Renewal and Transformation: The Historian as How-to Guide

Renewal and Transformation: The Historian as How-to Guide Paula Kane I n celebrating David J. O’Brien’s achievements as educator, scholar, activist, and friend, I recall that of all my professors, he took seriously Pope John XXIII’s call for the formation of Christians to serve the needs of the world, not merely those of the Church. Among the personal memories I carry of him are of his infectious laugh and generous spirit which have been a magnet for so many students. From a storage box of college memorabilia I recently unearthed the blue spiral notebook from my first class with Professor O’Brien at the College of the Holy Cross. As a History major, studying with him was an imperative for me, especially since my parents mentioned it in every long-distance phone call. It was not a hard sell for them to make, since our family was quite involved in parish life as Eucharistic ministers, lectors , liturgists, and musicians, and a course in Catholic history seemed a natural corollary . I began to realize, however, that my piecemeal involvements in parish and campus ministry and in selected charitable projects were not the same as living and even shaping one’s faith. As students, we performed social service, maybe, but social action, rarely. That I can appreciate the difference between service and action as differing strategies of living one’s Catholicism is due entirely to Professor O’Brien. On the front of the notebook I had written my name in looping cursive script, the course title, and the year of 1978. David had just returned to Holy Cross after two years of involvement in the “Call to Action” project of the NCCB, which itself had been prompted by the celebration of the nation’s bicentennial. O’Brien called it “the American Church’s first authentic national assembly.” In Detroit at the end of the consultative process the bishops adopted resolutions after receiving data gathered from American dioceses on topics affecting Catholics and American society, and much of David’s enthusiasm for teaching us clearly came from his connection to that project. My course notes, however, are rather sparse, a fair reminder of his teaching style. As a great storyteller who drew even then upon a reservoir of personal experiences that has only expanded through the years, O’Brien did not present a set of sequential selfcontained lectures. The neat outlines and chronologies of events that filled the pages 69 of my other History course notebooks never emerged here. Instead, there are keywords inscribed like mantras on otherwise blank sheets: aggiornamento, Isaac Hecker, labor priests, Rerum Novarum, Decree on Religious Liberty, Dorothy Day, Catonsville Nine. The readings for that course included Daniel Callahan, Robert Cross, Michael Harrington, Thomas McAvoy, John Courtney Murray, and Garry Wills. From this list, several things are apparent: first, there was a tilt toward a progressive view of Vatican II, except for the nostalgia of Wills in his elegy for the Latin Mass. Second, although the 1970s were the heyday of American feminism, women were relatively invisible. In retrospect these two elements strike me as characteristic of O’Brien’s generation of Catholic social historians: although they were committed to writing history “from the bottom up,” only Dorothy Day and an occasional nun were conjured up to represent the contributions of women. While it is clear that O’Brien and his colleagues worked alongside remarkable Catholic women such as Sidney Callahan, Eileen Egan, Alice Gallin, Dolores Huerta, Teresa Kane, Karen Kenneally, Dolores Leckey, Mary Oates, Rosemary Ruether, Peggy Steinfels, Mary Luke Tobin, and Mary Jo Weaver, in the histories that Catholics wrote then, women were not yet visible as agents. I know that David is supportive of the equality of women in the Church and in society, so I cannot berate him too energetically here, except as a marker of where things were in the seventies when, for example, colleges like Holy Cross first admitted women. Fortunately, the recent decades have generated scholarship in critical theory on the role that religion has played in legitimizing male dominance over women, as well as expanding the literature on the histories of women themselves. Perhaps in its androcentrism...