In recent years, public discourse has become saturated with expressions such as cancel culture, “war against the past,” and the “toppling of symbols.” This is not merely a linguistic trend. It is a specific way of relating to history: instead of interpreting the past, it is put on trial; instead of understanding it, it is turned into a collective defendant.
The sociologist Frank Furedi, in The War Against the Past, describes this phenomenon well: when people begin to blame the past and lash out at historical figures who until recently were respected, attention shifts away from the real challenges of the present toward settling accounts with yesterday. In effect, he writes, a “war against the past” has been declared.
This war is not merely an academic debate. It takes extremely concrete forms: monuments vandalized because they recall figures now deemed “problematic”; museums defaced, as in the case of the Charles Dickens Museum marred by graffiti branding the writer as “racist,” with the perpetrator proudly claiming to have “done justice” to a dead man from the nineteenth century; school history curricula turned into an ideological battlefield, where what matters is no longer understanding what happened, but using the past to bolster present political identities. Furedi shows how all this is made possible by a cultural climate dominated by presentism: a society that lives in an eternal present, that has lost the sense of historical continuity, treats the past as a primitive phase from which to extract only evidence of oppression. Concepts such as the “ideology of year zero” and “identity politics” move in the same direction: one is urged to break with origins because they would be toxic; a one-sided narrative of the past is fueled as an unbroken chain of violence. In this scenario, memory is no longer a teacher of life, but becomes an archive of guilt to be sanctioned. The past is not a story to understand, but an indictment.
Year zero in the parish: when the Church replicates the mechanisms it criticizes
In the face of these drifts, voices in the Catholic world are not lacking that criticize cancel culture, vandalism against works of art, and the ideological rewriting of school curricula. And yet, if we look honestly at the dynamics within our communities, we must recognize an uncomfortable reality: much of what we contest in society we are practicing internally. The “year zero” attitude, for example, is recognizable in many changes of ecclesial government: there are priors who, as soon as they are elected, make it clear that the predecessor must leave— not only relinquish office, but physically move away from the monastery, as if his presence were an obstacle; in some communities, especially where there is already a growing vocational crisis, the first operation of the new course seems to be the removal of the father who founded or led; the implicit narrative is clear: “from today the true history begins; before, at best, a problematic past to be corrected.”
In many ecclesial environments a logic is taking hold in which the community’s recent past is delegitimized, not through true discernment, but through campaigns of personal delegitimization. The language is that typical of cancel culture: a narrative is constructed that renders the predecessor “no longer presentable,” “no longer reliable,” “no longer acceptable.” People speak of “abuses,” “misinterpretation of the charism,” “authority wrongly exercised,” etc. Voices are spread, reconstructions carefully staged, lies, and insinuations.
The weapon of the generic accusation of “abuses”
The point of greatest similarity between the cultural war against the past and certain ecclesial dynamics is the indeterminate and all-encompassing use of the word “abuses.” In civil society, the media weapon is often the label of racism, machismo, sexism, applied retroactively, with categories born today used to judge eras in which they did not exist. In the Church today, something analogous happens: it is enough to invoke “abuses”—without specifying what type, in what period, with what facts— to brand a person; often there is no knowledge of evidence, no precise episodes are indicated, no real adversarial process is offered to the person concerned; summary proceedings are cobbled together that juridically are not even proceedings: informal acts, “internal” investigations, opaque administrative decisions, which in fact destroy a reputation without any possibility of defense. The result is a punitive climate: an imprecise shadow is enough for a priest, a superior, a founder to be suspended, removed, expelled, without the community truly knowing what happened. In theory one acts to “protect victims”; in practice, often, the category of abuse is used as a club to settle other scores: power conflicts, theological divergences, political struggles, and personal antipathies. Thus, while we criticize the demolition of statues in public squares, in the Church we demolish people with the same lightness with which someone defaces a monument: one strikes because that figure “symbolizes” something we can no longer tolerate today, and that is enough.
“At Bose a parricide is underway”: the emblematic case
From this point of view, the Bose affair has been exemplary. In that community, a few members, but well placed, progressively worked to strip the founder of authority, around whom tensions, divergences, and criticisms had accumulated. The conflict, from an internal matter to be governed with prudence, became a true trial of the father. Not by chance, in one of the episodes of Silere non possum’s investigation, the title was: “At Bose a parricide is underway.” It was not merely a strong formula: it was the description of a deep anthropological mechanism. Silere demonstrated, with documents in hand, that in the Decree of the Secretariat of State, moreover, there was no accusation or proof that would justify such treatment. Sigmund Freud, in Totem and Taboo, developed the famous myth of the primal horde: the sons, driven out by the tyrannical father who monopolizes the women of the clan, unite, one day rebel, kill and eat the father, symbolically appropriating his strength. After the parricide, however, a pacified freedom is not born: remorse, nostalgia, and the need to create taboos and prohibitions arise in order to keep in check the desire that led to the crime. Freud notes that the father, once killed, becomes “more powerful than the living one”: hatred turns into posthumous idealization, into an “absolute submission” to that primal father. Applied to our communities, this scheme—though with all due distance—is illuminating: a part of the community coalizes against the founder or superior; it puts him in the minority, expels him, turns him into the scapegoat for all problems; but once “eliminated,” the group does not truly become mature: it remains obsessed with the cast-out father, continues to define itself in opposition to him. Symbolic parricide does not liberate: it nails one down. It is what happens when a monastery or a community or a movement, instead of loyally facing its crises, prefers to construct a narrative in which all evil is concentrated in one person, to be removed in order to begin a year zero.
Semel abbas, semper abbas: monastic wisdom against the throwaway culture
The monastic tradition, and in particular the Benedictine one, possesses a precious antidote against this drift: “Semel abbas, semper abbas.” Once a monk has been called to be Abbot, he remains the father of the community forever, even if he no longer governs. The history of the Church knows many examples of: abbots who guided a monastery for their entire existence for decades; abbots who, having reached old age or in difficult situations, renounced governance, but remained in the community as a discreet presence, memory, counsel; communities that, even while going through strong conflicts, preserved the bond with their father, distinguishing between his correctable choices and objective gratitude for the good received. Today, instead, even in several monasteries that claim fidelity to Saint Benedict, this logic is overturned: the non-re-elected abbot is treated as a problem to eliminate: he is sent away, isolated, everything is done so that he no longer has a voice, his mere presence is perceived as “cumbersome,” as if the community were incapable of sustaining the coexistence of an emeritus fatherhood and a reigning fatherhood. In a monastery that is experiencing an incredible vocational crisis and has taken a spiritualistic drift in recent years, the prior general recently had a letter slipped under the door of the prior emeritus inviting him to leave the monastery. This man had to, at his age, turn to a holy bishop who welcomed him. All this, however, is not at all normal. It is striking that precisely where one would be called to preserve the memory of tradition, a form of throwaway cultureis practiced toward those who reigned before. It is the ecclesial version of cancel culture: marble statues are not torn down, but living fathers are removed.
Ecclesial presentism: judging yesterday with today’s categories
Another common trait between the war against the past and certain dynamics in the Church is anachronistic judgment. Furedi, speaking of presentism, notes that Western society has begun to treat past eras as “early versions of the present,” judging people who lived centuries ago as if they had our tools and sensibilities. In the same way, in the Church, entire periods of a community’s life are reread with criteria that did not exist then, neither juridically nor culturally; they are applied retroactively to prove that “everything was wrong”; they fuel a narrative in which the past is only a list of “systemic abuses,” without distinguishing between lights and shadows. Of course, it is right to acknowledge that in certain seasons there were attitudes and practices that we now understand as problematic. But it is another thing to use this awareness as a pretext to cancel everything: people, works, spiritual fruits. A community that judges only with categories born yesterday loses the capacity to read its own history in the logic of Providence: God acted also through limited men, within imperfect structures. Whoever cancels the fathers also loses the sense of how the Spirit works in time.
A conversion of memory: beyond parricide and beyond removal
If, as Church, we want to be credible, even when we rightly criticize cancel culture and defend historical memory in society, we must first begin with ourselves. It is not enough to say that vandalizing statues or defacing museums is wrong: we must question how we treat our fathers. Some steps seem indispensable. We must recover a grammar of gratitude: even when a founder or a superior has made real mistakes, the community must be able to say what it received through him; we must ensure just procedures, especially when “abuses” are invoked: transparency, adversarial process, possibility of defense, clarity of facts. The protection of victims does not come from summary justice, but from full truth; we must reject the illusion of an ecclesial year zero: every reform authentically Catholic is not founded on cancellation, but on purification and continuity; and we must safeguard the figure of the emeritus abbot, of the superior who has stepped down, of the aging founder, of the elderly parish priest: not as cumbersome relics, but as living witnesses to a history that precedes us.
The Church cannot be a community of orphans who have killed the fathers nor a people without memory crushed by an ideological present.
Recovering the principle “Semel abbas, semper abbas,” in a broader sense, means precisely this: recognizing that fatherhood is not a time-limited function, but a gift that precedes us and accompanies us. Without fathers, there are no children; without memory, there is no future. And a Church that practices, within itself, parricide risks losing both.
M.P. and fr.R.M.
Silere non possum