BOOK REVIEW
Historians explore influence of Catholicism

Reviewed by Andrew Junker, The Catholic Sun
March 15, 2007

History can be a difficult and messy trade. In attempting to understand the past, historians spend countless hours unearthing a narrative from disparate and fragmentary bits of evidence.

Government documents, personal letters, newspaper articles, even the notes someone made in the margins of a novel help give flesh to the skeleton of the past.

“Faith and the Historian: Catholic Perspectives,” a new book of collected essays, explores how religion may influence historians’ research.

Historians don’t exist in a vacuum. Their experiences and upbringing influence their interests and how they approach the historical record.

“That our historical sensibilities did not begin with that first graduate seminar was obvious,” writes Nick Salvatore, the professor of American Studies at Cornell University who edited the book.

“But how an experience with faith might have influenced my professional work remained more elusive,” he adds.

“Faith and the Historian” chases down that influence through eight personal essays written by American historians who were “touched” by Catholicism.

Not all of the contributors are practicing Catholics today, but all admit that the Church’s theology and culture fundamentally shaped the way they view history, and, by extension, the world.

 ‘Spiritual earthquake’

The collection is fascinating on many levels. The writers take a sometimes painfully honest look at the influences that brought them to their current beliefs.

In digging through their own historical record to find their personal narrative, the contributors confront the powerful — and sometimes confusing — social and religious forces that shaped their worldview.

The essays are engagingly written and devoid — for the most part — of academic jargon, which lend them a wide appeal to anyone interested in the movement of American Catholicism over the past 50 years.

Most of the writers attended a university during the 1960s, and it is here that their reflections on the Church and academia are often astounding for the reader who didn’t live through such volatile times.

“Whatever later revisionists may say,” writes Philip Gleason, a professor emeritus of history at the University of Notre Dame, “the ’60s was a decade wracked by crisis — the deepest, in my opinion, since the Civil War.”

He goes on to write that for American Catholics, the decade held even greater significance.

“There was also the Second Vatican Council, which set off a spiritual earthquake that transformed the religious landscape and added a new and shockingly unexpected element to the atmosphere of revolutionary instability that pervaded the national culture.”

This is not necessarily an indictment of the times. Nearly all of the contributors praise the Second Vatican Council and its implementation unreservedly. Indeed, if they lament at all about that “spiritual earthquake,” it is only to criticize its aims as too modest.

But almost every historian in the collection who lived through those years writes that the religion they grew up with — the faith that permeated every aspect of their lives socially, culturally and intellectually — was utterly changed.

As college students, many of the writers left the Church or, as James R. Barrett, a University of Illinois professor puts it, “drifted away.”

He, like many of the other writers, drifted into Marxism as a new way of understanding the world and its history.

Interestingly, many of the historians realized later in life that their movement towards socialism was rooted in their upbringing in the Catholic neighborhoods of the ’50s.

“My involvement in labor and socialist politics was always dictated far more by heart than by brain, and its ethical foundations remained what I still think of as ‘Catholic,’” Barrett writes.

He, like many of the authors, grew up in a poor, ethnic neighborhood in a large city. Their parishes and their fathers’ labor unions ingrained in them the notion of mutual assistance and communal bonds.

The tightly-knit, homogenous parishes — an Irish one here, a Polish one three blocks south — fostered a sense of unity and concern for each other based on a shared religion, ethnicity and economic bracket.

This world dissolved in the ’60s and ’70s as the neighborhoods became more diverse and its inhabitants left for better opportunities.

Some of the writers realized their worldview wasn’t as far removed from the Church as they imagined and returned, embracing the sacraments as well as the social teaching.

The past for today

Through their reflections, the writers discover the pivotal role the faith played in bringing them to their present understanding of history and their interest in the subjects they choose.

The essays also show the many tensions currently existing in the Church that were, in many ways, birthed by this generation.

The book is a good primer for anyone who wants to better understand why there are so many, often rancorous debates over the liturgy, Scripture and social issues today.

As these writers can attest to, the past is often surprisingly present in the now and can be the key to understanding it.

Andrew Junker is a staff writer for The Catholic Sun. Comments are welcome. Send e-mail to letters@catholicsun.org.