South Korea’s past offers an example of an authoritarian context in which police roles proliferated. Besides maintaining order, police officers in Seoul were deployed for all sorts of purposes. Police were positioned as representatives of a state that had, in the 1960s and 1970s, ambitious plans for remaking society. Seoul’s large underclass posed, in the visions of City Hall and the central government, challenges to those plans. The policing of vagrancy in this period serves as a window onto the interface between state and society. Despite impressive coercive resources, police struggled to impose the state’s demands in managing the streets of Seoul. Instead, they made compromises. In order to attend to their many tasks, police relied on delegates with no formal authority and on irregular procedures. These observations point to a situation of unrestrained power that was also, effectively, limited.

The Tridentine Decree on the religious life reflected long-standing ecclesial disaffection and aspirations for reform. The product of a lively conciliar debate, it was neither innovative nor theologically sophisticated but narrowly disciplinary. In the aftermath of the Council, several of its prescriptions concerning male religious went unheeded.