On December 20, 2002, I was at lunch in the papal apartment when the wide-ranging conversation John Paul II always encouraged took an unexpected turn, with the pope asking me how President Ronald Reagan was doing. As it happened, I had recently run into Reagan’s former attorney general, Edwin Meese, and had asked the same question. The answer was a sad one.
Meese had been to the christening of the USS Ronald Reagan, a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier, and had brought one of the traditional baseball caps with the ship’s name on it back to the former president. Reagan, ever the gentleman, thanked Meese and then said, “But Ed, why would anyone name a ship after me?” The Alzheimer’s that would kill him a few years later had obliterated his memory to the point where Ronald Reagan had no recollection of having been president of the United States for eight years.
When I related this story, John Paul, sitting directly across from me, looked utterly stricken, and what seemed a full minute’s silence ensued. The pope was in tough physical shape from Parkinson’s disease. But it was as if he now imagined a worse fate than being locked in an increasingly frozen body: a life in which he had lost the capacity to reflect on his life. The silence was broken by John Paul quietly asking me to “please let Mrs. Reagan know that I am praying for her husband”—a message I conveyed through Ed Meese on my return home.
That vignette puts a prayer once familiar to many Catholics, the Suscipe of St. Ignatius Loyola, into striking relief:
Take, O Lord, and receive my entire liberty, my memory, my understanding, and my whole will. All that I am and all that I possess You have given to me: I surrender it all to You to be disposed of according to Your will. Give me only Your love and Your grace; with these, I will be rich enough and will desire nothing more.
I learned the Suscipe as a boy, and I must confess that, for a half-century, I balked at the idea of offering the Lord my memory. It seemed a bridge too far, a self-immolation of an almost suicidal character. What would be left of me if I lost my memory? I could lose my liberty and still be me. I could lose what little understanding of things I had gained and still be me, for I could always understand better.
As for losing my willfulness, well, it would surely be a blessing if the divine will took over in my life, unreservedly. But my memory?
On the surface, John Paul II’s reaction to my telling him of President Reagan’s loss of memory suggests that he, too, choked, at least metaphorically, at the idea of losing his memory in addition to his mobility.
The coming of Lent, however, suggests that the gift of one’s memory to God involves the constant purification of memory over a lifetime, as a saint like John Paul surely knew.
The annual forty-day pilgrimage through the desert of Lent, patterned on the Lord’s forty days in the Judaean wilderness in preparation for his public ministry, is the preeminent moment in the Church’s year of grace for the purification of memory—especially our memories of the successes and failures of living missionary discipleship since Pentecost 2024 closed last year’s season of paschal celebration.
As I note in Roman Pilgrimage: The Station Churches, Lent, as presently constituted in the sacred liturgy, divides into two periods. The first two and a half weeks ask us to conduct an extensive examination of conscience: What in me needs purification if I am to become more effectively the missionary disciple I was baptized to be? What is the dross in my soul that must be incinerated to make me as transparent a witness to the love of Christ as I ought to be?
Lent’s second half has a baptismal character. As we prepare to receive the blessing of Easter water, which is baptismal water, at the Easter Vigil or on Easter Sunday, our purified memories enable us to encounter anew, and in greater depth, Christ’s thirst for us (as in the Lenten Gospel story of the woman at the well), Christ’s enlightenment of us (as in the Lenten Gospel story of the man born blind), and Christ’s power over death (as in the Lenten Gospel story of Lazarus).
The Lord purifies our memory so that we can, in due course, “see his face…and…reign forever and ever” (Revelation 22:4-5).
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A real, very significant challenge for many of us. “The annual forty-day pilgrimage through the desert of Lent, [imitating Christ’s] forty days in the Judaean wilderness, is the preeminent moment for the purification of memory” (redaction of Weigel). Memory can continue to convict us. Draw us back to sin.
Grief easily becomes depression, eventually dysfunction.
What is behind this unfortunate pattern if not the unwillingness to acknowledge God’s infinite, merciful goodness? That with repentance our sins evaporate in the darkness from which they came. An exorcist said that the devil will confront us with our unforgiven sins. Those that were confessed he has no knowledge of or access to. I add, unless we remind him by our lack of faith.
Confidence in Christ’s forgiving love, which Judas refused, is itself an act of love that brings the peace of freedom from that accusatory past.
But, who needs a backwardist memory if you can have a forwardist Synod on Synodality?
SHOCK AND AWE
This article is my first encounter with the phrase “purification of memory.”
My first reaction was that “purification of memory” sounds like what took place in the culture of the Communist and Fascist dictatorships, in which so many key facts were excluded from journalism and from the teaching of history that nearly everyone lost memory of major events of the past.
But having looked at a 1999 document issued by the Vatican, I now see that the phrase “purification of memory” refers to Catholic Church leaders making public confessions of the past sins of the Church.
But how that amounts to a “purification” of “memory” still puzzles me.
“Purification” sounds to me like “elimination.”
When you purify raw milk, you kill and eliminate certain pathogens in the milk. They are GONE. And then the milk is pure and safe. You don’t think about those pathogens anymore.
When I read Dante’s medieval book “Purgatorio,” I saw that his poem depicted people in Purgatory as literally having their memories wiped of their sins committed during their mortal life on earth. At least, that’s how I recall it.
Are we supposed to forget that we, or our Catholic forebears, ever committed any sins?
The 1999 Vatican document that I found contains these passages:
–“Thus, a number of questions can be identified: Can today’s conscience be assigned ‘guilt’ for isolated historical phenomena like the Crusades or the Inquisition? Isn’t it a bit too easy to judge people of the past by the conscience of today….”
–“Liberation from the weight of this responsibility comes above all through imploring God’s forgiveness for the wrongs of the past, and then, where appropriate, through the “purification of memory” culminating in a mutual pardoning of sins and offenses in the present.”
Am I wrong in continuing to be repulsed by a phrase, “purification of memory,” since it sounds exactly like what happened to poor Winston Smith in George Orwell’s anti-totalitarian novel “1984, and also sounds exactly like what is depicted in Ray Bradbury’s novel “Fahrenheit 451” (books were systematically hunted down and burned by the gov’t, in order to erase memory).
And there was nothing good about poor President Reagan forgetting that he ever was president.
I can’t believe that the Suscipe of St. Ignatius Loyola (quoted in this article) refers to the erasure of memory.
We now live in a time in which the crimes of Hitler and the Nazis and the crimes of the Communists are being forgotten, rationalized, or minimized.
Some leading, popular members of the U.S. Congress openly call themselves “socialists.”
Recently, one of the leading conservative podcasters in the U.S. expressed support for the views of his guest “historian” who declared that Churchill, not Hitler, was the villain of WW2.
I took a free online course on Communism from Hillsdale College, and one of the professors in that video course say that Stalin, not Hitler, was responsible for WW2 in Europe.
Recently, prominent political personalities have been making, in public, what appears to be the old Nazi salute.
Just yesterday a major conservative figure proposed that the police officer who killed George Floyd should be pardoned because he was “unjustly convicted.” That police officer was never shown to have any racist intent, but the well-established facts of that case make it beyond all doubt that he did commit involuntary manslaughter, and thus deserved to be fired, prosecuted, convicted of a felony, imprisoned for some period of time, and to carry the lifelong stigma of being a convicted felon.
Does not the preservation of civilization depend on the preserving, in living memory, of an intellectually honest depiction of history?
I have nothing but fear and dread of the erasure of memory.
I see it already happening on a mass scale among my fellow Catholics and fellow American citizens.
Am I wrong in that?
I want to remember what the Catholic Church has taught at every point in its history. No matter what some of my fellow Catholics may say or do, I want to remember, and never forget, what Saint Pope Pius X taught, just to name one figure. (Example: In 1907 St. Pius issued a momentous papal encyclical condemning the heresy of Modernism, which he identified as the “synthesis of all heresies.” He required that an Oath Against Modernism be solemnly sworn by all Catholic clergy, pastors, confessors, preachers, religious superiors, and professors. I want to never lose the memory of the fact that the Anti-Modernist Oath was terminated by Pope Paul VI in 1967, and to remember what came after that.)
I want to remember, and never forget, the very different Catholic Culture in which my grandparents were raised, married, and raised their own kids.
I want to remember what Abraham Lincoln said and did. (Examples: 1. Lincoln’s 1838 Lyceum speech warning that sooner or later a Napoleon type figure would arise in the USA and would try to overthrow the U.S. Constitution and the Anglo-American tradition of the rule of law. 2. Lincoln’s 1848 speech declaring that President Polk in 1846 carried out the “sheerest deception” in order to illegally and unconstitutionally start the war with Mexico.)
I want to remember what was said and done by George Washington, John Adams, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and the Confederation Congress that governed the US federal gov’t from 1776 to 1789. (Example: John Adams, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”)
I want to keep in memory the fact that homosexuality was officially classified by the American Psychological Association as a treatable mental illness until 1975, when, for no scientific reason, the APA suddenly declared it was no longer a mental illness.
I don’t want to see the God-blessed USA swallowed up in propaganda and trendy “-isms” of left or right.
I don’t want Big Tech, aligned with Big Gov’t, using all-engulfing social media and soulless AI to carry out a “purification of memory.” God help us!
Does anyone else have this reaction to the depths of possible meaning that seem to be lurking in the phrase “the purification of memory”?
Wouldn’t “purification of conscience” be a better and safer phrase for Catholics, given that it would align with the traditional Catholic phrase, “examination of conscience”?
Am I bonkers? Or am I touching on something real?
I do very much believe in keeping alive one’s Hope in God regarding the ultimate triumph of the Good.
But maintaining Hope surely that can’t mean being indifferent, blasé, naïve, and obsequiously passive to what one sees going on around him?
Be ye “puzzled” no longer!
Purification of memory is also called “healing of memory”, as in getting past the facts and the lingering neuroses of bad memories. The replacement with good memories (Benedict XVI who also did caution that any Church confession about history must be matched by the same from others, which did not happen).
So, not milquetoast forgiveness, but, in sometimes and finally the depths of the real thing rooted in “heart speaking to heart” (Newman’s motto). And, biblically, as in “Anyone who puts a hand to the plow and then looks back [ruminating resentments] is not fit for the Kingdom of God” (Luke 9:62).
We probably won’t find any of this kind of stuff in a superficial scan of Wikipedia, or whatever.
George Weigel consistently exhibits a thoughtfulness and intellectual depth that I find truly admirable. His book on John Paul II was instrumental in opening my eyes to the Church of Christ, for which I am eternally grateful. My heart is filled with joy each time I read about St. John Paul II, as he has a unique ability to clarify, inspire, and elevate those around him. I miss him deeply and pray that the Church will once again be guided by a pope who fearlessly speaks the truths of the Gospel of Jesus Christ from an overflowing heart of charity.