American stories of the Sacred Heart

Religious orders and congregations are being caught up by their own history. For the Netherlands, this has been the case since the spring of 2010, when Dutch media began to report on numerous cases of sexual abuse of minors committed by representatives of the Dutch Roman Catholic Church. Not a trace of this all occurs in recent general historiographies on the church or religion in the Netherlands, while such violations are but scantily considered in the historiography of religious communities. This raises the question of how this could be. In answering that question, we will analyze the perspectives that have guided and continue to guide historical research into religious communities. This particular field has been commanded in the past two decades by the religious themselves as well as by academically formed professional historians. To a large extent it has evolved beyond the reach of scholarly debate, due to the academic lack of interest for such institutions. First tendencies in historical research and their effect on narrative changes in the historiography of the religious are considered. Second the commemorative activities of religious communities are taken into account that reveal their self-understanding, a societal and churchly repositioning from the late 1960’s that channeled the religious’ new narratives on the past. We concentrate on the role of such narratives in processes of (revised) self-historicizing where new narratives began to dominate the actual past. A case study of the Dutch Dominicans elucidates to what extent their repositioning from the latter half of the 1960’s relied on a form of self-historicizing that involved reinventing, as it were, themselves, their own identity, and their vocation. The notion of self-historicizing implies the selective process of appropriating certain aspects from the past, while excluding others. With the religious this took shape through processes of resourcement that enabled them to recreate their so-called ‘authentic’ identity and vocation by foregrounding a ‘desired legacy’ primarily expressing who they wished to be. It is the contention of the authors that this caused them to lose perspective of their actual history, including the ‘undesired legacy’ that could pose quite a challenge to the more positive self-images. Historians should thus be wary of defining legacy in terms of what the religious themselves view as ‘desired.’ Alternative views offered by others who have had experiences with the religious in different capacities should also be considered. This calls for a new narrative of religious communities, designed to add depth to the formerly introvert perspective on one’s own community, one’s own institution and its specific idiosyncrasies, by means of memories and experiences of those whom the religious directly interacted with in daily life and work.

1995

Scottish Journal of Theology, 2000

2015

Horizons, 2005

2016

This conference aims to explore the ways in which the sacred space of Late Antiquity has been reconstructed (in materials and historiography) in a retrospective manner through the most important reforms in the two millennia of the Western Church.

This essay surveys seven histories of Christianity published in the 1960-2010 period, exemplifying several trends: from confessional to non-confessional; from Western or even Roman to a global orientation.

2007