Preservation and Control of Information; New Blog
Breaking News: Chinese History Blog Launched: The Frog in a Well project has opened its second web journal: 井底之蛙, or Frog in a Well: China. That I'm a member is a tribute to Konrad Lawson's vision of the Frog project as a place for academic cross-fertilization, trans-national historiography and trans-national discourse. He has lined up a substantial bunch of contributors, who will be introducing themselves and getting down to serious blogging in the near future. We now return you to your regularly scheduled blogging...
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It turns out that the late Pope John Paul II's order to burn his private papers upon his death will not be honored:"Nothing has been burnt," said Archbishop Stanislaw Dziwisz,"Nothing is fit for burning, everything should be preserved and kept for history, for the future generations - every single sentence." [via HNN's Breaking News, of course]
As an historian, of course, horrified at the prospect of the initial will, I applaud the preservation, while as an individual I have deep reservations about the refusal to carry out explicit instructions in a will and testament. Preservation, though, is not enough: for documents to be historically useful, they must be accessible. The Roman Catholic Church has a long and not terribly distinguished record of restricting access to its archives based on the beliefs and subject of the researchers who make requests.
Archbishop Dziwisz, the late Pope's secretary who is at the center of this issue, has an explicit agenda:"He suggested some of the material left by the pope could be useful in the process of beatification, announced by Pope Benedict XVI last month." He is also known for being somewhat arbitrary in the exercise of his authority, and he has, apparently, sole access to the documents in question. The article cites a"Polish source" as suggesting that the Archbishop could selectively destroy papers and that"There's a real danger that he could invent an order of John Paul's, leading to the promoting or firing of people, and there would be no way of checking it."
It seems to me that the window for revealing orders from the late Pope has pretty well closed: with a new Pope installed, any order given by his precedessor would probably need some confirmation and approval. There's two logical problems with that, as well: first, since John Paul II ordered the papers destroyed, presumably he didn't want the orders carried out; second, the Archbishop who refused to carry out the Pope's last will is standing on pretty shaky ground in calling for obedience to posthumous written orders.