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Coda: Savonarola’s Reformation Fails
- University of Notre Dame Press
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CODA Savonarola’s Reformation Fails In this volume we have seen Protestants celebrating the triumph of the Reformation while warning against the ever-present possibility of its present-day failure, and Catholics arguing that failure lurked at the heart of the Reformation project from its very beginning. I want to conclude with Protestant attempts in the second half of the century to wrestle with a nation whose history appeared to contradict narratives about the inevitability of religious reform—a nation that, in fact, had successfully resisted the Reformation and its call for a return to “pure” scriptural religion. This time, the nation wasn’t Ireland (itself the site of “second Reformation” evangelization earlier in the century). It was Italy. In his influential History of the Progress and Suppression of the Reformation in Italy during the Sixteenth Century, first published in 1827 and reprinted frequently over the next several decades, Thomas M’Crie the Elder argued of the Inquisition that “[t]he ease with which it was introduced into Italy, showed that, whatever illumination there was among the Italians, and however desirous they might be to share in those blessings which other nations had secured to themselves, they were destitute of that public spirit and energy of principle which would have enabled them to shake off the degrading yoke by which they were 203 oppressed.”1 In this reading the Italians were doomed by national character to constantly embrace their own subjugation to the papal yoke. Any attempted Reformation would necessarily rot from within, barring some sea change to the population’s nature. Was it truly possible that Italy could refuse Protestantism with that much determination? As we have seen over and over again, many Protestants saw the Reformation as a crucial phase in the battle between Christ and Antichrist , and successive historical events were but one more part of this cosmological battle. British missionaries were conducting active campaigns across Italy from the early 1860s onward.2 The 1860s were the years in which British Protestants began to wonder if, after all, the Italians were not quite so unregenerate as they had initially appeared. This renewed interest in the possibility of another try at an Italian Reformation was sparked by the Risorgimento, the political and cultural movement to unify the disparate Italian states under a single national banner. Because the nationalist program ultimately required the pope to relinquish the use of his temporal powers, Protestants regarded it as a positive sign of Protestant rebirth—not realizing, of course, that anticlericalism and Roman Catholicism could still go hand in hand. The great heroes of the Risorgimento, like Garibaldi and Mazzini, were feted during their visits to or exiles in England, even if some of their political projects—like Mazzini’s republicanism—garnered less enthusiasm.3 As C.T. McIntire points out, the British government found itself supporting the antipapal nationalists because “English concerns in commerce , finance, industry, naval affairs, social class, the church and religion all easily conjoined to promote the moral and material progress of Italy and to overcome the moral and material contagion of the papacy .”4 Protestant authors were eager to seize on the nationalist uprisings in order to revisit the possibility that success might emerge, after all, from the ashes of prior failures and to construct newly successful narratives from the rubble of the Italian Reformation’s beginnings. They did not, however, always succeed. Protestants had been interested in the Risorgimento’s religious implications from the beginning. Although Pope Pius IX initially professed tepid support for the nationalists, which was misread as enthu204 | Victorian Reformations [44.210.237.223] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 10:27 GMT) siasm both inside and outside Italy,5 he decried them once they sought to move against the Austrians in 1848. As a result, both the nationalists and their international supporters adopted an anticlerical rhetoric that frequently escalated into full-blown anti-Catholicism, while the Jesuits attacked the nationalists for being fundamentally Protestant.6 In Britain such views were encouraged by Italian exiles like Ferdinando Dal Pozzo and Ugo Foscolo, whose English-language political writings often shared conventional British attitudes to Catholicism’s socioeconomic effects.7 British and American observers argued that Italian nationalists were rapidly trending toward Protestantism and were therefore worth supporting for theological as well as political reasons .8 Nevertheless, the more cautious among them questioned the extent to which the Catholic countryside was really willing to divest itself of its loyalty to both Catholicism and the pope...