Zusammenfassung / Abstract
“Reflections on the handling of archived witness statements in beatification proceedings. A case study from the Josef Kentenich case” – In canonisation processes, emotionality and piety on the one hand clash with the demands of professional intellectual work on the other. Since emotionality can be guided by both reverence and rejection, those responsible for the process must consider how to balance critical statements with the often more numerous positive ones. In this article the process of the founder of Schönstatt, Josef Kentenich, is used as a case study. While clear criteria can ensure a historiographically and sourcecritically clean procedure, misconduct must also be clarified, whereby it will ultimately not be possible to penetrate directly to a historical fact.