Whales
Cadnum, Michael
Whales "The whales got too big and had to go back into the water." A mother to her child, overheard at a museum Even when we no longer ran, for years, the hills comforted, the...
...And when the weariness began we could not name it, we who had coursed over the hill, plunged valley, tossed free in the cold morning light...
...The strict identification of the historical community with the mystical bride of Christ has had all sorts of effects...
...The church changed its mind about this in 1965 and there is no escaping it...
...It just means that we've got it wrong and have to go back and rethink...
...Some of the theologians, for example, wanted us to say that the church had done terrible things and murdered people for their beliefs in the past but that was not the magisterium...
...People will think less of a theology that does not confront history truthfully...
...I love that phrase in the third Eucharistic Prayer, ecclesia peregrinantem in terra--a pilgrim church on earth...
...If our account of the magisterium is such that it cannot take account of facts that everybody can see, then it is the theology that must change, not the history...
...People can forgive but the dead cannot forgive...
...But is must not involve laundering the past...
...The grace of God is working itself out in all human history and very often the gospel is focused in the church by its absence rather than by its effectiveness in the community...
...9 DE SOUZA: Should a church historian see his work as part of the intellectual work of the church, akin to the vocation of a theologian...
...9 DE SOUZA: If these theological dangers are on the horizon...
...He got an ovation for that...
...I don't believe there is anyone to forgive us...
...He said, "I don't believe in forgiveness...
...We were tongues...
...Michael Cadnum One of the things that happened in English Reformation history over the last fifteen or twenty years has been the discovery--which is not a terribly surprising discovery-that most people were religiously conservative and did not like what was happening...
...Night was threadbare, wearing thin, wearing through...
...The idea of apologizing for the past and starting with a clean sheet in the third millennium-you cannot start with a clean sheet...
...The hierarchy is always looking, not in any malevolent sense, to the past to justify its own actions...
...It means that, for example, we never make mistakes and the Catholic church has worked on this assumption at every level of its life---from the doctrinal to the practical--that we never make mistakes...
...But the Inquisition was an arm of the papacy, and it was the uniform teaching of the church for a thousand years that heretics should be punished physically...
...I think that the Jubilee is gathering all that up and the idea of presenting our very mottled history to God and saying we know we made a mess of it but you can heal it--that's a very powerful and evangelical thing...
...There is a fear that, if we say that the church changed its mind, then Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre was right and the Second Vatican Council was apostasy...
...I don't think that they are dangers, just difficulties for the theologians...
...It is very good that the church can say, "We have sinned...
...In any case, I think when people ask for forgiveness they are very often asking to be let off...
...And began...
...I think they would be tempted to massage the past into a particular form...
...Sun kneaded the hair along our spine, and rain combed it warm and easy under the dawn...
...One more afternoon, we prayed, one more sunrise...
...Each taste of living food, quick and hot, was strength and daylight was a giant room...
...I certainly do not think that is the pope's wish...
...It was interesting that among the historians called to the Inquisition symposium there were a large number of Catholics but also atheists, Jews, Protestants, and agnostics, because the Holy See recognized that you had to go to the people who knew the history...
...That simple discovery, which has been endlessly endorsed by local studies, has completely shifted perceptions of the Reformation...
...There is a theological problem here which the theologians at the symposium were very conscious of and which is implicit in the relevant sections of the pope's apostolic letter on the millennium, where he says that the church must face up to its past and must admit that its children often got things wrong...
...That is not always true...
...9 DUFFY: Dangers...
...Nosing the tang of foam-spume, shivering, chest to surf...
...But there were also those who disagreed with that...
...9 DUFFY: I think the idea of "purification of memory" can be a dangerous concept...
...I think that historical work has serious implications for theology...
...It could not bear, the grass, the rain-brushed soil...
...Years since we had danced, we thought: we are dancers...
...Without a star we drank the black salt...
...9 DE SOUZA: What is the value then of this historical examination of conscience...
...9 DE SOUZA: Given these theological difficulties, why do you think that the Vatican desires this examination of history...
...It is more important to tell the truth than to protect the church...
...That is a problem for the theologians, not for the historians...
...One of the Jewish historians at the Inquisition symposium made a devastating intervention when talking about the church asking forgiveness...
...9 DE SOUZA: What is your view of the call for a "purification of memory" as a preparation for the Jubilee, by confessing the sins of the past...
...Some of the most telling interventions came from people who were non-Catholics and they were often extremely friendly...
...It is very important that if the church goes to the past, then it should be the real past it goes to and not some fantasy or some heritage past that has been manicured and tidied up...
...9 DE SOUZA: Is there then an inevitable tension between historians and the church hierarchy...
...That teaching--which was practical teaching, if not doctrinal teaching--is contrary to the teaching of Vatican II...
...Until we could not pretend, until the stone sky pressed, and each breath hauled a quarry in, and pushed it out again, each heartbeat the grinding of ore on ore...
...Bird shadow whispered across our eyelids and slow voles flattened under the browse of our jowls...
...In this century the church has made a great leap into seeing itself as voyaging through time...
...I am a Catholic so I think that more often than not the truth is no threat to the church...
...We must find extenuating circumstances for atrocities, for moral lapses in the past, for bad teaching in the past...
...So I do think it is very largely driven by the pope, but I think most of us also feel some symbolic resonance there...
...9 DtJFFY: I would be very suspicious, myself, of historians who thought it was their primary job to vindicate the Catholic religion...
...It is impossible not to feel when you meet him that he is keeping himself going just so that he survives into the new millennium...
...The church is facing up to the truth that it is a pilgrim people and therefore it falls on the road, that it wanders and loses its way...
...It is felt that we must automatically, for example, defend Pius XII against charges that he was anti-Semitic...
...It is very, very awkward but you have to live with the awkwardness...
...Indeed, one of the non-Catholic participants said that if he had been a sixteenth-century heretic he would have much rather been tried by the Inquisition than by any secular court...
...Gravel parted hard beneath our plowing preludes, voice to voice...
...I think Poles have a very strong sense of the meaning of dates and anniversaries and so on...
...Commonweal | 7 January I4, 2000...
...The purification of the memory must not involve the laundering of the memory...
...We were wet as eyes...
...9 r)UFFY: The historian has a great contribution to make in Commonweal | 6 January 14, 2000 reminding the church of what actually happened and refusing to allow anyone, particularly the hierarchy, to sanitize it...
...And the church got that wrong...
...9 DUFFY: I think it is important...
...Such rooted exhaustion we could not lift a song...
...I think historians have the great responsibility of bringing home to the church that it is a historical community made up of fallible people and that therefore the past of the church is not a sacred area...
...No one would know us, we would have no name...
...Everybody felt he had said a true thing...
...You carry with you what you have done...
...It is an area where we believe that the grace of God is working itself out in history but that does not privilege our history as different from other human history...
...I don't want to hammer that point, but this is an area where theologians are clearly having a problem at the moment with facing up to a changed perception of history...
...People do take note when the church admits that it got things wrong...
...9 DE SOUZA: What is the role of church historians with the preparation of the church's examination of conscience in the view of the Jubilee...
...But that cannot be true...
...I think we have to be able and willing to say with integrity that the church was wrong...
...9 DUFFV: I think it is largely the Holy Father's initiative...
...If your theology cannot face the truth, then it's not itself telling the truth...
...That is patently not always the case, but in England that was the case...
...It really frightens the theologians to say that, because the church cannot change its mind...
...The historians can all see that the church has actually changed its mind...
...The Reformation is now seen not as a popular movement which quickly took effect but as something that had to be labored for over a couple or even three generations and which was largely driven by elite and governmental power...
...What I did not hear the pope say and what I have not heard any of you say is that the church is ashamed of what it did...
...A mother to her child, overheard at a museum Even when we no longer ran, for years, the hills comforted, the pine-wood brushed our broad, bony paws...
...I don't believe in God...
...I am dubious about that...
...There is a danger of thinking that if you say what you have done---that is it, it is finished...
...9 DUFFY: One of the problems about Catholic ecclesiology in the past has been the identification of the historical phenomenon of Catholicism with the bride of Christ who is spotless and pure...
...The Jubilee looms very large in the pope's sensibility...
...I think it is the historian's job to tell the truth and if the truth goes against the church then so be it...
...All of us, Catholics and non-Catholics alike, at the Inquisition symposium felt that this was an evasion...
...I would not want to argue that Catholicism is the superior article in every culture and is always popular while Protestantism is always unpopular...
...The primary qualification of the historians there was that they should be good historians, and not that they should be believers...
...We must not put ourselves in the theological position of saying, "It is better not to believe the historians...
...Remember that the church is human history in a particular mode...
Vol. 127 • January 2000 • No. 1
