„De Signis Ecclesiae Dei”. L’ecclesiologia militante di Tommaso Bozio

Abstract

What were the identifying marks of the true Church of God has been a strategic theological issue in the dispute between Catholics and Protestants in the modern age. Oratorian Tommaso Bozio’s De Signis Ecclesiae Dei (1592) represents a notable example of post-Tridentine controversialist theology, conceived in the Rome of the Counter Reformation as a form of a militant ecclesiology against heresy, to defend Catholic orthodoxy and aspiring to present itself as the theology of the Papal Magisterium. The article analyses the signa of the universality and of the Roman nature of the Catholic Church, of the primacy of the Roman Pontifex, source and foundation for any further spiritual and temporal power, and the signa of felicitas temporalis of the Spanish Monarchy as evidence of its historical adherence to the Ecclesia Dei.