2010 Election: Meet the Candidates – Nominating Committee

Richard Crane

Richard Crane

Greensboro College

I am pleased to be a candidate for the Nominating Committee of the American Catholic Historical Association. It would be an honor to serve the ACHA, which has given me a great deal of support in my studies of Catholic history. By “support,” I mean warm fellowship, constructive criticism, and varied venues for the presentation and publication of my research. For all the above I am grateful.

Most of my career as a history professor has unfolded at Greensboro College, a small, Methodist-affiliated, liberal arts college in North Carolina. Fourteen years of teaching in a school in which academic departments typically comprise but two or three persons have given both my pedagogy and my scholarship an increasingly interdisciplinary flavor. The consequent exposure to ethics, philosophy, and especially theology has enriched and altered my conception of my vocation as a historian.

My Ph.D. dissertation and first book focused on political and military aspects of French appeasement of Nazi Germany in the late-1930s. While that study, published in 1996 as A French Conscience in Prague: Louis Eugène Faucher and the Abandonment of Czechoslovakia, contained obvious ethical implications (how could appeasing Adolf Hitler not raise questions of right and wrong?), my research methodology and intellectual outlook were closely tied to the military and diplomatic documents I had gathered through painstaking archival research. Matters of fact tended to overshadow questions of value.

Almost fifteen years later, I am still researching France during the era of the Second World War, but more explicitly and reflectively examining this period through the study of Catholic belief and practice. In 2004, I published my first article in The Catholic Historical Review, titled “La Croix and the Swastika: The Ambiguities of Catholic Responses to the Fall of France,” centering on how French Catholics tried to comprehend their country’s sudden conquest by the Third Reich. A stunned populace confronted an unexpected catastrophe through a variety of cultural and political responses. One of the most powerful and controversial responses came from those who argued that the nation had just experienced divine punishment, necessitating personal repentance, collective atonement, and the re-Christianization of society-at-large. Early in the research for this article, I realized that my attempt to enter the minds and emotions of French Catholics in the annus horribilis 1940 required not only a more acute grasp of mid-twentieth-century Catholic thought, but also an exploration of the larger question of theodicy.

I still find myself intrigued by the question of how people of faith, including Roman Catholics, perceive God’s justice in the events of history, especially in the theological challenges posed by the Holocaust. My new book, Passion of Israel: Jacques Maritain, Catholic Conscience, and the Holocaust, has its origins not only in archival research in France and the United States, but in a critical reading of Maritain’s oeuvre, as well as faculty seminars on the tradition of natural law and on the history of antisemitism in modern France. I wrote the book as a visiting fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum during the 2006-07 academic year. Passion of Israel takes account of Maritain’s well-deserved reputation as an opponent of antisemitism and an advocate for improved Jewish-Christian relations both before and after the Holocaust. But the book also explores elements of ambivalence in Maritain’s Catholic philosemitism, indeed in the idea of philosemitism itself. This study, which also sheds light on Maritain’s misunderstood relationship with Pope Pius XII (Maritain served as French ambassador to the Holy See between 1945 and 1948) also found itself nurtured by the American Catholic Historical Association. I presented the first sketch of my research at an ACHA spring meeting in Worcester, Massachusetts in 2006, and The Catholic Historical Review published one of the articles that preceded the book itself.

I would like to thank my colleagues in the ACHA for the way that you have welcomed me, and guided, even shaped, the development of my craft. If elected to the Nominating Committee, I will do my best to contribute to the ongoing vitality of the ACHA. I am honored to have you consider my candidacy.

Mark Edward Ruff

Mark Edward Ruff

St. Louis University

I am a historian of 20th century German and European Catholicism. I completed my undergraduate work in 1991 at the University at Buffalo under the guidance of Georg Iggers, an eminent Jewish émigré from Germany in 1938 who became a pioneering figure in the field of historiography. In 1999, I received my PhD from Brown University, having worked with Volker Berghahn, a leading historian of 19th and 20th century Germany. Under Berghahn’s direction, I spent two years in Germany to carry out my research on the erosion of the Roman Catholic milieu in post-1945 West Germany. This work was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2005 under the title, “The Wayward Flock: Catholic Youth in Postwar West Germany, 1945 -1965.” I have published more than one dozen articles and chapters in edited volumes in the United States and Germany as well as an edited volume on Christian Workers’ Movements in 19th and 20th century Europe. In addition, I have written numerous reviews, including many that have appeared in the Catholic Historical Review.

My current research represents an attempt to historicize the debates about the relationship between Roman Catholicism and National Socialism. My monograph in progress bears the working title, “The Battle for the Catholic Past in Germany, 1945 – 1975” and focuses on the debates launched by critics of the church’s past such as Rolf Hochhuth, Günter Lewy, Gordon Zahn and Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde. It argues that the battles over the church’s relationship to National Socialism were frequently proxy wars for how the church was to position itself in the modern world, and in particularly, in politics, society and the public sphere. Thanks to a Research Fellowship from the Alexander-von-Humboldt Foundation, I recently spent more than two years in Germany, France and Switzerland , where I examined manuscript collections in more than sixty archives and conducted more than two dozen interviews with those providing accounts of the recent Catholic past, including Hochhuth and Böckenförde. I am also publishing two edited volumes, one in German, the other in English, which are designed to introduce students to the debates about the churches’ past under National Socialism.

I am an Associate Professor of History at Saint Louis University, a Jesuit university. Since 2005, I have served as SLU’s representative to the Lilly Foundation, an inter-confessional network of more than 90 schools committed to helping universities maintain their religious identities. My work with the Lilly Foundation dovetails with the themes raised in my research: how does one maintain a religious identity in a society and culture that can easily undermine the social and intellectual foundations on which religious cultures are based.

I would be most honored to serve on the Nominating Committee of the ACHA, particularly since an organization such as the American Catholic Historical Association invariably wrestles with questions that echo those that emerge in my own research and work at SLU. How does one take on board many of the approaches and themes that have become an established part of the historical profession in recent decades without relinquishing one’s own religious and confessional distinctiveness? During the last decade, moreover, questions of religion have become central areas of inquiry in the mainstream historical profession. A recent article in the AHA Perspectives noted that religious history has experienced the most rapid growth of any single area in the field in the last ten years. This development provides the ACHA with a singular opportunity to extend the range of its voice and serve as a significant venue from which to launch this new research.