Lisa Beyeler-Yvarra
"New Dispensations" examines the spatial politics of the largest non-state landholder in the world: the Roman Catholic Church. Focusing on the Asia-Pacific, a region key to the future of global Catholicism and global climate change, this study interrogates how Catholic property systems multiplied in majority-Catholic capitals from 1945 to the present. From this transnational perspective, I analyze how the spatial economies of Catholic institutions constitute the religious regimes of ownership that regulate concentrations of urban power. I focus on archdiocesan proprietorship to argue that the Church’s consecration and investment in corporate monopolies sustains conditions of extreme wealth disparity and environmental degradation. I draw on oral and archival histories, from local parishes to the Vatican Apostolic Archives, and formal analysis to study the built environment as both a monument to the Church’s glory and an engine for the aggregation of capital.