Father Ignacio Gordon, SJ, taught canon law (the Catholic Church’s law) from 1960 until 1985 at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, with a concentration on procedural law, or the laws on trials. By all testimonies, he was outstanding for the clarity of his teaching, his humble affection for his students, his indefatigable and hidden service to the Apostolic See, and his priestly zeal. Notable among his endeavors was an educational initiative for the ongoing formation of judges and other ministers of justice in ecclesiastical tribunals. In his teaching, he stressed the ecclesial importance and supernatural implications of procedural law in general, and the indispensability of the judicial protection of marriage in particular. Special efforts were made to make procedural law understandable to his students and to canonists in general, at a time when the Church was celebrating and implementing the teachings of the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, as a result of which her law was undergoing a major revision. Father Gordon taught from the consistent canonical tradition, while also laying bare the latest developments in law and jurisprudence. He taught the entirety of the law on trials, producing numerous scholarly works on questions both timeless and new, giving marked emphasis to the problem of the excessive length of trials and the causes of delayed justice. An area of his particular attention and dedication was the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura—of which he was a consultor (referendary and later votans)—including both its proper law and its history. This history displayed, in part, why that Tribunal was the natural one to function as the supreme administrative tribunal of the Church. Father Gordon’s contribution to the question of ecclesiastical administrative justice was among those leading the novel and dynamic discussion about it in the 1960s and 1970s.

One of the greatest ironies of the history of Soviet rule is that, for an officially atheistic state, those in the political police and in the Politburo devoted an enormous amount of time and attention to the question of religion. The Soviet government’s policies toward religious institutions in the USSR, and toward religious institutions in the non-Communist world, reflected this, especially when it came to the Vatican and Catholic Churches, both the Latin and Byzantine Rite, in Soviet territory. The KGB and the Vatican consists of the transcripts of KGB records concerning the policies of the Soviet secret police towards the Vatican and the Catholic Church in the Communist world, transcripts provided by KGB archivist and defector Vasili Mitrokhin, from the Second Vatican Council to the election of John Paul II. Among the topics covered include how the Soviet regime viewed the efforts of John XXIII and Paul VI of reaching out to eastern side of the Iron Curtain, the experience of the Roman Catholic Church in Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic and the underground Greek Catholic Church in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, the religious underground in the key cities of Leningrad and Moscow, and finally the election of John Paul II and its effect on the tumultuous events in Poland in the late 1970s and early 1980s. This valuable primary source collection also contains a historical introduction written by the translator, Sean Brennan, a professor of History at the University of Scranton.

Over seven hundred years after the pope dissolved their Order, the Templars remain as controversial as ever. How could warriors also be monks? What did they really believe in? Why did they fail to protect the Holy Land? What impact did they have on society? Why were they dissolved–-were they really heretics? Based on the medieval evidence and the latest research by modern scholars, this book surveys some key areas of the Templars' history. It argues that despite their wide landholdings and apparent power the Templars‘ influence depended on the patronage of popes and kings, and that they were destroyed when their most powerful patron had more to gain than lose from their dissolution.