A Journal. La Civiltà Cattolica From Pius IX to Pius XII (1850-1958)

The explosion of the periodical press in mid-nineteenth-century Italy provoked a substantially new form of literary engagement on the part of clergy and lay militants. Following the 1848 revolutions, which in Italy had brought about the temporary collapse of the papal monarchy, Italian clericals identified the periodical press as a dangerous and even ‘nefarious’ force and as the most powerful instrument of their liberal opponents. The remedy, so the founders of the Jesuit opinion-journal La Civiltà Cattolica, among others, asserted, was to combat the liberals with their own weapons: to counter the ‘bad press’ with the ‘good press’. An extensive but mainly local and in many instances, ephemeral Catholic periodical press did in fact develop in Italy from the mid-nineteenth century, asserting Catholic and essentially conservative values against secular ones. In united Italy much of this press was clericalist and ‘intransigentist’, demanding the restoration of the papacy’s temporal power and resisting compromise with the new order, although part of it was liberalizing and ‘conciliatorist’, seeking to reconcile Catholics to the new order. The two great survivors from this proliferation of Catholic periodicals, both intransigentist, were La Civiltà Cattolica (1850+), and the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano (1861+). The former was unusual in aiming at a national circulation and was a pioneer in the development of commercial distribution networks. Over the decades, its editorial team or ‘college’ of Jesuits, subject to a collective discipline, sought to combine lively polemic with information, erudition, and entertainment in an attractive and readily marketable product. This college, alongside the faculty of the Collegio Romano (alias Gregorian University), has constituted the main intellectual force of the Jesuits in Italy; indeed, it has substantially been the intellectual vanguard of hard-line clericalist Catholicism there. It has generally enjoyed a privileged relationship with the Vatican, and has contributed to the papacy’s teaching. The concern with social and political order which marked the periodical from its inception was a characteristic feature at least up to the pontificate of Pius XII (1939-38), after which the papacy became more detached from political matters.