Nova et vetera

Christopher Shannon and Christopher Blum have written a fascinating and challenging book. It is directed to historians who are also Catholics, not Catholics who happen to be historians. I am one of those, part of the target group they hope to reach and persuade to bring their faith life to bear on their work. I need little persuading—but am greatly appreciative of their instructions on how to do it well and in the proper spirit. Alasdair MacIntyre, whose ideas inspired and inform their book, said that the study of the past should have a virtuous, “sacred” component, that it should be part of the practice of “right judgment.”¹ The Past as Pilgrimage is Shannon’s and Blum’s affectionate tribute to “virtuous history,” to “research” as a re-searching for something substantial, even noble.

I am not a student of medieval Europe or eighteenth-century France, where being a Catholic historian gives one a certain built-in advantage, a “hermeneutic of affection,” as it was once described to me. I was responsible for courses in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America, meaning the history of the most purposeful amnesiacs ever to trod God’s earth at the time when forgetfulness was thought a necessary prerequisite to progress. Whatever pilgrimages they set out on were not to the past. They scarcely acknowledged that they had had one.

My field of research, however, was more specialized. I am, and remain even in retirement, a student of the lives of immigrant/ethnic working people. Even more specifically, I am re-searching into the lives of those in that demographic subset who were from Ireland, exiles, as they preferred to call themselves, of that sainted and Catholic-saturated land, and quite possibly the least forgetful people ever to trod God’s earth. A hermeneutic of affection was and is as available to me as to anyone.

And Shannon and Blum’s book may be as relevant to me as to anyone. In any event, I claim the indulgence of making it such, and for what I hope is one very good reason: America did not just experience periodic anti-Catholic movements; “America was an anti-Catholic movement.” My source for this clear truth was Sydney Ahlstrom, [End Page 1424] the dean of historians of American religion.² Ahlstrom’s conclusion was a bit nonchalant, but it was intended seriously; it may even have been celebratory. The likes of me must be counted among America’s apparently perpetual Others. For an American historian, outsidedness is a signal blessing, an advantage that is mine and my fellow “Papists” alone. What Shannon’s and Blum’s book has done is convince me of the historiographical foothold that “Ahlstrom’s truth” provides. The role of outsider gives my hermeneutic special traction. Maybe it gave me a second hermeneutic, one of disaffection. The one may well require the other; I will try to use both.

Exploring the differences between Catholic and non-Catholic, taking Ahlstrom’s point literally, is the only way to understand the Catholic experience in America. But reverse the order. It is also the case that it is the key to understanding U.S. history. Like it or not—and most Americans will not—American history cannot be understood without reference to the experience of Catholics as a Catholic experience. It is here that Shannon’s and Blum’s plea for a “renewal of Catholic history” is especially relevant for Americanists. Looking at the American past through a Catholic lens, asking Catholic questions of that past, in sum, putting a Catholic hermeneutic of affection to work in a place where the Catholic presence was not always—or ever—welcome, is the best imaginable way to challenge the established narrative.

Take, for example, G. K. Chesterton’s semi-famous remark that traditional societies—Catholic ones by way of obvious example—practice a “democracy of...