Italian Bishops Research Articles

The Council of Turin (398/399) and the Reorganization of Gaul ca. 395/406

The Council of Turin, which quite irregularly met in Italy even though it proposed to deal with the church of Gaul, has been the most studied and least understood of all the councils involving the late antique Gallic church. This study argues for a single council, contrary to past suggestions that there were two or even three Councils of Turin. It pinpoints the date of the meeting in either 398 or 399 CE. It then investigates in detail the background, procedures, and consequences of the council. Because of the lack of authority of Italian bishops to legislate for the church of Gaul, the most the council could do was make suggestions. It is argued that, with the imperial court located in northern Italy and with the bishops of Milan attempting to aggrandize their influence, the Council of Turin was but one element of a coherent initiative to reorganize and regularize the secular and ecclesiastical administration of Gaul as of 395 CE. These initiatives were brought to a halt by the Gallic political crises of 406 and later. Contrary to past assumptions, the Council of Turin had very little direct influence on the subsequent history of the Gallic church, and was only very rarely cited as an authority.

La gerarchia cattolica italiana e la questione linguistica in diocesi plurinazionali. Il caso della Chiesa di Rijeka (Fiume) durante il fascismo

The arrival of another state in Rijeka after World War One, with changes to the city’s political and legal authorities, is reflected in its Church. After the foundation of the Apostolic Administration in 1920 and the Diocese of Rijeka in 1925, the city ceased to belong to the bishop of Senj-Modrus. The Italian apostolic administrators and bishops (Celso Costantini, Isidoro Sain, Carlo Mecchia, Antonio Santin and Ugo Camozzo) had different approaches to the linguistic issues both in the city of Rijeka and in the Diocese. Italianization of Church life was already quite advanced during the founding period of new parishes in 1923 and gained further impetus with the creation of the Diocese of Rijeka. This Italianization of pastoral life continued until the early 1930s, even in the bilingual parishes of the Liburnia Region, with a further deepening of linguistic problems, during that same decade, in the Croatian and Slovene hinterland of the Diocese of Rijeka, mainly due to the Latinization of liturgical language.

Jak interpretować normy kodeksowe? Prawo kanoniczne wyrazem jedności Kościoła

It is over a quarter of a century since the promulgation of the postconciliar Code of the Canon Law. The past time is characterized by insignificant revisions of the Code legislation introduced both by John Paul II as well as Benedict XVI. Daily life of the Church provides various information that canons of the Code of John Paul II are incessantly interpreted, mainly by judiciary of the Church as well as practice of the diocesan curias and parish offices; naturally it is necessary here to emphasize the considerable and dominant role in applying law by practice of the Roman Curia. Apart from this, it is essential to add the legislative action of particular diocesan bishops and conferences of bishops, among which the Italian Bishops’ Conference must be predominantly highlighted. Particular legislation issued by postconciliar particular and diocesan synods cannot be omitted; undoubtedly widely understood postconciliar monastic law also remains a specific collection of the canon law. The article discusses the aspect of an eventual possibility of changing the retirement age of the parish priest by a legislator, mainly by pointing out how to interpret the canons of the binding Code properly. This aspect is examined not unilaterally but in relation to two issues, i.e. regarding canonical marriage process and abovementioned matter concerning the eventual possibility of changing the retirement age of the parish priest. This is a short scientific reflection on the subject of interpretation of the norms of the Code, without critical reference to particular judicial as well as administrative and legal practice.

Hitler, Mussolini, and the Vatican: Pope Pius XI and the speech that was never made

Translated by CARL IPSEN The Vatican against Nazism and Fascism on the eve of the Second World War. A tired pope watching the crisis unfold and considering what action to take against the new enemies of Christianity. Pius XI died on February 10th, 1939, just after finishing the address he hoped to deliver to the Italian bishops on the tenth anniversary of the Lateran Pact. That text dealt harshly with Nazism and Fascism and was written in solitude. It was a discourse that Mussolini feared and that the pope did not survive to deliver. This moment captures the spirit of Emma Fattorini's book, a work that employs newly available and unpublished documentation from the Vatican Secret Archive to rewrite a fundamental page of 20th history. Pius XI came to view the 1930s as a conflict of civilizations,' a crisis which could only be resolved by a return to the Christian roots of the West. He was a pope who strongly defended the Jews because, in contrast to other elements in the Catholic hierarchy, he held the theological conviction that Jews and Christians shared a common origin: spiritually we are all Semites.' So wrote Pius XI in the last years of his life as he contemplated the direction in which the world was headed and came to the conclusion that Nazi and Fascist totalitarianism could be stopped by the Vatican.

Light a Candle: Encounters and Friendship with China: Festschrift in Honor of Angelo Lazzarotto P.I.M.E. ed. by Roman Malek and Gianni Criveller (review)

Reviewed by: Light a Candle: Encounters and Friendship with China: Festschrift in Honor of Angelo Lazzarotto P.I.M.E. ed. by Roman Malek and Gianni Criveller Jeremy Clarke SJ (bio) Roman Malek and Gianni Criveller, editors. Light a Candle: Encounters and Friendship with China: Festschrift in Honor of Angelo Lazzarotto P.I.M.E. Sankt Agustin: Institut Monumenta Serica, 2010. vii + 564 pp. Hardcover €60.00, isbn 978-3-8050-0563-0. While this impressive book cannot be understood outside its church context, just like the light of a candle, its impact extends beyond this ambit. To those involved [End Page 305] in the study of Christianity in China in general, not only does Angelo Lazzarotto (of the Pontifical Institute of Milan) need no introduction but also the fact that a festschrift has been written for him is no surprise either. In some ways, a reader can wonder why it has not happened before. Thankfully, as the result of conversations at a church history conference in Hong Kong in 2007, such a work has now seen the light. Lazzarotto has been a priest and scholar for sixty-five years and for many of those years has served the church in China, either through his academic work at the Holy Spirit Study Centre of Hong Kong (of which he was a founding member), or in Europe, as a promoter of greater appreciation of China and its church situation. Much of this work occurred as a result of his various responsibilities to his missionary institute (for twelve years he was on its international leadership committee) and to the church more broadly, as the rector of a large college in Rome, and as an appointee of the Italian Bishops’ Conference as their expert on Asia. These positions enabled Lazzarotto to sponsor projects, organize conferences, and animate younger academics (both secular and confessional). One can only imagine how much more Lazzarotto could have done were he not involved in administration. Nevertheless, there is no evidence of a reduced productivity during his work, as shown by the bibliography compiled by Gianni Criveller, of the same religious institute (and coeditor with Roman Malek, a Society of the Divine Word priest and academic). Between 1950 and 2010, Lazzarotto wrote articles and book chapters as well as gave interviews in journals and newspapers throughout the world. He consistently encouraged others to reflect upon the realities of China’s Christian past, whether from a missiological, sociological, historical, or historiographical point of view. At all times, Lazzarotto’s encouragement was inspiring and beneficial. For the purposes of this review, an important question remains: Can a festchrift about such varied activities, which was deliberately designed as a celebration of one priest’s contributions, count as an academic work? In the main the answer is mixed: yes, maybe not, and does it matter? That is, while most of the articles are indeed examples of well-grounded and fascinating research, some are not, but then that’s likely because those pieces are either true instances of homage or personal reflections. Specialist readers who wish to know about aspects of Chinese Catholic Christian history or its present reality will not be disappointed by the offerings here, while the general reader has a wide range of articles and items from which to choose. An impressive aspect is the compilation’s breadth, in terms of both the years covered and the disciplinary fields of the authors. The contributing scholars (who all had met and worked with Lazzarotto) likewise come from all quarters of the globe. The articles appear in their original English, in translation, or in Chinese. [End Page 306] The book is structured into five parts: articles on traditional China, work on archival material about the history of Christianity in China, considerations of the place of the Catholic Church within modern China, two articles from a Hong Kong perspective (important, given Lazzarotto’s long involvement there), and reflections on more contemporary themes. Thus, one can find a survey and bibliography of monastic literature in China (written by Matteo Nicolini-Zani), a piece about the quest for the real Cathay (written by Paolo de Troia), an examination of the attempts to introduce Aristotelian thought to...

The Development of Rome as Metropolitan of Suburbicarian Italy. Innocent I’s Letter to the Bruttians

Innocent I (402-417) addressed Epistula 38 to two Bruttian bishops, Maximus and Severus, in response to a complaint from Maximilianus, an agens in rebus,that these southern Italian bishops had failed to take action against presbyters who fathered children contrary to the requirements of celibacy after ordination and claimed to be ignorant of any policy on this matter. Innocent reminded the two bishops that they needed to attend to their duties. This letter is among the earliest evidence for how the Roman bishop operated in practice as metropolitan of Suburbicarian (and possibly Annonarian) Italy and so this article examines the growth of Rome’s metropolitan authority and concludes from an examination of both context and content of the letter that Innocent did not refer to any formal authority,which grew over time but seems to have been limited to presiding over synods, approving the election and ordination of new bishops, and hearing appeals from deposed bishops outside his province, but was exercising a practical authority as the leading bishop of the area, which he expressed in surprised tones, to direct them to do their duty.

Inquiring into Adultery and Other Wicked Deeds: Episcopal Justice in Tenth- and Early Eleventh-Century Italy

This article suggests that Italian bishops often had recourse to spiritual penalties when exercising coercive authority over serious offences during the tenth and early eleventh centuries. Tracing the history of episcopal jurisdiction over serious offences from the ninth century, where it was supported by the Carolingian rulers, into the post-Carolingian world of the tenth and early eleventh centuries, it argues for continuity between the earlier and later periods. It thus revises the widely accepted view that episcopal interest in the use of such penalties only reemerged in the period after the Gregorian reforms as a consequence of the political marginalization of bishops created by the emergence of the communes.

Papes, princes et savants dans l’Europe moderne: Mélanges à la mémoire de Bruno Neveu (review)

Reviewed by: Papes, princes et savants dans l’Europe moderne: Mélanges à la mémoire de Bruno Neveu Daniella Kostroun Papes, princes et savants dans l’Europe moderne: Mélanges à la mémoire de Bruno Neveu. Edited by Jean-Louis QuantinJean-Claude Waquet. [École Pratique des Hautes Études, Sciences historiques et philologiques VI, Hautes Études Médiévales et Modernes, 90.] (Geneva: Librarie Droz. 2007. Pp xii, 441. $75.00 paperback. ISBN 978-2-600-01125-9.) When Jean-Louis Quantin and Jean-Claude Waquet approached Bruno Neveu in 2003 with an idea to assemble a volume of essays in his honor, they had no idea how timely their tribute would be. Neveu died the following year while on a research trip. The volume, which Neveu helped to assemble before his death, contains eighteen essays divided equally into three sections reflecting the major themes permeating his work on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France, England, and Italy: (1) the culture, exchanges, and production of knowledge among religious scholars; (2) diplomatic relations and practices of negotiation; and (3) the instruments, representations, and power of Rome and the papacy. Two introductory essays by Quantin and Waquet and a complete bibliography of Neveu’s printed works precede the core essays. Quantin’s “De l’Histoire de l’érudition [End Page 155] ecclésiastique à l’histoire de l’orthodoxie religieuse: Bruno Neveu et le catholicisme” is a bio-bibliographic essay that traces Neveu’s interests as they swung from French Jansenism and Gallican politics at Port Royal, to the study of theology—particularly problems of orthodoxy and papal infallibility—at the court of Rome. Neveu’s most current and unfinished book settled on the topic of English recusant history. For Neveu, the ecclesiology of English Catholics represented a possible synthesis, or “third way,” between the two extremes of French conciliarism and papal infallibility that he had examined in earlier works. Waquet’s essay, “Bruno Neveu: Historien des relations diplomatiques,” emphasizes Neveu’s defense of positivist historical methods in the 1960s and 1970s when French intellectuals were rejecting the importance of individual agency and authorial intent as historical frameworks. For Neveu, the diplomatic dispatches he studied provided tangible evidence of texts in which human intent and authenticity were integral to their meaning and production. The eighteen invited essays represent original research by scholars whose works intersect with Neveu’s interests in various ways. In part 1, Sylvio Hermann de Francheschi’s article “Gallicanisme, antirichérisme et reconnaissance de la romanité ecclésiale: La dispute entre le cardinal Bellarmin et le théologien parisien André Duval (1614)” explores resistance in France to the doctrine of papal infallibility. Whereas Neveu focused on the diehard resistance of those associated with Port Royal, Francheschi examines the case of André Duval, who had sought a compromise between the extremes of Gallican conciliarism and papal infallibility in the early-seventeenth century by supporting papal authority but with some concessions to the French clergy. Duval’s correspondence with Bellarmine reveals how authorities in Rome tried to manage their supporters abroad and undermined them by preventing them from straddling the gap between national and international Catholic interests. In part 2, Robert Anthony Beddard’s essay, “Queen Henrietta Maria’s Mission and the Reopening of the Catholic Chapel Royal in Restoration England,” reveals the potential of Neveu’s interests and methods to enrich other fields—in this case, women’s history. By placing Henrietta Maria at the center of his analysis, Beddard highlights the role played by dynastic marriage and female conversion in international diplomacy and negotiations in seventeenth-century Europe. Pietro Stella’s article in part 3, “Quesnel autore spirituale nell’Italia dei secoli XVIII e XIX,” considers the Italian editions of texts by Pasquier Quesnel, the French Oratorian and Jansenist whose reflections on the New Testament were famously condemned by the bull Unigenitus in 1713. The timing of Italian editions of his works and several of the adjustments made to his original texts reveal how editors tailored these translations to fit specific controversies surrounding Italian bishops. Thus, although the ideas of French Jansenists permeated Italy, their ideas passed through linguistic and political filters that made them distinctly Italian by the time they circulated...

Salvo Burci. Liber suprastella (review)

Reviewed by: Salvo Burci. Liber suprastella Andrew P. Roach Salvo Burci. Liber suprastella. Edited by Caterina Bruschi. [Fonti per la storia dell'Italia medievale.Antiquitates, 15.] (Rome: Istituto storico italiano per il Medio Evo. 2002. Pp. xxxvii, 528. €98.00 paperback.) This work, purportedly written by a layman in Piacenza in 1235 against local Cathar and Poor Lombard heretics, is well known to historians through the extracts published by Döllinger and later by Ilarino da Milano as well as the [End Page 140] small excerpt translated into English by Wakefield and Evans. An edition of the whole substantial work (it runs to 424 pages) is long overdue, and Caterina Bruschi has provided one of a very high standard. From the outset it is apparent that Liber Suprastella is not quite what we thought it was. In her introduction Bruschi challenges the idea that it was written in response to a heretical book entitled Stella ("The Star"), arguing instead that the true title was probably Asinthium or "Wormwood" referred to in the Apocalypse. Its lay origin has always made this work particularly interesting to historians, and Bruschi's archival research reveals that there was indeed a Salvo Burci from a family of Piacenzan notaries as well as a Monaco de Cario, in whose house the book was supposedly written and who may have been Burci's patron. Even so Bruschi is surely right to stress Burci's links with the Dominican friars. The abbreviated scriptural references are reminiscent of professional preaching manuals, and the reference to "fratres karissimi mei" (p. 64) hints that Burci had in mind a specific audience, perhaps of friars or a lay fraternity. Bruschi's edition enables us to identify Burci's primary concerns. Although the whole work is written as a debate with various heretical groups, especially the Poor Lombards and the Cathars known as Albanenses, much of the subject matter is the practical theological issues of pastoral care. These issues such as sanctity of marriage, oath taking, and the status of civil authority were also current within orthodox debate. Burci begins his assault on heretics by attacking their views denying the sanctity of marriage. This was particularly an issue in Italy, which was noted for its secret marriages and minimizing of ecclesiastical involvement in the process. The Fourth Lateran Council had outlawed secret unions, and Italian bishops were trying to enforce marriage as a sacrament taking place in church. The edition demonstrates that Burci's celebrated passage on Cathar belief in two principles is brief in comparison with the longest sections of the book, which are concerned with oath taking and the use of the temporal sword. The implicit threat to civic authority and economic life by a refusal to swear hovers around Burci's emphatic denunciation of the practice. Given the Italian communal context, it is perhaps expected that he would argue in favor of effective and divinely sanctioned temporal authority; however, the tone is often crisp and pragmatic: "men, that is malefactors, do not fear bishops and priests spiritually because [such] men are not spiritual" (p. 258). Instead he advocates the use of the secular powers to introduce a fear of bodily vengeance. In dealing with heresy, this is not a blueprint for inquisition procedure, but Burci is interested in a two-track approach of robust preaching against heretical doctrine and secular punishment of the obdurate. There is also evidence of the tensions between wealth and spirituality which bedeviled all spiritual movements of that century. In a careful chapter on "the good rich" Burci justifies the possession of wealth, firstly saying that the [End Page 141] rich could be saved by good works and then justifying the possession of wealth by stating that although the rich have a duty to help the poor in times of shortage, in times of abundance they are allowed to possess their riches. Dr. Bruschi is to be greatly congratulated for making available a text which will continue to offer insights into thirteenth-century Italian communal life as well as the religious dissenters of the day. Andrew P. Roach University of Glasgow Copyright © 2008 The Catholic University of America Press

Cattolicesimo e totalitarismo: Chiese e culture religiose tra le due guerre mondiali (Italia, Spagna, Francia) (review)

Cattolicesimo e totalitarianismo. Chiese e culture religiose tra le due guerre mondiali (Italia, Spagna, Francia). Edited by Daniele Menozzi and Renato Moro. (Brescia, Italy: Editrice Morcelliana. 2004. Pp. 411. euro28.00.) Daniele Menozzi, of the Scuola normale superiore di Pisa, and Renato Moro, of the Universita degli studi Roma Tre, edited this worthy volume based on research and conferences at the University of Florence and at the University of Urbino's Romolo Murri Foundation. Given the book's concentration on the Spanish, French, and Italian experience, here mainly concerns its right-wing dimensions rather than its communist one. Nor does German Nazism figure much except in discussions of Mussolini's alliance -with Hitler. Nevertheless, given the enormous volume of recent work on how the Holy see or the German Catholic Church faced Nazi racism, Cattolicesimo e totalitarianismo provides needed context and reminds us that Rome's response to interwar Latin totalitarianism was ambivalent. One question provoked by the book's title might be the choice of the word totalitarianism, a concept that touches every essay in one way or another. Among the central questions for historians of fascism are ones of definition; is fascism, for instance, or is totalitarianism? Such queries apply to this book. How totalitarian was Mussolini's state? Menozzi and Moro acknowledge difficulties with this term that, they note, the Church did not use until about 1938 (p. 374). Other concepts at work include secularization and, more important for the purposes of the book, what the Italians call statolatria or state worship .The essays in Cattolicesimo e totalitarianismo mix Catholic elements into this stew. Many of the figures dealt with here ponder the idea of a universal state, often in efforts to reconcile the Church and Mussolini's regime, recalling both pagan and the Christian Roman Empire, medieval Christendom, modern Italian nationalism, and the Duce's resurrected empire in Africa. Menozzi and Moro group the collection into three sections. The first, titled Authority, deals with the Church and the new twentieth-century false religion of statolotria. Menozzi begins with a discussion of Pius XI's 1925 encyclical, Quas primas on the social kingdom of Christ and its interpretation as either a political call to arms or as a spiritual document. Quas primas occurs in many of the following studies. The next chapter, by Giovanni Vian, samples Italian bishops for their ideas on power and authority, concepts that they preferred over anarchy and mob rule. For them, Fascism offered solace and the Lateran Accords. Alfonso Botti concludes with a study of the Spanish Church and the dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera and recalls the question here of whether or not he was, indeed, a totalitarian? Like the split over Quas primas, Botti finds diverse judgments on the regime, from (at times) suspicious Jesuits to more sympathetic Augustinians. …

A History of the Popes, 1830–1914 (review)

A History of the Popes, 1830-1914. By Owen Chadwick. [The Oxford History of the Christian Church.] (New York: Oxford University Press. 1998. Pp. x, 614. $135.00.) Following up his 1981 volume in the same series, Ropes and European Revolution, Professor Chadwick has now given us a history of the four popes from Gregory XVI to X. He devotes one chapter to each of them except IX, to whom he accords five. He emphasizes their relations with the major countries of the Continent but spends little time on Great Britain and Ireland and almost none on the rest of the world, since, as an editor's note states, the history of the Church in the British Isles and in non-European countries, including the Americas, is to be found in other volumes of the series. eight chapters on individual pontiffs contain much material about the Catholics in various countries, especially France, Italy, Germany, and Switzerland, even in affairs in which the popes did not play a major role, as well as much political history, for example concerning Cavour and Napoleon III. Under the subheading Pius X and France (p. 377) the relations between Catholics and Jews in Italy, Austria, and Poland are traced before the Dreyfus Affair and its aftermath (mainly the separation of Church and State in France) are recounted. These eight chapters the author complements with three on Nationality and Religion in Tyrol and Poland (including Ruthenians), Spain, and Portugal. He then bestows a chapter on The Religious, meaning mostly male orders or congregations. He concludes the book with three briefer chapters on Catholic universities, The Idea of Reunion, and Saints in the Modern World, including Doctors of the Church. Papal promotion of the foreign missions is not considered even though most of the missionaries were Europeans and their headquarters and seminaries were in Europe. Professor Chadwick deftly relates the history of the four conclaves. He is especially adept at painting character sketches or vignettes of well-known persons such as Lamennais, Felix Dupanloup, Louis Veuillot, and Wilhelm Emmanuel von Ketteler, and of lesser-known persons such as several Italian bishops, Enrico Campello, Ignacy Holowinski, Umberto Benigni, and Antonio Maria Claret, who appears a second time in the chapter on saints. His treatment of particular topics such as the Syllabus of Errors and the First Vatican Council, though necessarily brief, are excellent. Throughout the book the author skillfully interweaves the secular history with the religious history of the countries he studies. …

The Social and Regional Origins of the Henrician Episcopacy

Individual Henrician bishops are well known, but our knowledge of the bishops as an ecclesiastical elite is less cultivated. This article addresses the latter deficiency. It provides a new perspective on the Henricians and develops a comparative aspect in order to better contextualize them, and it shows them to be a social microcosm of early modern English society. This was done three ways: first, by undertaking a detailed analysis of their social and regional origins; second, by comparing the resulting data with the results of similar examinations of contemporary Italian, Scots, French, and Spanish bishops and with medieval English bishops; and third, the data were compared with statistics regarding the social, economic, and political nation as a whole. The article's findings demonstrate that the elite status achieved by Henricians was not attributable to their ascribed status, and that the Henrician bishops were ideally suited to the society they represented.

Pope Pius XI's "Encyclical" Humani Generis Unitas Against Racism and Anti-Semitism and the "Silence" of Pope Pius XII

In June 1938, the eighty-one-year-old Achille Ratti, who had served as Pope Pius XI since 1922, exasperated by the exaggerated nationalism and racism of Nazi Germany, commissioned an encyclical condemning these moral evils. Quickly drawn up by three Jesuit priests, and translated into Latin by another, it was presented to Vladi mir Ledochowski, the General of their Order, at the end of September 1938.1 Pius XI died the evening of 9-10 February 1939. The draft of the encyclical denouncing racism, together with the address he planned to present to the Italian bishops on the tenth anniversary of the Lateran Accords, were found on his desk.2 His secretary of state and chief collaborator Eugenio Pacelli, who became Pope Pius XII on 2 March 1939, decided to shelve both. Did the condemnation of ra cism and antisemitism in Humani Generis Unitas (The Unity of the Human Race) reflect the thought of Pius XI? Did it similarly reflect the sentiments of Pius XII? If so, why did Pope Pius XII refuse to

La Bibbia al rogo. La censura ecclesiastica e i volgarizzamenti della Scrittura (1471-1605) by Gigliola Fragnito

La Bibbia al rogo. La censura ecclesiastica e i volgarizzamenti delta Scrittura (1471-1605). By Gigliola Fragnito. (Bologna: Il Mulino. 1997. Pp. 345. Lire 38.000.) Italian bishops proclaimed 1997 the year of the and enjoined their flocks to read the Scriptures with fervor. They expressed their unease at the fact that the Bible, although widely diffused in Italy, was probably among the least read books. Their proclamation followed Pope John Paul II's call to all Christians in his pastoral letter Tertio millennio adveniente to turn with renewed interest to the Bible. The appearance of Professor Fragnito's book coincidentally with these efforts to deepen the knowledge of biblical texts among Catholics is nothing short of ironic. She tells a complex story which shows why and how this knowledge disappeared among the Italian people in the sixteenth century, never to return to the mainstream of their culture. This book quite literally opens a new stage in scholarship. Professor Fragnito is one of the very few who were given permission to use the archives of the former Holy Office (or Inquisition), inaccessible to most scholars before its very recent opening celebrated on January 22, 1998. Her work is based on hitherto unknown material and brings an entirely new perspective on vexed and muchdebated questions. In her opening chapter the author has assembled information showing the ready availability of vernacular Scriptures during the first half of the sixteenth century, whether editions of the Old and New Testaments, the Gospels, or the Epistles. The first printed Italian translation of the Bible by Nicolo Malerbi appeared in Venice in 1471, to be followed by other translations in many editions. A wealth of devotional works based on biblical texts like the Fioretti della Bibbia were printed as well. Italy was a country where reading the vernacular Bible was common and widespread among individuals, in families, confraternities, convents, and monasteries. The increased interest in reading the Scriptures in the wake of the Reformation led ecclesiastical authorities to mistrust the owners of vernacular Bibles. Reading the word of God in one's own language became suspect or linked with heresy. The author points out that this was true not only in Italy, but that political authorities in England, France, or Spain made the same connection between reading the Bible and heresy. However, in Italy the enforcement of the prohibition lay not so much with the state as with the Inquisition, reorganized and made into an effective organ of the papacy in 1542. The central part of the book is devoted to a discussion of the various Indexes from that of Paul IV in 1559 to the Clementine Index of 1596, and their provisions regulating the printing and/or reading of vernacular Bibles. Using the newly accessible documentation with exemplary expertise, the author shows the profound differences which existed during these years at the highest levels of the Church concerning the reading of the word of God by the common people. Popes, masters of the Sacred Palace, the Congregations of the Index and of the Inquisition, cardinals and bishops disagreed among themselves. The Index of 1559 flatly forbade both reading and printing the Bible, putting control over enforcement into the hands of inquisitors. However, the Tridentine Index of 1564, drawn up by a commission of more sympathetic bishops, mitigated these prohibitions. Soon afterward, in 1567, the last vernacular Bible until 1773 was printed in Italy. With the establishment of the Congregation of the Index in 1571 a new office entered the picture. One of the most surprising aspects of this book is its presentation of the ongoing conflict between this new congregation and the Inquisition. The latter defended its turf, aimed at control over all literary and religious works, and wanted to nullify the role of bishops in the censorship of books. The former, while generally not more lenient, was sensitive to encroachments of its jurisdiction by the Inquisition and more ready to co-operate with bishops. …

The Administration of the Diocese of Worcester Under the Italian Bishops, 1497-1535

The Administration of the Diocese of Worcester Under the Italian Bishops, 1497-1535

Henry II's Italian Bishops: A Study in the Use and Abuse of the Concordat of Bologna

Henry II's Italian Bishops: A Study in the Use and Abuse of the Concordat of Bologna