Vatican City, Nov 21, 2024 / 17:20 pm (CNA).
Pope Francis has published a letter addressed especially to priests in formation to promote the renewal of the study of Church history, emphasizing its importance in better interpreting reality.
At the beginning of the letter, presented Thursday at the Vatican Press Office, the Holy Father refers to the need to promote a “genuine sense of history” that takes into account the “historical dimension that is ours as human beings.”
“No one can truly know their deepest identity, or what they wish to be in the future, without attending to the bonds that link them to preceding generations,” the Holy Father says. The pontiff also points out that everyone, not only candidates for the priesthood, needs this renewal.
‘To love the Church as she truly exists’
In this context, the Holy Father states that we must abandon an “angelic” conception of the Church and embrace its “stains and wrinkles” in order to love the Church as it is.
In short, Pope Francis invites the faithful to see the real Church “in order to love the Church as she truly exists,” a Church that has learned “and continues to learn from her mistakes and failures.”
According to the Holy Father, this can “serve as a corrective to the misguided approach that would view reality only from a triumphalist defense of our function or role.”
Dangers of an ideological reading of history
In the letter Pope Francis criticizes the manipulation of history by ideologies that “destroy (or deconstruct) all differences so that they can reign unopposed.” These ideologies seek to lead young people to “spurn the spiritual and human riches inherited from past generations” and ignore everything that came before them, he says.
For the pope, this also leads to posing “false problems” and seeking “inadequate solutions,” especially in an era marked by a tendency “to dismiss the memory of the past or to invent one suited to the requirements of dominant ideologies.”
“Faced with the cancellation 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 curb on misrepresentations, partisan efforts at revisionism, and their use to justify” any number of evils, including wars and persecutions, the Holy Father indicated.
The pope thus points out that “we cannot come to grips with the past by hasty interpretations disconnected from their consequences” and that reality “is never a simple phenomenon reducible to naive and dangerous simplifications.”
The Holy Father warns against the efforts of those who act like “gods” who want to “cancel part of history and humanity.”
Human frailty and the spread of the Gospel
The Holy Father goes on to recognize “the human weakness of those to whom the Gospel has been entrusted” and exhorts the faithful to not ignore shortcomings and to “combat them assiduously” so that they do not hinder the spread of the Gospel.
The Holy Father reiterates that “forgiving does not mean forgetting,” and he encourages the Church “to initiate — and help initiate in society — sincere and effective paths of reconciliation and social peace.”
He also calls for avoiding the “merely chronological approach” to the history of the Church, which “would transform the history of the Church into a mere buttress for the history of theology or spirituality of past centuries.”
This story was first published by ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.
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We read: “He also calls for avoiding the ‘merely chronological approach’ to the history of the Church, which ‘would transform the history of the Church into a mere buttress for the history of theology or spirituality of past centuries’.”
Yes, beware the linear periodization of history, as with Joachim de Fiore who proposed three eras (the Old Testament age of the Father, the next age of Jesus Christ, and the third age of the Holy Spirit, beginning in A.D. 1260. Beware the later periodization of August Comte, founder of sociology, who discerned a a theological age, displaced by an age of metaphysics, and then by an age of science and positivism. Or, maybe the specifically periodized history of the Church with an apostolic age, then the age of councils, and now the age of inclusive synodality…
In lesser hands, will Pope Francis’ valid message about non-ideological history be dished out by others as contextualizing the Council of Nicaea, and even the doctrinal Creed, as somewhat of a period piece? Now to be left behind by the finally pastoral age of (Joachim’s!) Holy Spirit, the laity, and permanent synodality? Will we be tutored that Arianism was not really rejected (non-inclusivity!), but just put on hold until a more enlightened and self-referentially non-ideological era…
C.S. Lewis’s “chronological snobbery” in a red hat?
I say: “Make the Papacy Catholic Again.”
When has the Orwellian mind of Francis not disparaged and trivialized anything authentically Catholic as “ideology” while not praising anti-religious secular ideologies as sources of wisdom?
“No one can truly know their deepest identity, or what they wish to be in the future, without attending to the bonds that link them to preceding generations,” suggests our essential identity is not inherent within our nature, rather it’s formed by history.
Sans ideology corresponds to time is greater than space ideology, that it’s not the theological value of decisions made during crises and councils called to correct and clarify dogma. He’s suggesting in effect that the present moment may cancel out previous decisions on doctrinal matters, to wit, that doctrinal permanence is a deficient ideology.
Historical and sociological determinism has long replaced philosophy and religion in academia. And a pope who is an ambassador of the world to the Church rather than a defender of the Church from the world is not about to even consider asking the right questions.
I pray it’s a translation issue, but most of the time I honestly don’t understand what the heck Francis is talking about. Word salads and church jargon.
Pope Francis calls for study of Church history free from ideologies. Umm 🤨 🧐
God’s Fool calls for commentary free from foolishness! 💋
Not sure if Pope Francis actually wrote this. More importantly, can’t tell to whom it is addressed. It seems to want to correct problems with historicism but itself involves historicist patterning.
It is about Church history but there is no mention of the Holy Spirit.
It can’t be considered universal; and yet while it is right to emphasize the importance of particulars, in any approach to history, it gives no proper foundational truths or leads about that.
Diachrony and synchrony relate with language and linguistics through times and in moments. They both have a valid place in analyzing and understanding what is communicated.
Both of these two contain a) things sustained, b) things left behind and and c) things ambivalent and the letter fails to bring out (among other things) these characteristics related to ecclesiology or just people and culture in general.
The letter is imbued with positivism: diachrony, whether thought of as “three dimensional” or “polyhedron”, does not automatically assure of being led into any truthful reality nor itself provide a measure or yardstick.
The word “fact” is deployed in purely negative and reflexive a-historical sense.
Members of the Lodge often assert their own interpretations of Scripture by rooting hard on factuals taken out of all context including Redemption; and the letter seems to uphold this or carry it forward as authentic.
The 20th Century is marked by Modernist positivism, determinism and relativism and what seems to be morphing in our time is Modernist neutralism and syncretism. But no mention!
I have pinpointed at least a further 13 other objectionable standpoints in the letter adding to those here and what is mentioned by Fr. and Beaulieu.
I am sorry to criticize the Holy Father. I have no way to reach him in person about that so as to avoid the situation of Ham. THIS is a problem and it is not solved by allowing parrhesia!
Who is advising him? In the past 8 days or so he is lamenting war while entertaining children and Czech survivors “neutrally” and signing Burbon bottles, as Parolin avers “openly confess China ad experimentum!”
The letter seems to stake out a separation from wrongs already done yet still repeating wrong.
This prolific pontificate seems to fulfill the wish of the nineteenth century William George Ward to have a new papal Bull for breakfast every morning. While this “Letter” rightly addresses the sad ignorance of history in contemporary culture, classical Formgeschichte might detect in its opaque inferences and rhetoric, the influence of Hegel and Derrida and Kamala Harris.