Exceedingly few priests, ministers or counsellors will remark that it is ever helpful, or even relevant, to apportion something called ‘blame’ to unhappy parties in a crisis or dispute. Yet interpreters of the great crises of the 20th century have often set to work with exactly that purpose in view. This has become a fundamental, and inescapable, thread in any discussion of the ‘record’ of churches caught up in a time of dictatorship, persecution or conflict. Popes, archbishops, bishops, and Christians of every kind have attracted a barrage of criticism from observers and journalists for failing to do what they allegedly should have done or for doing what they should never have attempted (for obvious examples one might see how much of the present literature on Pope Pius XII wears this polemical character: see Cornwell 1999). Historical scholars, too, often show a mighty relish in converting themselves into lawyers determined to prove a case for prosecution against offending individuals or institutions, trading intently on a provocative generalisation, an annihilation of character or an accumulation of ‘mistakes’, and on these things they seek to establish a new picture of failure, ‘silence’, complicity, corruption, even betrayal. Such analysis can be invigorating and it can also puncture, valuably, self-serving complacency, not least in high places. But the loss which such arguments involve is an uncomfortable one because all too often it involves the sensitivity and humility of our own understanding. Moreover, such work rather often reveals self-serving qualities of its own. While reputation continues to be prized by scholars, they too have their own interests – their arguments and discoveries – to protect and promote. Like that of archaeology, the study of contemporary history is essentially a work of excavation in which the practitioners become, in their own manner, participants, moralists and politicians.

Many of these lively debates fail to acknowledge at least two necessary truths. The first is an inescapable hermeneutical problem. Distance and detachment might enhance a capacity to create a broad picture, and even to judge, but they also remove the scholar from the pressures of context, the specific atmosphere of a particular time, with all its unanswered questions and dilemmas. The limitations of evidence are severe.