Rosmini: Conoscere e credere, Storia della Causa (review)

Claudio Massimiliano Papa is the postulator of the Institute of Charity and has guided the cause for the beatification of Antonio Rosmini, its founder. Papa’s study, Rosmini: Conoscere e credere, Storia della Causa (Rosmini: To Know and Believe, History of the Cause), traces Rosmini’s life and concludes with a history of the labors toward his beatification, efforts that saw a successful conclusion at Novara in November 2007.

Papa ably recounts Rosmini’s extraordinary literary and scholarly production and his work toward the establishment of the Institute of Charity. Rosmini is clearly the hero of the study, and this is understandable considering its origin. Nonetheless, Papa’s investigation is well grounded in archival evidence and rigor; and perhaps the author may be forgiven for a little exuberance. Perhaps the group at Rosmini House in Durham, which has done so much to translate Rosmini’s works into English, will consider Papa’s contribution. Geography figures prominently in the story of Rosmini. He spent much of his youth in what was, the Napoleonic interlude notwithstanding, the Austrian Empire—in his home, the provincial city of Rovereto, and in Milan. He later was active in Piedmont, particularly in the area around Domodossola, where he founded his Institute of Charity and the Sisters of Providence. By the time of his first visit to Rome, in 1823, Rosmini had acquired a reputation as a scholar; so much so that no less a figure than Pope Pius VII met the young priest and encouraged him. He was, therefore, a prominent figure on the stage of the Italian Risorgimento, and Papa devotes a great deal of attention to Rosmini’s friendships with such key figures in the movement as Alessandro Manzoni and Niccolò Tommaseo. Piedmont’s King Carlo Alberto, furthermore, cultivated Rosmini and secured for him and the institute the spectacular but abandoned Benedictine abbey of Sacra San Michele. Papa’s narrative takes a dramatic turn with the outbreak of the Roman revolution in 1848 where Rosmini found himself in negotiations for a concordat between Piedmont and the Holy See. Amid the chaos, he discovered that he had been designated the new minister of education (Istruzione). Soon after, Pius IX fled the city to the coastal port of Gaeta but asked that Rosmini accompany him to consult on the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. By then, however, long-standing quarrels over Rosmini had come to a head. A party—Papa uses the term reactionaries—had opposed Rosmini since at least Pope Gregory XVI’s approval of the Institute of Charity in 1839, and the pope soon felt obliged to impose a “silence” on both factions. Still, the Austrians resented Rosmini’s criticisms of Josephism and had censured his works in their territories. Later, when he accompanied Pius to Gaeta, Rosmini faced, as Papa writes, “perhaps the bitterest days of his life” (p. 161). Cardinal Giacomo Antonelli urged the pontiff to expel him, launch an investigation of his works, and place two of them on the Index of Prohibited Books: The Five Wounds of the Church and The Constitution of Social Justice, both of which advocated popular and clerical election of bishops (p. 163). Rosmini submitted to the papal decision and endured about five years of “insulting libels” and insinuations from many sides, from Italian Jesuits to the French publication, L’Univers, which linked him to Jansenism. Even Cardinal Wiseman hindered the establishment of the institute in England. In 1854, however, the Congregation of the Index decided that the censorship was unwarranted and absolved Rosmini. Almost 150 years later, in 2001, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger declared in a nota his complete rehabilitation and cleared the final steps for beatification, which, fittingly, was pronounced during the pontificate of Benedict XVI. At the end of June 1855 Rosmini passed his last days, often with Manzoni, at Stresa on Lake Maggiore where today the International Center of Rosminian Studies operates. Piedmont’s Prime Minister Cavour announced the death...