The Great Jubilee and the Purification of Memory Kevin Lenehan

Louvain Studies 25 (2000) 291-311

The awareness of the advent of the third millennium in the historical self-understanding and ministry of Pope John Paul II cannot be underestimated. The first encyclical of his pontificate made explicit ref- erence to the impending turn of the millennium, and interpreted the last years of the twentieth century as ‘a new Advent,' preparing for the celebration of the Great Jubilee.1 In his apostolic letter on the preparation for the Jubilee of the Year 2000, The Third Millennium (Tertio Mil- lennio Adveniente), he writes that “preparing for the Year 2000 has become as it were a hermeneutical key of my pontificate.”2 Convinced that “in the Church's history every jubilee is prepared for by Divine Providence,” he affirms that the Second Vatican Council was “a provi- dential event, whereby the Church began the more immediate preparation for the Jubilee of the Second Millennium.” He notes the importance of the Council in its historical context of “the profoundly disturbing experiences of the twentieth century, a century scarred by the First and Second World Wars, by the experience of concentration camps and by horrendous massacres.” The richness and new tone of the Coun- cil's teaching constituted a “proclamation of new times,” and leads the Pope to affirm that “the best preparation for the new millennium, there- fore, can only be expressed in a renewed commitment to apply, as faithfully as possible, the teachings of Vatican II to the life of every individual Christian and of the whole Church.”3 The Pope then outlines what concrete preparation for the Jubilee might entail. Seeing the need “to link the structure of memorial with

1. John Paul II, Encyclical, Redemptor Hominis, Origins 8 (March 1979) 625-644, n. 1. 2. John Paul II, Apostolic Letter, Tertio Millennio Adveniente (hereafter TMA), Origins 24 (November 1994) 401-416, n. 23. 3. Ibid., nn. 17-20. 292 KEVIN LENEHAN that of celebration,” he calls the church to become more “fully con- scious of the sinfulness of her children, recalling all those times in history when they departed from the spirit of Christ and his Gospel and, instead of offering to the world the witness of a life inspired by the val- ues of faith, indulged in ways of thinking and acting which were truly forms of counter-witness and scandal.” This requires a thorough examination of conscience by the church, which is always at the same time holy and in need of renewal, so that the light of the Gospel may be shed on its history, illuminating the concrete actions of Christian men and women. From this memoria an attitude of repentance and sorrow arises in the church, which is expressed by publicly acknowledging the sinfulness of the past and by a recommitment to strengthening relationships with those who bear the consequences of past wrongdoing. “Acknowl- edging the weaknesses of the past is an act of honesty and courage which helps us to strengthen our faith, which alerts us to face today's temptations and challenges and prepares us to meet them.”4 In November 1998, the Pope reiterated his call for an ecclesial examination of conscience in the Bull of Indiction of the Great Jubilee of the Year 2000, The Mystery of the Incarnation (Incarnationis Mysterium). He speaks of a purification of memory, which “calls everyone to make an act of courage and humility in recognizing the wrongs done by those who have borne or bear the name of Christian.” While the history of the church is a history of holiness, “it must be acknowledged that history also records events which constitute a counter-testimony to Christianity. Because of the bond which unites us to one another in the Mystical Body, all of us, though not personally responsible and without encroaching on the judge- ment of God who alone knows every heart, bear the burden of the errors and faults of those who have gone before us. Yet we too … have sinned and have … impeded the Spirit's working in the hearts of many people.” By acknowledging the faults of all the members of the Mystical Body, before God and before those offended by their actions, Christians are able to confidently await God's mercy and look to the future. For God “is now doing something new, and in the love which forgives he anticipates the new heavens and the new earth.”5 It is evident that John Paul II deeply desires the church to take seri- ously the process of the purification of memory, and is personally leading the way through the requests for pardon made on the First Sunday

4. TMA, n. 33, passim. 5. John Paul II, Bull of Indiction of the Great Jubilee of the Year 2000, Incarna- tionis Mysterium (hereafter IM), Origins 28 (December 1998) 445-453, n. 11. THE GREAT JUBILEE AND THE PURIFICATION OF MEMORY 293 of Lent 2000.6 It is yet to be seen how local churches will respond to the papal challenge. However, the Pope's action raises many issues both for the theological reflection and pastoral praxis of the church: the way in which we read and relate to historical evidence; the authority of the magisterium and the fact of historical errors in teaching; the understanding and formation of personal conscience in regard to the teaching authority of the church and the signs of the times; the centrality of metanoia to the witness of the church; the relation of history, and the history of the church in particular, to the unfolding of God's definitive purpose in creation.7 In this paper, I will suggest some preliminary lines of thought regarding: (1) the relation of history and memory, (2) the memory of the church and the anticipation of God's future, and (3) some possible sites of actualisation in the context of my country of origin, Australia.

The Remembering of History

The ‘Space' of History In response to the horror of both the First and Second World Wars, writers in various disciplines have developed critiques of the idea of history that undergird Western modernity. Perhaps arising from the mathematico-geometric revolution in rationality begun by Descartes and his preference for extension in space over the sensible properties of objects, the modern understanding of the world operated through the process of abstraction, whereby general and universally applicable laws were used to regulate and predict the realm of empirical data. While this principle is more obvious in scientific and technological development, it also comes to inform ideas about society, politics, education and history. Abstraction can clearly be seen at work in the development of modern notions of time and space. Where in the pre-modern world time was intimately connected to locality and varied from place to place, the increasingly accurate measurement of time in discrete units

6. The Pope's requests for pardon in the Jubilee Year need to be seen in the context of the many apologies for particular moments in the church's history that John Paul II has made during his time in office. See Luigi Accattoli, When a Pope Asks Forgiveness: The Mea Culpa's of John Paul II (New York: Alba House, 1998). 7. In relation to some of these issues, see Bruce Duncan, “The Significance of the Pope's Proposed Apologies for Errors by the Church,” The Australasian Catholic Record 76 (1999) 463-479. 294 KEVIN LENEHAN allowed time to be uniformly calculated independently of local conditions. The development of the mechanical clock is the most striking icon of this abstraction of time. “The invention of the mechanical clock and its diffusion to virtually all members of the population … were of key significance in the separation of time from space. The clock expressed a uniform dimension of ‘empty' time, quantified in such a way as to permit the precise designation of ‘zones' of the day.”8 This leads to a new understanding of space. No longer defined by the per- sons, physical objects, customs, and language typical of a particular locality, the standardisation of calculated time allows for an abstraction of space across regions and borders. “The ‘emptying' of time is in large part the precondition for the ‘emptying' of space.”9 In Western modernity, this ‘empty' space of time is seen as the realm of history, particularly understood as human progress. Isolated from any real past or future, the ‘space' of history is the arena of an autonomous, reasonable humanity that continuously realises itself through exercising its rationality on the material world. Thus, technological advances, social planning, the division of labour and the genera- tion of capital, educational systems and the contractual state, each itself a consequence of the principle of abstraction embedded in modernity, become means by which humanity progresses in self-realisation towards the perfection of history. This ‘space' of history becomes, as it were, her- metically sealed after Hegel, for whom “the history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom.”10 In history, society is progressively and rationally organised by human reason until a perfect harmony exists between free individual choices and the needs of society as a whole, as the fulfilment of human freedom.

History and the Memory of Victims The positivist approach, in which the writing of history becomes a recording of the ‘facts' of the relentless progress of human reason ordering

8. Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990) 17. See also Peter Eicher, “Temporalisation de l'éternité,” Temps et Eschatologie, ed. Jean-Louis Leuba (Paris: Cerf, 1994) 215-234, pp. 227-229. 9. Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 18. 10. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History (New York: Dover, 1956) 19. On Hegel and history see Peter Singer, “Hegel,” German Philosophers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997, first published 1983) 123-138. See also Eicher, “Temporalisation de l'éternité” (n. 8), 233. Wolfhart Pannenberg notes that in Hegel “we have a type of Christianity which apparently can do without an eschatology,” in “Can Christianity do without an Eschatology?,” The Christian Hope, ed. G. B. Caird (London: SPCK, 1970) 25-34, p. 27. THE GREAT JUBILEE AND THE PURIFICATION OF MEMORY 295 and civilizing the natural world, came under review from many perspectives during the twentieth century. Various disciplines, including philosophy, theology, sociology, political theory, psychology, women's studies, critical theory and more recently, indigenous studies, have con- tributed methodological critiques of the study and writing of history, and in particular the hermeneutical awareness that this implies. The critical theorists of the Frankfurt School have deeply influ- enced theology, both Protestant and Catholic. For Walter Benjamin, ‘history' is what follows an act of interpretation in the face of a chaos of ambiguous events. A reading of history based on the inevitability of historical and technological progress can only be an interpretation of events from the point of view of the ‘victors' of that reading, and is based on the concealment of the victims which progress produces. Rather, to articulate the past is to be attentive to particular memories: “it means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.”11 A reading of history produced from the remembrance of the suffering of the victims of historical progress, through the hermeneutical category of danger, collapses the continuum of history and bridges the distance between the past and the present, between the living and the dead. “Time gathers in this single point, and those who dare, after all, to remember it risk letting into the still open present a fragment whose broken shape evokes both the unfulfilled promise of the past and the limitless hope for the future.”12 Thus, the memory of past oppression arising in the experience of danger is the breaking into history of ‘splin- ters' of messianic redemption. “Only for a redeemed mankind has every moment of its past become citable.”13 Taking up this line of thought, Theodor Adorno emphasizes the category of memory. He argues that the culture of mass capitalism sus- tains itself by insulating its consumers from the content of their own (alienated) experiences. Such experiences no longer arise freely and involuntarily in the memory, but are replaced by a culturally and socially induced content. The same capitalistic mechanism which produces alienation and suffering also produces an “industry of oblivion,” the entertainment culture, to mask and conceal the suffering of its victims. Knowledge and reason are also marked by this socially engineered

11. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940), Illumina- tions, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1969) 255. 12. Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street and Other Writings (London: New Left Books, 1979) 359. 13. Ibid., 254. See also Jürgen Moltmann, The Coming of God (London: SCM Press, 1996) 38-41; Alberto Moreira, “The Dangerous Memory of Jesus Christ in a Post-Traditional Society,” Concilium (1994:4) 39-48. 296 KEVIN LENEHAN forgetfulness. “It is of the essence of domination to prevent recognition of the suffering it produces of itself.”14 It is only the remembrance of pain and suffering, one's own and that of others, which creates an ‘estrangement' or awareness of non-identity between the individual and the cultural system. From this awareness arises a cognition that differs from that of the logic of progress, allowing a new identity to develop, which is distinct from the cultural meta-discourses and resistant to the causes of suffering. The memory of suffering is self-authenticating, and is an imperative that demands the overcoming of suffering. Thus, in the memory of suffering, a cognition of non-identity within the predominant culture and an impulse towards liberative praxis are inter-connected. The concepts of danger, memory and solidarity are brought together in the ‘political' or ‘secularisation' theology of Johann Baptist Metz. For Metz, the memoria passionis, mortis et resurrectionis Jesu Christi is the ground of the anamnetic identity of Christians. The church bears in history the “dangerous memory of the freedom of Jesus Christ.”15 This memory is dangerous in that it confronts the present moment of history and calls it into question through the unfulfilled demands, the repressed conflicts and the open wounds of the past. It is also subversive, in that it identifies the one who remembers with the suffering and injustice borne by the victims of history. It bears witness to an “indebted freedom… gained in the cross and resurrection of Jesus and which cannot be absorbed into the ideal of man's coming of age that is contained in the middle-class history of the Enlightenment or into the apotheosis of the history of liberation by revolution.”16 It leads to a solidarity which runs backwards, as a memory of the dead and of all those who have been over- come by suffering and the ‘success' of history, and runs forwards, as a solidarity towards a future as precisely a future for those who are “oppressed, without hope and doomed to fail.” This dangerous memory of Jesus Christ is actualised among Christians through the process of narrativity,17 it is kept alive in its telling, and in the consequent acts of solidarity with the victims of history. Finally, this memory is a privileged locus theologicus in all practical reasoning about God and the relationship of church and

14. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life (London: New Left Books, 1974), cited in Moreira, “The Dangerous Memory,” 41. See also Theodor Adorno, The Culture Industry (London: Routledge, 1991). 15. Johann Baptist Metz, Faith in History and Society (New York: Seabury Press, 1980) 88-99. See also Faith and the Future: Essays in Theology, Solidarity and Modernity (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1995). 16. Metz, Faith in History and Society, 91. 17. Ibid., 205-218. THE GREAT JUBILEE AND THE PURIFICATION OF MEMORY 297 society, which “shocks us out of ever becoming prematurely reconciled to the facts and trends of our technological society. It becomes a dangerous and liberating memory over against the controls and mechanisms of the dominant consciousness and its abstract ideal of emancipation.”18

Memory and Identity In this critique of the meta-discourse of modern history, identity is understood as a culturally formed and reinforced construct, conforming the person to the prevailing cultural system. Whereas modernity tended to understand the ‘individual' or ‘subject' as a discrete and autonomous centre of consciousness and rationality, existing prior to any engagement with the world of culture, the historical critique perceives that personal identity is always already ‘de-centred.' “In clutching at the categories of ‘self' and ‘individual,' one misses the immediacy of consciousness as opening up of world. In its most intimate consciousness the self is already a ‘between,' ‘caught among things' (Merleau-Ponty), stretched out in time, living space as a bodily existence. The self is caught in a maze of différance, which is ‘older' than any self-constitution of an ego.”19 Thus identity is ambiguous, yet necessary. The identifier is already identified, yet subsists as an unrepeatable and unique locus of consciousness, an original point of departure in the world. The network of customs, traditions, myths, institutions, family, economy and so on, which make up our cultural context inscribes us with a constructed memory, designed to perpetuate the existence of the culture it describes. Necessarily, this memory is a selective interpretation of past events, tending to conceal or ignore alterity, the experience of the victims of this history, in order to convey the logical continuity of the predominant culture. This ‘history' is suggested to us, solicits us, and at the same time we interpret ourselves within its point of view. We identify with this historical memory and appropriate it as our own. It becomes the worldview through which we relate to history and interpret our own present experience of the world in which we exist. In appro- priating our worldview, we both ‘forget' its alterity to ourselves, and come to share its blindness to the victims of its history.

18. Metz, Faith in History and Society, 113. See also Dorothee Sölle, Political The- ology (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1974). On the category of memory in a feminist and liberationist reinterpretation of scripture see Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, “Jesus and the Politics of Interpretation,” Harvard Theological Review 90 (1997) 343-358. 19. Joseph S. O'Leary, Religious Pluralism and Christian Truth (Edinburgh: Edin- burgh University Press, 1996) 34. See also Charles Taylor, The Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989). 298 KEVIN LENEHAN

Yet, the universality of human suffering assaults the constructed memory that informs us. Our history always has an underside. The memory of pain has the ability to seep through our culturally informed identity, causing a disorientation, an estrangement, in our sense of self. We must either reinforce our perceived identity by remov- ing or resolving the threatening awareness or allow our identity to relo- cate and embrace the suffering we encounter. This latter movement repositions us in relation to the world and to ourselves in it, both past and present. We become vulnerable to alternatively suggested histories, to other ways of interpreting. We see things that demand of us an explanation, and for which our constructed history gives no account. Thus a new interpretation is required in order that our history becomes intelligible to us. The interplay between our own suffering and that of others, and between past and present suffering, coagulates in the body, for “only bodies suffer.”20 Identity, memory and suffering are inscribed on bodies through acts of historically conditioned perception and interpretation. There is no physiological pain that is not interpreted as it is experienced or remembered. The body, too, is an interpreted reality. While the tendency of Western modernity has been to understand the body in a closed, empirical meaning, more recently the body has come to be seen as a ‘location' on which various meanings are mapped. We perceive our bodies, and those of others, through the eyes of our cultural world, and we identify with those bodies through the interpretations that are suggested to us. The immediacy of pain addresses itself to this identifica- tion and dislodges it. The experience of pain engages us prior to language and culture, and ‘unmakes' the interpretations of the body that we carry, opening us to new identifications and interpretations. “Physi- cal pain has no voice, but when it at last finds a voice, it begins to tell a story…”21

20. Elaine Graham, “‘Only Bodies Suffer:' Embodiment, Representation and the Practice of Ethics,” The Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 80 (1998) 253-271. The title is taken from Arthur W. Frank, “For a Sociology for the Body: An Analytical Review,” The Body: Social Processes and Cultural Theory, ed. M. Featherstone (London: Sage, 1991) 36-102, p. 95. On the interpretative construction of the body see Taylor, The Sources of the Self (n. 19) and Linda Nicholson, “Interpreting Gender,” Social Postmodernism: Beyond Identity Politics, ed. Linda Nicholson and Steven Seidman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) 39-67. 21. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985) 3. On suffering and language see also Dorothee Sölle, Suffering (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984) 61-86. THE GREAT JUBILEE AND THE PURIFICATION OF MEMORY 299

Modernity and the Apocalyptic Imagination When history is understood as the self-contained, abstracted space in which humanity steadily progresses towards its self-realisation through the exercise of reason over the variables of nature, apocalyptic is a means by which the experience of suffering is interpreted without allowing the disorientation in identity described above.22 In a closed hermeneutical system, the estrangement in identity worked by suffering gives rise to an apocalyptically imagined ‘reversal' of the prevailing system, in religious or secularised form, yet still configured within its meta- discourse. While other epochs have exhibited apocalyptic interpretations, not least the utopic vision of the Augustan era in which Jesus lived,23 I would argue that the notions of time, history and human autonomy that characterise the modern era lead inevitably to the culti- vation of a secularised apocalyptic hermeneutic. We can see this at work in the nineteenth century reactions to the ‘reconciled world' of Hegel. The inescapable fact of suffering, particularly of the victims of the technological developments realised in the industrial revolution and the capitalist mechanism that sustained it, lead to the rise of a mirror image of the prevailing world view, based not on human fulfilment but on human alienation. In this way suffering is accounted for, but without a reconfiguring of the identity and understanding of history constructed in the context of the prevailing culture. The dualistic imagination of apocalyptic reads the fact of alienation at cosmic, social and temporal levels. Cosmically, the historical processes of alienation are seen to be at war with the self-realisation of the human spirit. This is reflected socially in the struggle between the oppressors and the oppressed. The struggle can only be resolved by the ‘time' of the present being replaced by a new ‘time,' a new era, in which the alienating factors of the present are eliminated. While this interpretation is surely a caricature, for example of Marx, it is precisely in its caricatured exaggeration that the energy of apocalyptic gathers. It could be argued that the twentieth century has seen the historical manifestation of the apocalyptic imagination latent in the

22. On the genre of apocalyptic see for example M. Rist, “Apocalypticism,” The Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible, vol. I (New York: Abingdon Press, 1962) 157-161; John J. Collins, “Old Testament Apocalypticism and Eschatology,” The New Jerome Bib- lical Commentary, ed. Raymond Brown (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1990) 298- 304, and The Apocalyptic Imagination: An Introduction to the Jewish Matrix of Christian- ity (New York: Crossroad, 1984). 23. See Helmut Koester, “Jesus the Victim,” Journal of Biblical Literature 111 (1992) 3-15. 300 KEVIN LENEHAN self-understanding of Western modernity. It can be seen at work in the imperialistic and millennial confidence which collapsed into the two World Wars, the shape of Cold War politics leading to the arms race and the threat of nuclear annihilation, the question of the sustainability of the earth's resources in the face of the ecological crisis, the rise of neo-rightist groups and their pressure on democratic principles, and the phenomenon of religious or secular survivalist groups waiting for, and sometimes violently helping to bring about, the end of this world.24 Karl Rahner distinguishes between eschatology and ‘false' apocalyptic. Eschatology is “a forward look which is necessary to human beings for their spiritual decision in freedom, and it is made from the standpoint of their situation in saving history as this is determined by the Christ-event.”25 The starting point for eschatological statements is the present experience of grace, which orients us towards a future fulfilment of what has already begun in us. “Knowledge of the future will be knowledge about the futurity of the present.”26 False apocalyptic, on the other hand, takes a standpoint in an anticipated future, as though such a ‘place' already exists somewhere as a ‘present' moment, and communi- cates back into the present descriptions of what is to come. “To extrap- olate from the present into the future is eschatology, to interpolate from the future into the present is apocalyptic.”27 While such a neat distinction between eschatology and apocalyptic can cover over the complexity of ‘apocalyptic' texts, particularly in the apostolic witness,28 it is helpful in noting the directional tendency of

24. See for example Douglas John Hall, “ ‘The Great War' and the Theologians,” in The Twentieth Century: A Theological Overview, ed. Gregory Baum (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1999) 3-13; Moltmann, The Coming of God (n. 13), 3-6; Catherine Keller, Apoc- alypse Now and Then: A Feminist Guide to the End of the World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996). As I write, the authorities in Uganda are trying to count the bodies of the members of a religious millennarian sect, the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Com- mandments, who either suicided or were murdered in anticipation of a prophesied end of the world. 25. Karl Rahner, “Eschatology,” Sacramentum Mundi, vol. 2 (New York: Herder and Herder, 1968) 242-246, p. 244. 26. Karl Rahner, “The Hermeneutics of Eschatological Assertions,” Theological Investigations, vol. 4 (London: DLT, 1966) 323-345, p. 332. 27. Ibid., 337. 28. On the need for a hermeneutic of apocalyptic intratextuality in interpreting NT texts, see Richard B. Hayes, “‘Why do you stand looking up toward Heaven?' New Testament Eschatology at the Turn of the Millennium,” Modern Theology 16 (2000) 115-135, pp. 131-133. James Alison understands this NT intratextuality as the subversion of apocalyptic language and symbolism by the Christian eschatological imagination. See Raising Abel: The Recovery of the Eschatological Imagination (New York: Cross- road, 1996) 117-137. THE GREAT JUBILEE AND THE PURIFICATION OF MEMORY 301 each. It also indicates the fundamental importance of particular concepts of time, history and the human being in the imaginative structure of each. In a worldview governed by a spatialised and abstracted notion of the present as the realm of history, by a mathematical notion of time (which theoretically can run forwards or backwards), and by a univer- salised notion of humanity which is inexorably perfecting (or alienating) itself through the operation of rationality in history, the only way for something qualitatively new to occur seems to be by its breaking into the present from outside history, bringing to an end the time of the present and the laws by which it operates. When confronted with suffering, a worldview that is closed and self-realising offers fertile soil for the cul- tivation of the apocalyptic imagination. I would suggest that such a context, one of almost unimagin- able suffering experienced within a closed historical system, describes the twentieth century. I would also suggest that, in this same context, the Pope's action of leading the church in a ‘purification of memory,' expressed in concrete historical apologies and a renewed commitment to solidarity with the victims of past and present, is precisely an attempt at undoing the apocalyptic interpretation of history. Linking “the structure of memorial with that of celebration”29 opens up an alternative hermeneutical approach to history, one that is properly eschatological. This calls for a more porous conceptual world, where the memory of suffering is the aporia from which new futures can be imagined and anticipated in acts of solidarity with historical victims towards that future.

The Wounded Imagination of the Mystical Body

Linking the Structure of Memorial and the Structure of Celebration The understanding of time described in The Third Millennium stands in contrast to the conception of time as the progression of exter- nal and measured units which underlay Western modernity. While for each human being time has a beginning and an end, and a certain num- ber of days, the human is characterized by “an irrepressible longing to live forever.” Historical time is not a closed system, but open and moti- vated towards fulfilment. This fulfilment could not be satisfied by repeating cycles of historical time, as in reincarnation, or by being

29. TMA, n. 33. 302 KEVIN LENEHAN removed from historical time to an existence in a parallel, supra-temporal ‘place.' Rather, it is “a fulfilment which (one) is called to achieve in the course of a single earthly existence.” It is realised by the free gift of self towards this fulfilment, the goal of time. In the Christian proclamation, this human fulfilment of time has been historically realised in the event of Jesus Christ. In him, eternity is definitively realised in time, making time's fulfilment a historical possibility. “In Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, time becomes a dimension of God, who is … eternal.” Thus, the fulfilment of time has already occurred in the history of Jesus Christ, which at the same time sets human history on its course towards its goal, “the One who is eternal, God.” In this perspective, time and eternity are not mutually exclusive, but related through the category of fulfilment, “to enter into the ‘fullness of time' means to reach the end of time and to transcend its limits, in order to find one's fulfilment in the eternity of God.”30 In this understanding of time the historical present is marked by a double openness. It is open to its past, not just as a point of beginning, but in relationship to its already accomplished ‘fullness.' It is open to its future, not just as a point of termination, but in relationship to its goal, the revealing of an ever-present eternity. Thus time is irreversible, and its moments unrepeatable, yet not linear. Past, present and future relate to each other not by mathematical principles, but as modes of presence, intersecting in the present moment of the human being. The self- awareness of the human being is marked by a ‘remembered past' and an ‘expected future,' and is existentially directed towards this future.31 Through memory the past becomes present, but as a fragment of realised existence, for a complete historical presence would mean the destruction of the present (apocalyptic in reverse). The accomplished nature of the past is experienced in human self-awareness, but in the mode of incompleteness or, better, demand. It is present in awareness as a promise of an open future, yet to be realised, but summoning us. Spon- taneous upsurgings of memory break into our awareness, bringing a fragment of a completed past to us, orienting us towards its open future which demands to be realized. Rituals of memorial structure our awareness, hold it open, to the presence of this fullness-yet-to-be-realized.

30. TMA, nn. 9-10 passim. 31. See Moltmann, The Coming of God (n. 13), 284-292. Augustine speaks of “a present of past things, a present of present things, and a present of future things” in the soul's exercise of memoria, intentio and expectatio, in Confessions, XI:20 (London: Pen- guin, 1961) 269. THE GREAT JUBILEE AND THE PURIFICATION OF MEMORY 303

To link the structure of memorial with that of celebration, then, is to pay attention to the ‘performance' of memory, to respond to the demand of the past summoning us to realise the possibility of the future. It takes us back to the future. Through memory, what has been accomplished in the past is present to us again in a fragment of its com- pletion, and ‘presents' us with the task of its realisation. Thus memory can only be fulfilled in performance, in historical actions that make the present also something accomplished. Of course, the content of memory is of vital importance here, and has inevitable consequences for action in the present, and for the future towards which we are oriented. In the thinking of T. Adorno, briefly outlined above, we are alienated from the spontaneous memory of experience, and supplied by our context with a memory constructed from its particular perspective. In this case, we are bound to act out of that constructed memory, and our actions are no more than the compulsive re- enactment of the very processes that have alienated us from our spontaneous self. We are caught in a cycle or pattern of deception and alienation. For him, the memory of suffering interrupts this cycle, and opens up a new future, realised in acts of resistance to the cultural context. For the Pope, too, the content of memory is of vital concern. In The Mystery of the Incarnation, the Pope outlines the performance of a memory marked by suffering and hope, which “opens our eyes to the needs of those who are poor and excluded,” and sees in them the work of God who is “now doing something new.” He mentions the oppression of poverty and debt repayment, the abuse of power, the need for a new economic model that serves everyone, and a new attitude to the goods of the earth. He insists that “there can be no real progress without effective cooperation between the peoples of every language, race, nationality and religion,” and calls for a “new culture of international solidarity and cooperation.”32 The memory of suffering is performed in acts of hope in solidarity with those who are currently at risk of being overwhelmed by the prevailing history; it is performed in action which creates new futures for those whose existence is threatened by the present; it is performed by actions which open up the possibility of a new, but unknowable, history. In the performance of the memory of suffering, the historical future is anticipated as something genuinely new, unknowable and unpredictable. It is no longer seen as the inevitable

32. IM, n. 12. 304 KEVIN LENEHAN progression of units of measured time towards their perfected end. So, too, the consummation of history is not the evolutionary maturing of the ‘natural' processes of culture, understood either from the perspective of rationality or biology. Linking the structure of memorial with that of celebration, through a reading of history from the point of view of its victims, demands the performance of the memory of suffering in acts of hope towards alternatively suggested futures. While there is time, this interplay of the modes of past, present and future continues, for the moment of their total simultaneity is itself the fulfilment of time, the revelation of the eternal One, for whom “every moment of (the) past becomes citable.”

The Mystical Body and the Wounded Imagination The purification of memory called for by the Pope requires a rereading of history from the perspective of that history's victims and the performance of the memory of the victim, made possible by the structure of the Mystical Body. “Because of the bond that unites us to one another in the Mystical Body, all of us, though not personally responsible … bear the burden of the errors and faults of those who have gone before us. Yet we, too, sons and daughters of the Church, have sinned …”33 It is comforting to be reminded that it is our sin that holds us into the church as much as our graciously given righteousness! Here the interplay of memory and identity is at work in the ‘body' of the church. As noted above, the understanding of the body emerging from the twentieth-century critique of modernity shows an awareness of the relatedness of bodies, to other bodies and to the interpretations and cultural meanings that bodies carry. “No longer are bodies discrete enti- ties, limited by their own attributes. No longer is matter simply positivist data. Bodies are always multiple, never the same in any moment, always mapped on to other bodies, participating in other bodies, part of a continuing ex- and inter-change.”34 From this perspective, the interplay of memory, identity and body can be understood to characterise the Mystical Body of the post-Easter Christ. “The paschal Christ is, even less than the pre-paschal Jesus, an isolated individual. He is ‘a life-giving Spirit' (1 Cor 15:45), the opening up of a pneumatic mode of existence, which is realised as a

33. IM, n. 11. 34. Graham Ward, “Kenosis: Death, Discourse and Resurrection,” Balthasar at the End of Modernity, ed. Lucy Gardner (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1999) 67. THE GREAT JUBILEE AND THE PURIFICATION OF MEMORY 305 communal phenomenon.”35 Because the Risen Jesus lives in the ‘fullness of time,' in the simultaneity of the modes of past, present and future, he has no other historical body than the many bodies onto which his memory is inscribed. “Jesus Christ is himself plural, … he has no identity except in relation to others, … he is disseminated across history, and … our construction of his identity is a contingent historical upàya (‘skillful means'), subject to profound alterations in the light of new encounters.”36 Through human historical acts of identifying and interpreting bodies, the Risen Jesus continually seeks to be incarnated, to be made flesh. Memory seeks out its body, and the particular structure of the memory of Jesus Christ structures in turn the acts of its inscription on particular historical bodies. For, as the resurrection narratives show, it is precisely as the inno- cent victim, dead yet alive, that the Risen One is present in time.37 The presence of the Risen Victim unravels the memory of the disciples constructed by the universal mechanism of identifying and excluding victims, and suggests to them a new identity (‘he opened their minds') by making available in human memory an alternative structure: the pacific imitation of the self-knowing Victim. This “intelligence of the victim”38 enables the disciples to recognise the mechanism of victimisation, even while still participating in it, and to reinterpret the bodies of those who are overwhelmed or endangered by it. Thus, the Spirit of Jesus inscribes the Mystical Body of Christ with the memory both of its own making of victims and its being the victim of violence and persecution. It is worth noting that in The Third Mil- lennium and The Mystery of the Incarnation, the ‘purification of memory' involves an examination of conscience that discerns the victims of the church's history, and also the commemoration of the martyrs.39 Keeping the memory of the martyrs conforms us to Christ, “the origin of their martyrdom,” in his words of forgiveness towards his persecutors (Lk 23:34), and it “arouses in us the desire to imitate their faith.”40 The intelligence of the victim, continually at work in the Mystical Body through the Spirit of the Risen Victim, reads all historical suffering

35. O'Leary, Religious Pluralism and Christian Truth (n. 19), 220. 36. Ibid., 4. 37. See the work based on René Girard's theory of mimetic desire by James Ali- son, Knowing Jesus (London: SPCK, 1993); Raising Abel: The Recovery of the Eschatolog- ical Imagination (n. 28), republished as Living in the End Times: the Last Things Re-imagined (London: SPCK, 1997). 38. Alison, Knowing Jesus (n. 28), 33-58. 39. See TMA, n. 37; IM, n. 13. 40. IM, n. 13. 306 KEVIN LENEHAN bodies through the prism of the memory of Jesus Christ, and demands the performance of a new future for them, the revealing and unravelling of the mechanism of victimisation through acts of subversion lived out in the imitation of the self-knowing Victim.41 The Risen Victim, through whom the ‘fullness of time' is always already present in history, definitively inscribes the wounds of Jesus' historical body on the body of the church, and holds the wounds perma- nently open, as it were, as the hermeneutical means by which the Mys- tical Body interprets itself and others. This epistemological wound is carried within the imagination of the Body, in its liturgy, its catechesis, its praxis, its doctrine, and in the interrelation of past, present and future. This means that the Christian imagination is estranged from any system of closure in time. It is characterized by an ‘eschatological pro- viso' (J. B. Metz) in relation to its cultural context. Thus, the Chris- tian imagination can never identify itself fully with any particular cultural or political system, although it might be argued, for example, that a democratic system is more open to alternative futures than a totalitarian regime. It can never point with certainty to a particular system and say, ‘There it is – that is God's future.' It can only point to the victims of all systems and say, ‘There it is not – and so it will come to be' (cf. Lk 6:20-26). Then, in what has been termed “a negative procedure of legitimation,”42 the absence of salvation experienced by the victims of poverty, violence, exclusion or injustice prompts the Christian imagination to recognize in the performance of acts of solidarity with those victims the unmasking of the dynamic of victimisation and the opening up of alternative futures. The wounded imagination of the Mystical Body discerns “in the world, faithfully though darkly, the mystery of its Lord until, in the end, it will be manifested in full light.”43

41. Perhaps the episcopal ministry of Oscar Romero, in the country bearing the name of El Salvador, could be interpreted as an exercising of ‘the intelligence of the victim'. See, for example, his second Pastoral Letter, “The Church, the Body of Christ in History,” Voice of the Voiceless: The Four Pastoral Letters and Other Statements (Mary- knoll: Orbis Books, 1985). 42. Johan De Tavernier, “Human or ‘Secular' History as a Medium for the His- tory of Salvation or its Opposite: Outside the World there is No Salvation,” Concilium (1991:4) 3-15, p. 7. 43. Vatican II, Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium, in Vati- can II: The Conciliar and Post Conciliar Documents, ed. A. Flannery (New York: Costello Publishing Company, 1987) n. 8. THE GREAT JUBILEE AND THE PURIFICATION OF MEMORY 307

Purifying the Australian Memory

On the continent of Australia, where one of the most ancient cultures of humanity and one of the most recent immigrant settlements co- exist, an awareness that notions of identity, history and memory cannot be univocal began to emerge toward the end of the twentieth century. Reviewing the attitudes of Australians at the end of the century, social researcher Hugh Mackay notes the presence of contradictory messages: on the one hand, there is evidence of widespread anxiety about the complexity of personal and social life; on the other, there is evidence of a new confidence and the expectation of a some kind of break-through into a new sense of identity. “Perhaps this is a kind of interregnum in which we are preparing, even without knowing it, to confront questions we've been avoiding for too long. We might finally be coming to terms with some of the more demanding meanings of diversity, egalitarianism and even the famous Aussie ‘fair go.' … Are we, perhaps, catching a glimpse of the future we want? And the futures we don't want?”44 While acknowledging my limited research in these areas, I would like to point to two ‘sites' in Australian consciousness where the interpretations of history, memory, identity and the body are coalescing with a new intensity, suggesting an estrangement in the Australian identity through the recognition of the victims of our history, and calling for a reconfiguration of identity that opens new futures for those who are being overwhelmed by our constructed history.

Bringing Them Home – The Stolen Generations The launch of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Com- mission's report on the separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, Bringing Them Home, in May 1997 has opened a running wound in the Australian consciousness. While previously attention had been paid to ‘Aboriginal issues' by a few people, concerned with health standards, education, juvenile detention rates, deaths in custody and land rights, the suffering given voice in the stories of generations of black children, removed from their families by Government policy, to be assimilated into the white European culture through foster agencies managed by the state and the churches, has created a deep disorientation within Australia's sense of identity and

44. Hugh Mackay, Turning Point: Australians Choosing Their Future (Sydney: Macmillan, 1999) 302. 308 KEVIN LENEHAN relationship to its history. While attitudes towards the most appropriate response to the Stolen Generations differ greatly, it is almost impossible to be an Australian at the turn of the millennium and not be called into question by the memory of “an act of genocide, aimed at wiping out Indigenous families, communities and cultures, vital to the precious and inalienable heritage of Australia.”45 This memory of suffering, and its continuing effects on individuals and communities, is a hermeneutical lens through which the history of white settlement in Australia is beginning to be reread. Over some decades, historians, activists, and welfare agencies have been tracing an alternative history – of the violent dispossession of land and (thus) the capacity for self-sufficiency; of the implementation of policies reinforc- ing racial inferiority and economic dependency;46 of the introduction of European viruses and substances (e.g., alcohol) into indigenous communities; of the effects of an articulated national policy of assimilation from the post-war period until the 1970s; of the systematic and legally sanctioned removal of children from their families of origin on the grounds of ‘neglect' from the 1930s until the 1970s – through to the present crisis in regard to the health, education and living standards of indigenous communities, described recently as “third world health in a first world nation.”47 Despite this, the constructed memory of most white Australians remains that of the successful conquest of a terra nul- lius by the pioneering settlers of the New World, the fulfilment of the Enlightenment vision of a democratic, egalitarian, non-sectarian state. As the underside of this history emerges, told from the perspective of its victims, a new reading of Australian identity is suggested to all Aus- tralians, indigenous, settler and more recently arrived. The performance of this memory of suffering is emerging as the criterion for national authenticity in the twenty-first century. Recon- ciliation can only be realised within a profound shift in cultural identity. Ironically, the goal of the policy of assimilation, where indigenous

45. Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission, Bringing Them Home: A Guide to the Findings of the National Inquiry (1997) 33. 46. On the relationship of racist subordination and economic exploitation, see Quentin Beresford and Paul Omaji, Our State of Mind: Racial Planning and the Stolen Generations (South Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1998). On the rereading of white Australian history see Henry Reynolds, Why Weren't We Told? (Ringwood: Viking, 1999). 47. Lowitja O'Donoghue, Australia Day Address (delivered on January 24, 2000), at http://www.australiaday.com.au/lodonoghue.html. Current statistics on health, education, mortality and juvenile detention are available from the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation, at http://www.austlii.edu.au.html. THE GREAT JUBILEE AND THE PURIFICATION OF MEMORY 309

Australians become an unrecognisable part of the ‘mainstream' culture, is being subverted through the memory of the victim towards an understanding that indigenous culture must indeed be at the heart of Australian identity, but reverenced, identifiable and safeguarded. Imagining a future through dialogue with indigenous sensitivity to the land, community, ritual, differences of language and culture, and spir- ituality48 may be the only means by which all Australians can learn how to belong to our land. “In this new century, it is important to recognize that Indigenous people have been central to this nation for over 50000 years. We are fundamental to the national character and being.”49

Who is My Neighbour? Many Australians had been increasingly concerned about the activ- ities in East Timor of pro-Indonesian militia groups, and the suspected involvement of Indonesian military and police personnel, since the new Indonesian Government's commitment to reform and greater respect for human rights in May 1998. The reports of widespread violence and destruction following the announcement of the results of the referen- dum on independence of August 30, 1999 led to the largest public out- cry in Australia in many years. The overwhelming preference of the East Timorese for independence (78% of voters rejected the option of autonomy within Indonesia), and a continuing unease in some sectors of the Australian community about the Australian Government's refusal to recognize East Timor's right to self-determination after its annexation by Indonesia in 1976, seemed to galvanize public support for the Aus- tralian Government's active cooperation with the UN-sponsored peace- keeping force in East Timor, InterFET. Consequently, Australia's attention has been captured by the emerging evidence of “patterns of gross violations of human rights and breaches of humanitarian law (which) varied over time and took the form of systematic and widespread intim- idation, humiliation and terror, destruction of property, violence against women and displacement of people. Patterns were also found relating to the destruction of evidence and the involvement of the Indonesian Army (TNI) and the militias in the violations.”50

48. See for example Mudrooroo, Us Mob (Sydney: HarperCollins, 1995). 49. O'Donoghue, Australia Day Address (n. 47). 50. United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Report of the International Commission of Inquiry on East Timor to the Secretary-General (January 2000) n. 123, at http://www.unhchr.ch.html. 310 KEVIN LENEHAN

The severity of human suffering in East Timor seems to have brought into concrete focus a gradual process of re-imaging Australia's relationship to its South-East Asian and Pacific neighbours which has been at work during the last decades of the twentieth century. The self- identity expressed in the White Australia policy on immigration, which persisted virtually until the Racial Discrimination Act of 1975, was that of a homogeneous European culture, to be kept ‘pure' by refusing resi- dency to any one who did not fit that culture.51 Thus, by and large, Australia related to its neighbours from a position of difference, based on our perceived cultural homogeneity. In this context, those who have entered Australia seeking asylum as political and economic refugees have tended to be viewed as ‘illegals', threatening our national identity, rather than from the perspective of human rights. Concern over the mandatory detention of asylum seekers, and the conditions and consequences of detention, has led to public inquiries into this matter.52 “Where asylum seekers are regarded as objects of control rather than as subjects of rights, it is to be expected that they will be treated in inhumane ways.”53 While Australian policy is relatively hospitable to ‘legal' immigrants and many Australians are increasingly happy to live in a ‘multicultural' society, it seems we still want to choose who makes up our society, on the basis of economic and political self-interest. Yet the suffering arising from the violation of the human rights of Australia's near neighbours is also suggesting a rereading of our history, calling into question notions of homogeneity and identity. We are beginning to see that Australian history always has been one of cultural diversity.54 Around 250 recognisably separate Aboriginal nations co- existed in Australia prior to the first European settlement; deep cultural differences marked both the convict and free settlers in the eighteenth century and the wave of those who followed the lure of gold to Australia in the nineteenth century; this was also true of the post-War immigrants of European origin and, more recently, those from almost every corner of the world. Further, we are beginning to remember that most of those who have arrived in Australia over the past two hundred years have been, in some sense, seeking asylum in this land, seeking the promise of

51. On the racist underpinnings of Australia's immigration history, see Q. Beres- ford and Omaji, Our State of Mind (n. 46), 255-260. 52. Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission, Those who've come across the seas: detention of unauthorised arrivals (May 1998) and Submission on Aus- tralia's refugee and humanitarian programs (continuing), at http://www.hreoc.gov.au.html. 53. Andrew Hamilton, “What Price Hospitality?,” Eureka Street 9:7 (Sept. 1999) 15. 54. See Mackay, Turning Point (n. 44), 35-48. THE GREAT JUBILEE AND THE PURIFICATION OF MEMORY 311 a better life, based on human rights, economic development and political freedom, although this has generally been to the detriment of indigenous Australians. Remembering the diversity that has characterised every stage of Australia's history can create a new relationship with our near neighbours, expressed more in a collaboration towards the protection of human rights and development of human potential in every nation of the region, including Australia, than in a foreign policy primarily focussed on sovereign rights and economic advantage.

Conclusion

The interplay of memory, history, identity and the body in Aus- tralia could be approached from other perspectives – the slow coming to light of the alarming incidence of the sexual abuse of children; the long history of the physical, sexual and structural abuse of women; the increasingly inequitable distribution of wealth; the religious and cultural marginalisation of people of other than heterosexual orientation; the recognition of the symptoms of systematic abuse of the body of the land and its environment. Living “in the time between the times,”55 the wounded imagination of the body of Christ in history reads on each suffering body the memory of its Lord, and is called to perform that memory in acts of solidarity with the victim that open up alternative futures. The Spirit of the Risen Victim continually suggests the reconfiguration of the church's identity through its encounters with the victims of history and its own memory of suffering. The discernment of the body of the victim is an act of eschatological hope, demanding an ecclesial praxis by which God's new future is anticipated in and through history, yet remains unknowable in its fullness. In each case, the possibility of an alternative future, awakened by the memory of the victim, becomes an imperative for the praxis and cult of the Body of Christ. To the extent that each possibility is realised in the present, one more voice can join the song of the multitude standing before the One on the throne and the Lamb: “now the kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our God and of his Christ” (Rev 11:15).

Kevin Lenehan is a priest of the Diocese of Ballarat, Victoria, Australia, and a graduate student in the Faculty of Theology of the K.U. Leuven. Address: Heilige-Geestcollege, Naamsestraat 40, 3000 Leuven, Belgium.

55. Hayes, “Why do you stand looking up toward Heaven?” (n. 28), 127.