARGUEÑO, José Ramón RODRÍGUEZ LAGO (ed.) “Beyond ‘National-catholicisms’: Transnational Networks of Hispanic Catholicisms” (Ed. Silex)., 2021

This book illustrates the manifold ways in which the Hispanic spiritual world has served -still serves- as a fundamental and dynamic contact zone between European, American, and Asian Catholicisms. Our analysis of the global presence of Hispanic Catholics not only emphasises the intricate relationships (of similarity, disparity, conflict, negotiation) among different nations in the Hispanic speaking world, it also elucidates the crucial and complex way in which local preoccupations have interacted with wider transnational agendas that went well-beyond the traditional confines of the so-called "Hispanidad", and how these transoceanic entanglements continue to shape the Catholic world even today. Written in English and Spanish, this book’s 20 chapters provide a multiplicity of perspectives (theology, sociology, religious and cultural history, gender and "decolonial" studies) and geographies from which the reader can approach the circulation of human, material, symbolic and spiritual resources beyond national, linguistic and religious frontiers in the late modern Catholic world.

Journal of early modern Christianity, 2017

2010

Puritans and Catholics in the Trans-Atlantic World 1600–1800, 2016

This work aims to examine the relationship between the specific Christianity practiced by the European colonizers and the development of ethnic and racial identity in the Americas. More specifically, the scope of this work is to suggest that Roman Catholicism, unreformed and still largely ritualistic, allowed for the development of syncretic religions when it was combined with the traditional beliefs of indigenous and African descended peoples.

Records of the American Catholic Historical Society of Philadelphia, 1990