Antonio Rosmini

Antonio Rosmini-Serbati was born on 24 March 1797 in Rovereto, in the Italian-speaking Tyrol then under Habsburg rule within the Holy Roman Empire. He came from a wealthy noble family: his father, Pier Modesto Rosmini-Serbati, was a cultured landowner, and his mother, Giovanna dei Conti Formenti di Riva, maintained a devout household. Tutored privately in his youth, he later studied theology and canon law at the University of Padua. He was ordained a priest in 1821. From early adulthood he combined pastoral work with an ambitious philosophical programme, seeking a Christian account of knowledge that would answer both empiricism and Kantian subjectivism by taking the idea of being as the innate light of the intellect.

In 1828, after a retreat at Monte Calvario near Domodossola, he founded the Institute of Charity (the Rosminians), a congregation of priests and brothers bound to universal charity and to whatever works the Church might assign. A related congregation of women, the Sisters of Providence, followed. Rosmini’s principal philosophical writings include the Nuovo saggio sull’origine delle idee (1830), works on moral science, the philosophy of right, theodicy, and anthropology. He corresponded with Alessandro Manzoni and other figures of the Italian Risorgimento and of European Catholicism. For a time he enjoyed the confidence of Pope Pius IX, who in 1848 considered him for high civil office in the Papal States and received from him a draft constitution; those hopes collapsed with the revolutionary crisis in Rome.

Two of his books on church and social reform, Delle cinque piaghe della Santa Chiesa (The Five Wounds of the Holy Church) and La costituzione secondo la giustizia sociale, were placed on the Index of Forbidden Books in 1849. Rosmini submitted at once. He spent his remaining years mainly at Stresa on Lake Maggiore, writing, directing his institute, and living in relative retirement. He died there on 1 July 1855 and was later buried in the Church of the Santissimo Crocifisso beside the Rosminian college in Stresa.

After his death controversy continued. In 1887 the Holy Office condemned forty propositions extracted from his works (the decree Post obitum). A century later the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, in a note of 2001, judged that those propositions did not faithfully represent his thought, which opened the way for his cause. Pope Benedict XVI beatified him on 18 November 2007. His liturgical memorial is kept on 1 July. Rosmini remains a major, still-discussed figure in nineteenth-century Catholic philosophy and in the history of the Italian Church, known both as founder of the Institute of Charity and as a systematic thinker whose rehabilitation was a notable episode in modern doctrinal history.