Giulio Salvadori and the Catholic Political Tradition in Italy

Abstract

The Catholic political tradition is at the very center of contemporary Italian politics, but the process by which that tradition came into existence and how it evolved remains obscure and often is subjected to extremely simplistic explanations. Modern Catholic political theory began to take shape during the period of the French Revolution. However, it was the Risorgimento that decisively influenced the political consciousness of Italy's Catholics. The unification of the country in 1860 came about largely at the Church's expense. Pius IX, once the darling of Catholic liberals, responded to the Risorgimento with a fusillade of counterrevolutionary invective in Sillabo degli errori del nostro tempo (8 December 1864), still the most notorious example of anguished Catholic imprecations in the post-Risorgimento period. The Church, never comfortable in the post-1789 world, now made unforgettably clear her utter and irrevocable rejection of that world. Her role as the aggressive critic of modernity hardened into one of the outstanding conventions of nineteenthcentury European culture.