CONFRONTING THE CHURCH'S PAST : An interview with Eamon Duffy - Interview

Commonweal, Jan 14, 2000 by Raymond De Souza

* Duffy: Dangers? I don't think that they are dangers, just difficulties for the theologians!

* De Souza: Given these theological difficulties, why do you think that the Vatican desires this examination of history?

* Duffy: I think it is largely the Holy Father's initiative. I think Poles have a very strong sense of the meaning of dates and anniversaries and so on. The Jubilee looms very large in the pope's sensibility. 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. So I do think it is very largely driven by the pope, but I think most of us also feel some symbolic resonance there.

In this century the church has made a great leap into seeing itself as voyaging through time. I love that phrase in the third Eucharistic Prayer, ecclesia peregrinantem in terra-a pilgrim church on earth. 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. 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. But is must not involve laundering the past. The purification of the memory must not involve the laundering of the memory. I certainly do not think that is the pope's wish. It is very good that the church can say, "We have sinned."

Raymond De Souza is a seminarian for the Archdiocese of Kingston, Ontario, studying at the North American College in Rome.