Everyday Cosmopolitanisms: Living the Silk Road in Medieval Armenia by Kate Franklin

Abstract

prediction of sociologists as recently as a decade ago that modern societies were becoming more secular has suffered hard rebuffs in many respects. By virtue of marriage, this reviewer was an observer of remarkably changing Catholic practices for half a century. He remembers, too, his undergraduate history tutor, who was still a devout enough Catholic at the end of the 1950s to assign a sympathetic biography of Pius IX, confessing to a completely disoriented faith twenty years later. Was there any trace of this fluidity in the 1930s and 1940s? What was the range of beliefs and practices in different classrooms, confessionals, and masses? Can we unite the history of religious practices, in the way that modern religious anthropology does, with the high politics of the curia? The liberal veering of the Church in the 1960s and thereafter may have represented not merely a reaction to the orthodoxies of Cold War Catholicism but an effort to compensate for the silences of the Church under fascism a generation earlier. It aroused the same kind of opposition from both European and American cold warriors that Pope Francis faces today. If contemporary Church spokespersons can overcome the tendency of any criticized institution to close ranks in defense, they, too, should be grateful to Kertzer whose successive histories have documented the administrative Church and, alas, in this latest study, its eminently fallible shepherd.