ABSTRACT
The Catholic church has declared 2000 a Holy Year, just as it did for 1900. Some of the planning that highlight the turn of the century has already begun. Pope John Paul II has urged that the year be used to review the church's 2000-year history so that the institution may publicly acknowledge past faults, such as its inadequate response to the Nazi campaign against the Jews. Catholicism is a religion intensely conscious of history. It may be unrealistic to expect any such sober look backward from the US public. Greeting the new millennium or the new century calls upon willingness to explore historical accuracy, to find out whether what being told about the last millennium or even the last turn of the century corresponds to the facts. References to the millennium are already increasing, which makes it easy to predict that they increase further.
