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  • Converting a Nation: A Modern Inquisition and the Unification of Italy
  • Richard Drake
Converting a Nation: A Modern Inquisition and the Unification of Italy. By Ariella Lang. [Studies in European Culture and History.] (New York: Palgrave. 2008. Pp. x, 237. $79.95. ISBN 978-0-230-60672-2.)

In The Old Régime and the French Revolution, Alexis de Tocqueville commented extensively on the failure of Catholic intellectuals to defend the Church during the eighteenth century. Fierce, intolerant, and predatory philosophers of that period, as he characterized them, attacked the Church without effective hindrance. For the radical littérateurs on the eve of the French Revolution, “the Church represented the most vulnerable and least [End Page 369] defended side of the vast fortress they were attacking.”1 The Church suffered a prolonged battering during this era and emerged from it greatly weakened.

No less than Tocqueville does Ariella Lang view the French Revolution as a turning point in the modern history of the Church. She is the anti-Tocqueville, however, in one crucial respect. “When I began my study of the old régime,” he declared in the plenitude of his nineteenth-century liberalism, “I was full of prejudices against our clergy; when I ended it, full of respect for them” (p. 114). Lang finds virtually nothing of a redeeming nature in any part of the Church’s record that she examines.

Occasionally a decent Catholic does appear in these pages. She has some words of measured praise for Ercole Consalvi and the Abbé André-Vincent Delacouture. She honors Consalvi, Pope Pius VII’s embattled secretary of state, for a noble attempt, utter failure though it was, to stem the tide of Catholic reaction in the post-Napoleonic period. Delacouture, a French priest, had the courage to criticize Pope Pius IX in the Edgardo Mortara affair regarding a baptized Jewish boy who, in the 1850s, was separated from his parents by the Church and raised in the Catholic faith. Such exceptions serve only to highlight the moral, intellectual, and political failure of the institution as a whole. She puts her case against the Church plainly in the introduction: “Through its ruling, reasoning, and rhetoric, the Vatican played a central role in shaping attitudes that encouraged religious intolerance...” (p. 5). A morally degraded Catholic Church would have a blighting effect on the history of modern Italy, she laments.

Lang’s critique of the nineteenth-century Church consists of three parts. First, she describes two trials involving the rejection by Jews of their conversions to Catholicism. In so doing, the defendants had violated the law in the Papal States. She attaches high historical importance to these trials, for they “provide a new framework within which to understand the position that the Vatican held with regard to the Jews in the nineteenth century” (p. 16). Obsessed with the Jews as intractable aliens inside the Papal States, the Church viewed conversion as a force “propelling Catholicism forward as a national identification for inhabitants of the Italian peninsula” (p. 33). She presents a convincing case in her analysis of the two trials that the Church made some heartless decisions. More questionable are the world–historical-sounding claims that she puts forward for the unique importance of the Catholic conversion phenomenon following the Congress of Vienna. From New Testament times, all Christian religions have stressed the importance of gaining new converts. The Catholic practices of the nineteenth century that she describes did not constitute a dramatic departure in principle from the institution’s historical norms. [End Page 370]

Second, Lang analyzes two Catholic novels of the period for what they reveal about the Church’s interest in converting Jews: Alessandro Manzoni’s I promessi sposi (Milan, 1825–27) and Antonio Bresciani’s L’ebreo di Verona (Milan, 1855). Her analysis of the Manzoni novel has to be supplemented with references to his poetry, as well as to Jews he knew and converted in real life. She seeks to scale down his reputation as a liberal, granting the applicability of this label to his political views, but not to his religious beliefs. Inni sacri, in particular, “exemplifies the Pauline influence on Manzoni’s work in...

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