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  • Giuseppe Dossetti: La fede e la storia. Studi nel decennale della morte
  • Roy Domenico
Giuseppe Dossetti: La fede e la storia. Studi nel decennale della morte. Edited by Alberto Melloni. [Istituto per le scienze religiose–Bologna. Testi e richerche di scienze religiose, Nuova serie, 39.] (Bologna: Società editrice il Mulino. 2007. Pp. 415. €29,00 paperback. ISBN 978-8-815-12069-4.)

This book presents the fruit of meetings held in 2006, the tenth anniversary of Giuseppe Dossetti's death. Bologna's respected Fondazione per le scienze religiose Giovanni XXIII, which he launched, hosted the conferences. Dossetti (1913–96) was a key figure in postwar Italian Catholic politics and might be considered a founding father of the republic. The product of Milan's Catholic University, he eventually taught there, acquiring a reputation as a progressive and as one of the professorini ("little professors"), a like-minded group that included Giuseppe Lazzati (who became the rector of the university), Giorgio LaPira (the mayor of Florence), and Amintore Fanfani (Italy's five-time prime minister). During World War II, Dossetti stood among the most important Catholics in the antifascist resistance, and he then worked as one of the key Christian Democrats (of the Democrazia Cristiana, or DC) who drafted Italy's new constitution. His views on land reform and opposition to adherence to NATO, however, led to a rift with the DC leadership, beginning with Alcide DeGasperi and extending, as Paolo Pombeni notes in his chapter, to rather nasty polemics with Giulio Andreotti. These fights ended his status in the party by the early 1950s. Still, in 1956 he was persuaded to run in what turned out to be an unsuccessful campaign to unseat Bologna's popular communist mayor, Giuseppe Dozza. Dossetti "retired" from politics and entered the priesthood, serving at the Second Vatican Council and establishing a religious community in the Middle East.

Dossetti was a figure who collected groups of passionate followers and bitter enemies, and, although this book displays an admirable scholarship, the contributors clearly identify themselves more with the former than with the latter. Many of them, such as Romano and Paolo Prodi, knew him well. Romano, the former prime minister, begins the work with a remembrance, and his brother adds an essay on "Law and History" in Dossetti's thought and works. As editor, Alberto Melloni grouped that essay and the others into three [End Page 170] sections: nodi (cruxes), tappe (stages), and frammenti (fragments). The pieces are somewhat scattered, and the whole work should not be considered a comprehensive study of Dossetti's life. The Resistance and the constituent debates, for instance, receive much attention, while less is accorded to the arguments over NATO.

As ably portrayed in these chapters, however, Dossetti's life evokes feelings of both hope and the tragedy of lost opportunities. Giuseppe Ruggieri's piece on Dossetti's "Christian life," for example, emphasizes the weight of community in his thinking, a concept also present in Giancarlo Mori's discussion of his anxiety that Italy not be split into clerical and anticlerical camps. Community, rather, clearly determined his hopes for Catholic participation in the Resistance. But that struggle posed difficult choices for many of the faithful; not all of whom rallied to the cause as he did. Dossetti's work at the Constituent Assembly also illustrates these themes. In his study on "The Defense and Development of the Constitution," Umberto Allegretti writes that Dossetti considered the document "an ethical-philosophical reality, a great juridical-political foundation, (and) the fruit of a historical event" (p. 145). His effort to include an article on the right and duty of citizens to resist unjust rulers, however, was ill fated. Nevertheless, Dossetti always defended the finished product, and, when the whole Italian system appeared to unravel in the 1990s, he surfaced to defend it. Allegretti presents, finally, an image that cannot fail to make an impression on any reader. During his last illness in mid-December 1996, Giuseppe Dossetti, semi-paralyzed, continued to work from his hospital bed to save the constitution. In that last fight, at least, he ended on the winning side.

Roy Domenico
The University of Scranton

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