Teaching the Church's Mistakes: Historical Hermeneutics in Memory and Reconciliation: the Church and the Faults of the Past

How can church history help students and teachers make sense of what happens when the church makes mistakes? The Jubilee Year of 2000 represented a moment to think about the far past, but after January 2002, the revelations about priest-pedophiles and institutional cover-ups placed the topic of the church's errors squarely in the current daily life of the church. This essay explores the historical hermeneutics in the International Theological Commission's document, Memory and Reconciliation: The Church and the Faults of the Past, issued a few months before Pope John Paul II's Jubilee apologies in Lent 2000. The essay strives to identify and critique historical and theological concerns in this document while applying them not only to historical events, but to the more recent sex abuse revelations. Two topics serve as entry points to this discussion: purification of memory and the historian's role in discerning personal and corporate responsibility.