Faculty Spotlight: Imbuing Students With a Love of Church History

To say it has been a busy year for Dr. Adrian Ciani, Adjunct Professor of Church History at St. Augustine’s Seminary, would be an understatement.

Aside from teaching his regular courses at the Seminary, he has also been busy working on and publishing numerous scholarly articles. With the ink still drying on his chapter contribution on Vatican ‘neutrality’ during the Second World War in The Routledge History of the Second World War (Routledge), he is also currently completing his book manuscript examining the Church’s relationship with the State of Israel between 1945 and 1960.

“I am also now under contract to write a chapter on the Vatican for The Routledge History of the First World War, which should appear in early 2024,” he adds. “I am also doing the final edits on a chapter in the Cambridge History of the Papacy, for which I wrote a chapter on papal policy on the Jews since the French Revolution.”

When Dr. Ciani speaks about the Church and its role in history, he does so with a great deal of passion. He brings that passion with him into the classroom.

“If I’m not excited about what I’m trying to explain, it’s certainly not going to be interesting to anyone else. I try to present to students who take my courses this idea of a Church constantly in dialogue with the world around it and how that has shaped the Church over the last 200 years and how the Church has shaped the society that surrounds it as well. So Church history is kind of the narrative of the dialogue between the Church and the wider world.”

He says there is beauty in that.

“What’s beautiful about reading history is that you can kind of observe from a distance, how the institution and how the body of the Church negotiated the challenges that have arisen over the last 200 years. It’s been a very interesting period of history to say the least. I think the students are quite interested in seeing how the Church negotiated through the challenges of war and against the position of the Church in society itself.”

Dr. Ciani says understanding history helps give students perspective.

“We often believe that we’re at the biggest crisis moment the Church has ever faced,” he says. “We see the Church facing challenges on this front, and that front, but I think the historical perspective helps allay fears that we’re not necessarily in the worst time. There are always challenges, but that has been the story of the Church since its inception.”