Lezioni di storia ecclesiastica. Il medioevo by Ernesti Buonaiuti (review)

Francesco Mores of the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa has edited in this book the dispense or class notes of a course on medieval church history offered in the 1905-06 academic year at the Pontifical Roman Seminary. The course's professor was the twenty-five-year-old Ernesto Buonaiuti, a priest of the Diocese of Rome. The course's content is interesting, detailed, grounded in primary sources, but not particularly extraordinary. Judged from our contemporary perspective, it reveals the usual Western focus of church history, ignore the roles of women in the period, and betray a prejudice against and a superficial knowledge of Islam. They form the basis for a slightly revised version that Buonaiuti published in 1914. As such, these dispense do not deserve to be published. Their significance, however, comes not from their content, but from the identity of the author and from the circumstances surrounding their recent discovery.

In 1906 Buonaiuti was attacked in La Civiltà Cattolica because of an article he had written on Maurice Blondel. He was subsequently dismissed from his position at the Roman Seminary and was one of the most prominent Italians who, after 1907, were called "modernists." In the wake of the modernist crisis he was both laicized and excommunicated. He died in 1946.

Francesco Mores, in doing research in 2008 on an introductory chapter to writings by the young Angelo Roncalli, the future Pope John XXIII, discovered a reference to Roncalli's order in 1906 of a copy of Buonaiuti's dispense, most likely to assist him in his lectures in church history at the Bergamo seminary. Roncalli and Buonaiuti had been fellow students at the Roman Seminary—at least for a short time—and had even been roommates. Mores could not locate the work among Roncalli's papers, but he eventually discovered it as one of two works donated by Geremia Pacchiani to the public library in Bergamo, in a collection now located in the room dedicated to John XXIII. Pacchiani was Roncalli's successor as professor of church history when Roncalli became the seminary's spiritual director in 1919. Written on the frontispiece of one of the two sets of dispense was "Don Angelo Roncalli a don Pacchiani" (p. 35). Mores suggests that Roncalli's use of the work for his own lectures and conveyance of it to his successor can be interpreted as a sign of Roncalli's intellectual openness—he continued to use what he considered an intellectually valuable source, even when Buonaiuti had been dismissed from his position.

Any positive connection between Roncalli and Buonaiuti, Mores reports, was definitely played down during the process leading toward the beatification of John XXIII, when Roncalli's connections to modernism were continually being probed. Witnesses during the process denied that Roncalli had ever attended any of Buonaiuti's lectures. According to these individuals, if Buonaiuti had given Roncalli books to read, the future pope stopped reading them when he found something objectionable. If he did go on walks with Buonaiuti, it was only at the order of the superiors or to try to persuade Buonaiuti to be less excessive in his thinking. After reading John's dossier in 1977, Pope Paul VI wrote in the margin: "Sta bene: cresce la stima per papa Giovanni e la pietà per Buonaiuti" (Fine. Esteem for Pope John is growing as well as compassion for Buonaiuti, p. 59.)

The importance of this book lies more in its fifty-six-page introduction than in the work it introduces. The introduction is a fascinating story of a surprising discovery that perhaps adds one more detail to what we know about John XXIII, pope and saint.