THE PLACE OF HISTORY

...In fact, so marked has the Latin American bishops' defense of human rights become that the Nation—a somewhat surprising source of such comment—prompted by a parallel action of the bishops of Paraguay, recently editorialized in these words: The Church there has been the focus of opposition to a brutal system that comes close to genocide for the Indian population...

...If the professional historian of the Church may be thought to speak more fittingly of the spiritual and moral aspects of humankind's past, he or she neither enjoys, nor should enjoy a monopoly here...

...To be sure, the Haley work did not pretend to be history in sensu stricto, but neither can the author's ten years of careful and laborious research be dismissed as fiction...

...The evidence for this view is increasing, and with each succeeding month it grows more impressive...

...This awakened consciousness brought about by the striking portrayal of a significant movement in the nation's past cannot help but have redounded to the benefit of your profession and mine...

...But let me have done with this dreary lament over trends of the recent past...

...If we can respond imaginatively to the challenge we may yet find ourselves participants of an improved situation envisioned by an editorial writer of the Washington Post who, in musing on the last AHA annual meeting, declared: Thus the professional custodians of the past are becoming less stuffy and self-indulgent, even as the public is growing more sensitive to the real richness and rewards of historical inquiry...

...When it is recalled that this happened in the 'green wood' of one of this country's most famous centers of learning, it prompts the inquiry as to what must be the state of affairs in the 'dry wood.' I suspect there are few among us who could not duplicate the friar's experience, but to date at least we in higher education have been spared an encounter with the products of a Catholic school in a far western diocese whose parents were sent several years ago a set of directives by the sisters in charge which contained this extraordinary proclamation of pedagogical freedom: "We protect the child's right not to learn...

...For me one of the most recent examples came from a Franciscan professor of church history who stated that in correcting a set of examination papers of a group of graduate students he was puzzled to find reference to "Richard Loo," only to discover that the student was referring to Cardinal Richelieu...

...Certainly the learned community of this country did not lack warning signals from the past...

...Historians of education long since recorded the gains made for higher learning in the elective system introduced at Harvard by Charles W. Eliot a century or more ago...

...And from learning these local circumstances they were better equipped to take on history in a wider and more significant context...

...True, this sort of thing represents a highly subjective approach...

...Thirdly, at a time when many of the People of God who constitute His Church are underCommonweal: 45 standably dispirited and discouraged, it is heartening to hear the bishops of so many lands raising their voices on a burning issue in a way that arrests the attention of even secular-minded observers...

...One would like to cherish the hope that it will be this latter accent of the present hour, rather than that of violence and its attendant evils, that will ultimately emerge as the predominant feature of our age when future historians set out to record its happenings...

...The same friend remarked that a number of these graduate students were uncertain as to the identity of the Syllabus of Errors, of Bismarck, and several were at a loss to understand the significance of the French Revolution...

...He disdains the current myriad of religious and quasi-religious movements...

...to historians of every kind, "to suffer no man and no cause to escape the undying penalty which history has the power to inflict on wrong...

...Can we historians be galvanized to capture the promise and potential value of this changed condition for our depressed discipline before it fades...

...Those accounts did, indeed, mirror a situation that is all too real, a fact that needs no emphasis for this audience...

...We are taught by history that the Church has always stepped boldly from old to new centuries with the very Bethlehem freshness of the new-born Christ, carrying God's salvation to them...

...Members of the American Catholic Historical Association will not be indifferent to the fact that in 1976 George Gallup should have found a year that for the first time in Commonweal: 43 nearly two decades marked an upturn in church attendance, that the proportion of the population who believe religion is increasing its influence on national life has tripled since 1970, and that a surprising number of Americans had "developed an interest in the inner or spiritual life...

...Lest there should be a lurking unease that this is a subtle invitation to subvert the prescribed rules of historical method to the purposes of apologetics, let it be said that any and every effort in behalf of the Church's history worthy of the name must comply as rigidly as the account of secular events to Lord Acton's warning monsignor John Tracy ellis is the well known historian, now professorial lecturer in church history in the Catholic University of America...

...It was not in this sense that Baronius understood his duty as an historian of the Church...

...I have personally heard or read of no other voice in Argentina that has had the force and courage to raise such questions in the public forum...

...In fact, the demand for academic reform is growing louder and more insistent, for example, when the editor of the American Scholar, Joseph Epstein, unashamedly entitled an article in the New York Times Magazine of February 6, "Bring Back Elitist Universities...

...institutions trying to define a 'common core' of knowledge they would deem essential for all students...

...Amid the madness that descended upon higher learning in the 1960s, it is true, there remained a few islands of sanity that held to the proven worth of history and its allied liberal arts, to a program of industry and study that offered no mitigation, and to an attitude of respect for the past befitting the heirs of the longest unbroken intellectual tradition of the western world...

...Yet in this instance it was responsible for enkindling an interest in the students' family background that, in turn, led to a broadening and deepening of their knowledge about their respective geographical regions and states, the cities and counties of their birth, as well as the parish and church affiliation of their ancestors and of themselves...

...Instances of such defense of human rights have, in fact, of late been multiplying so fast it is no longer easy to keep them all in mind...

...Hardly a week passes that does not bring additional evidence of the mounting discontent with much of what, since the 1960's, has been allowed to pass for the learning process...

...In this regard the spirit in which ecclesiastical history should be studied, written, and taught was rarely expressed to better effect than by Lacordaire when in 1855 he told l'abbe Henri Perreyve, professor of church history at the Sorbonne: Ought history to hide the faults of men and Orders...

...There were probably some ultrasecularists in that Atlanta audience of Christmas Week, 1975, who entertained strong objections as the speaker proceeded, even if they fell short of the nigh to audible dissent heard at the Hotel Mayflower in Washington in December, 1948, when the late Kenneth Scott LatourCommonweal: 41 ette's presidential address to the same Association was entitled, "The Christian Understanding of History...

...I have no desire to play the role of a 'hanging judge,' needless to say...

...As you may recall, the AHA president of 1975 showed himself fully conscious of the obligations owed to objective scholarship, as well as the special pitfalls that can betray the historian of moral values...

...it is sacrificing freedoms, suppressing individual guarantees and leading to state abuses, arbitrary imprisonment, torture and the loss of freedom of thought...

...Moreover, the Harvard study is not unique, for the same basic motivation has found expression elsewhere as, for example, in the survey financed by the Carnegie Council on Policy Studies in Higher Education made known in early January...

...The Catholic Church in much of Latin America is now in the forefront of resistance to these repressive governments...

...Less than six weeks ago a news story in the Washington Post stated: Genealogy is the third biggest hobby in America, right behind stamps and coins, but it is going beyond the hobby status, just as it goes beyond the search for birthdates and occupations and offspring...

...and should a situation arise where I felt such criticism to be in the interest of the Church, I should not hesitate to be so again...

...Thus a thorough review of Harvard's curriculum has been going on for over two years at the initiative of Henry Rosovsky, dean of arts and sciences, a review that gives renewed hope for history's place in the curriculum...

...Peter was a sinner and a renegade, and God has been at pains to have the fact recorded in the Gospels...

...Parenthetically it can be said that in all these countries that noble group, Amnesty International, has had no more consistent and articulate friends than these same nations' Catholic bishops...

...If these developments prove to be durable, both the historical profession and the nation as a whole will become not 'aged,' but more civilized and mature...

...Six months later (November 18, 1976) the bishops of Brazil spoke in similar terms in a ringing indictment of the torture, oppression and subversion of human rights in their midst...

...Nor has "Roots" been alone in signaling a change in contemporary opinion about matters that relate to history...

...The effort to keep these two goals in balance may be precarious...

...However one may characterize the phenomenon —for phenomenon it assuredly was—the vast majority of Americans who witnessed "Roots" saw it as an aspect of their own or their nation's history, and it stirred them in a manner without parallel...

...They declared: . . . regimes of force, claiming to fight Communism and carry out economic development, declare an anti-subversive war against all who do not agree with an authoritarian vision of society...

...Meanwhile history's general state has notably worsened and one hears on all sides stories of the blackout that has overshadowed the victims of the 'now' generation...

...Let a single example suffice to indicate what is meant...

...Yet, when one thinks of the spectacular result of "Roots" transposed to the television screen, the dullest intellect will conclude that something altogether out of the ordinary transpired in the national mind during those evenings in late January, 1977, something that may, indeed, have made a major contribution in breaking the spell of neglect with which Americans have treated history...

...It was not after this fashion that the Saints laid open the scandals of their times...

...In that cord that Owen nth in his inmodern history the politician in any other ; tyranny of many examples ype of tyranny : more accurate lied in George vho cannot reat it...

...If historians understandably shy away from pampering to hobbies, they will not be insensitive to the growing curiosity among Americans over their genealogical and ethnic origins, for they will recognize that out of this mood can come serious contributions to social history on a varied scale...

...God indeed has conferred upon His Church the prerogative of infallibility, but to none of her members has He granted immunity from sin...

...In the final analysis it is sustained by something beyond documentary evidence and purely human reasoning...

...It is becoming a national rage for social history...

...More closely allied to history's future, however, is the changing climate of the academic world...

...It was that mysterious and hidden element that was subtly expressed some years ago by the Polish bishops in a pastoral letter issued at a moment of severe trial and tension caused by their Communist overlords...

...The American Catholic past is doubtless less dramatic than the story of Kunte Kinte and his descendants, but if properly told it is far from devoid of its own color and moving drama...

...Most moves in this direction will, of course, be gratifying to historians, but one is still warranted in wondering why the deplorable situation was allowed to happen in the first place...

...In a word, regardless of the undeniably bleak and negative factors operating within contemporary Catholicism...

...Related to these encouraging trends other 'signs of the times' in both the nation's religious and intellectual life offer support for cautious optimism...

...Nearly a quarter century ago in his famous inaugural lecture as Cambridge's Regius professor of history, "The Historian and Character," the late David Knowles declared, ". . . the historian is not a judge, still less a hanging judge...

...They shion as the have acted, lose regions isters in the lonal Cathole that the tholic backle harbinger • Hard Coal s the fabled >und Wilkes some Scots North and e prevailing it American heritage act of modern de unionism i OWEN RICE urgh pastor, it activities...

...as and the give away legotiators mad race ms, laser While one s as to the ision—and THE PLACE OF HISTORY JOHN TRACY ELUS Is a brighter hour dawning for Clio...

...If, then, before the enthusiasm wanes we have the wit and wisdom to alert ourselves to the mood engendered by "Roots...

...It does, indeed, but there are all too many examples such as the one just cited where that type of tyranny has prevailed, situations that suggest that more accurate than Chadwick's view was that embodied in George Santayana's oft-quoted axiom, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it...

...And if it has not, to what is that fact owed...

...And every friend of liberty the world over has been anxiously watching for the sequel to the trial and condemnation of the brave Bishop of Umtali in Rhodesia, Donal Lamont, O.Carm., not to mention the encounter between the government of South Africa and that country's Catholic bishops whose forthright stand in behalf of racial justice has so often been voiced by Denis F. Hurley, O.M.I., Archbishop of Durban, and now more elaborately detailed in the hierarchy's twenty-one-point "Declaration of Commitment," described in a despatch from Johannesburg, "as the most significant move for change by a major organization in the country in recent history...

...It would be comforting to think that history, which lies at the heart of so much of the liberal tradition in learning, had fared better in Catholic institutions than in others, due to their fidelity to that tradition as a vital part of their religious philosophy...

...The bishops and priests have boldly stood up to the Stroessner regime and they have suffered the persecution such governments routinely impose on their subjects...

...Can we Catholic members of Clio's company, it may be asked, be excused from doing less...

...For example, last April 15 (1976) the Argentine hierarchy's pastoral letter recounted the succession of assassinations, murders, and kidnappings, and the bishops pointedly asked, "What forces act with such impunity...

...In all likelihood you have heard them before, but as the Irish say, it will be "by way of no harm" for you and me to hear them once again...

...Secondly, as historians who in the main are Catholics, this striking chain of circumstances should fire our imagination as to possibilities for research and publication on the part of ourselves and of our students...

...The issue of human rights was at the heart of the document to which the delegates at Helsinki affixed their signatures in the late summer of 1975...

...there will be itnesses to the sanctity of human rights in the generation following World War II than that of the bishops of the Roman Catholic Church...

...In the Orient violations of human rights in South Korea, for example, have drawn the repeated protests of Cardinal Stephan Kim, Archbishop of Seoul, as the repressive policies of Ferdinand Marcos's government in the Philippines has had no more consistent opposition than that offered by Cardinal Jaime Sin, Archbishop of Manila, and his associates, whose pastoral letter of less than six weeks ago was described as, "the strongest church statement yet against policies of the four-year old martial law regime...

...From Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski, Archbishop of Warsaw, battling in eastern Europe for human rights under the Communist regime of Poland, to far off Latin America where Cardinal Raul Silva, Archbishop of Santiago, is locked in almost daily combat with the military tyranny that has ruled Chile since 1973, the pattern continues to unfold...

...This paper was delivered as the dinner address at the 1977 Regional Meeting of the American Catholic Historical Association, College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Massachusetts, and is printed here with Monsignor Ellis's permission...

...Unless I have woefully misread the mood of the present moment, I think signs can be detected that offer historians reasons to hope that the winter of their discontent may once again be giving way to a new springtime that may herald a 20 January 1978: 42 f this country's npts the inquiry the 'dry wood.' :ould not dupliat least we in encounter with 'ar western diorears ago a set vhich contained ogical freedom: n." mous inaugural )f history, "The d Knowles deIge, still less a y the role of a am convinced nt generation's 1 as its lack of qualify it as a > lies far more academic addoes on them, ght that many ' names anyvard and, inulum that detures of their lat descended rue, there reto the proven ts, to a pro10 mitigation, befitting the I tradition of :uch Catholic ted on more lament over voefully mis[ think signs ons to hope ice again be ay herald a brighter hour ahead...

...That something has, historically speaking, been called supernatural faith...

...In every instance, whether it be at Harvard or at Stanford, at Chicago or at Berkeley, history has figured in varying degrees of prominence in this reckoning, especially the much used—and abused—course in western civilization...

...In that connection about four years ago in a class in historical method at the University of San Francisco I assigned the students the task of writing a letter to their prospective biographer with a view to furnishing him or her all the authenticated data at their command...

...I would answer: first, it has to do with the informed minds that you and I should cultivate on current events of our hour, events that suggest an enduring effect on the closing years of the twentieth century and beyond...

...It was something of an experiment on my part, as well as on theirs, but it yielded results beyond my expectation...

...Admittedly, prophecy is not the terrain on which the historian thrives best and feels at home, and one should, therefore, be cautious in that regard...

...000 soldiers d in August Ceausescu, 1 couple of ical skill to t all is quiet rotation but rd of trade sen the only ly we may A miners of le vanguard States...

...If those who succeed us in the historical profession will describe these years as a period of violence and foreboding, they will also, I believe, view them as a time when the concept of human rights took on more of an air of reality than had hitherto been true...

...Of more immediate concern to historians in this March of 1977, however, is the malaise that overtook the discipline a decade or more ago, a condition that is still very much with us...

...Quite apart from Latin America, however, what Clayton Fritchey a month ago called "The Catholic Crusade for Human Rights," has been literally worldwide...

...Most of the class took the assignment seriously, and one Black student told me it had led to the most prolonged and memorable conversation with his grandmother that he had ever had...

...Thus readers of the Washington Post and Star during the last week of December, 1976, might easily have gathered the impression that those attending the annual meeting of the American Historical Association and its affiliated societies had little else on their minds...

...Yet I am convinced that the principal blame for this student generation's lack of acquaintance with history, as well as its lack of so much other knowledge necessary to qualify it as a truly educated and cultivated generation, lies far more on the conscience of their elders among academic administrators and faculty members than it does on them...

...this worldwide championing of human rights attests that the light has not gone out for the Church in which most of this audience believes and to which they have given their allegiance and their love...

...Nor is it without meaning that the Harvard psychologist, Robert Coles, should be steadily gaining in national stature, a scholar of whom it has been said: At a time when social scientists have become the secular priests of intellectuals, Coles is a churchgoing Episcopalian who believes in original sin and takes his religion seriously...

...You and I know that nothing of the sort can be claimed, and that the indictment of us on that score by Robert Maynard Hutchins forty years ago is as valid today as when he uttered it in those oft-quoted remarks to the Mid-West unit of the National Catholic Educational Association at Chicago in April, 1937...

...Such anti-Communism is brutalizing its agents, creating fanaticism, violence and fear...

...But the same historians made clear the extremes to which that system led and the remedies that had to be applied to eliminate its abuses, such as Columbia's general education program begun soon after World War I. Yet in spite of this widely publicized experience academic administrators and faculty members of the 1960s paid it no heed when they permitted, or perhaps inspired, the nonsense that crowded pell mell into the nation's college and university curricula...

...In introducing my remarks with these sentences of Thomas Babington Macaulay—no believer in the Church of Rome—from the Edinburgh Review of October, 1840, I do so with no apology to an audience of this kind...

...Allowing for that possibility, one can still say that there is something astir in the land that bodes well for history, when social analysts speak of the demise of the 'now' generation and the birth of a new time they christen the 'then' generation...

...No other institution is left standing which carries the mind back to the times when the smoke of sacrifice rose from the Pantheon, and when camelopards and tigers bounded in the Flavian amphitheatre...

...One dares not, therefore, predict what this new current of thought may bring, for it may suddenly reverse its course and as quickly wipe out these feeble gains as it unexpectedly brought them into being...

...If those m will describe ireboding, they ime when the of an air of ssue of human ; to which the res in the late the Carter adrmost in mind le violation of Soviet Union, it will be this - than that of vill ultimately 3ur age when penings...

...And in its first days the Carter administration had the same concept uppermost in mind when it called the world's attention to the violation of these rights in Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union...

...Time was when the Church was an ally of such rulers, but that is long gone...

...If time allowed this listing could easily be extended and would include Cardinal Vicente Enrique y Taracon, Archbishop of Madrid, and his fellow churchmen who have championed King Juan Carlos's efforts to strengthen freedom in Spain as well as to abolish the centuries-old union of Church and State...

...it could well be turned to history's profit...

...But as I survey the global struggle of the last few decades, I am at a loss to find any country, society, or institution more consistent in this regard than the Catholic bishops, the while I remain fully aware of the inadequacy of episcopal leadership in certain matters both in this country and abroad...

...In that connection it would be comforting to record that Owen Chadwick had voiced an unvarying truth in his inaugural lecture as Regius professor of modern history at Cambridge when he maintained: History may not often be useful to the politician and the citizen, but it does more than any other discipline to free the mind from the tyranny of present opinion...

...I go to church to pray to God, not to have a group therapy,' he says...

...If the violation of human rights in Latin America is of more than ordinary concern to us of the Western Hemisphere, we Catholics of the United States cannot have been other than heartened by the mounting protests from the bishops of our neighboring republics...

...What began as a national nostalgia some years ago is developing, in the judgment of some, into a phenomenon of deeper meaning wherein from the bicentennial feature, "The Adams Chronicles," to "Roots" Americans have seen themselves: burrowing into the archives of individual and national memory, clinging to old certainties, relieving old traumas, fishing for the answers and the solace that neither the present nor the future offer promise of disclosing...

...But the numbers of such Catholic institutions, alas, could scarcely be counted on more than the fingers of one's hands...

...If they serve no other purpose they may remind us of the dual fact of the antiquity of the Church to which most of us adhere, as well as of the debt we owe as historians to do what in us lies to keep her history alive and fresh in the minds of those we teach and influence...

...In our role as historians you and I can produce certain documentary proofs in support of that survival, but if we are honest with ourselves we will confess that historical data alone will not satisfactorily explain this continuing vitality...

...What, you may well be asking yourselves, has all this to do with us, historians bearing as best we can the burdens of 1977...

...Historians have no need to be reminded that every age in the story of humankind has had its peculiar characteristics, and this closing quarter of the twentieth century has in that respect been no exception...

...Thanks to this, she sees her eternal mission more and more deeply, because she endures while the times, the conditions of life and of people, are changing...

...That is why we, the servants of God, together with His blessed people, can maintain complete freedom with regard to the new times, and a quiet courage regarding the new conditions of life in which it is given to the Church to lead people toward God...

...Movement to reinstate required courses gains...

...But he maintained his point throughout, and while stating that his convictions had not driven him to attempt a revival of history's old label of 'moral science,' his reasoning, he declared...

...Truth, when discreetly told, is an inestimable boon to mankind, and to suppress it, especially in history, is an act of cowardice unworthy of a Christian...

...does impel me to think that for some of us at least, our search for truth ought to be quite consciously suffused by a commitment to some deeply held humane values...

...but if we can manage it, perhaps we will be on the way to re-establishing the role of history as one— and not the least—of what we might fairly call the moral arts...

...On more than one occasion in the past I have been critical of the action, or lack of action, of Catholic bishops both in the United States and other lands...

...The turns and twists of popular opinion are notoriously fickle, and who should know that better than historians...

...I hope I will be proven wrong in the thought that many of today's students will call their elders' names anything but blessed for their tolerance toward and, indeed, their fostering of a mindless curriculum that deprived them of all too many essential features of their intellectual heritage...

...ded that every id its peculiar f the twentieth ption...

...On that occasion the bishops of Poland declared: The eyes of the Church are filled with historical wisdom...

...As a recent writer remarked, Americans of the 1970s have little but painful recollections of their immediate past, as they have deeply unsettling thoughts about a future overcast by the shadow of nuclear warfare and other problems that threaten to become unmanageable...

...If that should prove to be the case, there will be found no more articulate and forceful witnesses to the 20 January 1978: 44 le remedies that ibuses, such as egun soon after idely publicized "acuity members they permitted, owded pell mell urricula...

...That was demonstrated in December of 1975 when Gordon Wright devoted his presidential address before the American Historical Association to the theme, "History as a Moral Science...

...There is not, and there never was, on this earth, a work of human policy so well deserving of examination as the Roman Catholic Church...

...In taking note of this emerging pattern the Chronicle of Higher Education captured the central idea in a headline that read, "Many Colleges Re-Appraising Their Undergraduate Curricula...

...The history of that Church joins together the two great ages of human civilization...

...In a manner intended to afford consolation and to induce calm among their priests and people they spoke words that may offer a fitting conclusion to what I have been saying here...

...What rights are left to the average citizen...