Christianity in the 20th century
Catholic and Protestant missionaries also made inroads in East Asia, increasing their presence and activity in Korea, mainland China, Taiwan, and Japan.
[8] Read from the pulpits of all German Catholic churches, it described Hitler as an insane and arrogant prophet and was the first official denunciation of Nazism made by any major organization.
[11][12][13][14] Neo-orthodoxy is a branch of Protestant thought which arose in the early 20th century in the context of the rise of the Third Reich in Germany and the accompanying political and ecclesiastical destabilization of Europe in the years before and during World War II.
Neo-orthodoxy's highly contextual, dialectical modes of argument and reasoning often rendered its main premises incomprehensible to American thinkers and clergy, and it was frequently either dismissed out of hand as unrealistic or cast into the reigning left- or right-wing molds of theologizing.
Karl Barth, a Swiss Reformed pastor and professor, brought this movement into being by drawing upon earlier criticisms of established (largely modernist) Protestant thought made by the likes of Søren Kierkegaard and Franz Overbeck.
[17] Regarding the matter, historian Derek Holmes wrote, "There is no doubt that the Catholic districts, resisted the lure of National Socialism Nazism far better than the Protestant ones.
South America, historically Catholic since European colonization, has experienced a large Evangelical and Pentecostal infusion in the 20th century with the influx of Christian missionaries from abroad.
In 1939 Pope Pius XII, within weeks of his coronation, radically reverted the 250-year-old Vatican policy and permitted the veneration of dead family members.
The Philippine clergy was ruled by Spanish friars at the time and de los Reyes and Aglipay had wanted to replace them with native Filipino priests instead.
Members of the Unión Obrera Democrática Filipina and de los Reyes were also excommunicated in December 1902 and early 1903, respectively, shortly after the establishment of the Philippine Independent Church.
Here in a nutshell are the basic elements of the Council's much-discussed communio ecclesiology[clarification needed], which affirms the importance of local churches and the doctrine of collegiality.
Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutiérrez became its primary proponent,[35] and in 1979 the bishops' conference in Mexico officially declared the Latin American Church's "preferential option for the poor".
[36] Archbishop Óscar Romero, a supporter of the movement, became the region's most famous contemporary martyr in 1980, when he was murdered while saying mass by forces allied with the government.
[39] While Pope John Paul II was criticized for his severity in dealing with proponents of the movement, he maintained that the Church, in its efforts to champion the poor, should not do so by resorting to violence or partisan politics.
Unlike Leo, who mainly addressed the condition of workers, Pius XI concentrated on the ethical implications of the social and economic order.
Going beyond Pius XI, he also defined social teachings in the areas of medicine, psychology, sport, TV, science, law and education.
Pope Paul VI's 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae reaffirmed the Catholic Church's traditional view of marriage and marital relations and asserted a continued proscription of artificial birth control.
In addition, the encyclical reaffirmed the sanctity of life from conception to natural death and asserted a continued condemnation of both abortion and euthanasia as grave sins which were equivalent to murder.
[45][46] Efforts to consider the ordination of women led Pope John Paul II to issue two documents to explain Church teaching.
[56] Cuba, under atheist Fidel Castro, succeeded in reducing the Church's ability to work by deporting the archbishop and 150 Spanish priests, discriminating against Catholics in public life and education and refusing to accept them as members of the Communist Party.
Emigration from Greece and the Near East in the 20th century created a sizable Orthodox diaspora in Western Europe, North and South America, and Australia.
This was opposed by various groups of traditionalists and Old Calendarists, especially in Moldavia, where Metropolitan Gurie Grosu of Bessarabia refused to accept the orders given by the Patriarchate.
Zoë sponsored numerous auxiliaries and affiliated groups, including organizations for professional men, youth, parents, and young women nurses.
As Bishop of Androusa, Anastasios was dividing his time between his teaching duties at the University of Athens and the Archbishopric of Irinoupolis in Kenya, which was then going through a difficult patch, before his appointment.
In June 1968, Coptic Pope Cyril VI received the relics of Saint Mark the Evangelist, which had been taken from Alexandria to Venice over eleven centuries earlier.
On Sunday, 2 January 2000, 21 Coptic Christians in Kosheh village in Upper (southern) Egypt, 450 kilometers south of Cairo, were massacred by Salafists.
Some of the most difficult questions in relations with the ancient Eastern Churches concern some doctrine (i.e. Filioque, Scholasticism, functional purposes of asceticism, the essence of God, Hesychasm, Fourth Crusade, establishment of the Latin Empire, Uniatism to note but a few) as well as practical matters such as the concrete exercise of the claim to papal primacy and how to ensure that ecclesiastical union would not mean mere absorption of the smaller Churches by the Latin component of the much larger Catholic Church (the most numerous single religious denomination in the world), and the stifling or abandonment of their own rich theological, liturgical and cultural heritage.
Pope John Paul II and Bartholomew I explicitly stated their mutual "desire to relegate the excommunications of the past to oblivion and to set out on the way to re-establishing full communion".
Pope John Paul II visited other heavily Orthodox areas such as Ukraine, despite lack of welcome at times, and he said that healing the divisions between Western and Eastern Christianity was one of his fondest wishes.
In 1966, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey, made an official visit to Pope Paul VI and, in the following year, the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission was established.
