Athanasius in Exile: The Catholic Antifascism of Don Luigi Sturzo
Date of Award
12-12-2024
Degree Name
Ph.D. in Theology
Department
Department of Religious Studies
Advisor/Chair
William Portier
Abstract
This dissertation develops an insight of Italian historian, Gabriele De Rosa, that Don Luigi Sturzo, Italian priest-politician and leader of Christian Democracy during the interwar period, developed a form of religious intransigence that deviated from the generally accepted norms of ultramontane Catholics and provided the principles for the practical activities of a mass party representing Italian Christian Democracy (1919-1924). I press on De Rosa’s insight to show that Sturzo’s “historicizing” of intransigence gave him a method of Catholic antifascism (1924-1946) that in exile found a friendly reception in Britain and the United States. Sturzo named his method popolarismo, or popularism. Through it he aimed to maintain the hard stance of the Catholic faithful on anticlericalism while at the same time conditioning religious intransigence into a friendlier debate with modernity through Catholic social teaching. I investigate De Rosa’s briefly stated interpretation during the time of Sturzo’s party-building but develop it further by looking at Sturzo’s relationships in an exile milieu. Between 1924 and 1946, Sturzo employed his method, a combination of astute historical analysis with a firm belief that Catholic Social teaching had opened a door for the Church’s entrance into modernity, inside a transnational antifascist discourse conducted in correspondence, conferences, and the international press. He and his closest associates used his popularist vision to craft arguments that generally favored Wilsonian internationalism while rejecting all forms of authoritarianism, even those that were Catholic. He reminded readers that while culture and politics were not the same thing, the Church’s moral teaching ought to have at least an inspired authority in politics because it possessed this in culture. He persisted in this argument despite the Vatican’s lean toward authoritarian governments that assured a more abundant ecclesial influence over statecraft than what was assumed in the term, “inspired.” I pursue questions related to Sturzo’s method of political engagement by using an historical and biographical approach following the chronology of Sturzo's life and double exile. The dissertation consults biographical sources, documentary evidence from the Archivio di Luigi Sturzo in Rome, pertinent articles and books authored by Sturzo and others, as well as a large number of primary and secondary sources in both Italian and English. Several of these latter works are used to measure, against Sturzo’s proposals, how the Church maintained its presence in the global public sphere in a time of trial and how she proposed to maintain it into the future. Sturzo’s method of popularism is not remembered in history as earthshaking. Jacques Maritain’s theory of “integral humanism” fared better than Sturzo’s method of popularism yet both were a response to fascism through the new tradition of Catholic Social Teaching. The reader gains from this study a living example of religiously conditioned patience put at the service of a pluralistic world on behalf of the Catholic Church. Thus, popularism, incarnated in its first craftsman, becomes one contributor to a Catholic experiment with modernity which, through him, had something to say from personal suffering in favor of democracy.
Keywords
religious intransigence, ultramontane, Christian democracy, antifascism, exile, Britain, United States, popolarismo, popularism, anticlericalism, modernity, Catholic social teaching, Vatican, authoritarianism, fascism, democracy
Rights Statement
Copyright © 2024, author.
Recommended Citation
Coughlin, Laura, "Athanasius in Exile: The Catholic Antifascism of Don Luigi Sturzo" (2024). Graduate Theses and Dissertations. 7468.
https://ecommons.udayton.edu/graduate_theses/7468
