John Morrill (Photo courtesy of historycambridge.com)
By Harry Blakeman, Staff Writer blakeman15@up.edu
John Morrill, a professor of English and Irish history, will speak at Buckley Center room 163 on Sept. 25 at 7 p.m. Morrill will headline "Faith of our Fathers: Legacies of the English Catholic History" presented by the Garaventa Center
Q&A
Q: Is this your first time in Portland?
A: I have been several times. One of my oldest friends whom I met when we both at Oxford University in 1966 has lived in Portland since 1970 (conducting Latin church choirs and the annual Byrd Festival) and I have visited him several times.
One of my first graduate students came to Cambridge from Portland State University and he helped set it up for me to come with my wife and four daughters for seven weeks to teach a summer school at PSU in 1982. I visited UP then because my late wife did a summer programme in Renaissance English polyphony on campus and I heard her sing in a production of Carissimi's Jeptha.
Q: Was history always your favorite subject, or was there something else that appealed to you in college?
A: I had a wonderful High School teacher who turned me on not just to History but to Tudors and Stuarts and I have been hooked on it ever since - and that was in 1961 and 1962!
Q: Is there any particular subject you'd like to share with students?
A: As I have got older I have become more and more passionate about Irish History and especially about the terrible events of the mid seventeenth century: when many thousands of English settlers were massacred by the Catholic population in 1641 and 1642 and the revolutionary regime under Cromwell took a terrible revenge a decade later -- being an English Catholic makes me as neutral as it is possible to get!
But I am also passionate about the dilemmas of Catholics during the centuries of persecution, what an old English Catholic hymn calls the period of 'dungeon, fire and sword' and that is the starting point for my lecture.
Q: Why do you think history is important when thinking about faith?
A: As well as being a Professor of History I am an ordained permanent deacon and preach regularly (VERY different from lecturing!) I also teach Church History at a seminary at weekends and try to help those in formation to put themselves into the mental worlds of the past and how men and women made sense of their worlds and struggled with dilemmas which are echoed in our own.
Q: Do you have a favorite historical figure?
A: Embarrassingly, I have to say Oliver Cromwell a man of great (if misguided) faith whose attempts to live out the gospel as he understood it are a great deal more edifying than some of the results!
But I also have a huge admiration for other people of faith who struggle to work out how to live in the world as it is with all its brokenness and not to live in the world as they would like it to be. This will become clear from my lecture, I hope!
Q: How you do think being Catholic affects your views of English history?
A: I was brought up as a Protestant, spent 10 years in agonized agnosticism and became a Catholic in December 1977 at the age of 31. I was ordained in 1996. Being a Christian affects what interests me in the past; being a Catholic has only made a difference since I had to teach the whole of Church history from the death of Jesus to the Second Vatican Council in 12 hours!
At the end of my lecture, you will understand more about the relationship of my faith and my views than I will ever see for myself.
