Suchergebnisse

At the outset of his engaging and accessible study, Frank Coppa, professor of history at St. John's University, states: 'The present work seeks neither to prosecute the papacy nor to provide an apologia for its policies on Jews, neither to denigrate nor to defend its response to the antisemitism of the fascist regimes of the twentieth century. For example, Coppa notes that Pius IX's conduct during the Mortara affair, in which the pope refused to return a Jewish child to his parents after he determined that the child had been baptized, cannot 'be seen solely in terms of the degradation of the Jews, but must be viewed in light of his understanding of the canon law of the period as well as his dual responsibility as ruler of the state and head of the faith' (p. 106).

In the wake of WWI, religious identity and practice became tools for leaders to appropriate as instruments to define national belonging, often to the detriment of those outside the faith tradition. This book places ethnonationalism - a particular articulation of nationalism based upon an imagined ethnic community - at the centre of its analysis.