Ernesto Buonaiuti

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Ernesto Buonaiuti (June 25, 1881

modernist
current.

Life

Buonaiuti was born in

Sacred
Congregation of Apostolic Visitation.

He founded the magazine Rivista storico-critica delle scienze teologiche[1] ("Historical-critical Review of the Theological Sciences"), and was its director from 1905 to 1910.[1] After that he directed the magazine Ricerche religiose ("Religious Researches"). Those magazines were soon banned by the church and placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the index of publications to be considered as forbidden to Catholic readers.

On January 25, 1925, he was

modernism,[2]
particularly in Il programma dei modernisti ("The Modernists' Program", 1908) and Lettere di un prete modernista ("Letters from a Modernist Priest", 1908).

From 1925 he was Professor of History of Christianity at the

Concordat
in 1929, the university forbade him to teach and to examine students, and he was given non-academic tasks, such as library investigation and the writing of research papers. In 1931 his university chair was definitively revoked, because he refused to swear the "oath of loyalty" to Fascism (all teachers were forced by law to swear an oath of loyalty to the Fascist government, and those who refused were fired).

In his autobiography Il pellegrino di Roma ("The Pilgrim from Rome", 1945), Buonaiuti reconstructed the history of his conflict with the Catholic Church, of which he continued to claim himself a "loyal son", even after his excommunication.

In 1945, after the Allied victory in the

Second World War he was restored to his rank of university professor, but he was not allowed to give lectures, since, according to the bureaucracy
and the laws resulting from the Concordat, which were retained by the new government, teaching in any Italian State University was forbidden to any excommunicated priest.

He died on April 20, 1946, in Rome.

He was honoured as

Righteous among the nations (n°12380) in 2012 for hiding Jews in German/fascist controlled Rome, while isolated by excommunication.[3]

Works

The complete works of Buonaiuti are very extensive: he wrote more than three thousand works, including books and articles, among them the ponderous Storia del Cristianesimo ("History of Christianity") in three volumes, his autobiography (Il pellegrino di Roma) and many studies about

Gioacchino da Fiore (Gioacchino da Fiore: i tempi, la vita, il messaggio) and Martin Luther
(Lutero e la riforma in Germania).

Storia del Cristianesimo

The three books of Storia del Cristianesimo were published between 1942 and 1943; the first volume is about ancient times, the second is about the Middle Ages and the third is about the modern era. It is considered Buonaiuti's most significant academic work. As he himself wrote in his autobiography of 1945, the work was motivated by apologetic reasons: "in order to draw up the definitive balance-sheet of Christian action in history, now that from a thousand signs one could easily and certainly deduce that Christianity was approaching its hour of dramatic expiration".

The main theme of the work revolves around the mystic and moral character of Christianity and its subsequent transformation into a philosofico-theological system and a bureaucratic organization. In Buonaiuti's view, the main religions are not speculative views of the world or rational schematizations of reality, but normative indications of a set of pre-rational and spiritual behaviours. Christianity, born as an announcement of palingenesis, implied a huge social program "which imposed a progressive conceptual enrichment and an increasingly rigid disciplinary organization. To live and bear fruit in the world, Christianity was condemned to lose its nature and degenerate" (Storia del cristianesimo, I, p. 15 and seq.). The only chance of salvation for the Church and all of modern society is, in Buonaiuti's view, the restoration of the elementary values of primitive Christianity: love, pain, regret, death.

Il Pellegrino di Roma (also La generazione dell'esodo)

The title of this autobiographical work, published in

Calvinist Church
.

Buonaiuti and John XXIII

Buonaiuti was an exact contemporary in Rome with Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, who was elected to the papacy as

John XXIII in 1958. According to Roncalli's biographer Peter Hebblethwaite the two men were initially close friends, and this connection may have played a part in the future pope's abrupt removal from a seminary post early in his career,[4] as well as in the "Suspected of Modernism" entry which was made against Roncalli's name in his official record in the Vatican archives, something he would later refute by inserting, in his own hand "I, Pope John XXIII, have never been a Modernist".[5]

Portrayal in film

The Good Pope has a character called Nicola Catania who is loosely based on Buonaiuti, although a certain amount of licence is employed. The movie has Catania, a priest deposed for Modernism, keeping vigil in St. Peter's Square
as John XXIII, who had been his friend in the seminary lies dying. In actuality, Buonaiuti died in 1946 and Roncalli in 1963.

See also

References

  1. ^ a b c "Buonaiuti, Reverend Ernesto", The Catholic Encyclopedia and Its Makers, New York, the Encyclopedia Press, 1917, p. 21Public Domain This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain.
  2. ISBN 9783110584356
  3. ^ https://www.yadvashem.org/yv/pdf-drupal/italy.pdf [bare URL PDF]
  4. ISBN 0-225-66419-4
    Revised edition Fount Paperbacks, 1994. Abridged edition Continuum, 2000.
  5. ^ Elliott, L, 1973, I Will be Called John, London, Collins.
  • Domenico Grasso: Il cristianesimo di Ernesto Buonaiuti, Morcelliana, Brescia 1953.
  • Lorenzo Tedeschi: Buonaiuti il concordato e la chiesa: con un'appendice di lettere inedite,
    Il Saggiatore
    1970.
  • Fausto Parente: Ernesto Buonaiuti, Rome, Istituto della enciclopedia italiana 1971.
  • Max Ascoli: Ernesto Bonaiuti, Naples, Arte tipografica 1975.
  • Ambrogio Donini: Ernesto Buonaiuti e il modernismo, Bari, Cressati 1961.
  • Annibale Zambarbieri: Il cattolicesimo tra crisi e rinnovamento: Ernesto Buonaiuti ed Enrico Rosa nella prima fase della polemica modernista, Brescia, Morcelliana 1979.
  • Valdo Vinay: Ernesto Buonaiuti e l'Italia religiosa del suo tempo, Torre Pellice, Claudiana 1956.
  • Enrico Lepri: Il pensiero religioso di Ernesto Buonaiuti, Rome, Libreria Tropea 1969.
  • Liliana Scalero: Colui che vaga laggiù: una biografia di Buonaiuti, Parma, Guanda 1970.
  • Giorgio Levi Della Vida, Fantasmi ritrovati, Naples, Ricciardi.
  • Claud Nelson and Norman Pittenger: "Pilgrim of Rome. An introduction to the life and work of Ernesto Buonaiuti." Herts., UK: James Nisbet and Co., Ltd., 1969.

External links

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