Faith in History / Sean Gallagher

Reflecting on how God works in human history can deepen our faith

I have had a great love of history, and of Church history in particular, for much of my life.

It was nurtured in me by the teachers I had growing up at St. Joseph School in Shelbyville. I can remember doing research as a fifth grader in the school’s small library on the leaders of the Protestant Reformation.

I think the history of my own family predisposed me to have a love of history. My maternal grandmother’s maiden name was Seward, and she took some pride in being related to William Seward, the secretary of state under President Abraham Lincoln who later negotiated the U.S. purchase from Russia of what is now Alaska.

My paternal grandfather, Victor Gallagher, came of age as a Catholic young adult in the early 1920s when the Ku Klux Klan held sway in Indiana and put much social pressure on Catholic Hoosiers like himself. As I was growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, Grandpa told me many stories about those difficult times.

At the same time that he experienced this, a maternal great-grandfather of mine was a Klan member and served in the Indiana House of Representatives.

No matter how I may view today what my ancestors did and who they became through their actions, their history helped shape who I am today.

This is true for all of us individually, and it is true for us together as the faithful who make up the Church.

God has been active in history from the time that he created the universe. In this history of the Hebrew people, he continually sought in love to draw them closer to himself as they struggled with their own sinfulness and infidelity.

These acts of divine mercy reached their culmination when Jesus Christ, the eternal Son of God, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, entered history when he was conceived in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which we call the incarnation.

Ever since that hinge moment of our history occurred 2,000 years ago, God has continued to work through the history of men and women of faith wherever the Church has existed.

The God in which we place our trust is not the deity imagined by thinkers in the Enlightenment 250 years ago as a divine watchmaker who creates the watch and sets it going, but then has nothing more to do with it.

Christ’s incarnation makes God working in history an integral part of the Catholic faith.

That’s what I hope to explore with readers through this new column. I call it “Faith in History” not because I am suggesting that we place our faith in history, but because our faith here and now can benefit from learning about and reflecting on how faith has shaped history and at times been shaped by it in various times and places.

The love of history, and of Church history in particular, that was planted in my heart and mind as a child became well-rooted in me as I studied it at Marian University in Indianapolis, the University of Notre Dame in northern Indiana and at Saint Meinrad Seminary and School of Theology in St. Meinrad.

So, I invite you to explore faith in history with me in this column and let God’s grace flow to you through it, for he always showers his grace upon us in all the ins and outs of the history of our own lives as well as the history of peoples, nations and the Church we’re blessed to be a part of. †