Pope Francis calls for a real study of the history of the Church without ideologies

Pope Francis has published a letter addressed especially to priests in training to promote the renewal of the study of the history of the Church, underlining its importance to better interpret reality.

At the beginning of the letter, presented today at the Vatican Press Office, the Holy Father refers to the need to promote a “real historical sensitivity” in community, which also includes the “historical dimension of the human being himself.”

“No one can truly know who he is and what he intends to be tomorrow without nurturing the bond that unites him with the generations that precede him,” highlights the Holy Father. Furthermore, he specifies that everyone, and not just candidates for the priesthood, need this renewal.

“Love the Church as it is”

In this context, he emphasizes that we must abandon the “angelic conception of the Church” and embrace its “spots and wrinkles” in order to love it as it is.

In short, Pope Francis invites us to see the real Church “in order to love the one that truly exists”, a Church “that has learned and continues to learn from its mistakes and its falls.”

It is, according to the Holy Father, the “rectification of that terrible approach that makes us understand reality only from the triumphalist defense of the function or role that one fulfills.”

The Pope warns about the dangers of an ideological reading of history

Pope Francis denounces the manipulation of history by ideologies that, under various “colors,” destroy “everything that is different” in order to perpetuate themselves without opposition. This distortion, alert, leads young people to despise history and ignore everything that has preceded.

For the Pontiff, this also leads to posing “false problems” and seeking “inadequate solutions,” especially in an era marked by the tendency to dispense with memory or to construct one “that adapts to the needs of the dominant ideologies.”

He insists on the risk of “ideological deformations” and those “carefully and secretly prefabricated stories that serve to construct narratives.” for thisidentity stories and exclusion stories.”

For this reason, he points out that the past cannot be “approached with a quick interpretation disconnected from its consequences” and that reality “is never something simple that can be reduced to naive and dangerous simplifications.”

The Holy Father warns about those who believe they are “perfect gods” who want to suppress part of history and asks to avoid judgments created from the media or social networks, where “we are always exposed to the irrational impetus of anger or the emotion.”

Given this, he praises the essential and decisive role of historians, which can represent “one of the antidotes to confront this deadly regime of hatred based on ignorance and prejudice.”

Human fragility and the spread of the Gospel

The Holy Father also places his gaze on the human fragility of those to whom “the Gospel is entrusted” and urges them to be aware of these deficiencies and “fight them with maximum energy” so that they do not harm its dissemination.

He then invites us to keep in mind the “historical facts that make us ashamed of being human,” such as the wars that have occurred throughout history since, he assures, “no progress is ever made without an “integral and luminous” memory.”

He reiterates that “forgiveness does not imply forgetting” and encourages cultivating “a penitential memory, capable of assuming the past to free the future from one’s own dissatisfactions, confusions or projections.”

He also asks to avoid the “merely chronological approach” to the history of the Church, which “taught as part of theology, cannot be disconnected from the history of society.”

The Pope asks to avoid internet plagiarism

He also points out that “there is a lack of tools” to read the sources without “ideological filters” and also highlights that the history of the Church can help “recover the entire experience of martyrdom,” stressing “that this precious memory should never be lost.”

Precisely – Pope Francis continues in his letter – “where the Church has not triumphed in the eyes of the world is when it has achieved its greatest beauty.”

By way of conclusion, he asks priests in training to avoid “chatter” and superficial readings, as well as “cutting and pasting” from internet summaries. “Study serves to ask questions, to not be anesthetized by banality, to search for meaning in life,” concludes Pope Francis.