Pope: Priests Need Better Formation in Church History to Share Gospel

by CNS · Published November 23, 2024 · Updated November 23, 2024

Pope Francis prays during his weekly general audience in St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican Nov. 20, 2024. (CNS photo/Vatican Media)

By Carol Glatz, CNS – A true study and understanding of the church’s history and experience are needed to help priests better interpret today’s world, to make the Gospel more relevant and to counter ideologies and distorted narratives about the church, Pope Francis said.

The study of history protects Catholics “from an overly angelic conception of the Church, presenting a Church that is unreal because she lacks spots and wrinkles,” the pope wrote.

“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 truly exists, and love what she has learned and continues to learn from her mistakes and failures,” he wrote.

In a letter titled “On the Renewal of the Study of the History of the Church,” published by the Vatican on Nov. 21, Pope Francis said his message was meant to help priests, seminarians, pastoral workers and all those involved in formation.

Only a church that is conscious “of her deepest identity,” which is rooted in her history, “can be capable of understanding the imperfect and wounded world in which she lives,” the pope wrote.

The church should also work to faithfully reconstruct voices and insights that have been “cancelled” over the centuries, he wrote.

“Is it not a privilege for 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, offering tools for understanding today’s phenomena of marginalisation and exclusion?” he asked.

However, he wrote, “all of us — not just candidates for the priesthood — need a renewed sense of history.”

That’s because those who ignore, avoid or distrust history are more vulnerable to manipulation and lies, he wrote. Ignoring history is also a kind of “blindness that drives us to waste our energies on a world that does not exist, raising false problems and veering toward inadequate solutions.”

“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 wars, persecutions, the production, sale, and utilization of weapons and any number of other evils,” the pope added.

Historians who are connected to communities “can serve as an antidote to this lethal regime of hatred that rests on ignorance and prejudice,” he wrote, and they can help people understand the complexities behind issues, which are too often simplified by social and mass media or by political interests to trigger or fuel anger and misunderstandings.

“A sincere and courageous study of history, then, helps the Church to understand better her relations with different peoples,” he wrote. The church must never forget the Holocaust, the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan, all persecutions, the slave trade, ethnic killings and “the many other historical events that make us ashamed of our humanity.”

“It is easy to be tempted to turn the page, to say that all these things happened long ago and we should look to the future. For God’s sake, no! We can never move forward without remembering the past,” he wrote.

Pope Francis called for a renewal in how church history is taught and studied. Priestly formation “is still inadequate with regard to sources” and understanding Christianity’s foundational texts, he wrote.

“When this happens, students will be ill-equipped to read them and resort instead to ideological filters or theoretical pre-conceptions that do not permit a lively and stimulating understanding,” he said.

Those engaged in evangelization need to have “a personal and collective passion” for “doing” church history stemming from “the love they have for the Church. They welcome her as Mother and as she is,” the pope wrote.

Cardinal Lazarus You Heung-sik, prefect of the Dicastery for Clergy, told reporters at a Vatican news conference that the letter follows in the footsteps of the pope’s Aug. 4 letter on the role of literature and poetry in Christian, priestly and human formation.

He said the latest letter continues to encourage and guide people toward “a full personal and historical understanding of the world we live and have to work in, inviting us to correct and avoid a view of our life and place in history that is too ‘angelic,'” that is, falsely perfect or triumphalist.

Andrea Riccardi, a church historian and founder of the Community of Sant’Egidio, told reporters there had been a period before the Second Vatican Council that the Catholic Church was “comfortable” being “timeless,” that is, above or removed from the present, “unfolding of history” which seemed to be “a sign of humanity’s fallen and worldly condition.”

“This timeless attitude sometimes caused an inability to understand the time in which the church lived,” but that attitude shifted with the Second Vatican Council, he said.

“In line with the council, Francis is calling for maturing a ‘real historical sensitivity,’ not a triumphalist defence, not an ideological history, not a manipulative history of events” or reconstructions which can be used to justify conflicts, he said.

The idea, Riccardi said, is “to have a historical mentality living in the present and in the church because we can never move forward without remembering the past.”

The renewal the pope is calling for “will require serious reforms in teaching, but also investments in teaching and research,” he added.