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Napoli reviews For All Peoples and All Nations: The Ecumenical Church and Human Rights by John S. Nurser.

The recent bankruptcies of Catholic Dioceses are unprecedented. For the first time, Bankruptcy Courts must deal with the difficult question of who owns the parish church. In this paper, I will explore two possible sources of confusion about this question. The first is the non- commercial, charitable nature of the Church. The second is its organizational complexity. Resolving the confusion requires a familiarity with various different sources of law including charities law, bankruptcy law, trust law, and Canon Law. In this paper I address this issue by: 1. discussing why the equities and policies that govern charitable bankruptcies are different from those that govern commercial bankruptcies; 2. laying out a road map for determining ownership issues that indicates what sub-questions must be answered and in what order; and 3. discussing the role that each of the different sources of law plays in answering these questions. My conclusion is that, in most circumstances, individual parishes do have a significant ownership stake in assets that are given or dedicated for their use.

After the Second World War, West German Catholics placed more faith in religious miracles than they did at almost any other period in the modern era. West German congregations reported eleven apparitions of the Virgin Mary to Church officials be-tween 1945 and 1954, as well as Europe's most prominent twentieth century case of stigmata. Existing scholarship links the popularity of these alleged miracles to the ways in which Marian symbolism articulated anxieties about war trauma and the Cold War. This article illustrates how an interconnected movement of rural women, provincial priests, concentration camp survivors, and former prisoners of war based around Marian visions and stigmata emerged as a reaction not only to the Cold War, but also to Americanisation, consumerism, and the Nazi past. To frame the bitter conflicts between Marian pilgrims and Church hierarchy about the recognition of religious miracles, the article utilises Pierre Bourdieu's concept of 'religious field'. It also takes into account the gendered character of the conflicts.