Ironically, recent years have also seen previously esoteric debates within the historical profession make their way to the center of today’s culture wars. In 2019, left-leaning academic historians partnered with the New York Times to produce the “1619 Project,” a work of revisionist public history that took the year of the first arrival of African slaves in Virginia as the defining moment of American history. Conservative politicians expressed outrage and, with the assistance of conservative historians, crafted an alternative, “patriotic” history, the “1776 Report.”
Is this of any concern to Catholics or the Church in America? To my knowledge, no Catholic pundit has chimed in with a strong position based on Church teaching. On the one hand, this avoids dragging the Church into the messy mud wrestling of contemporary politics. On the other hand, the silence suggests that Catholic tradition has nothing significant to say on the matter.
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