Regional Reports

¦s 2 1 — t/1 5c RegionalReports For the most current information about upcoming events inyour region, please visit our Web site at www.bu.edu/historic/calendar.html Announcing the Appointment of a Regimiti! Coordinatorfor France From George Huppert, President ofThe Historical Society \ We do not think ofTHS as a guild established fot the purpose ofdefending the interests of its members. We constitute an informal, voluntary association ofscholars and teachers bound together by a common interest in historical research, which is in no way circumscribed by national boundaries. It follows that we ought to reach out to historians wherever they might be. As it happens, we already have members in several countries, including England, France, Germany, Holland, and Italy. We are now prepared to take a first initiative towards broadening our organizations reach by opening up new regions with specific programs outside the United States. As a pilot project, I have asked one of our members, an American historian residing in Paris, to accept the position of Regional Coordinator for France. He intends to introduce THS members doing research in France to each other. Ifyou are headed to Paris, be sure to e-mail Steven Englund who lives in the heart of the Quartier Latin, at amdgsle@aol.com. Steven hopes to arrange informal meetings and make it possible for us to discuss our work with each other and our European colleagues . Ifthe Paris project proves successful , we are likely to replicate it in London, Rome, Berlin, and perhaps St. Petersburg. May I ask for comments and suggestions from anyone interested in these developments? CHESAPEAKE PopeJohn Paul IVs Role in World History by Don Avery, Regional Coordinator On Friday, January 26th, forty-five THS members and guests squeezed into the history conference room of George Washington University to participate in a "conversation" about the role of Pope John Paul 11 in world history. The format was one the Chesapeake Region has used successfully several times. In the first hour, three historians, Gertrude Himmelfarb (emerita, CUNY), Jerry Müller (Catholic University), and Darryl Hart (Westminster Seminary) critiqued the recent biography ofJohn Paul II, Witness to Hope, by George Weigel, Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. After Weigel responded to each commentator's remarks, the audience, made up ofacademic historians, graduate students, and some government workers, lawyers, and high school teachers, joined the conversation during the second hour. In praising the high quality ofWeigel's book, Himmelfarb emphasized the importance ofJohn Paul's (and the Catholic Church's) role as a moral force in dismantling communism in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and other eastern European countries. She reminded the audience that, although the Church has been associated with privilege and repression in western Europe (especially France) since the ancien régime, it has been an important part ofa spiritual reawakening in other parts of the world, including the United States, which she called "the most religious country in the Western world." Although much ofthat religious energy is non-Catholic evangelical , Himmelfarb concluded, John Paul II personifies its dynamic response to the hedonistic and nihilistic forces of our secular age. Darryl Hart, author of The University Gets Religion (Hopkins Press, 1999) and "The Failure ofAmerican Religious History" (in the first issue of The Journal ofthe Historical Society), identified himself as an historian of American Protestantism with limited knowledge ofglobal Roman Catholicism. Pointing out that Weigel's book was an excellent source for those who wanted a better understanding of the Roman Catholic Church in the modern world, Hart wondered why Witness to Hope only devoted 24 of its 800 pages to the United States, one quarter ofwhose people are Roman Catholic. Mentioning that a Southern Baptist friend had said ofJohn Paul Hs popularity that "he really knew how to pope," Hart suggested that the pope had helped defuse anti-Catholicism in the U.S. by muting church dogma and emphasizing Christian ecumenicism, rapproachment -20- with Jews, and redistribution ofwealth to the poor in the Third World. Hart wondered if, in becoming "the perfect pontiff for American neoconservatives. . . kindler, gentler but not dogmatic," John Paul II would leave a theologically weaker church to his successor. Jerry Muller, an...