CONFRONTING THE CHURCH'S PAST
Souza, Raymond de
CONFRONTING THE CHURCH'S PAST An interview with Eamon Duffy Raymond de Souza amon Duffy, professor in church history at the University of Cambridge, is one of the leading...
...9 DUFFY: I do not think Christians are necessarily better historians or more truthful historians than other people...
...9 DE SOUZA: IS that what explains why your book, The Stripping of the Altars, challenged the standard telling of the English Reformation...
...There are perfectly good secular historians who have all the virtues that I have said I thought a Christian ought to practice...
...So you can be a churchman and a lousy historian...
...view, have a set of prejudices...
...He also authored a highly acclaimed book on papal history, Saints and Sinners (Yale...
...In fact, all historians, whether they are Christians or not, have a point of Raymond de Souza is a seminarian for the Archdiocese of Kingston, Ontario, studying at the North American College in Rome...
...I suppose a Christian also comes to the past equipped with a certain set of assumptions about the way human beings behave, why they behave in particular ways, and with a set of prejudices and ideas which are a result of one's own religious formation...
...I believe that we discover patterns in the past...
...9 RAYMOND DE SOUZA" IS there a specifically Christian way of doing the work of a historian...
...Perhaps that constitutes a Christian approach to history because none of those things can be taken for granted now, even among people practicing history...
...Many of the historians who practiced Reformation history were not Protestants, in the sense that they were not believers, but they inherited a Whig view of the Reformation as a stage in modernity--in the liberation of the human mind from superstition and prejudice---and so they worked with a whole set of assumptions about what must have happened...
...Commonweal | 4 January 14, 2000...
...9 EAMON DUFFY: I do not think there is a Christian shape to history in the sense that things move according to God's plan in any discernible way...
...CONFRONTING THE CHURCH'S PAST An interview with Eamon Duffy Raymond de Souza amon Duffy, professor in church history at the University of Cambridge, is one of the leading contemporary historians of the church...
...I did not think of religious ritual, for example, as meaningless mumbo jumbo...
...9 DUFFY: The legacy of Protestant Christians writing the history of the Reformation was that it was seen as the story of the restoration of true Christianity after a period of corruption...
...There are people who practice history who think that it is a branch of the creative arts in the sense that we impose patterns on the past...
...That used to be thought disabling in a historian--to have a point of view, to have a prejudice or a set of expectations...
...Raymond de Souza spoke with Duffy in his office at Magdalene College in Cambridge, England...
...I was, therefore, able to read aspects of the pre-Reformation and Reformation period that did not make sense to colleagues who did not share that formation...
...In my own area, for example, in the history of the Reformation, I came to the Reformation period with an acquired understanding of how the Catholic religion functions as a symbol system...
...9 DE SOUZA: Would that make Christians better historians...
...In England, for example, Cardinal Francis Aidan Gasquet, a great Benedictine historian, was both a bad workman and not entirely scrupulous about what he said...
...No doubt, I have blind spots and cannot see things that somebody with a prejudice against the Catholic church might be more alert to...
...The important thing is to know what you have got and to use it as a tool, not as a fortress wall...
...Some Christian historians have been shabby workmen and rather economical with the truth...
...His landmark book, The Stripping of the Altars (Yale) challenged the reigning Protestant account of the English Reformation...
...The Reformation must have been popular because it was true and therefore they never looked for evidence to see actually whether or not it was popular...
...He was invited by the Vatican last .fall to participate in the symposium examining the history of the Inquisition...
...We have to work with the grain of our own inheritance...
...I think a Christian approaches history with a sense that human life matters and has meaning and that it is both possible and important to tell the truth...
Vol. 127 • January 2000 • No. 1
