Pope Francis: Renewal of Study of Church History

Illustration: A 1512 altarpiece adorns the chancel of Drothem Church,
a medieval-era Lutheran parish of the Church of Sweden.

Pope Francis’ letter on the renewal of the study of Church History

“I would like to emphasize the development of a genuine sense of history in young students of theology”

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

In this letter, I would like to share with you some thoughts on the importance of the study of Church history, especially to help priests better interpret the world in which we live.
This is an issue that I would like to see taken to account in the formation of new priests and other pastoral workers.

I am aware that in the formation of candidates for the priesthood, much attention is devoted to the study of Church history, as is only right and proper.
What I would like to stress here is the importance of developing in young theological students a genuine sense of history.
By this, I mean not only a solid and detailed knowledge of the great events in the past twenty centuries of Christianity, but also and above all, the cultivation of a clear sense of the historical dimension that is ours as human beings.
No one can truly know his deepest identity, or what he wants to be in the future, without being attentive to the ties that bind him to previous generations.
This is true not only of us as individuals, but also of us as a community.
Indeed, the study and writing of history helps to keep alive “the flame of collective conscience”.
Otherwise, all that remains is the personal recollection of facts linked to our own interests or sensibilities, without any real connection to the human and ecclesial community in which we live.

A proper sense of history can help each of us to develop a better sense of proportion and perspective in coming to understand reality as it is and not as we imagine it or would like it to be.
Leaving aside dangerous and disembodied abstractions, we can relate to reality as it calls us to ethical responsibility, sharing and solidarity.

According to an oral tradition whose written source I cannot confirm, a great French theologian used to tell his students that the study of history protects us from “ecclesiological monophysitism”, (which is, a Christological doctrine that states that there was only one nature—the divine—in the person of Jesus Christ, who was the incarnated Word) OR from an overly angelic conception of the Church, which present a Church that is unreal because she lacks spots and wrinkles.
In fact the Church, like our own mothers, must be loved as she is; otherwise we do not love her at all, or what we love is only a figment of our imagination.
Church history helps us to see the real Church and to love the Church as she really is, and to love what she has learned and continues to learn from her mistakes and failures.
A church that is conscious of its deepest identity even in its darkest moments can be able to understand the imperfect and wounded world in which it lives.
In its efforts to bring healing and renewal to the world, it will use the same means by which it seeks to heal and renew itself, even if it sometimes fails.

This can serve as a corrective to the misguided approach that sees reality only in terms of a triumphalist defense of our function or role.
As I pointed out in the Encyclical Letter Fratelli Tutti, this is precisely the approach that sees the injured man in the parable of the Good Samaritan as a distraction, irrelevant to the important things in life, a “nobody”.

The need to cultivate a sense of history in candidates for the priesthood should be obvious, and all the more so in our time, when “there is a growing loss of the sense of history, which leads to further fragmentation.
A kind of “deconstructionism”, in which human freedom claims to create everything from scratch, is gaining ground in today’s culture. The only thing it leaves in its wake is the desire for limitless consumption and expressions of empty individualism.

The importance of a connection to history

More generally, it must be said that all of us – not just candidates for the priesthood – need a renewed sense of history.
In this regard, I have made the following observation.
“If someone tells young people to ignore their history, to reject the experiences of their elders, to look down on the past and to look forward to a future of their own making, won’t it be easy to drag them along so that they do only what he tells them to do?
He needs the young to be superficial, uprooted and suspicious, so that they can only trust in his promises and act according to his plans.
This is how different ideologies work: they destroy (or deconstruct) all differences so that they can rule unchallenged.
To do this, however, they need young people who have no use for history, who distain the spiritual and human riches inherited from previous generations and who are ignorant of everything that came before them”.

In order to understand reality, it is necessary to approach it from a diachronic perspective (i.e, it seeks to describe and explain processes of continuity and change over time), whereas the prevailing tendency is to see things from a flattened synchronic point of view: a present without a past.
The avoidance of history very often appears as a form of blindness that leads us to waste our energies on a world that does not exist, to pose false problems and to seek inadequate solutions.
Some of these interpretations may be useful to small groups but certainly not for humanity and the Christian community as a whole.

Hence the urgent need for a greater sense of history at a time when we are witnessing a tendency to dismiss the memory of the past or to invent one that suits the needs of dominant ideologies.
Faced with the erasure of past-history or with clearly biased historical narratives, the work of historians, together with knowledge and dissemination of their work, can act as a check on misrepresentations, partisan efforts at revisionism, and their use to justify wars, persecutions, the production, sale, and utilization of weapons and any number of other evils.

Today we are inundated with “memories”, often false, artificial and even mendacious, and at the same time with an absence of history and historical awareness in civil society and even in our Christian communities.

The situation is even worse when we consider the carefully and covertly prefabricated histories that serve to construct ad hoc memories, identity-based memories and exclusionary memories.

The work of historians and knowledge of their findings are crucial today and can serve as an antidote to this deadly regime of hatred based on ignorance and prejudice.

On the other hand, an in-depth, participatory knowledge of history (i.e. a theory of knowledge that holds that meaning is enacted through the participation of the human mind with the world) makes clear that we cannot come to terms with the past through hasty interpretations divorced from their consequences.
Reality, past or present, is never a simple phenomenon that can be reduced to naive and dangerous simplifications.
Much less to the attempts of those who believe themselves to be perfect and omnipotent gods and wish to erase a part of history and humanity.
There may well be terrible moments and terrible individuals in humanity, but when judgements are made primarily through mass communication and social media, or on purely political interests, we can be subject to an irrational rush of anger or emotion.
After all, as the saying goes, “facts taken out of context can only serve as a excuse”.
This is where the study of history comes to the rescue.
Historians, through their rigorous method of interpreting the past, can contribute to an understanding of complexity.
An understanding that is indispensable for transforming the present world and overcoming ideological distortions.

The memory of the whole truth

Let us recall the genealogy of Jesus narrated by Saint Matthew.
Nothing is simplified, erased or invented.
The Lord’s genealogy is the true story which includes characters who are problematic to say the least.
The sin of King David is also highlighted (cf. Mt 1:6).
But everything culminates in Mary and Christ (cf. Mt 1:16).

If this happened in the history of salvation, it has happened in the history of the Church:
“Sometimes after a successful beginning she has reason to lament a setback, or she remains in a state of semi-fulfilment and insufficiency”.
Moreover, “she is not unaware that over the centuries some of her members, both clerical and laity, have been unfaithful to the Spirit of God.
Even today, the Church is not blind to the discrepancy between the message she proclaims and the human weakness of those to whom the Gospel has been entrusted.
Whatever history may make judgement on these shortcomings, they cannot be ignored and must be fought vigorously, lest they hinder the spread of the Gospel.
The Church is also aware of how much she needs the maturing influence of centuries of past experience in order to work out her relationship with the world”.

A sincere and courageous study of history, then, helps the Church to understand better her relations with different peoples, and this effort must help to interpret and clarify the most difficult and perplexing moments of these peoples.
We must not ask people to forget, indeed “we cannot allow present and future generations to lose the memory of what happened… It is a memory that guarantees and encourages the building of a more just and fraternal future”.
For this reason, I insist that, “the Shoah must not be forgotten… Nor must we forget the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki… Nor must we forget the persecutions, the slave trade and the ethnic killings that continue in various countries, and the many other historical events that make us ashamed of our humanity.
They must be remembered, again and again.
We must never get used to them or become accustomed to them…
Today it is easy to be tempted to turn the page, to say that all these things happened a long time ago and that we should look to the future.
For God’s sake, no!

We cannot move forward without remembering the past; we cannot move forward without an honest and clear memory…
I am thinking not only of the need to remember the atrocities, but also of all those who, in the midst of such great inhumanity and corruption, retained their dignity and, with gestures large and small, chose the path of solidarity, forgiveness and fraternity.
To remember healthy to remember the good. … To Forgive is not to forget…
In the face of something that cannot be forgotten for any reason, we can still forgive”.

Along with remembrance, the search for historical truth is necessary to allow the Church to initiate – and to help initiate in society – sincere and effective paths of reconciliation and social peace:
“Those who have been bitter enemies must speak the plain and clear truth.
They must learn how to cultivate a penitential memory a memory capable of accepting the past so as not to cloud the future with their own regrets, problems and plans.
Only on the basis of the historical truth of events will they be able to make a broad and persevering effort to understand each other and to strive for a new synthesis for the good of all”.

The study of Church history

I would now like to make a few brief observations about the study of Church history.

The first observation concerns the danger of such a study taking a purely chronological approach or that of a false apologetics, which would turn the history of the Church into a mere support for the history of theology or spirituality of past centuries.
This would be a way of studying and consequently teaching Church history that does not promote that sense of history that I mentioned at the beginning.

The second observation concerns the fact that the history of the Church, as it is taught throughout the world, seems to suffer from an overriding reductionism.
Here, history is treated as a secondary topic within theology, resulting in a form of theology that ultimately proves incapable of truly entering into dialogue with the profound and existential reality of the men and women of our time.
This is so because the history of Church, taught as part of theology, cannot be separated from the history of societies.

The third observation takes into account the fact that, in the formation of future priests, we see that their formation is still inadequate with regard to the sources.
For example, students are rarely trained in how to read the fundamental texts of ancient Christianity such as the Letter to Diognetus, the Didache or the Acts of the Martyrs.
When this happens, students are ill-equipped to read them and instead resort to ideological filters or theoretical preconceptions that do not allow for a lively and stimulating understanding.

A fourth observation concerns the importance of “doing Church history” – as well as “doing theology” – not only with rigor and precision, but also with passion and commitment.
What is needed is a personal and collective passion, a commitment appropriate to those who are committed to evangelization, and who have not chosen a neutral or sterile position.
This comes from their love for the Church.
They welcome her as mother and as she is.

Another observation, connected to the previous one, touches on the link between Church history and ecclesiology. Historical research has an indispensable contribution to make in the development of an ecclesiology that is both truly historical and mysterious.

The penultimate observation, which is very close to my heart, concerns the “erasure” of the insights from those whose voices have not. been heard over the centuries.
This makes faithful historical reconstruction a difficult task.
Here, I ask myself: is it not a privilege of the Church historian to bring to light as much as possible the popular faces of the “least important” and to reconstruct the history of their defeats and the oppressions they suffered, together with their human and spiritual riches, and to offer tools for understanding today’s phenomena of marginalization and exclusion?

In my final observation, I would like to recall that the history of the Church can help to recover the whole experience of martyrdom, in the knowledge that there is no Church history without martyrdom and that we must never lose this precious memory.
Even in the history of her sufferings, “the Church herself also recognizes that she has benefited and continues to benefit from the opposition of her enemies and persecutors”.
It is precisely where the Church has not triumphed in the eyes of the world that she has attained her greatest beauty.

In conclusion, I would like to emphasize that what we are talking about study, not gossip, superficial reading or the “cutting and pasting” of internet summaries.
Many people today urge us to pursue success at no cost, discrediting sacrifice and promoting the idea that study is useless if it does not immediately produce concrete results. On the contrary, studying is about asking questions, not being numbered by banality and searching for meaning in life. Moreover, study should enable us to regain the right to reject the many seductive voices of today that distract us from this search.
This is your great task: to respond to the paralyzing litany of cultural consumerism through dynamic and strong choices, through sharing, knowledge and research”.