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Associate Professor of history Fr. Tom Worcester has spent
a good deal of his life in the 17th century. One focal point
of his scholarly work has been the life and the writings
of the French Bishop Jean-Pierre Camus who was made Bishop
of Belley at the age of 25, by special dispensation of Paul
V, in 1609, and was consecrated by St. Francis of Sales,
bishop of Geneva.
“He published 250 books in his lifetime,” Fr.
Worcester notes, “so there’s a lot of material
to work on. I used him as a kind of window onto religious
mentality, religious culture of the early 17th century in
France.”
Worcester was educated at a catalog of first-rank universities.
He earned his bachelor’s degree from Columbia University
and Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge. He received a
master of theological studies from Harvard Divinity School,
a licence en philosophie from the Institut Supérieur
de Théologie et de Philosophie de la Compagnie de
Jésus, Paris, and a licentiate in sacred theology
from the Weston School of Theology.
His scholarly interests, while anchored in history, have
an interdisciplinary cast to them. In 1999, for example,
he was one of five co-curators who received a National Endowment
for the Arts grant for an exhibition at the McMullen Museum
of Art at Boston College, titled “Saints and Sinners:
Caravaggio and the Baroque Image.”
Is teaching medieval or renaissance history difficult, when
your students are part of the short-attention span, MTV generation?
In some ways, he admits, it is. There is a balancing act
to be maintained between demonstrating some measure of contemporary
relevance and modern parallel, while still remaining true
to history.
“If you make it too familiar, too relevant,” Fr.
Worcester says, “you falsify the past … On the
other hand, if it’s too strange to them, if it’s
too foreign, then it’s completely opaque, and they have
no access to it.”
Fr. Worcester also stresses the value of the study of history
as an important counterpoint to many of the cultural influences
that swamp today’s students. “History, in all kinds
of ways,” he says, “provides a healthy perspective,
sort of the antidote to the CNN, sound-bite approach to reality,
where everything is a crisis … The historian takes the
exact opposite approach, takes the long view: patience, stepping
back, looking at things in context.”
That perspective, that longer view, that patience—a
more nuanced and variegated view of both the past and the
present—also informs how Worcester sees the current
situation of Jesuit faculty at Holy Cross.
“Sometimes people will speak negatively about the situation
of the Jesuits here—oh, there are so few of you;
there used to be so many. If you go back to the late
18th century, Jesuits were suppressed altogether. In that
sense, today is a kind of Golden Age.”
Changes in number or in surface appearance notwithstanding,
he also sees underlying continuities.
“The bottom-line commitments that Jesuits have,” he
says, “include things like [the idea that] reason and
revelation are not contradictory. There is not—should
not be—a war between faith and reason. The way we approach
things is not to be afraid of all kinds of rigorous academic
enquiry in all kinds of fields, not just in theology, but
in all areas. At the same time, we also see questions about
faith and meaning and God as central questions that have
a place in the academy.”
Donald N.S. Unger is a free-lance journalist from Worcester,
Mass.
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