“Are you a Catholic historian?”

“‘Are you a Catholic historian?’ isn’t a polite question. … It suggests that you have ceased to be a serious, independent-minded seeker after truth and instead have been corralled into the Catholic Church’s public relations department.” This quote comes from the Tablet’s account (6 October 2012, p. 14) of a recent dust-up in the UK over Eamon Duffy’s Saints, Sacrileges, and Sedition. Tudor historian Diarmaid MacCulloch accused Duffy of having ceased to be a historian who is Catholic and become a “Catholic historian.” This quote also shows what Shannon and Blum are up against in their effort to renew “Catholic history” and promote “the historian’s craft as practiced by Catholics, not the practice of Catholics who happen to be historians” (xii).

They begin with a critique, based on Alasdair MacIntyre’s perspective in After Virtue (1981) and later works, of twentieth-century ideals of objectivity and inclusion that they think still dominate the field of professional history. Chapter 2 lays out their alternative understanding of the historian’s craft in Christian communities. Stories of human deeds raise inevitable questions about the good. Because it narrates progress rather than the common good of communities, “objective,” supposedly “neutral” history cannot aid in the pursuit of wisdom. Using the common good as a measure, historians are called to practice the virtue of right judgment, “a firm habitual disposition to evaluate practical matters in light of an adequate conception of the common good” (85). As they help teach about the good and pass on Christian culture, such prudence orders the historians’ craft to the final end of charity.

Chapter 3 offers a powerful and convincing account of Eamon Duffy’s work as rooted in the kind of community consciousness the authors want to promote. They suggest an intriguing secular parallel in the revision of Marxist class consciousness by the generation of Duffy’s professors. In Duffy’s account: “The English people became Protestant less through a conscious decision on matters of doctrine than through an enduring attachment to their local parish community” (122). For an example of Catholic history of a different sort, Chapter 4 turns to Pope Benedict XVI’s three volumes of Wednesday audiences on the saints and Fathers of the Church. They show the historian’s craft in the service of “renew[ing] Christian life in our time” (133). The choice of Pope Benedict anticipates the authors’ concluding challenge to Catholic historians to look beyond the monograph for wholeness rather than specialization, for new genres and forms of practicing the craft of history rooted in church community rather than the profession.

The authors issue an inspiring and learned call for a renewal of Catholic history. Historical work should “help particular communities in their common pursuit of the good life” (151). We need an “ecology of professional life” (154). The call for new institutions, practices, and genres is timely. A new kind of biographical writing can indeed be a privileged form of narrating the works of God in history.

I want to respond to their call with enthusiasm, but I work in a university and belong to the generations who “have not kept the narrative of Christian civilization in good order” (156). Indeed, I was part of the 2003 symposium on John McGreevy’s Catholicism and American Freedom that appeared in these pages and which the authors lament as representing the universal praise, seemingly undeserved, of “the Catholic historical establishment in America” (75–76, n.69).

I do not think the authors want to deny that a Catholic historian can work in a contemporary university. On the other hand, they do not just want to say that Catholic historians can serve the goods of their communities in many other venues as well. There is something about the contemporary university that tends to deform would-be Catholic historians and render their lot “unfortunate” (79). Bede, Bossuet, and Newman are invoked as models for the Catholic historian. They are admirable...