SEARCH · Search PubMed

Results for “CATHOLICISM”

Search indexed PubMed citations on genomics, clinical trials, systematic reviews and public health. Explore titles, authors and supplied subject terms, then open the PubMed record.

SourceResearch connectionFrom yearThrough year

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 73 records · Page 4Linked to original sources

PubMed1998

Eugenics, McGill, and the Catholic Church in Montreal and Quebec: 1890-1942.

Tracing the origins of eugenics in Canada and seeking to apply a national model, the article explores the juxtaposition between the movement's origin in Britain and its popularity in the Canadian academic milieu, and its condemnation in Quebecois intellectual circles. The first aspect of the movement is explored through the work of two McGill professors, Carrie Derrick and J.G. Adami. In contrast, there is both apathy and resistance from the Quebecois polity--and the influence of Catholicism in forming a resistant position to the eugenics movement--to consider. The impact of works by Blais, Forest, and others are examined in this respect. The conclusion argues for a bifurcated response to eugenic ideas in Quebec, divided along linguistic-cultural lines.

Canada↗

PubMed1991

Collaboration as a source of strength. Specific criteria guide potential collaborative relationships.

Leaders at SSM Health Care System (SSMHCS), St. Louis, believe collaboration can ensure that existing Catholic healthcare ministries continue to serve and to provide a full continuum of care. They see collaboration as both a source of strength and an expression of their Catholicism. To facilitate collaboration, SSMHCS leaders have developed six relationship models in which two types of collaborative arrangements are possible--informal and formal. Informal cooperative relationships may include consultation and participation by non-SSMHCS entities in established SSMHCS activities. Formal collaborative relationships include joint ventures at the operating entity level and in contract management, joint ventures at the governance-management level, and total affiliation (merger-acquisition). To ensure that SSMHCS leaders adequately evaluate healthcare providers with whom they may collaborate, in 1987 the system established criteria for collaboration. The criteria are based on specific mission, planning, financial, and operations principles. SSMHCS weights the mission criteria more heavily than other criteria because of the emphasis on mission in all its ministries.

Catholicism↗

PubMed1987

Culture, religion, and fertility: a global view.

This study tries to assess the effects of culture and religion on fertility after accounting for a country's socioeconomic standing. Analysis of covariance models are estimated for 128 countries with time-series covering the period 1950-1975. The dependent variable is the gross reproduction rate; independent variables are the infant mortality rate, an aggregate indicator of female educational standing, and gross domestic product per person as well as categorical variables for religion and cultural region. It turns out that the European countries have generally lower fertility than could be expected from their socioeconomic standing. In the Arab countries, culture and religion tend to have strong positive effects on fertility. Across cultures, Catholicism has a fertility-increasing effect but it--like the effect of all religions except Islam--is diminishing over time. In contrast, the effect of culture (as measured by a regional variable) on the level of national fertility has been increasing at the expense of socioeconomic effects.

Birth Rate↗

PubMedDate not supplied

[Dynamics of the dialogue on bioethics in a Spain in transition].

The bioethics dialogue began in Spain in 1975 in private institutions and developed in a society in transition toward democracy. Nostalgia for a nationalist Catholicism by some and the fervor of others to demonstrate that a break with the past had taken place have been important factors in bioethics legislation. Imitation of legislation considered progressive prevailed in the debate taking place in the country's bioethics centers, although in the case of assisted reproduction a commission of experts was set up to advise the government. The public has not participated in the debates, despite their coverage by the communications media. The medical schools have attempted to reform the deontological codes as a basis for formulating, promoting, and protecting the values of a pluralistic society. Results have been minimal, but the work of the bioethics centers is gradually being recognized and evaluated, and it is hoped that this ongoing bioethical dialogue will gradually mature.

Bioethics↗

PubMed1982

Influences of culture on sexuality.

Religion is a cultured phenomenon, a subculture within our larger cultural system. Different religions have different teachings about what constitutes sexual morality, while members within a specific religious denomination may also have different beliefs and practices. Religiosity, or acceptance of the teachings of a particular religion, is more important as a determinant of sexual behavior than a specific religion per se. Orthodox Judaism, traditional Catholicism and traditional Protestantism are alike in their condemnation of masturbation, abortion, homosexuality, and premarital and extramarital coitus. More liberal members of these religions may not tolerate these activities, but may espouse them as necessary means to maintain or attain health. Nurses assess the beliefs that clients hold in regard to sexual morality and also identify if the client is experiencing guilt about past sexual practices. Interventions are planned with the client within the framework of the client's religious and spiritual beliefs and practices. To do otherwise is to invite distrust and distress in the client. Nurses intervene with sensitivity, compassion, and respect for beliefs and values that may be different from their own.

Catholicism↗

PubMed1996

[Angelus Silesius--physician and mystic].

The priest as physician of the soul and the doctor as physician of the body, this ancient model of christian mentality was adapted by Johannes Scheffler-better known under his pseudonym Angelus Silesius-both in his biography and his literary works. Born 1624 in Breslau, he graduated to a Doctor philosophiae et medicinae and became physician in ordinary to an orthodox-Lutheran earl. Contacts to the esoteric Christianity, which was based on theosophy, mysticism and the physics of Johann Böhme, let Scheffler quit his profession. He converted to Catholicism in 1653 and was ordained as a catholic priest in 1661. His two main manuscripts, the Cherubinische Wandersmann and the Heilige Seelenlust, a poetical dyptichon, show the two possibilities of reaching the mystical recognition of god, either the capability of reason or the ability of emotion. The centre of all is the unio mystica, the union with god. Its a mysticism of the spontaneity of salvation, which occurs in a variety of prospects, metaphors and paradoxical language.

Catholicism↗

PubMed1993

Heterosexual behaviour of 18-year-olds in the Glasgow area.

This paper describes heterosexual behaviour, and protection against pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, among 908 18-year-olds in the Glasgow area in 1990. The proportion who reported having experienced sexual intercourse was similar to, though slightly lower than, that reported in most recent studies elsewhere. There were marked sex differences, with males reporting being significantly younger at first intercourse and having had more sexual partners than females. The reported prevalence of unprotected sex (without any contraception) and of "unsafe" sex (without a condom) was high. Being male, of no religious affiliation, an early school leaver, and not in higher education were independently associated with sexual experience. Among the sexually experienced, lower education was also associated with "unsafe" sex, and Catholicism with unprotected sex. The overall pattern of findings, particularly in relation to sex differences, suggests that young people in the Glasgow area may be subject to more traditional influences than those elsewhere.

Adolescent↗

PubMed1999

Religious characteristics of US women physicians.

Physicians' religious attributes are unknown, and may affect patient care. The Women Physicians' Health Study (WPHS) is a random sample (n = 4501 respondents, 59% response rate) of US women physicians aged 30-70; the first large, national study of US women physicians. In this study US women physicians were less likely to be Christian than were other Americans (61.2% of women physicians versus 85.1% of the general population), but were more likely to be Jewish (13.2% vs 2.0%), Buddhist (1.4% vs 0.3%), Hindu (3.9% vs 0.4%), or atheist/agnostic (5.9% vs 0.6%). Protestantism (29.3% of the population) and Catholicism (24.9%) were the most commonly reported religious identities. The strongest religious identity was claimed by Mormons and Seventh Day Adventists. Thus, women physicians' religious beliefs differ from those of the general population in the US. This may be particularly important for physicians practicing with patient populations with different religious affiliations, and in addressing clinical questions with ethical or religious dimensions.

Adult↗

PubMed1998

Nihilism, relativism, and Engelhardt.

This paper is a critical analysis of Tristram Engelhardt's attempts to avoid unrestricted nihilism and relativism. The focus of attention is his recent book, The Foundations of Bioethics (Oxford University Press, 1996). No substantive or "content-full" bioethics (e.g., that of Roman Catholicism or the Samurai) has an intersubjectively verifiable and universally binding foundation, Engelhardt thinks, for unaided secular reason cannot show that any particular substantive morality (or moral code) is correct. He thus seems to be committed to either nihilism or relativism. The first is the view that there is not even one true or valid moral code, and the second is the view that there is a plurality of true or valid moral codes. However, Engelhardt rejects both nihilism and relativism, at least in unrestricted form. Strictly speaking, he himself is a universalist, someone who believes that there is a single true moral code. Two argumentative strategies are employed by him to fend off unconstrained nihilism and relativism. The first argues that although all attempts to establish a content-full morality on the basis of secular reason fail, secular reason can still establish a content-less, purely procedural morality. Although not content-full and incapable of providing positive direction in life, much less a meaning of life, such a morality does limit the range of relativism and nihilism. The second argues that there is a single true, content-full morality. Grace and revelation, however, are needed to make it available to us; secular reason alone is not up to the task. This second line of argument is not pursued in The Foundations at any length, but it does crop up at times, and if it is sound, nihilism and relativism can be much more thoroughly routed than the first line of argument has it. Engelhardt's position and argumentative strategies are exposed at length and accorded a detailed critical examination. In the end, it is concluded that neither strategy will do, and that Engelhardt is probably committed to some form of relativism.

Bioethics↗

PubMed1998

Religious sanctions and rates of suicide worldwide.

In order to understand differences in suicide rates between the countries affiliated to the International Association for Suicide Prevention (IASP), the present paper investigates whether there is a relationship between the existence of religious sanctions and aggregate national suicide rates as reported to the World Health Organization. Through their participation in this study, 49 IASP national representatives reported on the existence of religious sanctions against suicide. It was discovered that countries with religious sanctions were less likely to return rates of suicide to the WHO. Comparative analysis revealed that the average reported rates for countries with sanctions are lower than those for countries without religious sanctions. The difference is particularly significant for females. Overall, then, at an aggregate level, it would appear that an inverse relationship does exist; however, while countries with religious sanctions against suicide return lower rates of suicide, as recorded by the WHO, recording and reporting procedures may be affected by the existence of sanctions, thus diminishing the reliability of reported rates. Furthermore, distinctions between rates among the different denominations seem to have been somewhat blurred, in particular between Catholics and Protestants, to the extent that in certain societies Catholics have a higher reported rate of suicide--despite the fact that, doctrinally, Catholicism is more severe in the condemnation of suicide than the majority of Protestant churches (with a few notable exceptions, such as the Orthodox Calvinists).

Attitude to Health↗

PubMed1996

Church attendance, denomination, and suicide ideology.

The influence of religion on attitudes toward suicide was explored, using a representative sample (N = 2,034) of 15- to 30-year-old Germans. The dependent variable was approval vs. disapproval of suicide in hopeless situations. A logit model that fits the data includes the variables of denomination, church attendance, education, and suicide of an acquaintance as well as a Church Attendance x Suicide of an Acquaintance interaction. Gender did not improve the fit of the model. The results of the analysis indicated that church attendance and Catholicism decreased support for suicide. The effect of religiosity on attitudes about suicide was not affected by gender or by education.

Adolescent↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Sexual morality of Christianity.

After discussing the origin of religion, functions of religion, and the construction of meaning by religion, the author focuses on the connection between religion and anxiety. The permanent anxiety in religion is determined by guilt feelings that arise for example from the violation of norms in the area of sexuality. In a religion at enmity with sexuality, such as Christianity, the satisfaction of sexual desires is considered bad and sinful; the permanent production of anxiety and a guilty conscience are the result of it. Christian sexual suppression leads to the propagation of asceticism as the taming of corrupt sensuality that only religious virtuosi can maintain. One result of asceticism is celibacy, although passages from the Bible demand monogamy for bishops without prohibiting celibacy. In Catholicism, celibacy institutionalizes the enmity with sexuality and causes a permanent depreciation of real sexuality in favor of one projected onto the mother church and the Virgin Mary. A further consequence of asceticism is the reduction of sexuality to reproduction. In the section about the factual consequences of Christian sexual morality, the author connects sexual instinctual gratification with religious affiliation on the basis of an analysis of the sexual behavior of Germans. The weekly frequency rate of sexual intercourse amounts to 3.1 with male and female nondenominationals, 2.6 with Protestants, and 2.3 with Catholics; 39% of nondenominational men, 20% of Protestant men, and 12% of Catholic men in Germany use condoms. The connection of religion and aggression is empirically significant as well. The religiously most active men feel more inclined to use aggression to reach sexual goals than religiously indifferent ones.

Adult↗

PubMed2002

Work as a cultural and personal value: attitudes towards work in Polish society.

The meaning of work for Poles is analyzed here from 2 perspectives: macrosocial and individual. From the macrosocial perspective work attitudes are explained by 3 factors: traditional Polish Catholicism, cultural patterns (influence of noble class tradition), and experience of "real socialism." From an individual perspective some psychological and demographic predictors of an autonomous (intrinsic) work attitude are empirically tested. The autonomous attitude towards work is understood here as treating work as an important autonomous value versus only an instrumental means for earning money. The data was collected by means of standardized interviews run on a representative random sample of adult working Poles, N = 1340.

Adult↗

PubMed2006

Pictures of evolution and charges of fraud: Ernst Haeckel's embryological illustrations.

Comparative illustrations of vertebrate embryos by the leading nineteenth-century Darwinist Ernst Haeckel have been both highly contested and canonical. Though the target of repeated fraud charges since 1868, the pictures were widely reproduced in textbooks through the twentieth century. Concentrating on their first ten years, this essay uses the accusations to shed light on the novelty of Haeckel's visual argumentation and to explore how images come to count as proper representations or illegitimate schematics as they cross between the esoteric and exoteric circles of science. It exploits previously unused manuscripts to reconstruct the drawing, printing, and publishing of the illustrations that attracted the first and most influential attack, compares these procedures to standard practice, and highlights their originality. It then explains why, though Haeckel was soon accused, controversy ignited only seven years later, after he aligned a disciplinary struggle over embryology with a major confrontation between liberal nationalism--and Catholicism--and why the contested pictures nevertheless survived.

Anatomy, Artistic↗

PubMed1999

Words, art, body and memory: readings from a writer.

This essay considers the consequences of childhood experiences with family illness on future adult sensibilities. Novelist and memoirist Mary Gordon describes her father's early death from heart disease and her childhood responsibilities toward her mother who was chronically ill with polio. She examines the relations between the ill body and the rituals and teachings of Catholicism and, by implication, all religious imagings of the body. By detailing her current caregiving responsibilities toward her mother, who is now homebound with Alzheimer disease, she scrutinizes the responses of the healthy toward the ill. She cites passages from her own novels--The Other Side, The Shadow Man, and Spending--in which characters' bodies fail and sicken. By examining these retrospective and prospective experiences with other people's ailments, Gordon exhorts medical students and doctors to tend to the bodies in their care with skill, with vision, and with words. She joins fellow writer Joseph Conrad in his task: "by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel; it is, before all, to make you see."

Adolescent↗

PubMed2003

Religious construction of a first episode of psychosis in urban Brazil.

Religion plays an important role in the lives of people with psychosis. Based on fieldwork with 21 families living in poor neighborhoods of São Paulo, Brazil, this article examines how youth suffering a first episode of psychosis resort to religion for help (including, Catholicism, Pentecostalism, Candomblé, and Umbanda) and how this frames their experience of psychosis and that of their family members. For young people, the personal articulation of religious idioms and signifiers served to communicate, elaborate and transform their experience of psychosis. Family members resorted to religion as a source of healing, complementary to psychiatric treatment, as well as for personal relief and comfort. For youth, involvement with religion worked in both 'progressive' and 'regressive' ways, to improve and, at times, to diminish functioning and well-being.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2004

What converges and what diverges when religious object representations transform? An annotated critique of Cohen (2002).

This essay is a discussion of several elements of Mariam Cohen's (2002) psychoanalytic reflections regarding the autobiographical account of Judith Bruder's gradual religious conversion from Orthodox Judaism to Catholicism. Despite advances in theory, it remains unclear how psychoanalysis is to accommodate the notion of an objective divine entity that truly exists behind the patient's religious representations. It would seem that the particular kind of object posited by religion is destined to remain the insoluble and nonnegotiable limit of psychoanalysis, akin to the virtual "navel" that Freud hypothesized as the endpoint or foveal spot of every dream. In order to advance theory and practice, the material used for discussion must be the product of some kind of intensive psychoanalytic process. Practically, it seems inaccurate, or at least incomplete, simply to state that a religious personality or representation has "converged into integration," as Cohen emphasizes, without also acknowledging that salient divergences occur simultaneously, whose tandem cooperation with convergence signifies healthy mindedness.

Culture↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Structural determinants of the abortion rate: a cross-societal analysis.

Data for a sample of 89 countries are used to examine societal-level predictors of the legal status of abortion and its incidence as indicated by abortion rates. Measures of socioeconomic development, women's labor force participation, and dominant religion are considered as predictors of abortion. Logistic regression analysis reveals that socioeconomic development has a positive effect on the probability of abortion being legal. Both a greater dominance of Catholicism and Islam in a society reduce the probability that abortion is legal. Results of tobit analyses show that development has curvilinear effects on abortion rates, with lower rates of abortion at both the lower and higher ends of development. Findings also indicate a positive effect of female labor force participation on the abortion rate that initially grows stronger with increases in socioeconomic development, but weakens with further increases. Finally, a greater proportion of Catholics in a population lowers the abortion rate.

Abortion, Induced↗