Roman Catholic Sacred Space

The article analyzes the forms and directions of social and charitable activities of the Roman Catholic community of Kharkov during the XIX - early XX century. Attention is drawn to the stages of creation and expansion of community through social and cultural events and defines the role of the church in the integration of the representatives of the Roman Catholic religion. The church acted as the central association of the whole community and was the organizer of all public initiatives. Focuses on the fact that Catholics acted within the Polish charitable organizations, and French, and it led to the unification of the representatives of many European Nations, who lived in Kharkov province in this period. Disclosed forms of charity, which was aimed at improving social protection, health care and the establishment of the national educational institutions. It is proved that the representatives of the community took an active part in organizing cultural and social events in the region, showed a high civil position, patriotism, providing assistance to the state during the complex socio-political processes, gave donations municipal charities organizations that operated during the First world war. Keywords: charity, the Roman Catholic community, Catholics, church, national community.

Barbara Cantalupo's Poe and the Visual Arts is an elegant contribution to the Poe scholarship that addresses a relatively undocumented aspect of the author: his aesthetic interest in the fine arts. The book consists of five chapters that range from Poe's exposure to art in Philadelphia (1838–45) to his stint in 1846 as the editor of the Broadway Journal while he was a resident of New York, a city that was fast becoming the epicenter of the American art scene. The chapters in between examine Poe's references to artists and artworks in his creative writing, his interest in homely interiors and beautiful exteriors in his later works, and his penchant for optical illusions and visual tricks throughout his career, and in particular his fascination with the perspectival device of anamorphosis in painting and in fiction.Cantalupo's examination of “Ligeia” (1838) and “William Wilson” (1839) are especially revelatory in this last regard, as she is able to demonstrate that Poe intended both tales to be read according to their anamorphic structures. The narrator of “Ligeia” purposively constructs a bridal chamber that would contribute to creating the anamorphic illusion that Rowena, whom he callously murders, has been transformed into his phantasmagoric departed lover. Cantalupo likewise solves the riddle of “William Wilson” that, as anyone who has ever taught the tale knows, has perplexed many undergraduate students and their professors alike. As opposed to stabbing himself at the end of the tale, a common misunderstanding of Poe's story, Cantalupo convincingly argues that the narrator murders an innocent stranger upon whom he has delusively projected the image of his sworn antagonist and doppelganger. The critic's attention to Poe's graphical interests enables her to substantiate a number of novel claims throughout her study.There have been numerous studies of Poe's aesthetic principles, as expressed in “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846) and “The Poetic Principle” (1850), for instance, to name just two of his major essays. Of course, Poe's aesthetic observations are scattered throughout his critical reviews (see G. R. Thompson's excellent collection). However, to date, besides the occasional article and a few notable studies (Cantalupo draws on the pioneering work of critics like Burton Pollin, Michael Deas, and Kent Ljungquist in her book), Poe's appreciation of the fine arts has largely been left in the dark. This should come as no surprise given the disciplinary background of most Poe acolytes. While Poe's oft-expressed aesthetic views have provided ample material for critical conversation, Cantalupo's book is refreshing in that it reorients his readers toward his love of fine art and how it informed the self-described “graphicality” of his own compositional style. We thus come to discover how landscape painting and portraiture influenced Poe's descriptions of external nature and domestic spaces, and how visual tricks and optical illusions were part and parcel of his penchant for the cryptic and the allusive in his writing. As a result, readers of Cantalupo's book are as likely to learn as much about their celebrated author as they are about the fascinating world of the American art scene in the mid-nineteenth century, at the time when Poe was penning many of his most enduring fables of mind.Cantalupo's chapters, which describe the art world Poe inhabited, document his artistic acquaintances and detail the various art works he was exposed to during the last decade of his life, are beautifully accompanied by over two dozen color prints. Cantalupo revisits Poe's writings during this time and stresses how much he borrowed from painting in his fictive work. The overall impression the reader gets from reading her book is of vicariously viewing a host of paintings that distinctly influenced the author's aesthetic sensibility. We are, as it were, positioned beside the author as he visits various art collections and exhibits in Philadelphia and New York City, and Cantalupo provides intelligent assessments of the predominant features of each painting that would have appealed to him. Beyond familiarizing the reader with artworks that Poe was himself familiar with, Cantalupo adds a new element to any biographical appreciation of the author, as we are introduced to Poe the lover of fine art, a facet of his personality that has been neglected. For the non-Poe scholar, this book makes for a wonderful addition to any coffee-table collection, as it is written in fine, clear prose, is amply illustrated with high-quality prints of famous artworks, and provides an interesting introduction to the American art scene. For the novice student of American culture, Cantalupo performs an admirable service in introducing readers to the works of such masters as those of the Hudson River School. And for the Poe scholar versed in the cultural politics of the time, Cantalupo helps to expand the critic's vision, to show how writers and painters shared a common concern in giving artistic expression to America's self-definition.One of the overarching arguments that structures Poe and the Visual Arts is that Poe became increasingly interested in an aesthetics of the beautiful as opposed to the sublime as he advanced in years. Cantalupo selects “The Philosophy of Furniture” (1840), “The Landscape Garden” (1842), “The Domain of Arnheim” (1846), and “Landor's Cottage” (1849) as her principal texts in illustrating her thesis. The portrait of the artist that emerges from Cantalupo's study of his later fiction is of an author who remained as receptive of natural beauty as he was of the landscape paintings that idealized and improved on the handiwork of creation. A second major observation made by the critic is that Poe insisted that art was humanity's best method of making manifest the beauty of nature and thus deifying the creation, which was always inherently flawed in some aspect or another. Finally, Cantalupo points out that Poe, while immersed in American art culture, preferred to cite European painters over their American counterparts, which of course fits in with the author's predilection for the foreign (and the universal) and his rejection of the narrow-minded patriotism that subsumed so many of his compatriots during the heyday of Young America. Cantalupo closes her study by speculating that had Poe vsurvived his fortieth year he may have left an entirely different legacy, one that transcended the sublime and sensationalistic earlier years and that advanced into an equally brilliant but yet more beautiful maturity.

Secularization, when defined as the decline in the authority of religious institutions, became a pronounced feature of Western culture in the 20th century, especially in its latter half. Secularization has affected the history of Western sacred space in four ways: (a) It has helped to shape the concept of “sacred space” so that it designates a space that helps generate a personal religious experience independent of religious rituals and teachings. (b) It has caused many houses of worship to use architectural forms not previously associated with religion in order to link their religious communities to the respected realms of business, science, and entertainment. And it has motivated religious communities to craft spaces that encourage worshipers to recognize God at work in the secular world and to demonstrate to others the continued relevance of religion. (c) Many former houses of worship have been destroyed or converted to other uses. Sometimes this occurred not because of declining membership but in order to relocate to a more favorable building or location. Nonetheless, these changes have created a more secular cityscape. Other times destruction and conversion have been the product of state-sponsored regimes of secularization or a decline in the number of clergy or church supporters. The reuse of these former houses of worship often results in the association of religious symbols with commercial or personal endeavors. It also raises challenges for maintaining public space in dense urban environments and for preserving artistic and cultural heritage. Given the increasing closure of churches, in 2018 the Pontifical Council of Culture issued guidelines to guide Roman Catholics in determining best uses for buildings no longer needed for worship. (d) Spaces which are not linked to religious communities, especially museums and monuments, came to be frequently designed in ways similar to historic sacred spaces. For this reason and others, they are esteemed by many people as places to encounter the sacred in a secularized world.

Reviews 266 Didier Péclard, Les Incertitudes de la nation en Angola: aux racines sociales de l’Unita (Paris: Éditions Karthala, 2015). 370 pages. Print. Reviewed by Iracema Dulley (CEBRAP — Brazilian Centre for Analysis and Planning) This book addresses the relations between Christian missions, Portuguese colonialism, local societies, and the emergence of UNITA (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola) in the Central Highlands of Angola. The book starts with a puzzle: how could a movement that on the verge of Angola’s independence had just a few thousand members and no significant international support manage to declare a rival government — together with the FNLA (National Front for the Liberation of Angola) — in Huambo in November 1975? The government was short-lived and unrecognized by any foreign country, but UNITA would continue to challenge the legitimacy of the MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) until the end of the bloody civil war, in 2002. In Savimbi’s retreat to Eastern Angola, he would be joined by a significant part of the Evangelical Congregational Church in Angola (IECA), known as the ‘church in the bush’. If UNITA’s ‘social roots’ include the Congregational church, Péclard’s analysis of the history of missionization in the Central Highlands outlines the conditions of possibility of this history, not its necessary causes. His examination of the architecture of the Congregational mission in the Central Highlands reveals both the introjection of an ethos in a long-term process of subjectification and the place of Christian missions as the only means of upward social mobility for the vast majority of Africans during Portuguese colonialism. The first chapter discusses the role of colonial knowledge in Angola and argues that the African population was rarely the object of detailed investigation. For the author, lusotropicalist ideology would promote the ontologization of the colonizer, not of colonial subjects, in its advocacy of Portuguese affability. The second chapter deals with the long-term relationship between the church and the colonial state and portrays the Portuguese New State as ‘Catholaicist’, i.e., marked by a separation of church and state in which the Catholic church was awarded privileges and funding in exchange for providing health and education services to Africans and promoting their ‘nationalization’ and ‘civilization’. Péclard relativizes the view according to which the Catholic Church is considered an extension of the colonial state by revealing the tensions that marked their relation; he also argues that while North American Protestant missionaries tended to be viewed as ‘denationalizing’, the Congregational mission’s diplomatic relations with the colonial state could ease tensions. The third chapter focuses on the implementation of the Congregational project from 1920 to 1950, a period in which the Highlands transitioned from caravan trade to agriculture. According to Péclard, the Congregational mission took advantage of the historical circumstances of sedentarization to build Reviews 267 ‘rural bastions’ relatively isolated from urban colonial society and undertake its work of ‘culturalist modernization’. The process of subjectification that ensued included transformations in agriculture, education, and the domestic space while retaining part of what was understood to be Umbundu tradition. The fourth chapter describes the challenges faced by Congregational missions from 1940 to 1960, a time of pauperization and proletarianization of the Highlands due to contract labour and the arrival of white settlers. The author describes the transformations in the Protestant project as a rural exodus and the inevitability of urbanization challenged its main pillars, rural life and relative isolation from the colonial world; he compares it with the Catholic missions, already inserted in urban areas and intimately connected to colonial society. The last chapter dwells both on the delayed participation of the Highlands in the uprisings and movements that challenged the colonial state from 1961 and on the repressive apparatus in the region, whose main targets were ‘assimilated’ subjects, especially Protestant ones. Repression and prosperity went hand in hand, as the ‘native statute’ was abolished in 1961 and economic growth provided opportunities for educated Africans. Péclard argues that while the Christian elite benefited from the colonial system that granted it privilege and status, the main opponents of the regime would nonetheless come from their ranks, given that education and...

Examining selected singing communities and individual practitioners of Bangladesh and West Bengal, I demonstrate how Bengali folk music production has recently concentrated within and around the home through fully equipped home-studios or the involvement of multiple individuals skilled at different aspects of content-creation or the use of smartphones. Both as a site of recording and the visual context, domestic spaces and natural spaces around the home generate an audiovisual aesthetics that animates the question of authenticity by foregrounding what is intimate, unadorned, and local, although the musical expressions thus articulated may eventually get involved in explicitly capitalistic enterprises.

At the start of the 1960s American labour appeared to be in a powerful position. After eight years of Eisenhower the Democrats won the White House. They put together the old New Deal coalition of labour unions and political machines, such as those of Richard Daley in Chicago and G. Mennen (Soapy) Williams in Michigan, and the solid South. This gave John F. Kennedy his wafer-thin victory over Richard Nixon in the November race to the White House. Despite his Roman Catholic religion, Kennedy had managed to hold the Democratic South while carrying the vote-heavy industrial States of the Northeast and Great Lakes region (with the exception of Ohio), plus Texas.

Now that parliament realized that the path to victory would be long and hard, it was inevitable that it should pursue an alliance with the Scottish Covenanters. The king, however, had been first in seeking allies outside his English kingdom, and the diplomatic efforts of both sides in the course of 1643 turned what had begun as an English civil war into a true war of three kingdoms. The situation in Ireland was complicated for both king and parliament. The Confederated catholics had established a form of provisional government, but they continued to profess their loyalty to the king, and they had strong reasons for wishing that he and not the parliament should win the war in England. The first General Assembly, which they summoned to Kilkenny in October 1642, had abjured the title of parliament because their oath of confederacy bound them to defend the king’s rights, which included the sole authority to summon a parliament. It had accepted the English common law as the law of Ireland and recognized the binding force of existing English statutes that legislated for Ireland, so long as they were not against the Roman Catholic religion or the liberties of the Irish people.

TO the student of Canadian-American relations an interesting problem is posed by the unexplained presence in the Articles of Confederation of a special provision for the adherence and admission of Canada,1 especially so because of the absence of a similar provision in the Constitution.2 What prompted the framers of the Articles of Confederation to seek the annexation of Canada? In this writer's opinion it was fear-the fear that the Revolutionary cause would be imperiled if Canada were permitted to return to its former French role as a base of anti-American military and Indian operations. To substantiate this thesis it will be necessary to begin our investigations with the Quebec Act of I774 and to continue them through the debates which led to the adoption of the Constitution in 1788. Whatever be the real intentions of its authors, the passage of the Quebec Act on June 22, 1774, in the company of the four Intolerable Acts, instantly revived the American fear of Canada which had lain dormant since the expulsion of the French in 1763. On September 17, the first Continental Congress, after being in session less than two weeks, registered its sharp disapproval of the Quebec Act by accepting the Suffolk Resolves, which bitterly condemned the establishment of "the Roman Catholic religion and the French laws" in Canada as "dangerous in an extreme degree to the Protestant religion and to the civil rights and liberties of all America."3 By October I4 Congress had concluded that the Quebec Act was further suspect because of the obnoxious company in which it had been passed.4 Less than a week later it voiced the opinion that the sinister purpose of the Quebec Act was "by the influence of civil principles and ancient prejudices to dispose the inhabitants [of Quebec] to act with hostility against the free Protestant

Based on the administrative records of the Escola Doméstica Nossa Senhora do Amparo and trials involving cases of violence between bosses and maids in domestic space, this essay discusses the emergence of a moral consciousness and a pedagogic discourse about domestic work linked to varied representations of emancipation in Rio de Janeiro in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth. The article discusses the ways in which slave emancipation and the preparation for free labor drew the attention of religious educators and families from the elite of the imperial city of Petrópolis, and how the nature of workplace relations in the domestic sphere constituted a central point of reference for the formulation of a nascent feminist rhetoric. These new rhetorics and practices, which engaged in defining and controlling the slow transformation of a complex landscape of domestic hierarchies, emerged in intimate articulation with slavery’s official end. After describing the project of domestic education carried out by the Catholic Church in Petrópolis, I focus on various attempts to use the force of law to interpret, regulate, and order work performed in private homes, aiming to reveal how domesticity became a site of power that was subject to the interference and control of various voices and institutions of the nascent republican state.

LAURA F. EDWARDS Duke University At the Threshold of the Plantation Household: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Southern Women’s History I REMEMBEREXACTLYWHENANDWHEREIREADELIZABETHFox-Genovese’s Within the Plantation Household: Women in the Old South for the first time. It was the academic year 1988-1989, and I had just left Chapel Hill, after completing my Ph.D. qualifying exams. I was living in Nashville, Tennessee, where I was trying to maintain momentum on my dissertation without access to the intellectual community of graduate school or an academic library. At a particularly difficult moment, I ordered Within the Plantation Household through a local bookstore. Having just realized the importance of women and gender to my dissertation, I had been searching for new scholarship on the topic in Southern history, regardless of time period. Fox-Genovese’s book appeared as a welcome and promising find. It was also a purchase that required a substantial waiting period and considerable thought on my part, for it came at a time when my budget did not allow for anything beyond the basics. At this time, though, I needed sustenance in an existential sense: I needed something to keep me connected to the world of history and, more importantly, to the excitement and challenge of new historical work. Within the Plantation Household did just that. Within the Plantation Household continues to reverberate through my own work and through the field of Southern women’s history more generally. At the time of its publication, Fox-Genovese broke new ground by bringing together white plantation mistresses and enslaved women in a single narrative, framed in terms of gender, race, and class. In some respects, the book reflected the general direction of the scholarship in women’s history, particularly its emphasis on the notion of gender and race as relational concepts. Yet Fox-Genovese rejected the more extreme postmodern and poststructuralist renderings that set gender, race, and class free from their materialist moorings. Remaining true to her Marxist intellectual roots, she subordinated women, race, and gender within an analytical framework rooted in the solid base of class 578 Laura F. Edwards relations.1 That approach led in two directions, one liberating and the other limiting. The way that Fox-Genovese fused new theoretical insights with venerable historiographical traditions opened up questions about women and Southern history. In particular, she was able to question—or perhaps more accurately, explode—the notion that Southern households were “private” domains separate from the “public” world of work and politics. Other scholars picked up those insights, producing a new body of historical work that completely refashioned how we think about Southern women’s lives, both inside and outside their households. Fox-Genovese, however, did not join this effort. She remained wedded to a more rigid analytical framework, one in which women remained firmly subordinated inside the social relations of the plantation household. Ironically, this same framework inspired others to expand Southern women’s history outside its traditional bounds—crossing the threshold of the household, so to speak. Within the Plantation Household appeared at a moment of particular creativity in the field of women’s history. Historians were developing a series of new questions and analytical approaches, critiquing the traditional focus on white middle-class women and organized efforts to obtain the vote. Rather than assuming a singular, unified feminine experience, they expanded the category “woman” to include working women, women of color, and lesbians, emphasizing the conflicts that characterized relations amongwomen and the variety across cultures. At the same time, some feminist historians were moving beyond the task of merely recovering information about women’s lives and positioning gender as a concept of historical analysis in its own right. By sharpening the concept of gender, they launched new analyses that focused on the dynamics of law and politics, with an eye toward addressing questions about the persistence of inequality in the past and the present. These historians built on earlier feminist scholarship that critiqued conceptual dichotomies that assumed a “natural” separation between all women and all men, and that associated women with unchanging arenas of nature, nurture, and domestic space. As these feminist scholars maintained, those conceptual categories themselves were products of history and culture...

As a postcolonial country with a legacy of nationalist engagement and a historically strong adherence to the Roman Catholic religion, one would expect only modest advances in women's rights. Yet, such is not the case. Ireland has undergone a remarkable change in the last thirty years with regard to the relationship between the Roman Catholic Church and the state and with regard to the implementation of women's rights. Whereas over 90 percent of the Irish population are born as Catholics, recent years have seen a growing secularization of Irish society accompanied by significant improvements in the role and status of women. All of this change has coincided with mammoth infusions of foreign direct investment in the island's economy. Today, foreign firms employ almost half of the country's labor force and account for two-thirds of its output (Economist 2000, 21).

The knowledge we have of the so called 'Nicodemites' is based on Calvin's polemical treatises against them. By 'Nicodemite' we mean someone who did not confess his-evangelical-faith openly but kept his conviction a secret in face of persecution. Calvin's treatise Response à un certain Holandois is remarkable, because it is his only work against a known Nicodemite: the Dutchman D.V. Coornhert. All his life Calvin combatted those who, in spite of evangelical opinions, did not break with the Roman Catholic Church. The arguments he used against them, were also used by Marcourt, Viret and Farel: They all stated that one should choose between God and Baal; one should follow the example of Daniel and his friends; and those who pretend not to know the Lord on earth, would not be known by Christ at the last judgement. The other arguments were aimed at the mass: the mass was idolatrous so therefore one should not attend. The central focus was the eucharist: Christ was in heaven at the right hand of the Father and not in the bread and wine; the mass had nothing to do with the true celebration of the Lord's supper; one should pray to the Lord in spirit and truth, not in physical things. Ceremonies belonged to the Mosaic law which is why they were abolished. These arguments had been used before by Oecolampadius. In 1560 Coornhert reacted against Calvin with his treatise Verschooninghe van Roomsche Afgoderye. He argued against ceremonies in general with the same arguments Calvin had used against the mass. Coornhert, inspired by S. Franck, defended a spiritualistic point of view. The external, visible things were unimportant, so one should not put one's life at risk for it. Ceremonies did not help the believer. On the contrary: they obstructed him. In the apostle Paul Coornhert saw the example of a spiritualistic man: one who was not bound anymore to the Old Testament ceremonies. Outwardly, corporal things did not count. All a believer had to do was to love the Lord and his neighbour. Coornhert blamed Calvin for bringing back his followers to the Mosaic law, and for making them suffer for 'childish things'. Supposing it was by some Dutch evangelicals, Calvin got Coornhert's Verschooninghe and wrote his last anti-Nicodemite work. The translation Calvin used must have been accurate. He maintained the arguments he had used before. There is one specific element in the controversy between Calvin and Coornhert and that is their focus on Saint Paul. The polemic between the two makes clear that the position of Calvin and his followers was not that easy. Arguments against an outward Roman Catholic religion, could be used to defend a spiritualistic point of view as well.

This chapter focuses on the tensions between the Catholic and Protestant communities in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Birmingham and Liverpool. It complements Andrew Holmes’s chapter which questions the unique position of Ulster with regard to its perceived bi-polarized society and ubiquitous sectarianism. It considers similar manifestations in the context of English cities and attempts to establish the extent to which religion, specifically evangelicalism, was responsible for sectarian conflict. Central to the argument is the recognition that, in the past as in the present, evangelicalism reflected a range of religious and religio-political stances contained within an overarching worldview. On the one hand were more theologically liberal and politically Liberal outlooks. At the other end of the spectrum was covenantal evangelicalism which triggered reactions when Protestant national identity was perceived to be in danger, in response to the supposed level of threat from ultramontane Catholicism.1 It will also be argued that an increasingly confident Catholic Church, while attempting to minimize conflict, compounded the problem by encouraging inward- looking Irish communities that were not readily absorbed into English society.

Despite widespread acceptance of the impact of the Penal Laws on Irish society, authors have focused on the more secular parts of society, tending to dismiss the religious aspect of Penal legislation as something of a ‘sideline’ to the main event and discounting vital dimensions such as faith and belief. Whilst there has been a shift towards an appreciation of the diverse nature of religious change during this period, few authors have attempted to discuss the link between persecution and the retention of Catholicism. This paper explores the role played by the Irish home in articulating Catholic identity throughout the Penal era and asks what this domestic space can tell us about the Catholic communities of the period. It analyses how this domestic space helped to reflect and reinforce very separate and different Catholic identities as religious communities were forced to create new spaces for worship and ritual, search for precedents and develop their own concepts of how space should be apportioned and organised. The paper concludes that Irish homes became the vessels of a sacred force that played a crucial role in maintaining Catholic identity and ensuring the survival of the Catholic faith. In an era of rapid cultural change, the Irish home continues to reflect, and help reconstruct, contemporary Irish identity whilst also providing a tangible and experiential connection to Irish heritage and tradition.

This paper analyses the influence of religion on identity, especially the political identity and political behavior of the non-orthodox people of Montenegro. Goal of this paper is to show that non-orthodox minorities in Montenegro have a mass influence on the politics of this country. For example, without their votes, the independence of Montenegro would not be possible. This is very easy to calculate. 55% voted for the independence, and Muslims represents a little bit more than 19% of the Montenegro's population. All of them say they voted for the independence of Montenegro in 2006 referendum. Therefore, this political decision was highly dependent on the Muslim votes, and had a great influence on the Serbian interests. This fact should be highlighted. Moreover, one can say that this was one of the major defeats of Serbs in the last century. This paper shows that the identity of the Serbian speaking population of Montenegro is dependent on their religious background. Bosnians, Muslims, Montenegrin Muslims or Croats base their national identity on their Islamic or Roman Catholic confession. Moreover, this paper shows that the Albanian national question in Montenegro is a great example of how both Serbian science and politics failed to explain this issue. Serbian politicians and scientist are wrong in saying that Albanians are motivated only by antireligious nationalism in their actions, basing their attitude in complex Albanian society made of Muslims, Catholics and Orthodox Christians. Due to this fact religious aspect was completely ignored. However, a great number of Albanians fighting for Islamic State in Syria and Iraq are quite opposite to this attitude, and making Serbians to ask themselves - how is it possible that an atheist Albanians are fighting in the name of Islam? The situation is similar in Montenegro. In this paper we show that Albanians are also divided on religious lines and that this division has huge consequences. If Serbs has analyzed Albanians interreligious relations based on what we have in Montenegro, it would be easier for them to understand that Albanians failed to overcome their religious differences in the name of national unity, and consequently to understand why so many of them are fighting for ISIL. We also deal with the Croatian question in Montenegro. This paper will show that Montenegrin Croats are a part of the same Serbian body, like Bosnians or Muslims. They are divided from this body only because of their religious belonging to Roman Catholic religion. Under the pressure of the First Croat Catholic Congress in 1900 they accepted to declare as Croats as their national belonging. Prior to this, they were divided between the idea of Slavs and Serbs, all sharing the same Serbian background and language.