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In Europe, the history of Catholicism was long a history of the Church, seen as an apologetics, auxiliary to theology and subordinate to the magisterium. Since the history of Catholicism became independent to a varying extent, depending on the country, this facilitated emergence of a religious history, still fragmentary, which is even today haunted by the necessary deconfessionalization of its approaches, themes and researchers. It can respond to these challenges with the requirement for neutrality, the extension of research fields, attention to the other social sciences and thus rightly claim to be a complete and separate facet of history in general.