A historian's faith & hope: Eamon Duffy & the uses of tradition.

Eamon Duffy, professor of the history of Christianity at the University of Cambridge, is one of those rare scholars who are both commanding presences in their fields and frequent contributors to magazines and journals aimed at the common reader. As a scholar he is perhaps best known for The Stripping of the Altars (1994), a study of the English Reformation that argued, persuasively to many, that Catholicism was not a corrupt and resented force before the imposition of Protestantism, but a vital and cherished practice. Commonweal readers will remember the essay "The Mass Bells of Maremma," which Duffy wrote for our eightieth-anniversary issue about the ongoing de-Christianization of Europe (November 5, 2004). He has also, among other things, tangled with Garry Wills in our pages (July 14, 2000), and written about the conciliarist tradition within Catholicism (March 12, 2004).

Duffy's most recent book, Faith of Our Fathers (Continuum, $16.95, 187 pp.), brings together essays he has written, mostly for the English magazines The Tablet and Priests and People, on a broad range of Catholic concerns. Because of the breadth of his interests and the economical way in which he wields his considerable erudition, we thought the book especially appropriate for extended attention in our Theological Books issue. Duffy has many thoughtful and occasionally provocative things to say about the inadequacies of contemporary liturgical language, the nature of papal authority, the cult of the saints, the power of traditional Catholic devotionalism, and much more. He reminds us, for example, of what it means for the church to be governed by a person, not merely a set of laws; in what ways tradition liberates rather than oppresses; and why our prayers must speak of the "ambivalence of worldly happiness" as well as affirm its goodness. Duffy is a robust defender of the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, but he is not uncritical of how those reforms have been implemented. "We grow from our past," he reminds us, "and we only flourish when we are in touch with that past."

Faith of Our Fathers is a challenging summons to renew Catholicism in light of its rich and varied tradition. We asked four writers to comment on aspects of the book that particularly engaged them. A brief response from Duffy concludes the discussion.

THE EDITORS

Margaret O'Brien Steinfels

The Catholic Church never throws anything out. Along with seven sacraments, the Nicene Creed, and the bishop of Rome, heresies live on in the refutations of theologians; great sinners are seen, after their immolation, to have been saints (or vice versa); and the pieties of a past age are resurrected with exclamations of the novel and the necessary. Catholicism's knack for holding on to the past is part of its all-embracing "both ... and" spirit, which preserves both the positives and negatives in its history. Even so, at times dramatic choices seem to have been made. Many Catholics took Vatican II as such an "either ... or" moment, a real turning point in the life of the church. Yet as any good historian of Catholicism knows--and Eamon Duffy is pre-eminent among them--the rejected idea, person, doctrine, etc., eventually worms its way back into the life of the church. Certainly this process has been at work over the last two decades--we now have a Vatican II church with good chunks of pre-Vatican II detritus reinserted into the liturgy, into texts and translation, and into the reassertion of curial power, along with much else that was sent into storage in 1965.

"Both ... and" is the underlying leitmotif of Faith of Our Fathers, a collection of essays, lectures, retreat talks--the pastoral work of a professional historian trying to explain Catholicism, past and present, to his fellow Catholics. Duffy would no doubt object to the word worms above, preferring to credit as normal, even inevitable, the response of time and generational shifts to the oscillations of church practices and decrees. Certainly he is a man of the council, describing the straitjacket that imprisoned the church in its own resistance to historical change during the nineteenth century, the consequences of which made Vatican II a necessity. But he is also a critic of the changes that followed the council. He decries the replacement of a mentality of "nonhistorical orthodoxy," with one of "nonhistorical liberalism," offering examples ranging from ungainly translations of collects to the end of mandatory rules for fast and abstinence. Duffy also expresses, as do many men his age, nostalgia for the devotions and pieties of his Irish childhood (which, despite the title of the book, was also very much the faith of his mother).

Duffy is a defender of the rich intellectual and liturgical tradition of the church (and I do not argue with his defense); yet, like each of us, he has his favorite prayers and practices, some of which seem to this U.S. Catholic well put away in storage. Still, Faith of Our Fathers is an engaging effort to assess where we are today in the church Vatican II tried to change--and it is today, not tomorrow.

What Duffy's analysis does not do is look to the future; perhaps his approach makes that cumbersome. His deep appreciation for the tradition, and his experience of Vatican II reform cause him to hesitate in pointing a way out of the current impasse. He recognizes that the centuries-long process of centralizing authority in Rome and the pope has enfeebled local churches and their bishops. At the same time, he argues that "any sudden transformation would be likely to be catastrophic." For example, were the pope to allow the selection of American bishops to be made through local processes, Duffy believes, there would be schism in the U.S. Catholic Church. (To this U.S. Catholic, schism seems as likely as the pope allowing such a process to take place at all.)

My point: the "both ... and mentality" can itself be a strait-jacket, or at least engender a form of paralysis that shrivels Catholicism's long, rich, and messy tradition as it is embedded in the lives of ordinary people in local churches around the world. The current papacy, its talk of inculturation notwith-standing, has acted as though that tradition ought to be embedded everywhere in more or less the same form. Duffy makes much of the bishop of Rome, the pope, acting as a sign of unity for the universal church; he makes too little of the papacy imposing a uniformity that is not of the tradition. Since I am a "both ... and" advocate myself, Duffy's masterful treatment of our recent history has taught me something about the shortcomings of never finally throwing anything out.

Margaret O'Brien Steinfels, former editor of Commonweal, is co-director of the Fordham Center on Religion and Culture.

Robert Ellsberg

For many of those who celebrate "the spirit of Vatican II," the word tradition signals a desperate clinging to musty and outmoded habits from the past. There are conservatives, on the other hand, for whom tradition is a warm security blanket, a protection from the drafty winds of aggiornamento. In this context, Eamon Duffy's book could be regarded as a welcome contribution to what Cardinal Joseph Bernardin called "the common ground."

His theme is the Catholic sense of tradition, something quite different from the stifling traditionalism (as Congar famously observed) that often goes by the name. For Duffy the challenge of Vatican II was not simply to open the windows to modernity, but also to recover lost symbols, memories, and resources from the church's ancient origins. In other words, we need tradition not just to conserve the past, but also to face the challenges of the present. It is a not a "straitjacket," but a "liberation." As Duffy puts it, "tradition offers us a point of vantage from which to criticize the present certainly, but it is also a source of confidence in launching into the uncharted future."

Duffy writes not just as a historian but as a product of the particularly "traditional" culture of preconciliar Irish Catholicism. He is able to recognize that there was much in that culture that was oppressive, superstitious, and authoritarian. Yet it also fostered a deep sense of the sacred, of communal identity, and of the meaning of life and death. A stripped-down, "secularized" faith may offer some advantages, according to Duffy, but it comes at a cost. In this light, he examines a number of topics, including prayer for the dead, the Eucharist, the role of Mary, ministry, and papal authority, showing how a proper sense of tradition provides a corrective balance to some of the competing ideological tendencies in the church.

One of the topics that figure in this book is the role of saints. Popular devotion to the saints is one of those features of traditional Catholicism that have notably waned since the council. This was in part a correction against an overly superstitious, even magical approach to saints that put more stress on their miraculous powers and otherworldly qualities than on their actual life stories. In this sense, veneration of the saints competed with the focus on Christ. It also distracted from what the council identified as the universal "call to holiness." In other words, if we regard saints as completely "other" than ourselves, how can they help us answer our own call to be saints?

Increasingly the church has met this problem by demythologizing the cult of the saints--downplaying those legends of dubious historical basis--while emphasizing the role of the saint as exemplar, "one who embodies some aspect of the Christian ideal." It is the example of a Maximilian Kolbe or a Mother Teresa that touches our hearts--not their reputation for miracles or spectacular feats of asceticism.

Yet Duffy feels one can go too far in this direction. The current approach runs a danger of Pelagianism, "a wearisome emphasis on good deeds and moral effort ... which is the antithesis of much that has proved most vital in the celebration of saints in the Christian past." Here, again, Duffy argues that a healthy dose of tradition enables us to appreciate both the example of the saints and that quality of holy "otherness" that they embodied. The saints are indeed ordinary people like us, faced with the same challenges and struggles to be faithful. At the same time, they are also "visible signs of a call to transcend the ordinariness or our own lives, and evidence of the possibility of heroism and wonder."

Duffy, in other words, objects to an approach to the saints that puts all the emphasis either on their historical deeds or on their role as heavenly intercessors. What he urges is a renewed sense of the communion of saints, an inclusive community that transcends the boundaries of time and space, including that boundary that separates this world and the next. To meditate deeply on any saint is thus to confront the eschatological--a vision of the kingdom of God as disclosed in the life of a human being. We are drawn not simply to imitate the good deeds of the saints, but to enter into the larger universe--marked by grace, love, and mystery--that they inhabited.

Overall these essays are largely addressed to an Irish and British audience, particularly to a generation that shares the author's memory of the way things were. But younger readers may benefit from Duffy's evocation of the past and recognize values and resources that address contemporary needs. His approach to Catholicism is positive and reassuring as he manages to rise above competing factions and agendas in the church. Ultimately, "faith is a direction, not a state of mind," Duffy writes. It teaches us that we are "citizens of a world whose heart is love. We know in the way of Jesus, not a law, but a liberation into true humanity; the power to love, to belong to one another, to start again when things go wrong, to be grateful, to adore."

Robert Ellsberg is the author of All Saints: Daily Reflections on Saints, Prophets, and Witnesses for Our Time (Crossroad) and The Saints' Guide to Happiness (North Point Press).

Elizabeth A. Johnson

Eamon Duffy's chapters on Mary and the saints give a fairly balanced presentation of the state of the question in the Catholic Church today. They are salted with personal reminiscences about his Catholic youth, which was steeped in the Marian and saintly images, hymns, and devotional practices of the pre-Vatican II church. They are also peppered with rueful stories about the checkered state of reform brought about by the council. For example, he recounts how an English bishop visited a Vatican department to acquire relics. Teasing the poker-faced friar in charge, he asked for a series of ever more improbable British saints. Finally the bishop asked if there was a relic of St. George, the legendary figure recently removed from the Roman Calendar. "Si, si," replied the friar, "anche il dragone": Yes indeed, and also the dragon!

More to the point, these chapters offer accessible reflection on the theological reasons why these devotions have all but evaporated in Western Europe and the United States, along with judgments about what might be lost or gained as a result.

Regarding Mary, Duffy highlights two key factors. First, by placing its teaching on Mary in the context of its teaching on the church, Vatican II reoriented the Catholic imagination. Instead of Mary's privileges making her the great, exclusive contrast to our sinful, helpless humanity, her role as model of the church now allows her excellence to stand inclusively for the way God's grace works even in us. Just as her fiat at the Annunciation is a model for every believer's response to the call of God, so too her assumption into heaven is given as a pledge of the destiny in glory that awaits us all.

Second, liberation theology's new reading of Mary's great song, the Magnificat, places her in the midst of those who struggle for freedom from oppression. Instead of spiritualizing this proclamation, seeing the "mighty" who will be brought down from their thrones as heresies or our personal sins, this text is now read as a manifesto for social justice in the world. Rather than abandoning the corrupt temporal world in favor of a focus on heaven, those who pray this prayer (it is still recited daily in the divine office) are moved to engage in the actual historical-political world where the hungry are not fed.

The cult of the saints presents a more complex picture. Wary of the anarchic qualities of traditional folk practices that treat the saints mainly as supernatural miracle workers, Duffy is also less than enchanted with today's official emphasis on the saints as exemplars. This approach veers toward Pelagianism, he feels, promoting a wearisome emphasis on moral effort that reduces the saint to a prig or a Puritan. Like many others who have studied it, he is critical of "the stranglehold of the papacy" on the process of saint-making. Not only does this restrict the ranks of the canonized mainly to the clergy and the rich, but it also suppresses the formation of local cults of holy persons that could enhance community in specific places. It's rather odd that Duffy finds hope for the future in popular rebellion against the papal suppression of the cult of St. Christopher as patron of motorists. But Duffy hits his theological stride again with the idea that what we want from the saints is a sense of the possibilities both within and beyond the range of our own human lives, a sense of the infinite resourcefulness of grace.

These chapters, written in good, plain English, are clearly the work of a committed Catholic thinker. They reward the reader with many beneficial insights. I would suggest, though, that richer fare would result if Duffy would expand his interests and read more theology being done on the margins: by women, by poor people, by Asians--indeed, by poor Asian women committed to justice. The Spirit is at work here, bubbling up insights and practices far removed from putting statues of a nonexistent saint on car dashboards. In my own research for books on the communion of saints and Mary, I found these venues full of fertile ideas about how best to renew the ancient Catholic traditions. To relate to the saints as neither wonderworkers nor exemplars but primarily as "friends of God and prophets" who are our companions in memory and hope; to honor Mary neither as perfect exception nor as exemplary model but primarily as "truly our sister" who encourages our struggle: such paradigms contain seeds of fruitfulness for the future life of the Christian community. But they are not found in official church statements or standard university treatments, which form the bulk of Duffy's references.

Reading on the margins, furthermore, would give this author a better grasp of the diversity of women's struggles with every subject that he addresses. Without attention to these, a vibrant future church, which he cares about so deeply, will simply not come into being. I register the melancholy fact that the very title of this book, Faith of Our Fathers, is taken from an old patriarchal hymn that ignores the faith of our mothers. The absence of any chapter dealing with women in the church coupled with lack of engagement with feminist theology (of which there is a goodly amount in his own country) indicate how lightly he weighs the importance of these matters. His silence indicates that he does not see the whole picture.

In sum, Duffy's chapters on Mary and the saints, as befits a historian, provide insightful descriptions of where we have been in the pre- and postconciliar church, and good--if partial--analyses of the present moment. On where to go from here, though, they offer a thin gruel.

Elizabeth A. Johnson, CSJ, is Distinguished Professor of Theology at Fordham University. Her most recent book is Truly Our Sister (Continuum).

John L. Allen Jr.

Eamon Duffy reminds us that Rome's centrality in Western Christianity was built, in the first place, not upon the presence of the papacy, but upon the shrines of the martyrs and saints. He helps us rediscover Roma Sancta as a window onto our Roman Catholic past and present.

Certainly there is that element to the city, waiting patiently for anyone who seeks it out. After living here for five years, though, I find that Roma Profana--that is, the streets, piazzas, restaurants, wine bars, and tobacco shops, the sinews in the living tissue of the place that have nothing specifically to do with religious devotion--offer an education in Roman psychology and sociology that is equally irreplaceable.

When Pope John Paul II calls on seminarians in the Eternal City to imparare Roma, meaning to "learn Rome," I suspect he's thinking more of Duffy's Rome than mine, but in fact both have to be mastered by anyone who wishes to grasp Roman Catholicism.

For example, for someone with eyes to see, even a Sunday morning trip to a Roman bakery offers ecclesiological insight. Sometimes, my wife and I awaken to a craving for a couple of tartufini, small balls of Italian pastry that taste like bits of rich chocolate cake. If this were Manhattan, we would await a commercial break during Meet the Press, pop around the corner to throw a few chocolate balls in a bag, and scamper back. In Rome, though, this is not how things work. The proprietors of the pastry shop, who are always behind the counter themselves instead of relying on part-time teenage help, patiently take each order, placing the items with care on a tray, and then covering them with colorful paper and tying the whole arrangement with a bow. One walks out of the shop not merely with food items, but with a piece of culinary art. If there's a line in the shop, this exercise can take upwards of a half-hour, but that's the Roman instinct: life is art, and it's better to do something well than to do it quickly. That's part of the instinct to "think in centuries."

One can learn the same lesson simply by eating out in Rome. Any meal at a Roman restaurant that takes less than two hours is an exercise in rapidity; even the simple act of getting the check can seem agonizingly prolonged for first-time American visitors accustomed to greater haste. I have said before that this is one expression of the cultural gap between Rome and America: America is a microwave culture, Rome a crockpot culture. Americans want things now. Romans believe that practicing the bella figura means it may take longer to get your food, but it will taste better in the end. In my experience, that's true often enough that I tend to give Romans the benefit of the doubt.

Even the Roman streets themselves open up aspects of the culture relevant to understanding the church. Anyone who has ever watched an Italian on a Vespa, the small motor scooter known colloquially as a "wasp," pull up to a traffic light, knows what I mean. A red light functions at best as a suggestion, not a command, to come to a complete halt. If there's no cross-traffic, or if it seems negotiable, the Vespas pour through the intersection. Traffic lanes on Roman streets are at best guidelines, more honored in the breach than the observance. It all looks to the untrained eye like chaos, and yet the city flows.

To take another example of the same principle, Italy recently adopted a ban on smoking in restaurants and bars. Threats of a hefty fine means that people by and large follow the ordinance. Yet in my favorite Roman eatery, things work this way. There's no smoking during the lunch rush, but when things wind down, when it's just a handful of faithful clients and the father and daughter who run the place, the front door is locked, ashtrays emerge, and we enjoy a soothing post-pranzo smoke. We all know it's technically illegal, but we also know this is one of life's many contexts in which fastidiousness doesn't make sense.

All of this illustrates Italian subjectivity about law; there's a deep understanding in Rome that laws are occasionally necessary, but they are exercises in abstraction that can never fully reflect the complexity of actual experience, and hence one should never be fanatical in their application. Law is an expression of a spiritual ideal, a description of what conduct would be like if people were angels. Everyone accepts that most people, most of the time, will fall short. In that sense, the two most important words in the Italian language are facciamo cosi: "let's do it like this," the expression that usually introduces a practical adjustment to an ostensibly absolute norm.

 Hyacinth for the Soul

Bake two loaves of bread, my mother used to say.
Give one away and plant a hyacinth for the soul.
I never understood and she did not explain.
It was one of those sayings from the old country.

Give one away and plant a hyacinth for the soul
as if the soul would not prefer two loaves of bread.
It was one of those sayings from the old country
that my Polish grandmother passed on to her daughters.

As if the soul would not prefer two loaves of bread
hungry and alone in its room beneath the heart
that my Polish grandmother passed on to her daughters:
Oh, soul who are you? What do you know?

Hungry and alone in my room beneath the heart
I sit out the bruised hours wondering,
Oh, soul who are you? What do you know?
until a poem rises through the dead leaves. Flowers.

I sit out the bruised hours wondering
who are the faces in the photographs
until words rise through the dry leaves. Flower.
I kneel in the dirt, plant hyacinths for my mother.

Who are the faces in the photographs?
I never understood and she did not explain.
So I kneel in the dirt, plant hyacinths for my mother,
bake two loaves of bread as she used to say.

--Joan I. Siegel

A trip to the Stadio Olimpico, Rome's citadel of professional soccer, makes a similar point. Compared to American football, Italian calcio has remarkably few rules--offside, use of the hands, and vicious tackling are about all you'll ever see called on a typical Sunday afternoon. Rather than inventing new rules to cover unforeseen situations, referees simply make on-the-spot adjustments. American football, on the other hand, has a rulebook as thick as the New York Yellow Pages, and it's constantly evolving. Anglo-Saxons like all of life's situations to be covered by a law; Italians prefer to keep things simple, with a few eternal and unchanging norms, and lots of room for casuistry.

Applications of all this to debates in the church over matters such as birth control, priestly celibacy, and homosexuality are, I should think, sufficiently obvious as to not require teasing out.

One could go on cataloguing ways in which Rome continually teaches its attentive denizens about the ways and means of Catholic culture--how Italian bureaucracy makes the Vatican look mild by comparison, for example, or how the Italian media train churchmen, especially cardinals, to believe that they have something important to say on every subject under the sun, regardless of their actual training or experience.

The point, though, is that it's not just by trudging to the Church of Santa Agnese, as Duffy did out on the Via Nomentana, that one can learn something in Rome about Catholicism. One can imbibe more than the "Christian past," though Duffy is right that history lurks around every street corner. The Christian present is also ubiquitous. It's available simply by going to the movies, drinking wine at an enoteca, or lingering over a long meal at a trattoria, experiences which, to be honest, are both more accessible and, generally, much more fun.

John L. Allen Jr. is the Vatican correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter and author of the 2004 book, All the Pope's Men: The Inside Story of How the Vatican Really Thinks (Doubleday).

Eamon Duffy Responds

It is both daunting and flattering that Commonweal should ask four distinguished writers to comment on Faith of Our Fathers. I wrote the book to help Catholics recover a more positive sense of the value of the church's past, both remote and recent, for contemporary Christian living, in an ecclesial culture in which "preconciliar" has often, sadly and unthinkingly, become a term of dismissal or abuse, as if Christianity had been invented in the 1960s. In Seamus Heaney's poem Station Island, the nineteenth-century writer William Carleton declares:

   We are earthworms of the earth, and all that
   Has gone through us is what will be our trace.

Intensely conscious of the extent to which my own sometimes shaky discipleship was and is sustained by values, insights, and instincts acquired in the preconciliar church, I wanted to alert fellow Catholics to the nurturing and liberating aspects of their own past, of all that "has gone through us," not merely as individuals, but as a community with a history whose complexity, diversity, and richness made it not a straitjacket or a dead weight, but an inexhaustible resource of enlightenment, inspiration, wisdom, and, occasionally, warning. So I wanted to celebrate this past while rejecting the rigid, fearful, and authoritarian conclusions which are often associated with advocacy of "tradition." Margaret O'Brien Steinfels goes straight to the heart of the matter, therefore, when she identifies "Both ... and" as the leitmotif of the book. No doubt this is a stance which can paralyze action and trap us in nostalgia (I winced at her remark about "men of his age"!). No doubt, too, my own constitutional suspicion of radical discontinuity colors my perceptions. But so too do my professional convictions as an historian. I am not greatly troubled that both she and Elizabeth Johnson should note in the book the absence of adequate blueprints for the future. Historians don't (or shouldn't) do crystal-gazing. It is, of course, not everything, but it is something, to help to recover a sense of the past as a place of growth, and if I have done that much, I will be content. I certainly don't conceive the historian's task in the somewhat judgmental terms implicit in Johnson's stern headshaking over the "old patriarchal hymn" from which my book takes its title. Such lapses persuade her, she declares, "that he does not see the whole picture." Well, precisely: that nobody sees the whole picture, but that a creative engagement with the complexities of our shared past can move us an inch or two closer to it is the central conviction of my book.