Ernesto Buonaiuti (June 25, 1881 – April 20, 1946) was an Italian historian, philosopher of religion, Catholic priest and anti-fascist. He lost his chair at the University of Rome owing to his opposition to the Fascists. As a scholar in History of Christianity and religious philosophy he was one of the most important exponents of the modernist current.
Life
Buonaiuti was born in Rome on April 24, 1881. He was ordained priest on December 19, 1903, and began his studies working with the historian of religion Salvatore Minocchi. He made use of the positive method in his study of early Christianity in his book Il cristianesimo primitivo e la Politica imperiale romana ("Primitive Christianity and Roman Imperial Politics", 1911). From 1906 to 1908 he was the archivist of the Sacred Congregation of Apostolic Visitation.
He founded the magazine Rivista storico-critica delle scienze teologiche ("Historical-critical Review of the Theological Sciences"), and was its director from 1905 to 1910. After that he directed the magazine Ricerche religiose ("Religious Researches"). Those magazines were soon banned by the church and placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the index of publications to be considered as forbidden to Catholic readers.
On January 25, 1925, he was excommunicated, which was confirmed several times, because in his works he defended the ideas of modernism, particularly in Il programma dei modernisti ("The Modernists' Program", 1908) and Lettere di un prete modernista ("Letters from a Modernist Priest", 1908).
From 1925 he was Professor of History of Christianity at the University of Rome; however, after the Concordat in 1929, the university forbade him to teach and to examine students, and he was given non-academic tasks, such as library investigation and the writing of research papers. In 1931 his university chair was definitively revoked, because he refused to swear the "oath of loyalty" to Fascism (all teachers were forced by law to swear an oath of loyalty to the Fascist government, and those who refused were fired).
In his autobiography Il pellegrino di Roma ("The Pilgrim from Rome", 1945), Buonaiuti reconstructed the history of his conflict with the Catholic Church, of which he continued to claim himself a "loyal son", even after his excommunication.
In 1945, after the Allied victory in the Second World War he was restored to his rank of university professor, but he was not allowed to give lectures, since, according to the bureaucracy and the laws resulting from the Concordat, which were retained by the new government, teaching in any Italian State University was forbidden to any excommunicated priest.
He died on April 20, 1946, in Rome.
He was honoured as Righteous among the nations (n°12380) in 2012 for hiding Jews in German/fascist controlled Rome, while isolated by excommunication.
Works
The complete works of Buonaiuti are very extensive: he wrote more than three thousand works, including books and articles, among them the ponderous Storia del Cristianesimo ("History of Christianity") in three volumes, his autobiography (Il pellegrino di Roma) and many studies about Gioacchino da Fiore (Gioacchino da Fiore: i tempi, la vita, il messaggio) and Martin Luther (Lutero e la riforma in Germania).
Storia del Cristianesimo
The three books of Storia del Cristianesimo were published between 1942 and 1943; the first volume is about ancient times, the second is about the Middle Ages and the third is about the modern era. It is considered Buonaiuti's most significant academic work. As he himself wrote in his autobiography of 1945, the work was motivated by apologetic reasons: "in order to draw up the definitive balance-sheet of Christian action in history, now that from a thousand signs one could easily and certainly deduce that Christianity was approaching its hour of dramatic expiration".