Perhaps I have missed them (it is, after all, so soon after the Synod that everyone is still rightly focused on it!), but I have not seen significant responses to Pope Francis’ recent (21 November 2024) letter on the importance of Church history[1]. As someone whose first academic specialization was in history, in this short article I’d like to present some preliminary comments on Francis’ text, as well as briefly suggest how his challenge speaks to moral theologians.
Noting the importance of the subject in clergy formation, Pope Francis argues that “not only a solid and detailed knowledge of major 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” is essential. He adds: “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. This is true not only of us as individuals, but also as a community.”
His view echoes many historians and philosophers of history that we need a profound sense of the past to understand the present, often with a view to create a few that learns from the past – achievements and mistakes – so that we build on the former and avoid similar mistakes in future. Such a view for Francis calls us to view the Church’s history with honesty, not glossing over (and least of all erasing or ‘cancelling’) things that present the Church negatively.
Nor too, he would add, should we adopt what might be called historical reductionism – overly simplistic accounts that all too often fit into our own ideological perspectives. We must seek as close to a true, comprehensive and complex vision of the past as possible. Indeed,
“[i]n order to grasp reality, it must be approached from a diachronic perspective, 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 drives us to waste our energies on a world that does not exist, raising false problems and veering towards inadequate solutions. Some of these interpretations may prove useful to small groups but certainly not to humanity and the Christian community as a whole.”
What is Pope Francis’ agenda here? Could it in fact be linked to the Synod, to root causes for tensions among participants whose understanding of the Church might have been coloured by an overly ‘presentist’ understanding of the form, shape and especially structures of our Church – a vision going back, dare I suggest, to 1870 and then conditioned by one’s ideological position over the subsequent years that have seen centralization, a shift to a hybrid centralization-collegialization at Vatican II, and then a back and forth between the collegial and centralized church after 1978? In short, a very present, even what might be called contemporary consciousness of church history, its events often read through whichever ideological lens best reflected or served the social position, privilege or lack (of either or both) of the reader?
If I read him correctly, Francis wants a renewed church history to serve truth – or at least a more nuanced common narrative that might build up a deeper sense of being church. I say this because the discipline of history is deeply complex. Though thinking may swing as ‘a pendulum’ (as historian Peter Burke[2], among others, has observed) between a desire for ‘just the facts’ (objective verifiable truth, based on reliable archival sources, etc.) and a sense that all history is just construction of ‘fictions’ based loosely on events (in other words pure relativism), historical research and writing is more complex.
Although based on events, ‘facts’ even as simple narratives are not enough. The facts of history are themselves accounts, or traces, of those events that are selected, recorded, preserved and above all interpreted.[3] This assumes that the (often, but not necessarily only, written) sources are preserved. Not every ‘text’ is. Those who keep sources (archivists) curate them, making decisions of what to keep – and what to throw away. Indeed, keeping let alone using, every record would on a philosophical level merely create a kind of historical Babel.
Moving beyond narratives, questions of causation are immensely complex, and causation itself is rooted in the mind and outlook and interests of the historian: is history an accounts of economic and social struggle, the clash of ideas or mentalités [worldviews], the lives of great people, or the evolution of cultures? All of the above – but each historian will focus their interpretation one or two of them. The same material ‘facts’ may thus yield a whole range of historical interpretations. The best we can perhaps do is, in the process of doing history, not exclude events that do not fit into our narrative and analysis.
I think Francis is starting to move in this direction, though perhaps he would like to see a kind of ‘consensus’ history, like for example an official record of events and causation found in official reports like Truth Commissions. But even here the ‘consensus’ as to what happened is neither full nor universally agreed upon.[4]
What does Francis’ reflections on church history – and their limits – say to Christian ethicists? Although there are some notable scholars who explore the history of moral theology[5], my sense is that many if not most Christian ethicists draw more heavily on disciples such as moral philosophy, anthropology, medicine, political theory or other areas of theology like biblical studies than on history. In these and other areas, many will inevitably use historical accounts of events either as a basis for reflection, or for examples to illustrate the moral theme they explore. This approach, focusing on published secondary sources, is both evitable and indeed necessary to their research – but sometimes the use of some sources rather than others might be problematic.
The selection of one or other historical account without a more thorough understanding of the work/s’ historiographical situation in the area of study may skew the theological analysis. The tone of the work might even serve as a kind of conscious or unconscious ‘confirmation bias’ for the theologian. Political bias of a theologian dealing in social ethics may even inform the selection of historical materials used in the construction of a theological argument. There is also the problem in some postcolonial societies where colonial powers may have manipulated or even eliminated precolonial history, creating myths that even today postcolonial cultures have uncritically assimilated into their culture and history.
There are no easy answers for us as Christian ethicists – apart perhaps from taking further the ‘historical turn’ some of us have already made, our use of church (and secular) history needs to be subjected to its own critical historiographical hermeneutic.
Francis has called the Church to take the study of its history more seriously. We need to do the same in how we take how history within Christian ethics very seriously too.
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[1] . Pope Francis, “On the Renewal of the Study of Church History” (21 November 2024). At: https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/letters/2024/documents/20241121-lettera-storia-chiesa.html. Last accessed: 20 December 2024.
[2] . Quoted in: Maria Lúcia G. Pallares-Burke, The New History: Confessions and Conversations (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), 137.
[3] . For more on this see, among many: R G Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946); E H Carr, What is History? (London: Penguin, 1961); Gordon Graham, The Shape of the Past: A Philosophical Approach to History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Richard J Evans, In Defence of History (London: Granta, 2000).
[4] . I think here of South Africa’s multivolume Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, available at: https://www.justice.gov.za/trc/report/ . The volume’s main editor, the Commissions Director of Research, told me a few years later that the Report itself used perhaps 10-15% of the data collected. And the ‘official history’ it presented was disputed in various ways by many of those who had participated in the process.
[5] . Notably, in the English-speaking world, at least: John Mahoney, The Making of Moral Theology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987); James F Keenan, A History of Catholic Moral Theology in the Twentieth Century (New York: Continuum, 2010) and A History of Catholic Theological Ethics (New York: Paulist Press, 2022).