The Church likes to ask for your trust today while aggressively hiding the paper trails of yesterday. But you cannot heal a wrong that you refuse to name, and you cannot build a healthy future on a foundation of buried history. Generational accountability is not a modern grudge; it is a spiritual mandate.
A principle often associated with the Reformation is the phrase Ecclesia semper reformanda est—”the Church is always being reformed.” Although the expression itself emerged after Luther, it captures an enduring conviction of the Reformers: every generation must continually measure the Church’s practices against the truth of the Gospel.
This principle asserts that a healthy spiritual community cannot be static; it must continually examine its traditions, practices, and leadership against the truth of the Gospel.
The reformers understood that when an organization stops critically auditing its own history and habits, it calcifies into a bureaucracy. By demanding that the Church confront its own financial and administrative indulgences, early reformers were simply enacting this principle: they believed that institutional confession must always precede true absolution.
During my time working for the Church, I quickly realized something:
Institutions preserve archives. Survivors preserve memories.
Years before my employment with the diocese ended, I had already entrusted part of my memories to Church leadership. It wasn’t an easy conversation, and it wasn’t one I had ever expected to have. But from that moment forward, they knew there was a history behind my relationship with the Church that no personnel file could adequately explain.
One day I’ll explain why preserving my memory became so important.
For now, it’s enough to say that I learned long ago what happens when uncomfortable stories disappear into filing cabinets.
Institutions often decide which records survive. When it came to how misconduct had been handled by the diocese, you were met with a wall of institutional amnesia.
The future is a remarkably convenient place to send people when you don’t want them looking at the past. Archives tell us what institutions wanted preserved. Memoirs tell us what people refused to forget.
Anathema Archives
Occasionally, I share a brief scene from my memoir, Anathema. Names and identifying details have been changed to protect the guilty.
I wondered if working in the school would have anyone asking or telling me we needed to go to Mass, but very few of the employees went regularly. And no one else had to ask why they didn’t see us at Mass because Jax was on it. One night, he asked again why we didn’t attend Mass regularly. He didn’t ask a lot, but occasionally this question came up, and it was coming up even more often after Jax became Catholic. Especially since it would seem that his conversion did absolutely nothing to change our pattern of Mass attendance. I had my reasons for not going that I held deep in the depths of my stomach and continued repressing for what I was sure would be a lifetime.
So my best response was “I don’t know.”
The next moment, he made a comment that stung, “Celia, I don’t think you really believe in God.”
I hated it when he started any sentence with my full first name. Aside from that, I don’t know what I felt at that moment. I guess it was a combination of shame, confusion, and anger. “What do you mean? Of course, I believe in God, I’m Catholic,” then I went to bed.
The truth was more complicated than the answer I gave him. I said, “Of course I believe in God,” because that was the answer I was supposed to have. I was Catholic. I had been raised Catholic. Of course I believed in God.
Except, at that point in my life, I wasn’t entirely sure that I did.
I wasn’t an atheist. I hadn’t reached some carefully reasoned conclusion that God didn’t exist. I simply didn’t know what I believed anymore. Faith had become tangled up with memories I had spent years trying not to examine, and avoiding Mass was easier than untangling God from the people and places I associated with Him.
I didn’t have words for that either. So, I said, “I don’t know” when Jax asked why we didn’t go to Mass, and “Of course I believe in God” when he questioned whether I believed at all. Then I went to bed to avoid any more discussion.
The name Ninetysix exists because every generation of the Church has moments where someone has to ask uncomfortable questions. Luther’s ninety-five theses were not simply a list of complaints; they were an attempt to begin a conversation about practices that had become disconnected from the faith they claimed to serve.
The ninety-sixth thesis is not a rejection of the Church, but an invitation for the Church to live up to its own call for continual conversion.
Generational accountability is an act of deep spiritual stewardship.
History cannot heal what it refuses to remember, and reform cannot begin where memory has been erased. The purpose of an archive is not to imprison the past—it is to ensure that the future is built on something sturdier than institutional forgetfulness.
“We will not hide them from their descendants; we will tell the next generation the praiseworthy deeds of the Lord… so that they should set their hope in God” (Psalm 78).
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