Archival Stewardship: Memory and Reconciliation
- Archival Stewardship: Memory and Reconciliation
Accepting the request of Dr. Mazzenga to be a participant on “Scholarship, Digitization, Collaboration: Future Directions in Catholic Archives and Research” at the January 2017 American Catholic Historical Association in Denver, Colorado prompted me to move beyond my historical comfort zone. I have opted to reflect on archival stewardship as it applies to memory and reconciliation.
I believe this topic is an important perspective faced by numerous archives of male and female religious congregations in the United States. Membership, structural and economic resources are so much different than they were one hundred years ago. Increasingly, this has had a direct impact on religious archival education and research. Thus, I would suggest that without implementing a plan of proper archival stewardship, religious congregations face death of memory, an inability to reconcile and heal the historical past and [even less prospect] to imagine a future. This aspect is all the more pronounced when the issue is framed from an international perspective. Effective response requires naming immediate challenges while risking open-ended opportunities.
Allow me to reflect on my own experience to illustrate this. Passionist vowed membership has continued to decline in the United States. In January 2017, the eastern province numbered 104 vowed members. Even so, ongoing organizational concerns of stewardship resulted in practical questions being asked on all ministerial fronts. I was challenged: How could I as the historian and archivist help develop a strategy to effectively balance, understand, and preserve the heritage, culture, and diverse memory of these Passionist priests, brothers, and laity affiliated with our mission?
Surprise: Creativity, Opportunity, and Cooperation Amidst Archival Restructuring
Unquestionable has been the longstanding and continuing support being given me as Passionist historian by my own province leadership [End Page 11] of St. Paul of the Cross Province. In this spirit, I hope the opportunity to chronicle the following events offers all of us archivists and historians a chance to stand on common ground as we seek to be responsible archival stewards.
First, the closing of the St. Michael’s Residence and Passionist development offices in Union City, New Jersey in 2012 prompted a reconfiguration the Passionist Historical Archives. A positive step in proper stewardship was taken when an agreement was reached to move the majority of the collection and establish a contractual relationship with Special Collections at the Weinberg Memorial Library of the University of Scranton. Legal and personnel records were sent on to the new Province Pastoral Center in Rye Brook, New York.27
But surprises can emerge: at this same time of archival restructuring, our province leadership and Special Collections at University of Scranton agreed in 2012 to partner with the Ricci Institute of Chinese-Western Cultural History at the University of San Francisco. Suddenly I was re-assigned to San Francisco in order to digitize the entire Passionist China Collection of some 60,000 documents and 10,000 photos, as well as Sign magazine (1921 to 1982). Completed in 2015, these materials encourage scholarly inquiry.28
Digitization of the Passionist China Collection has led me into new and unexpected stewardship opportunities and challenges that that might parallel archival situations faced by other religious congregations. Most important is that digitization can bring dead memory to life. Having concentrated on the study of manuscript archives rather than photographs, the chance to identify the metadata of the 10,000 photos reinvented my sense of historical inquiry and narrative. During this digitization process, China ceased to be a failed or dead missionary endeavor from the 1950s. Since that era, imprisonment and expulsion of American missionaries had become the dominant symbol and narrative. While historically true in one sense, my daily visual interaction to identify photos and documents led me to confidently conclude how their missionary zeal is a foundation crucial to the expression of twenty-first century Chinese Catholicism. 29 [End Page 12] Passionist missionaries, Sisters of Charity of Convent Station, New Jersey, and the Sisters of St. Joseph from Baden, Pennsylvania who had ministered in West Hunan, and China, with Chinese Catholics came to life. Simply put, rather than a dead memory, digitization of China mission archives represented a living memory.
