Taking care of the roots – Pope promotes the study of Church history

When Pope Francis speaks to younger people, he likes to use the image of a tree. They, the young, are the budding branches, while their grandparents and ancestors are the roots. From these they draw the strength to grow. Those who cut them off risk withering or toppling over. With this in mind, Francis published a letter on the study of history last week Thursday. In it, the head of the Church calls for a sensitive and realistic examination of church history.

"The history of the Church helps us to take a look at the real Church in order to be able to love the Church that actually exists and that has learnt and continues to learn from its mistakes and defeats." Their study protects against an "overly angelic idea (...) of a church that is not real because it has no stains or wrinkles". Accordingly, knowledge of history is also necessary in order to contain excessive or overly abstract dogmatism and systematic theology.

Example of traditionalism

Italian historian Andrea Riccardi cited Catholic traditionalism as an example of this when presenting the letter to media representatives. This consists of a "rejection of history and a fixation on a model of the Church as it was in an apparently absolute period of history: unsurpassable and constantly repeatable for the future".

Emanuela Prinzivalli also called for a more differentiated and relativising view of the "history of Christians" at the presentation. According to the historian from the Sapienza University in Rome, this applies both to faithfulness to the gospel of Jesus and to betrayal of it. After all, Jesus was on the side of the defeated, not the victors. "His proclamation of the kingdom of God includes a challenge to the present, which (...) must avoid any triumphalist reading of the history of the Church."

On the other hand, Francis is opposed to interpretations of history based solely on today's standards: "We are seeing the advance of a kind of 'deconstructivism' in culture, in which human freedom pretends to build everything from scratch." This is a "terrible attitude that leads us to understand reality only from the triumphalist defence of our own function or role".

In view of growing tendencies "to dispense with memory or to construct a memory tailored to the needs of the dominant ideologies, greater historical sensitivity is urgently needed". Historical sensitivity, the Pope said, "helps us all to have a sense of proportion, a sense of measure and the ability to understand reality as it is and not as one imagines it or would like it to be, without dangerous and irrelevant abstractions".

Sensitivity, as Francis repeatedly calls for, also perceives grey tones, different shades and contexts. The accusation of "deconstructionism", which he neither specifies nor substantiates here, is reminiscent of an accusation that accompanied the Pope during his trip to Canada in 2022, for example: that the Church legitimised colonial conquests by Europeans with its "doctrine of discovery". Although Francis does not deny the failures and crimes of church representatives, he has repeatedly spoken out against a "cancel culture" that stems from historical deconstructionism. "Something taken out of context merely serves as a pretext," Francis quotes an unspecified saying.

Letter from late in the pontificate

Speaking of evidence: in the four-and-a-half-page letter, Francis only quotes himself and the Second Vatican Council four times. In this respect, it is typical for a letter in the late period of a pontificate, says the Augsburg church historian Jörg Ernesti in an interview with KNA. This was also the case with John Paul II and other popes. Francis could well have referred to predecessors in office who were historians.

Pius XI (1922-1939), for example, or Leo XIII (1878-1903), who ordered the opening of the Vatican archives to academics in 1881 with the statement "God has no need of our lies". Pope John XXIII was also a historian; in his opening address, he described the role of history in the renewal of the Church. Riccardi also recognises a turn towards history in the post-conciliar church. The Second Vatican Council represented "a turning away from a general and established mistrust of history".

Historian Ernesti shares Francis' concern to promote a thorough, source-orientated study of history. However, he rejects the sweeping criticism of his profession expressed in the letter - at least for German-speaking countries. Equally generalised in the letter are references to the shadows of church history. "Francis does not speak of failure in the name of the Church and by the Church," says Ernesti. Sexual abuse, the Church's "supposed silence" on the Holocaust, the Crusades, witch-hunts and others are not mentioned.

Unfortunately, according to Ernesti, the Pope does not refer to the great confession of guilt of the Catholic Church under John Paul II in 2000. There were more concrete statements there, as well as in Francis' own encyclical "Fratelli tutti" from 2020. His reference, for example, that the Church knows "how great the distance is between the message it proclaims and the human wretchedness of those to whom the Gospel is entrusted", is simply too vague.

On the other hand, Francis strongly insists that the Shoah must not be forgotten, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the slave trade and ethnic cleansing in various countries "and so many other historical events for which we are ashamed to be human."

In the footsteps of those kept silent

At the same time, Francis is in favour of following in the footsteps of those "who have not been able to make themselves heard over the centuries". For church historians in particular, it must be "a priority field of research" to "bring to light as far as possible the ordinary face of the last ones and the history of their defeats and the oppression they suffered". This would also make it possible to better understand "today's phenomena of marginalisation and exclusion". It is also good to remember the good.

Forgiveness does not mean forgetting. "Even if there are things that should never be tolerated, justified or apologised for, we can still forgive," Francis advocates. Or as the historian Prinzivalli put it: "Knowledge of history, with its light and dark sides, contributes to developing a sense of tolerance, I would say pietas, towards the mistakes of all."

Even though the letter is initially addressed to priest candidates and was presented by the Prefect of the Dicastery for the Clergy, the South Korean Cardinal Lazarus You Heung-sik, among others, it is also aimed at "training (...) other pastoral workers", as the Pope writes at the beginning.