Giuseppe Dossetti e le Officine bolognesi by Paolo Prodi (review)

Paolo Prodi died on December 16, 2016, at the age of eighty-four. He taught modern history, focusing mainly on the Counter-Reformation era, at universities in Italy and abroad and served as rector of the University of Trent. He also served as a deputy in the Italian Parliament’s eleventh legislature in the 1990s and was widely known beyond academia as the brother of Prime Minister Romano Prodi. Giuseppe Dossetti e le Officine bolognesi is something of a memoir or perhaps a personal history of a place and an era, Bologna, particularly scholarly Bologna, in the 1950s and 1960s, and heavily influenced by a man, Giuseppe Dossetti, the Christian Democratic politician-turned-priest. Prodi will not, he declares, engineer a “general reconstruction,” but rather only provide “a few plugs” to the story (p. 98).

Prodi delivers a personal story about his scholarly development in postwar Italy, where he struggled to develop a viable dissertation subject and negotiate that decision with his supervisors, particularly Hubert Jedin and Delio Cantimori. Prodi needed to justify his choice of Reformation-era Italy, focusing on the diocese of Bologna. Most graduate students should recognize and appreciate this saga. Prodi weaves his personal account into politics and the foundation of what is now known as the John XXIII Foundation for Religious Studies. From its start in the early 1950s the institution reflected the personality of its founder, Dossetti, a scholar, World War II Resistance leader, Catholic politician, and, later, priest. Would this “workshop” (officina), called initially the Center for Documentation (Centro di documentazione), be a place of scholarship or one of prayer and reflection? To what extent would it be connected to the University of Bologna? Prodi attributes the spring of 1955 as the beginning of major changes at the Center. In May Bologna’s archbishop, Cardinal Giacomo Lercaro, pushed Dossetti to launch a bid in upcoming communal elections, hoping to get a Christian Democrat on the city council and challenging the city’s popular Communist mayor, Giuseppe Dozza. Dossetti reluctantly acquiesced, an act of submission that Prodi bitterly condemns as “contrary to the freedom of the Christian layman” (p. 65). Predictably, when the elections occurred the following year Dossetti lost and he eventually abandoned politics and entered the priesthood, distancing himself more and more from the institute that he founded. Others, such as the historian Giuseppe Alberigo took up most of the task of running it. Prodi continues the story through the Second Vatican Council, which he remembers as an “adventure” and the most exciting time in the Center’s history. For young scholars it opened new terrain for study, particularly in the areas of Scripture and religious history. By the end of the Council, furthermore, Dossetti had returned to the field, and the organization morphed into the Center for Documentation – Institute for Religious Sciences. Although the Second Vatican Council ultimately disappointed Dossetti and Prodi, the subsequent years witnessed impressive scholastic accomplishments until 1972 which Prodi considers to have been the “apex” of the institute’s influence. The narrative largely ends at that point although Prodi goes on to conclude with a section devoted to passages from Dossetti or about him.