Looking at History through the Eyes of Faith: David J. O'Brien and the U.S. Catholic Community

Abstract

Looking at History through the Eyes of Faith: David J. O’Brien and the U.S. Catholic Community Tricia Pyne . . . this is the age in which each one of us is required to make his own contribution to the universal common good. Daily is borne in on us the need to make the reality of social life conform better to the requirements of justice.1 W hen writing about the career of David J. O’Brien, one not only has to take into account his impressive accomplishments as an historian, but his faithful witness and service to the U.S. Catholic community in that role. Inspired as a young adult by Pope John XXIII’s encyclical, Pacem in Terris, this message of good will which signified the opening of a new era for the Catholic Church, transformed his faith and influenced his life’s work. In many ways O’Brien’s biography has been a reflection of the changes that the Catholic Church in America has undergone in the past fifty years. O’Brien, who came of age in post-World War II America, was raised in western Massachusetts, went to Catholic schools, and attended the parish his parents had helped to build. He was, by his own admission, a product of the Catholic subculture that had come into its own during this era. This identity was reinforced at the University of Notre Dame where he received his undergraduate education. When he graduated in the spring of 1960, he and his fellow graduates possessed a self-confidence that the Catholic community here was on the verge of something great. The elections of Pope John XIII and John F. Kennedy only served to reinforce this feeling and was best represented in the Catholic liberalism they espoused. In the following decade, all of the certainties that had defined his world were shaken by the convergence of several events: the collapse of the Catholic subculture, 93 1. Pope John XXIII, Pacem in Terris (1963), paragraph 155. the upheaval of the 1960s, and the Second Vatican Council. His identities as both a Catholic and an American were called into question during these years and, as with so many others, he was forced to reflect on how these events challenged his core beliefs. His career, in many ways, has represented an effort to answer the questions raised during this tumultuous decade.2 O’Brien became interested in the history of U.S. Catholicism as an undergraduate at Notre Dame, where he had the opportunity to study under Rev. Thomas McAvoy, C.S.C., and Professor Aaron I. Abell, whose interest and research on U.S. Catholicism no doubt made an impression. It was here that he first began to suspect that Catholics “mattered more than most scholars in American history admitted” and credited Will Herberg’s Catholic-Protestant-Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (1955) as having a formative influence on his historical consciousness, observing that “[Herberg] opened up the possibility that one could study American society, as I wanted to, by studying the experience of American Catholics, my people.”3 After receiving a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, he entered the graduate school at the University of Rochester to study U.S. history. Here he was encouraged to pursue his interest in the Catholic experience while being instructed in the fundamentals of historical research and methods that laid the foundations for the successful career that was to follow. Outside of academia, an important encounter occurred when he was introduced to the Catholic Worker. Unfamiliar with the movement when he arrived in Rochester, O’Brien was drawn to their radical social thought and counter-cultural stance. Their open criticism of American society challenged the widely held belief among Catholics, including O’Brien, that Americanism and Catholicism were fully compatible. Their prophetic witness led him to start reflecting on the relationship between faith and culture when examining the Catholic experience in America.4 O’Brien developed this idea in his dissertation written on Catholic social and political thought in the 1930s. Later published under the title American Catholics and Social Reform: The New Deal Years, his stated objective was “to gain some insight into the meaning of...