The nature of power and how the abuse of power has been dealt with in the past and present were the focus of an international conference in Rome attended by about a dozen scholars. (Catholic News Service)

Experts in history, philosophy, sociology, political science, psychology and education came together at Rome’s Pontifical Gregorian University April 17-19 to present talks including: the effects of mass violence waged by colonial powers; the misuse of the memory of the Holocaust; sexual predation in the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages; and slave holding by Jesuits in the the United States.

Jesuit Father David Collins, a professor of history at Georgetown University, presented a case study of his order’s work in the United States with “large communities of descendants of those who were held in slavery by Jesuits to develop programs of redress, repair and racial healing.”

How do good people become involved in bad things? How do good people have blindnesses that make them incapable of seeing something that we’re seeing with a certain amount of clarity a hundred years later?