I’m beginning to read Mary Carruthers’s The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. It’s one of those books that I really should have read by now, & I’m finally remedying that. One of the points she makes in her preface to the second edition concerns the relationship between memory & forgetting: for the medieval memory, forgetting is not always a failure of memory but may in fact be “the sort of forgetting that itself results form an activity of memory.

I’ve seen a fair amount of hand wringing over Fiducia supplicans where the consistency of church teaching & papal authority are concerned. The concern goes something like this: Fiducia supplicans, signed by Pope Francis, reaffirms the Catholic church’s historical teaching on marriage (as possible only between a woman & a man) while allowing for blessings of couples who do not conform to that teaching of marriage. This means the Catholic church will have to either forge ahead, perhaps revising its understanding of marriage to include partnerships between persons of the same gender, or pull back from Fiducia supplicans to reaffirm its historical understanding of marriage.