Suchergebnisse

The church -- Sin -- Modernity -- The person and society -- Politics -- The nation penitent -- Ecclesia militans -- The Jew -- Polak-Katolik -- Mary, militant and maternal

Marian devotion has long been a central component of Catholic spirituality, in part because the image of the Virgin has been accommodated effectively within so many diverse cultural contexts. In modern Poland, Marianism gained much of its power from the way it linked seemingly contradictory models of femininity together within a national (or even nationalist) worldview. Mary, the Queen of Poland, has been offered to the faithful as a model for conceptualising the feminine within the nation, a model which is flexible enough to endure because it rests on a basic dichotomy: on the one hand, Mary is a powerful, sometimes militant, protector of Poland; on the other, she is an exemplar of feminine domesticity. She provides an image of authority and power which ultimately (perhaps paradoxically) poses little challenge to traditional norms of femininity – indeed, she is frequently called upon to fortify those norms. Marianism thus provides some of the glue that helps hold together two otherwise distinct strains of Polish national thought, one focused on maintaining conservative gender relations and the other on attaining victory in the international realm.

It is a great irony in the history of international relations that David Davies, one of its early and more generous benefactors, and E.H. Carr, author of one of the discipline's classics, were so opposed to each other. Yet had Davies not founded the Woodrow Wilson Chair in Aberystwyth in 1919, it is unlikely that Carr (whose appointment Davies bitterly regretted) would have turned his mind to international relations and written The Twenty Years' Crisis. In the end however each man laboured under a great illusion: the Welshman that peace could be imposed on the world by force; and the Englishman that the planned economy, as developed in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, represented the future. Great believers in the idea of progress, each of these two eminent late-Victorians expended a fortune in the one case, and years of labour in the other, to justify and substantiate his own vision of the world.