Il Vescovo di Trento Giovanni Nepomuceno de Tschiderer e la situazione della Chiesa in Austria e nel Tirolo nel corso della prima metà del secolo XIX by Josef Grisar

Abstract

book reviews561 One could say that Fagan's chief interest is in the period before 1778 when Luke Gardiner's parliamentary bill,"a watershed in history,"enabled Catholics to take long leases and put paid both to "discoverers" of Catholic property and to the"gavelling act,"which broke up their small estates. For the period after 1778, one should also read Thomas Bartlett, The Fall and Rise ofthe Irish Nation.The Catholic Question, 1690-1830 (1992), which, though it says little of the early eighteenth century, offers a rich panorama of later decades from a purely political point of view.Yet Fagan does discuss in greater detail the later relief acts of 1782, 1792, and 1793. Even the so-called "Emancipation Act" of 1829 required a new oath of Catholic members of parliament, while denying to the regular clergy any legal recognition of their existence. The author's long analysis of names in the Test-Book (1775-76) and Catholic Qualification Rolls (1778-1830 ca.) is extremely useful, not least because it explains exactly which records survived the destruction of the Record Office in 1922 and where exactly one may find them. For this reviewer, the chief advantage of the book is that it draws into a cohesive whole a series of episodes and problems hitherto treated in isolation, such as Nary's controversy with the Protestant archbishop Synge (1733), the Stuart nomination of bishops, the "Trimblestown pastoral" (1756), Hamilton's "registration of priests" (1757), the embarrassing letter of the nuncio Ghilini (1769) upholding ancient papal "rights," and the dispute between the archbishops of Dublin and Cashel in 1774 over the oath of allegiance. More recent research has proved the author correct in his view (p. 93) that the formula of an oath proposed by the Catholic party in 1756 was drawn up by Cornelius Nary more than twenty years before. The evidence is to be found in A. R W. Malcomson , Eighteenth-century Irish Official Papers in Great Britain, vol. 2, p. 168. All told, there is far more to this book than its title suggests. While devoted to the search for an acceptable "oath," it is equally a penetrating guide to the long struggle for Catholic emancipation in Ireland. Hugh Fenning, O.P. St Mary's Priory, Tallaght, Co. Dublin Late Modern European Il Vescovo di Trento Giovanni Nepomuceno de Tschiderer e la situazione della Chiesa inAustria e nel Tirólo nel corso dellaprima meta del secólo XIX. ByJosef Grisar. Translated from the Latin by Elio Gottardi. [Istituto di Scienze Religiose in Trento, series maior, IV] (Bologna: Edizioni Dehoniane Bologna. 1997. Pp. xxi, 375. Lire 65.000.) This work had an unusual genesis. When during the 1930's the beatification of Johann Nepomuk von Tschiderer, Bishop of Trent (1834-1860), was under 562BOOK REVIEWS discussion at Rome, the objection was raised that he had supported the Josephinist state-church system then prevalent in Austria, and had indeed cooperated with it. Given the long-standing Papal hostility toward Josephinism, this would have been a serious obstacle to his beatification. To answer this objection , the Diocese ofTrent called upon the noted historian FatherJosef Grisar. He published the results ofhis research in 1936 in a Latin version essentially intended for internal use; it remained largely unknown to the scholarly community at large. After Tschiderer was at length beatified in 1995, the Istituto di Scienze Religiose in Trent decided to bring the work to a larger audience, and this slightly abridged Italian version is the result. It must be said at the outset that the work shows its age; much research has been done since 1936 on Josephinism, and Grisar's work has lost some of the originality it had when written. Moreover, its attitudes are those of an earlier era, and may jar the sensibilities of the post-Vatican Council II age (e.g., his sympathy with Tschiderer's efforts to keep the Tyrol a purely Catholic area by preventing the introduction there ofAustrian laws on religious toleration). Despite these inevitable limitations, this book still deserves attention, for it is a work by a great scholar, based on intensive research in the archives of Austria and the Vatican, and much...