|
|
Between Redefinition and Pluralisation: the Relationship between Religion and History as Marker of Religious Transformations in the long 1960s
| In my paper I will have a close look at the discursive and semantic transformations in self-reflexive discourses on (Church) history, in narratives of catholic historiography and within the broader catholic culture of memory from the 1950s to the 1970s. I argue that one can speak both of a redefinition and a pluralisation regarding the relationship of religion, history and memory, which actually makes this complex relationship a marker of transformations of catholic definitions of the self and society in second modernity.
With regard to self-reflexive discourses on Church history, the relationship of equivalence between general world history and history of salvation, i.e. the superposition of the two discursive fields, was transformed into a differentiated relationship which is expression of a changed vision on historicisation and sacralisation, that is of those factors which, in their entanglement, had been so fundamental to catholic historical discourses in the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries. With regard to the implementation of these self-reflexive discourses into concrete historiography not least the effect on and representation of discourses of self-definition of catholic elites in the long 1960s is paramount. How were historical discourses used for a re-definition of catholic culture? Not least a look at integrist catholic movements with their static, ahistoric vision of the church and its history reinforces the thesis of a pluralisation of discourses of memory and history within Catholicism. Concerning a broader culture of memory, questions regarding the reproduction of schemes of self-observation and -thematisation in catholic discourses of memory have to be incorporated. What was, in this context, the role of the universalised culture of memory of the Shoah? And how was religion itself transformed into cultural memory in the long 1960s and since?
|
|
