The Command to Baptize and Cases of Doubt. The Catholic Church's Early Modern Administration of the Sacraments from a Global Historical Perspective

• Applicant: Dr. Gregor Klapczynski
• Subject Area: Roman Catholic Theology
• Term: from 2015 to 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 298741659

The Catholic Church has not always been the global player it is considered today; it is what is has, indeed, become. This process has been decisively promoted by the European expansions as well as by the denominational divisions of the Early Modern Period. Subsequently, the universal claim to normativity raised by the centre of the Church in Rome increasingly collided with the normativity of the factual in various particular realities. These novel challenges activated long-term processes of (self-) transformation within Roman Catholicism. In the constitutive tensions between the headquarters of the Church in Rome and the peripheries all over the world Catholic Christianity experienced confessional drives of globalization on the one hand and global drives of "confessionalization" on the other. However, the static model of activity in urbe and passivity in orbe fails to apprehend the dialectical dynamics of these incidents. Instead, a highly complex and specifically Catholic version of "religious colonialism" emerged, characterized by the global interaction of subaltern, intermediate and hegemonic religious protagonists. Hardly any other realm of Catholicism manages to illustrate these concepts better than the administration of sacraments. The so-called dubia circa baptismum, an archival collection recently made accessible containing cases of doubt related to baptism, which were sent to Rome from all over the world, is particularly impressive in this regard. They convey an extraordinary view of the beginnings of a global confessional culture.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants