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NEW TO THE VOICE
Over the next few months new columnists to our readers. We begin this month with a leading expert in Church history who introduces himself and our diocesan expert in Canon Law who probably need no introduction and will be answering readers questions. Mgr Tully, for it is he begins with a question put to us some time ago by one of our readers
THE HISTORY MAN
Michael Mullett
Let me first of all introduce this new column which the editor has kindly invited me to contribute on a monthly basis. History is my job, teaching it (at Lancaster University), researching and writing it, so it may not surprise you to discover that this regular piece will be centred on my subject, with particular reference to our diocese. The Voice has been, rightly, conceived as the newsletter of ‘that family called the Diocese of Lancaster’ and what family in its right mind would not have a sense of its own history? Indeed, a focus on history is all the more important in this diocese, which is the cradle of English Catholic life since the Reformation.
However, the approach of this column will not be to dwell on ‘the past’ in any dead way, but to see how our Catholic diocesan history can inspire us today -- and tomorrow. St Augustine conceived of the Church as the people of God travelling though time to its destiny, salvation, and we too should be aware of history as past, present and future inter-connected through the virtue of hope. My theme will really be to borrow from the caption of Derek Longmire’s fine piece in the last Voice : ‘What History can tell us.’
One of my many pleasures in life is to get other people working, and in this column I shall be sparing myself considerable effort by getting a number of my history spies dotted around the region to report, via me, on their research and discoveries. Many readers will also have items of historical interest to impart, and if you do have historical items to share -- or historical queries that I or one of the spies can solve -- please contact me at Department of History, University of Lancaster, LA1 4YG, or m.mullett@lancaster.ac.uk
Our Catholic predecessors, ‘in heart and conscience free,’ were often, it is true, oppressed for their faith, though it will not be the aim of this column to dwell overmuch on the sufferings of the past, which were also shared by other denominations over the course of centuries of intolerance now, thank God, at an end. But those Catholic forebears certainly did continue to undergo regular harassment -- as we shall see in the next feature, when we encounter the strange case of ‘the Sizergh arson mystery’. Watch this space.
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