Information service of the Pontifical Mission Societies since 1927
Vatican City (Agenzia Fides) - Ecclesiastic Archives «a treasure in vases of clay». The importance indeed essentiality of archives for the very mission of the Church is directly in proportion to their complexity and fragility.
The approach to an historical archive requires first of all mediators able to decode the information gathered in order to consign it to public comprehension. Hence the need for experts able to investigate documentary material, giving it adequate tools of equipment and well trained managers, to foster adequate fruition of the material without undermining its preservation. Inventory and diffusing activity of data present in an archive is necessarily ‘in progress’, since it can always be improved. It requires many and various initiatives of valorisation in the depositary community and the entire community.
These institutions also need congruous interventions of juridical protection, material preservation and ecclesial valorisation. Archives must be protected with care particularly in the context of today, when changed conditions of society and the clergy lead to merging of dioceses and parishes, closing of institutions and confraternities now without energy, assimilation of duties of various different organisms whose respective archives are either neglected, or worse, in incongruous settings.
The transmission of documentary heritage is therefore a specific moment of Traditio, memory of evangelisation, and a pastoral tool. As a moment of Traditio this transmission reveals the continuity of the eventum salutis from the historic vicissitudes of Jesus Christ to the Pentecost of the Church today, so that the chronological memory leads to spiritual re-reading of past events fostering a sensus ecclesiae. As memory of evangelisation the documentary fonts inform on the plantatio ecclesiae wherever the Gospel is preached. As a pastoral tool the fonts give each ecclesial community a sense of history to enabling it to look at the past and open to the future.
The valorisation of this heritage is fundamental for the historical culture and the ecclesial mission. The local Christian community will thus be able to narrate its history with self awareness, free itself of prejudicial considerations and defective arguments. + Mauro Piacenza. president Pontifical Commission for the Cultural Heritage of the Church, president Pontifical Commission Sacred Archaeology. (Agenzia Fides 12/12/2006 - Righe 32, parole 372)
