Civilta Cattolica Research Articles

Pietro Caterini (1847-?), exemplární odpůrce evolučního vzniku člověka

In this paper, the author presents Pietro Caterini, who ranked among the important opponents of Mivert´s thesis among Catholic theologians in the 1870s and 1880s in Italy. He published 37 anti-darwinian studies in La Civilta Cattolica and then a nearly 400 page long book with the same content. The author analyses in detail the above-mentioned book and discovers that not everything in Catherini´s argumentation can be viewed as unacceptable. We encounter bright places, e.g. the resolute refusal of racism, but also dark places, e.g. the unacceptable extent of the competence of the biblical message, which is sometimes understood in a nearly fundamentalist way.

Periodikum La Civiltà Cattolica a evoluční vznik - stvoření člověka (1850-1980)

The study maps the attitudes of Italian Catholic theologians publishing in the prestigious journal La Civilta Cattolica on the issue of the evolutionary origin of the human body from 1850–1980. The strict rejection of the so-called Mivart‘s thesis lasted up to the beginning of the 1940s when things began to change gradually. It is noteworthy that German and Italian Jesuits used different strategies. The former approached Mivart‘s thesis in an increasingly liberal way as of the 1890s, while the latter remained in opposition up until the 1940s. Czech Catholic theology followed the German more closely, rather than the official Italian pattern.

Civil and Religious Freedom from Seeking the Truth

These admirable Discourses on civil and religious liberty have appeared, we believe, in a separate publication, but we have seen them only in Le Correspondant, where they were first published. Le Correspondant, by the way, published on the 25th of each month, is a periodical that we can conscientiously recommend to the general as well as to the Catholic public. It is able, learned, liberal, spirited, sincere, and earnest. It is the organ of the liberal Catholics of France, the only Catholics in Europe who sympathize with the loyal people of the Union in their war against the slavery Rebellion; and the best account of the struggle in which we are now engaged, that we have seen in any European periodical, has appeared in its pages, written by M. Henri Moreau. Its writers are such men as the Bishop of Orleans, the late Pere Lacordaire, Count de Montalembert, Count de Falloux, Auguste Cochin, A. Pontmartin, Henri Moreau, M. de Meaux, Prince de Broglie, and others hardly less eminent, all fervent, orthodox Catholics, devoted heart and soul to civil and religious liberty--men who combine the faith of the martyr ages with the civilization and progressive spirit of the nineteenth century. These Discourses are able and eloquent, as is every thing from the illustrious author, and exceedingly well timed. They are well matured, well reasoned, and contain views and advocate a policy which no friend of religion and civilization can prudently disregard. They are grave and earnest, bold and manly, noble and chivalric; and they have been read with surprise by non-Catholics, and with delight by all Catholics who do not happen to have their faces on the backside of their heads. They, however, have not given universal satisfaction, and several journals have entered their protest against them. They have incurred the decided hostility of La Civilta Cattolica, a periodical printed at the Propaganda Press, and published at Rome, under the eye of the General of the Jesuits. They have also incurred the wrath, we are told, of the new Dublin Review, said to be the organ of His Eminence Cardinal Wiseman, Archbishop of Westminster. They do not appear, however, to have been opposed by the Catholic organs of the United States, all devoted, as they are, to slavery, and hostile to liberty, whether civil or religious; but this is, probably, owing either to the incapacity of their conductors to understand their hearing, or to the fact that their author is a Frenchman, and a former peer of France. Had he been a plebeian, or had he been born aYankee, and a Yankee who will not concede that to be a Catholic it is necessary to denationalize himself, and become a foreigner in his native land, they would doubtless have honored him by a more formidable opposition than they have as yet received from any of the Catholic organs of Europe. Becoming a Catholic in this country means becoming an Irishman, or at least a European; and if one becomes a good Irishman, a good European, or a decided anti-American, he is a good Catholic, let him defend what doctrines he may. That M. de Montalembert's Discourses in favor of civil and religious liberty should incur opposition from La Civilta Cattolica is in the natural course of things. That periodical is the organ of Society which has outlived its day and generation, and which is now not in-aptly symbolized by the barren fig-tree of the Gospel. It was a noble and illustrious Society in its origin, and successfully did it labor to check the progress of error, and to place the Church in harmony with the civilization of the age. Its members were men of high character, often of noble birth, with the training and polish of men of the world, the literary tastes and culture of the most accomplished Humanists, the erudition of cloistered monks, the freedom of motion of secular priests, and the ardent charity and burning zeal of apostles. God gave them a great work to do, and they did it, and did it well. They deserved and won the admiration and gratitude of the Catholic world. …

A CONSTRUÇÃO DO ‘ETHOS’ NOS DISCURSOS DO PAPA FRANCISCO

Este trabalho objetiva investigar a construção de uma nova liderança na Igreja Católica sob a luz dos estudos da cenografia e ethos por Dominique Maingueneau (2008a, 2008b, 2008c, 2008d), a construção da imagem de si no discurso. A pesquisa se concentra em um infográfico do jornal Correio Braziliense, na entrevista do Papa Francisco concedida ao Padre Antonio Spadaro e publicada na revista Civiltà Cattolica, em setembro de 2013, e na Exortação Apostólica Evangelii Gaudium — A Alegria do Evangelho, publicada em novembro de 2013. Este estudo procura demonstrar que Bergoglio trabalha para constituir um ethos de humildade e abnegação que encontra força e legitimidade pelo contraste com a figura do pontífice emérito Joseph Ratzinger, seu antifiador, representante de um conjunto de valores no qual o católico atual não reconhece mais liderança. A pesquisa também pretende ilustrar o porquê de a reforma prometida com a sobrevinda de Bergoglio ao papado dificilmente corresponderia à reforma imaginada pela jovem comunidade católica no mundo. Será demonstrado que a mudança mais significativa dos dois primeiros anos do novo papa se deve ao tom de seu discurso, não a intenções de mudança em qualquer aspecto da doutrina.

Book Review: “The Tragic Couple”: Encounters between Jews and Jesuits. Edited by James Bernauer and Robert A. Maryks

Acknowledgements List of Illustrations List of Contributors Introduction James Bernauer and Robert A. Maryks Part one: JESUITS AND NEW CHRISTIANS 1. The Watershed of Conversion: Antonio Possevino, New Christians, and Jews Emanuele Colombo 2. Negotiating Relationship: Jesuits and Portuguese Conversos-A Reassessment Claude B. Stuczynski Part two: JESUITS, JEWS, AND MODERNITY 3. Polemics of Confessionalization: Depictions of Jews and Jesuits in Early Modern Germany Dean Phillip Bell 4. The Suppression of the Jesuits and the Enlightenment Discourse of Jewish Emancipation: Two Parallel Historical Phenomena Diego Lucci 5. Jesuit Influence on Italian Jewish Culture in the 16th and 17th Centuries Gianfranco Miletto 6. From Kaifeng to Shanghai via Rome and Paris: Jesuits and the History of Judaism in China Jeremy Clarke Part three: HATEFUL VISIONS 7. Visions of Hate: Jews and Jesuits in the European Feuilleton Lou Charnon-Deutsch 8. Jesuits, Jews, and Communists: Portrayals of Jesuits and Other Catholic Religious in Nazi Newspapers during the Spanish Civil War, 1936-39 Beth Griech-Polelle Part four: IN THE SHADOW OF 20TH-CENTURY CATASTROPHE A. French Conflicts 9. French Jesuits and Action Francaise Peter J. Bernardi 10. A Jesuit Spiritual Insurrection: Resistance to Vichy James Bernauer B. Italian Struggles 11. The Anti-Semitism of La Civilta Cattolica Revisited David Lebovitch Dahl 12. Transforming Anti-Semitism: The Civilta Cattolica after the Shoah, 1945-65 Elena Mazzini 13. Vatican Radio and Anti-Semitism during the Second World War Raffaella Perin 14. Pietro Tacchi Venturi, Mussolini, Pius XI, and the Jews David I. Kertzer 15. The Jesuit Pietro Tacchi Venturi and the Rescue of Italian Jews Robert A. Maryks C. American Contrasts 16. Correct and Christian: American Jesuit Support of Father Charles E. Coughlin's Anti-Semitism, 1935-38 Charles Gallagher 17. Accepted and Welcome: The Unlikely Response of the Jesuits at Marquette University to Jewish Applicants during the Interwar Years, 1920-40 Michael J. Burns Epilogue 18. Joseph Bonsirven, SJ: A Pioneer of a Theologian of Judaism before Vatican II Therese Andrevon Index

The Word Made Exhibition: Protestant Reading Meets Catholic Worship in <em>Uncle Tom's Cabin</em> and <em>The Gates Ajar</em>

When Uncle Tom's Cabin was translated and published Italy 1852, it was read widely and enthusiastically, but some Catholic observers took exception to its theology, according to Joseph Rossi. One newspaper, La Civilta Cattolica, objected to Harriet Beecher Stowe's portrayal sentiments so noble and virtues so marvelous [being acquired] sole reading of sole Bible, which seems to be predominant fixation of author (qtd. Rossi 42223). This judgment is no mistake. The scene of Little Eva and Uncle Tom reading Bible next to Lake Pontchartrain, for instance, represents an ideal of reading for and feeling presence of God, and it consecrates advance their upcoming deaths. The Italian newspaper reminds its readers that Catholic Church has little faith this means of accessing God through printed page and warns them not to be impressed images of scriptural salvation Stowe's novel. But paper also faults for taking inspiration from the immense treasures of Catholic hagiography to feed fervid embodied in a sentimental (qtd. Rossi 423). My essay argues that religious hybrid identified review--Stowe's attempt to wed treasures of Catholicism with a Protestant faith reading--shapes her fiction. Along with Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's The Gates Ajar, another best-seller that puts outsize pressure on question of how to read and how to access sacred, Uncle Tom's Cabin shows how Christian doctrinal differences influenced imagination of reading sentimental novel and decisively shaped its style. It is balancing appeals of Catholic and Protestant faith that and Phelps develop a novelistic strategy I will call exhibitional style. Certainly both and Phelps are possessed of impeccable Protestant credentials. was daughter and sister, respectively, to prominent clergymen Lyman and Henry Ward Beecher; Phelps was raised a family of two generations of Andover seminarians. Stowe's Protestant influences have been persuasively and extensively tracked, as have Phelps's. (1) But developed a robust, if vexed, relationship with Catholicism. Jenny Franchot argues that writing Agnes of Sorrento ten years after Uncle Tom's Cabin, Catholicize[s] her narrative on rhetorical level by imitating liturgical practices celebrated plot (250). Anthony E. Szczesiul finds that her religious poetry Stowe openly expresses a desire for 'imagistic' tradition of Catholicism--the sights, smells, and sounds of Catholic ritual' and he argues that portrays Eva and Tom according to specifically Catholic conventions of sainthood (par. 13). Little Eva is an evangelist, certainly, but a Catholic one. Phelps's novel, characters openly voice appreciation for Catholicism. The hero of The Gates Ajar, Winifred Forceythe, worries, In our recoil from materialism of Romish Church, we have, it seems to me, nearly stranded ourselves on opposite shore (110). Winifred's daughter Faith kisses a portrait of her dead father nightly, as if it were an icon, an act of devotion that startles narrator Mary when she first sees it. Wanting to win their readers to abolitionist cause or to console them for losses of Civil War, and Phelps act as both novelists and practical theologians. They take it that reading can save soul, a foundational Protestant view that inspires their projects as authors. But reading they imagine goes against grain of Protestant injunctions to sit alone and pore over pages. Reading is instead a communal and emotional, a visual and almost tactile, experience. (2) this way, Uncle Tom's Cabin and The Gates Ajar attempt to find a middle ground between competing models of human contact with God: private reading that goes deep between lines, or a public sacrament that relies on sharable, visual, and material. …

Jesuit Pulp Fiction: The Serial Novels of Antonio Bresciani in La Civilta Cattolica

The successful and highly authoritative Jesuit opinion-journal La Civiltà Cattolica was founded in 1850 to assert Catholic values in the face of ‘the Revolution’, an allegedly nefarious process that had begun with the Revolution of 1789 and was seen by the Jesuit writers as continuing with the 1848 revolution in Italy and the ongoing Risorgimento movement; this called the temporal power of the papacy into question and also entailed wider issues of secularization. For these writers, the periodical press was a dangerous new force and the only way to combat it effectively was on its own ground. The serial novels which ran in the fortnightly journal from 1850 until 1927 were evidendy written in the belief that the devil should not be left with all the most gripping yarns. The dangers to morality posed by romantic novels were constantly emphasized in the journal’s own fiction. The dominant tone of this fiction was polemical. The villains represented the forces of Jacobinism, the secret societies of the early Risorgimento, and Freemasonry. Conspiracy was a constant theme. Indeed, the leitmotifs of anti-Jesuit polemic depicting the Society of Jesus as an occult conspiratorial organization were in turn deployed by the Jesuit writers against Freemasonry. In the present study, however, the emphasis will be primarily on what the works of Antonio Bresciani (1798–1862), the pioneer Jesuit novelist between 1850 and 1861, had to say about Christian life and values. This, in fact, has most relevance to the genre of the romantic novel.

The Role of the Roman Catholic Church in the Formation of Modern Anti-Semitism: La Civilta Cattolica, 1850-1879

The Role of the Roman Catholic Church in the Formation of Modern Anti-Semitism: La Civilta Cattolica, 1850-1879

Katholische Konzilsidee im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert by Hermann Josef Sieben

Katholische Konzilisdee im 19. und 20. Jahrbundert. By Herman Josef Sieben. Konziliengeschichte, Reihe B: Untersuchungen. (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schoeningh. 1993. Pp. XX, 432. DM 128,-.) The well-known church historian and specialist in councils, H. J. Sieben, has already published major monographs for the series Konziliengeschichte illustrating how councils were understood in the Early Church (1979), in the Latin Middle Ages from A.D. 847 to 1378 (1984), and from the Reformation up to the Enlightenment (1988). In this final volume he tackles the daunting task of describing theological judgments about the nature of councils before, during, and after the First and Second Vatican Councils. The study is a mine of information, replete with numerous astute insights and usual factual data. The book is organized into thirteen chapters. The first of the opening five chapters treats the startlingly modern views of the Italian ex-Jesuit Giovan Vincenzo Bolgeni (1733-1811), whose teachings about the nature of councils anticipated by more than a century emphases on episcopal collegiality that emerged in the writings of Vatican Council II. Chapter two establishes how a gradual shift in the way theologians and historians in the first half of the nineteenth century contextualized Constance's decree of 1415, Haec sancta, prepared the way for Vatican Council I. Chapters three and four contrast the opposing theological assessments of councils first by Henri Maret (1805-1884), the Liberal dean of the Sorbonne theology faculty, in sharp contradistinction to his Ultramontane counterpart, Johann Baptist Heinrich (1816-1891), professor of dogmatic theology at Mainz. The fifth chapter cites numerous articles and editorials from the Jesuit review Civilta Cattolica,, which during the papacy of Pius IX served as a semi-official mouthpiece for the pope's personal theology of councils. Chapter six shows how various new accents shifted the traditional idea of a council's significance that gradually emerged after the papal convocation of Vatican Council I in 1868. After some 00 years without a council, theologians now began to consider a council as holding significance not only for the Church but also, in God's providence, for society at large. A council was now considered to bear witness in the presence of, in opposition to, and for the sake of the world (vor, gegen und fur die Welt). Chapter seven focuses specifically on the years between 1870 and 1908 to show how the dogmatic assessment of the nature of a council actually shifted as historical-critical studies clarified who had de facto convoked councils. …

Pio IX e La Rinascità del Tomismo by Antonio Piolanti

BOOK REVIEWS 939 the invention of the microscope. And in the " Brief Catalogue of Authentic Works" at the end Weisheipl frequently makes the notation "No English translation" when in fact such translations do exist: for example, the Sententia de caelo et mundo, Sententia super libros de generatione et corruptione , and Sententia super Meteora have all been translated into English by R. F. Larcher and P. H. Conway, Columbus: College of St. Mary of the Springs, 1963-1964; the polemical treatise De aeternitate mundi contra murmurantes has been done by Cyril Volaert et al., Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1964; and the De mixtione elementorum, by V. R. Larkin in Isis, 51 (1960), pp. 67-7~. Yet these are but minor defects, hardly worthy of mention, that in no way detract from what is obviously the best biography of Aquinas now available, in English or in any language. The Catholic University of America Washington, D. C. WILLIAM A. WALLACE, O.P. Pia IX e La Rinascita del Tomismo. By ANTONIO ProLANTI. Citta del Vaticano: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1974. Pp. 113. The sixth centenary of the death of St. Thomas (1874) was hailed by the then Pontiff, Pius IX, as paralleling the significant celebration of a few years earlier (1867) of the 18th centenary of the deaths of Saints Peter and Paul: Hos inter laetos eventus sicut iam anno millesimo octingentesimo sexagesimo septimo celebravimus decimi octavi saecularis anni, quo Principes Apostolorum proprii sanguinis testimonio traditam confirmavit Evangelii doctrinam, sic celebraturi nunc sumus sextum saecularem annum depositionis Angelici Doctoris, Sancti Thomas Aquinatis, a Divina Providentia largiti ad eamdem doctrinam miro modo illustrandum.... These words of Pope Mastai express the genuine high value in which throughout his life he held the Angelic Doctor and for the rebirth of whose teaching he labored unceasingly. For this reason it should be noted that the later encyclical Aeterni Patris of Leo XIII, together with his proclamation of St. Thomas as Patron of Catholic Schools, were the fruits of the long period of promotion and encouragement on the part of Pius IX to reawaken in the Church and in the world an appreciation of St. Thomas and his teaching. The author of this brief account of the rather forgotten relationship of Pio Nono to the rebirth of Thomism is Postulator of the Cause of canonization of Pius IX, Secretary of the Pontifical Roman Theological Academy, Vice President of the Pontifical Acardemy of St. Thomas Aquinas, and, 940 BOOK REVIEWS among other achievements of publication, founder and director of the Biblioteca per la Storia del Tomismo, of which this monograph is number 8. His study is based on hitherto unknown or forgotten or undervalued and thus not previously considered testimonies. It is divided into nine chapters. Chapter I introduces us to the thomistic formation of Giovanni Maria Mastai Ferretti. His early acquaintance with St. Thomas was augmented and deepened in his further studies at the Collegio Romano and the Accademia Ecclesiastica where he had as professor the convinced Thomist Canon Giuseppe M. Graziani. The latter's influence on the Thomistio:: orientation of Mastai as theological student and as pontiff was immense. Chapter II surveys the magisterial documents of the thirty-two year pontificate. The first, the encyclical Qui Pluribus (1846) , was the charter of the pontificate, the leitmotiv of the papal teaching: the concord and mutual assistance of reason and faith. By means of the many documents of Pius IX the teaching of St. Thomas found its way into the Constitutions of Vatican I. Pius IX (Ch. III) defended the value of the scholastic and thomistic methods (cf. Denz.-Schon. fl814, fl880, fl876-2880, fl918). Monsignor Piolanti (Ch. IV) singles out the Dominican Order as one of the recipients of the papal encouragement in the revival of Thomism and the Jesuit Order with its role in the Civilta Cattolica. Chapter V describes the efforts of the pope to protect, develop, and increase Thomistic centers both in Rome and throughout Italy, such as the schools of Perugia under Cardinal Gioacchino Pecci (Leo XIII) and Naples under Cardinal Sisto Riario Sforza. His interest naturally extended to the doctrinal formation of the clergy. Chapter VI relates the pontiff's promotion of the sixth...