A free priest

"Without freedom, the Church exists no better than man without air to breathe," wrote Antonio Rosmini in 1832. In nineteenth-century language, this is a perfectly normal statement: freedom is essential to the life of the Church. Instead, along with the other statements contained in his writing The Five Wounds of the Holy Church, Rosmini had earned a note from the Congregation of the Index declaring his writings "criticizable and censurable." After his death (suspected of poisoning, among other things), the same Congregation rushed to "condemn, reprove and proscribe" his works. In those years, the Papal State and the temporal government still existed, which Rosmini spoke of as a "misfortune" to be freed from as soon as possible in order to be a community that has "written on its chest beati pauperes." Who was Antonio Rosmini? A free man because he was a great spiritual man, who lived in poverty, with the immense charity of making his vast culture available to found a Christian philosophy capable of responding to secularism and the loss of the "values" he glimpsed. As a free, inconvenient man, founder of a society of priests who with their life of integrity and severe education had to respond concretely to the decadence of the clergy. A courageous reformer, as there have been many in the Church over the centuries, all in various ways set aside, mocked, condemned, only to be rehabilitated decades or centuries later, when the correctness of their statements had become evident.

The core of Rosmini's Five Wounds is precisely freedom, a word inseparable from the Gospel of Christ. Freedom from worldly power. The five wounds on the body of Jesus crucified, hands, feet, side, make him think of the Church. The first plague is "the division of the people from the clergy in public worship": the lay faithful reduced to a state of passivity and subjection, denied their awareness and participation, authoritarian and excluding clerical logic. But clergy and people, "all are free in Jesus Christ". The second plague, "the insufficient education of the clergy", the proclamation of the Gospel relegated to the background compared to the commitments of government and administration, the bishops' houses converted into "princely courts overflowing with military and courtiers". The third plague, the "disunity of the bishops", the hoarding of the episcopal dignity as a guarantee of income. The fourth plague is the appointment of bishops "abandoned to lay power", when the people have the right to have "pastors well accepted by them" so that there is between the bishop and the faithful a collaboration made of listening, continuous consultation, but free from the "spirit of flattery". The fifth plague, the loss of the sense of poverty, the use of the Church's assets for purposes other than the only ones that must be dear to her: the support of the clergy and help for the poor. Rosmini arrives – we are in 1832 – to touch bluntly on the burning issue of the Church's exemption from taxes: when it comes to assets exceeding needs (the poor and the clergy), it is right that the Church pays taxes like everyone else. When the Church is loaded with trophies, "then only it is impotent". The Church needs nothing but "full freedom" from economic favors and privileges: "The hour has come when impoverishing the Church is saving it", he writes.

But Rosmini obeys the harsh judgment of the Congregation of the Index docilely. He died in 1855 with the serenity and detachment that only a life of prayer and selfless love for Jesus can give. Only in 2007 Benedict XVI will declare this inconvenient priest blessed because he is free.


Flaminia Morandi
NP February 2025