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5. Pietro Ballerini
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Pietro Ballerini ‒ AVery RigorousTheologian Pietro Ballerini, a priest of the diocese of Verona, produced many works of erudition, particularly in collaboration with his brother Girolamo.1 Their father was a professor of surgery at the University of Verona. Very little is recorded of their youth other than they attended a local Jesuit school and then the diocesan seminary. Pietro, the older of the two by several years, was ordained priest for the diocese in . He began teaching Christian doctrine and literature and this stimulated interests that led to his first book, which he intended to introduce students to St. Augustine, Il metodo di S. Agostino negli studi (). Over several years he devoted much attention to moral theology , in which area he soon became known for great rigorism and relentless opposition to any ideas that might encourage moral laxity.Though educated by Jesuits in his youth, he strongly opposed the probabilism associated especially with Jesuits, considering it really tantamount to . Biographical information on Ballerini is given byTarcisio Facchini in his Il papato principio di unità e Pietro Ballerini di Verona: Dal concetto di unità ecclesiastica al concetto di monarchia infallibile (Padua: Il Messagero di S. Antonio, ), –. laxism. One of his books was a very critical history of probabilism. During a controversy over usury, he wrote a book strongly reasserting the Church’s traditional rejection of any taking of interest on a loan, a position that Pope Benedict XIV affirmed in his encyclical of , Vix pervenit. Impressed by Ballerini’s intelligence and learning, this pope asked him to produce a new and definitive edition of the works of Pope Leo I.The Ballerini brothers accepted this ambitious project and their edition of Leo’s works (published – ) was highly regarded and later incorporated by Jacques-Paul Migne in the Patrologia latina.2 Besides his publications Ballerini was entrusted with several significant tasks by Church leaders in Rome, Verona,Venice, and elsewhere. Ballerini was generally respected for his religious and moral integrity, an integrity that he sometimes took to extremes. Some contemporaries of his said that because of his very strict sense of morals,“he could not bear the burdensome task he had undertaken to hear confessions; he was afraid he might compromise his conscience.”This seemingly means that he feared that he might tempted to leniency if he listened to people’s personal stories.3 Despite the rigorism of his moral views, he was by all accounts a mild, courteous man in his personal manner who tried to avoid polemical language when discussing controversial topics. Pietro Ballerini wrote two major treatises on papal authority: De vi ac ratione primatus romanorum pontificum, et de ipsorum infallibilitate in definiendis controversiis fidei (Verona, ) and De potestate ecclesiastica summorum pontificum et conciliorum generalium (Verona, ). Of these, De vi ac ratione most expressly represents his determination to produce “un opera sistematica contro le teorie gallicane.”4 Systematic it Pietro Ballerini . See A. de Meyer,“Ballerini, Girolamo et Pietro,” DHGE, :. . Facchini, Il papato principio di unità, , citing an early-nineteenth-century source, Luigi Federici, Elogi storici de’ piu illustri ecclesiastici veronesi (Verona: Ramanzini, ), :. .The phrase is Facchini’s (Il papato principio di unità, ). Regarding this motivation , Facchini (–) draws on letters and other personal papers of Ballerini. He does not, incidentally, cite here or elsewhere any works by or about any Gallican authors , and mentions Gallican authors only once, in passing, on . [44.200.23.133] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 10:26 GMT) definitely is, and Giuseppe Alberigo aptly attributes much of Ballerini ’s influence on later authors to the rigorously methodical way in which he crafts the formulae that became “practically definitive” on papal supremacy and infallibility.5 This influence can readily be traced in Pastor Aeternus itself, asTarcisio Facchini in particular has shown in great detail, both by citing terms and phrases in the council document and by noting how some of the council fathers cited Ballerini by name in the council discussions.6 Hermann Pottmeyer calls Ballerini a “key figure” in the campaign against Gallicanism in the eighteenth century and says that his great influence clearly extends up to the FirstVatican Council.7 An important cardinal, Giuseppe Garampi, nuncio (–) to Poland and then to Austria, was one special promoter of Ballerini’s books on papal authority.He led a network of people across Europe dedicated to the cause of Ultramontanism and he considered Ballerini’s works the best of the many that he sent to these people.8 Candido da Remanzacco justifiably comments that the banner...