This book is the first to analyze the impacts of migration and transnationalism on global Catholicism. It explores how migration and transnationalism are producing diverse spaces and encounters that are moulding the Roman Catholic Church as institution and parish, pilgrimage and network, community and people. Bringing together established and emerging scholars of sociology, anthropology, geography, history and theology, it examines migrants’ religious transnationalism, but equally the effects of migration-related-diversity on non-migrant Catholics and the Church itself. This timely edited collection is organised around a series of theoretical frameworks for understanding the intersections of migration and Catholicism, with case studies from 17 different countries and contexts. The extent to which migrants’ religiosity transforms Catholicism, and the negotiations of unity in diversity within the Roman Catholic Church, are key themes throughout. This innovative approach will appeal to scholars of migration, transnationalism, religion, theology, and diversity.

Migrant Hearts and the Atlantic Return examines contemporary migration in the context of a Roman Catholic Church eager to both comprehend and act upon the movements of peoples. Combining extensive fieldwork with lay and religious Latin American migrants in Rome and analysis of the Catholic Church’s historical desires and anxieties around conversion since the period of colonization, Napolitano sketches the dynamics of a return to a faith’s putative center. Against a Eurocentric notion of Catholic identity, Napolitano shows how the Americas reorient Europe. Napolitano examines both popular and institutional Catholicism in the celebrations of the Virgin of Guadalupe and El Senor de los Milagros, papal encyclicals, the Latin American Catholic Mission, and the order of the Legionaries of Christ. Tracing the affective contours of documented and undocumented immigrants’ experiences and the Church’s multiple postures toward transnational migration, she shows how different ways of being Catholic inform constructions of gender, labor, and sexuality whose fault lines intersect across contemporary Europe.

This edited book explores the impact of globalisation on the relationship between religion and politics, religion and nation, religion and nationalism, and the impact that transnationalism has on religious groups. In a post-Westphalian and transnational world, with increased international communication and transportation, a plethora of new religious recompositions religions now take part in a network society that cuts across borders. This collection, through its analysis of historical and contemporary case studies, explores the growth of both national and transnational religious movements and their dealings with the various versions of modernity that they encounter. It considers trends of religious revitalisation and secularisation, and processes of nationalism and transnationalism through the prism of the theory of multiple modernities, acknowledging both its pluralist world view but also the argument that its definition of modernity is often so inclusive as to lose coherence. Providing a cutting edge take on 21st century religion and globalization, this volume is a key read for all scholars of religion, secularisation and transnationalism.

Gatherings in Diaspora brings together the latest chapters in the long-running chronicle of religion and immigration in the American experience. Today, as in the past, people migrating to the United States bring their religions with them, and their religious identities often mean more to them away from home, in their diaspora, than they did before. This book explores and analyzes the diverse religious communities of post-1965 diasporas: Christians, Hews, Muslims, Hindus, Rastafarians, and practitioners of Vodou, from countries such as China, Guatemala, Haiti, India, Iran, Jamaica, Korea, and Mexico. The contributors explore how, to a greater or lesser extent, immigrants and their offspring adapt their religious institutions to American conditions, often interacting with religious communities already established. The religious institutions they build, adapt, remodel, and adopt become worlds unto themselves, congregations, where new relations are forged within the community -- between men and women, parents and children, recent arrival and those longer settled.

Global migrations flows in the 20th century have seen the emergence of Muslim diaspora and minority communities in Europe, North America and other parts of the world. While there is a growing body of research on Muslim minorities in various regional contexts, the particular experiences of Shi'a Muslim minorities across the globe has only received scant attention.This book offers new comparative perspectives of Shi'a minorities outside of the so-called 'Muslim heartland' (the Middle East, North Africa, Central and South Asia). It includes contributions on Shi'a minority communities in Europe, North and South America, Sub-Saharan Africa and East Asia that emerged out of migration from the Middle East and South Asia in the 20th and 21st centuries in particular. As a 'minority within a minority', Shi'a Muslims face the double challenge of maintaining as Islamic as well as a particular Shi'a identity in terms of communal activities and practices, public perception and recognition.

Religious practices and their transformation are crucial elements of migrants' identities and are increasingly politicized by national governments in the light of perceived threats to national identity. As new immigrant flows shape religious pluralism in Europe, longstanding relations between the State and Church are challenged, together with majority-faith traditions and societies’ ways of representing and perceiving themselves. With attention to variations according to national setting, this volume explores the process of reformulating religious identities and practices amongst South Asian 'communities' in European contexts, Presenting a wide range of ethnographies, including studies of Hinduism, Sikhism, Jainism and Islam amongst migrant communities in contexts as diverse as Norway, Italy, the UK, France and Portugal, Migration and Religion in Europe sheds light on the meaning of religious practices to diasporic communities. It examines the manner in which such practices can be used by migrants and local societies to produce distance or proximity, as well as their political significance in various 'host' nations. Offering insights into the affirmation of national identities and cultures and the implications of this for governance and political discourse within Europe, this book will appeal to scholars with interests in anthropology, religion and society, migration, transnationalism and gender.

From a critical realist perspective, this book examines the manner and the extent to which religion is shaped by modernity. With a focus on Poland, one of the most monolithic and religiously active Catholic societies in the world – but which has undergone periods of intense transformation in its recent history – the author explores the transformations that have affected Catholicism from a position of reflexivity. Viewing Catholicism as a system of ideas elaborated by tradition, the author considers the relationship between human subjectivity and social structure by examining the shift from traditional religious practice to modern religious observance, particularly in an era of migration in which many Polish Catholics have relocated to western European countries, with profound changes in their religious outlook. Presenting a new approach to understanding religious change from the perspective of religious reflexivity, Polish Catholicism between Tradition and Migration will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in religion, research methods, social change and critical realist thought.

The fifth volume of The Oxford History of British & Irish Catholicism--covering the period from the Great War, through the Second World War and the Second Vatican Council--surveys the transformed ecclesial landscape between the papacies of Benedict XV and Pope Francis. It explores the efforts of bishops, priests and people in Ireland and Scotland, Wales and England to respond to modern challenges and reintegrate the experiences and expertise of the laity into the ministry of the Church. Alongside the twentieth century's designation as an era of technological innovation, war, peace, globalization, decolonization and liberation, this period has also been designated 'the People's Century'. Viewed through the lens of the Catholic church in Britain and Ireland, these same dynamics are explored within thematic, synoptic chapters by leading scholars. As a century characterized by the rise, or better renewal of the apostolate of the laity, this edited collection traces the struggles to reconcile tradition, re-evaluate hierarchical authority, adapt to social and educational mobility, as well as to adjudicate serious challenges from outside and within--including inflammatory biopolitics and clerical sexual abuse--to religious belief and the legitimacy of the Church as an institution.

Providing a critical overview of transnationalism as a concept, this Handbook looks at its growing influence in an era of high-speed, globalised interconnectivity. It offers crucial insights on how approaches to transnationalism have altered how we think about social life from the family to the nation-state, whilst also challenging the predominance of methodologically nationalist analyses.

This ethnographic study of a Chinese Catholic village reveals how the rapid penetration of transnational processes into the People’s Republic of China during the post-Mao period has redefined and created new social and cultural structures in rural communities. In examining the resurfacing of a Catholic community in a Hakka village in Jiaoling county, Guangdong, the book shows what it means to be part of a global and modern rural village. The Hakka are members of a Chinese diasporic group that in the past few decades have mobilized international campaigns to strengthen ethnic solidarity. After surviving campaigns of persecution in the Maoist era, Catholic villagers incorporated their village church into the state religious administrative structure while remaining faithful to Catholic traditions. They managed this transformation despite a multiplicity of national and transnational processes that might have deterred them: the privatization of local sectors of the socialist economy; the global movement of people as workers, students, and tourists; and the swift modernization of Chinese production and consumption. Through a close examination of life-cycle rituals such as weddings, baptisms, and funerals, and community-wide events such as the building of a new church and a celebration of Christmas, the author shows how Catholic villagers pursued strategies to make their imagined futures a reality. For these villagers, Chinese Catholicism has defined a deterritorialized community’s boundaries while simultaneously connecting them to the rest of the world through an international religious tradition.