Catholicism and the Risorgimento

Written by Kalki

A historically erroneous conviction is cultivated nowadays both by extreme secularists and by ultramontane Catholics, according to which the unification of Italy took place against Catholicism.

In reality the great Catholic historian Carlo Arturo Jemolo – regarded practically unanimously as the leading scholar on the relationship between the State and the Church in the Risorgimento, that is, the history of Catholicism in the period of the Risorgimento – has proven that the contrasts between the national state and ecclesiastical institutions occurred due to contingent and secondary causes. The desire for a political and juridical union of Italy, which would complete the more than two thousand-year-old ethnic and cultural unity of Italy, was widely shared also by Catholic politicians, intellectuals, clergymen.

Vittorio Emanuele II and Camillo Benso di Cavour were both Catholics and both received the sacraments on their deathbeds. The ruling class of the Historical Right was composed almost entirely of practicing Catholics: from Bettino Ricasoli to Ruggero Bonghi, from Marco Minghetti to Stefano Jacini; even those who were not Catholics, such as Francesco De Sanctis or Silvio Spaventa, had a philosophical conception strongly influenced by Catholicism or in any case not hostile to it. King Carlo Alberto was a fervent, practicing and militant Catholic, and by his will the Statute which bears his name – and which remained in force for a century before the proclamation of the Republic – named Catholicism as the State religion in the first article.

Considering that at the time almost the entire Italian population was Catholic, it can be affirmed without fear of being mistaken that the clear majority of the fighters for Italian Unity were made up of Catholics. There were also many clergymen, such as Don Ugo Bassi, who fought to defend Rome in 1849, Fra Pantaleo who joined joined Garibaldi's Thousand along with many other religious brothers, and Don Tazzoli who was hanged by Radetzky together with the other Belfiore martyrs.

In recent years an essay has been published, 'I cattolici che hanno fatto l’Italia' ('The Catholics Who Made Italy'), edited by L. Scaraffia, professor of Contemporary History at the Sapienza University of Rome. Scaraffia affirms among other things that the Kingdom of Sardinia managed to have a leading role not only on the political and military level, but also in religion, becoming a model also in that field. This occurred also thanks to the so-called "social saints" who worked in large numbers in Turin in the years of the Risorgimento, such as St. Joseph Cottolengo, Don Leonardo Murialdo, founder of the Congregation of St. Joseph, Don Francesco Faà di Bruno (founder of the Society of St. Zita, of the Congregation of the Minim Sisters of Our Lady of Suffrage and of a scholastic institute, which is now Faà di Bruno High School), the spouses Carlo Tancredi Falletti and Giulia, Marquises of Barolo, and many others, including of course the most famous and important of all, St. John Bosco, founder of the Salesian Order. Don Bosco was driven by his pedagogical interests to compose manuals of history on the Fatherland and modeled his belonging to the order he had founded on a paradigm coherent with a Cavourian conception, as citizens of the State and as religious of the Church.

On the occasion of the national holiday of March 17, 2011 held to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Unification of Italy, the then-pontiff Benedict XVI addressed an official message to the Italian President Giorgio Napolitano. The Pope wrote that:

"The process of Unification which took place in Italy in the 19th century and which has gone down in history as the Risorgimento, was the natural result of the development of a national identity which began much earlier. Indeed, the Italian Nation existed as a community of people united by language, by culture and by the same sense of belonging, despite the plurality of political divisions spread across the peninsula."

Therefore, the Holy Father continued:

"The Unification of Italy, achieved in the second half of the 19th century, did not take place as an artificial political construction of diverse identities, but rather as the natural political outcome of a strong and well-established national identity that existed for a long time. The unitary political community that arose at the end of the Risorgimento had, ultimately, the pre-existing national identity as a glue which held together the subsisting local differences. Christianity and the Church made a fundamental contribution to shaping this identity."

The then-reigning pope, Joseph Ratzinger, who is also an academic and a historian, then proceeded in his message to refute the idea that the Risorgimento was a phenomenon contrary to Catholicism and to the Catholic Church:

"For complex historical, cultural and political reasons, the Risorgimento has been seen as a movement in opposition to the Church, in opposition to Catholicism and, at times, even in opposition to religion in general. Without denying the role of traditions of different currents of thought, some marked by jurisdictionalist or secularist veins, the contribution of the thought – and sometimes action – of Catholics in the formation of the unitary State cannot be denied."

Benedict XVI then recalled the whole political history of the so-called neo-Guelph movement of the Risorgimento: Vincenzo Gioberti, one of its principal representatives; Antonio Rosmini, a figure whose thought was of such importance, to the point that it shaped significant parts of the present Italian Constitution; the various politicians of both patriotic and Catholic orientation, such as Cesare Balbo, Massimo d'Azeglio, Raffaele Lambruschini; all very important representatives of that literature which contributed to giving the Italians a sense of identity of belonging to the national and political community. Among the patriots who contributed in various ways to spreading the idea of a united Italy we can recall also Alessandro Manzoni, whose famous historical novel with a Catholic imprint is a critique of the foreign presence in Italy, and Silvio Pellico who in his autobiographical work "My Prisons" presented a description of the prison system of the Hapsburg Empire and his personal religious faith.

By endorsing in his official message the value of the Unification of Italy, Benedict XVI continued the now long-established position of the Church regarding the Risorgimento. The then-Cardinal Giovanni Battista Montini, the future Paul VI, gave a speech at the Campidoglio on October 10, 1962 in which he de facto justified the Capture of Rome, saying that it was positive for the Papacy itself. Even before that, John XXIII, the then-reigning pontiff, officially declared in 1961 that the Risorgimento had been "a design of Providence" and "a cause of jubilation" for the Church.