Recovering from the Past, Rediscovering History: The Problem of Memory and the Promise of History in Catholic Culture

If anti-Catholic bigotry exists in America, it might have something to do with the Catholic Church's past conduct. Just this weekend, His Holiness Pope John Paul II conceded as much when he finally got around to apologizing to the world for 2000 years of Catholic wickedness. He apologized for the forced conversions, for the murderous Crusades, and for the Inquisition.

Jack Shafer in Slate, Mar. 13, 2000¹

Any institution that backed the Inquisition, the Crusades and the Roman position on the Holocaust deserves to be the butt of a couple of jokes.

Movie Director Marshall Brickman, 2001²

[The Church] is not afraid of the truth that emerges from history and is ready to acknowledge mistakes wherever they have been identified, especially when they involve the respect that is owed to individuals and communities. She is inclined to mistrust generalizations that excuse or condemn various historical periods. She entrusts the investigation of the past to patient, honest, scholarly reconstruction . . .

[The Church cannot] rely on images of the past steered by public opinion, since these are frequently highly charged with passionate emotion which impedes serene and objective diagnosis.

Pope John Paul II³

Introduction

For close to two millennia now, the Catholic intellectual tradition has been grappling with basic questions about the meaning of life, while searching to discern meaning and direction in historical events. Monsignor Luigi Giussani, a life-long educator and founder of the communion and liberation movement, captured the essence of this tradition when he explained to his students, "I'm not here so that you can take my ideas as your own; I'm here to teach you a true method that you can use to judge the things I will tell you. And what I have to tell you is the result of a long experience, of a past that is two thousand years old."⁴ This "true method" is uniquely placed to offer its insights, its resources, and its gifts to a culture engaged in a seemingly unending cycle of social, economic, and political transformation. Sadly, today Catholicism is often portrayed, or understood, as an archaic and dogmatic institution with repressive attitudes and practices.⁵ Even worse, as we shall see below, broad segments of the popular culture, to say nothing of academe, believe the Catholic Church to be endemically flawed and archaic, if not outright evil. One only need consider the effect the recent sexual abuse scandal has had on popular images of the Catholic Church in North America. Indeed, as Michael Higgins, president of the University of St. Jerome's College, put it awhile back, "these are not easy days to be Roman Catholic."⁶ Higgins suggests that the "turmoil" Catholics face today comes from two directions. First, there is the opposition and hostility to the institution of the Church from without, that is, from society at large. Second, there is indifference, division, and cynicism of members from within.

Obviously, these are two distinct though related sources of the much-discussed crisis of contemporary Catholicism. The twofold nature of the problem presents a formidable intellectual, spiritual, and methodological challenge to those of us who are interested in offering a remedy and answers to the questions that come from without and from within the Church. Finding answers and offering remedies bears directly on the question of formation and renewal, since without such answers the narrow view of Catholicism as doctrinaire or morally flawed will continue to obscure the complex but rich heritage of the Catholic-Christian tradition.

What follows below represents a rather modest first step toward identifying what I believe to be a fundamental cause of the hostility and indifference of Catholics and non-Catholics toward the Church—namely, the loss of memory as a part...