The patient brilliance of a “great priestly figure and illustrious man of culture”

Technically, Antonio Rosmini—who was born in 1797 and who died on July 1, 1855—has only been declared a blessed by the Catholic Church, not (yet) a saint. But even that declaration by the Church was a surprise. After all, he could not be beatified until the Vatican formally lifted its condemnation of some of his writings.

He was baptized, like many children of the Italian nobility, with a mouthful of names: Antonio Francesco Davide Ambrogio Rosmini-Serbati. As a boy, he was intelligent, even-tempered, and pious. He was also a diligent student, which enabled him to obtain doctorates in theology and canon law and to become a priest. As he began to pursue philosophical studies on his own, he was invited to an audience with Pope Pius VII, who encouraged the young priest to continue his work.

There were many controversial philosophies circulating in Europe in the nineteenth century, and the pope wanted faithful Catholic thinkers to respond to secular arguments. Rosmini obediently spent the rest of his life researching and publishing on topics such as the nature of the human soul, the philosophy of law, original sin, and the relationship between Church and state.

Rosmini believed in the freedom and dignity of the human person. For that reason, he thought that political theories and practices should protect the freedom and dignity of all people. He also defended the rights of individuals against the potentially abusive powers of all-powerful states, including threats to their rights to own private property. These views and others made him a friend of liberalism and an enemy of many leaders in the Catholic Church. After all, the Church had associated itself with European monarchies for many centuries, while democratic governments were initially seen as a dangerous innovation.

Rosmini’s admiration of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, for example, seems reasonable now, but at the time it was highly controversial for a priest to support democratic governments, much less criticize the notion that nations should impose a state religion.

Antonio Rosmini was an original thinker and was able to show how liberalism’s emphasis on the rights of the individual could be compatible with Catholic belief. But he was not an unquestioning liberal. For example, one dangerous and popular liberal concept—from his century and our own—was the idea that if we just work hard enough, we can create a perfect society here on earth. Rosmini pointedly said that one can only hold such a belief through ignorance. Society is made up of fallible men and women, he wrote, not perfectly wise and charitable angels. Political theories that promise to create a utopia, in any century, are simply foolish theories.

In his spare time, Rosmini founded a religious order. Put another way, the example of his personal life as a priest inspired other men to want to follow him, which eventually became a religious order called the Institute of Charity. He and the priests of his order preached parish missions and promoted Catholic devotions to encourage the practice of the faith. The now-common practice of priests wearing a Roman collar was first brought to England by his Rosminian priests as his order spread from Italy.

Antonio Rosmini was a prolific writer. It has been said that his complete works will fill eighty large volumes in English when someone gets around to translating all of them. Some of his works were well received in his own lifetime, such as his Maxims of Christian Perfection and The Origin of Ideas. The former is a short collection of simple rules for any Christian seeking holiness, while the latter is a multi-volume, fifteen-hundred-page work examining the origin of philosophical ideas.

One of Rosmini’s most notable characteristics—although perhaps somewhat annoying to his associates—was his unwavering patience and trust in God’s timing. If there was any question about whether he should proceed with an action, he would wait for God to take the lead. In a more practical example, one of the first priests to join his new order was both dynamic and enthusiastic, but he was also impetuous. This led to repeated difficulties. Rosmini remained patient with the priest when others were ready to give up. In addition to gently directing the priests of his order, he patiently waited more than a decade before he decided the time was right to publish one of his major works: On the Five Wounds of the Church.

In On the Five Wounds of the Church, Rosmini identified five problems in the nineteenth-century Catholic Church, corresponding to the five wounds of Christ during His Passion. Those wounds are: 1) the division between the people and the clergy in public worship; 2) the lack of adequate education among the clergy; 3) the lack of unity among the bishops; 4) the practice of allowing secular leaders to nominate bishops; and 5) the Church’s enslavement to its riches and possessions.

The precise arguments of that book are too complicated to cover in this article. After all, Rosmini was a brilliant man who was willing to tackle complicated problems. But, in part, he argued that the laity did not understand their role in worship because they were being educated solely through rote memorization; that the clergy weren’t being educated much better; that bishops were too busy acting like CEOs to stay close to their people and to their pope; that outside powers were trying to control the Church through the selection of bishops; and that preoccupations about maintaining the Church’s wealth distracted Catholics from the primary goal of evangelization. Though some of the details may have changed in almost two centuries, his identification of wounds in the Church is just as valid today.

However, not everyone saw it that way. The publication of this work and of his Constitution of Social Justice led to a firestorm of scholarly feuding, not all of it gentlemanly, particularly between Rosminians and Jesuits. Because of the controversy, these two works were placed on the Vatican’s Index of Forbidden Books. Although the Vatican later declared these writings free from censure, arguments continued for decades. In 1887, Pope Leo XIII condemned forty propositions based on Rosmini’s positions, but in 2001, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith declared that Rosmini himself did not hold any of those false propositions. Rosmini was not the first brilliant Catholic thinker to propose complicated ideas that other Catholics would misinterpret in dangerous ways, and he will probably not be the last.

That decision to rehabilitate our understanding of Rosmini’s intellectual work opened the door to his canonization process. Liberated from allegations that he had held beliefs contrary to the faith, the Church was free to re-examine the evidence and recognize that he had lived a life of heroic virtue. For example, he had accepted the Church’s condemnation of his works with complete peace and obedience, a condemnation that was only lifted a year before his death.

By the year 1927, Sister Ludovica Noè, a religious sister of the female branch of the Institute of Charity, had been suffering for almost two decades from intermittent bouts of illness due to tuberculosis of the bones. Her health then took a turn for the worse due to internal abscesses and an intestinal blockage. After ten days in the hospital, she had no relief from her constant pain, had little hope for improvement from the medical treatment available at the time, and felt ready to die.

Her superior brought her two photos of their order’s founder, Antonio Rosmini. Sister Ludovica kissed the photos repeatedly, begged Rosmini, as her spiritual father, to have compassion on her, and simply prayed for his help to fulfill the Lord’s will. The other patient in her hospital room, also a religious sister, was so worried about Ludovica’s behavior that she stared at her and stopped eating her dinner. Ludovica felt a great urge to cheer up her troubled companion, so she jumped out of bed. And in doing so, she discovered she was completely cured.

Sister Ludovica’s inexplicable healing was used in Rosmini’s beatification process, and Pope Benedict XVI—himself an original thinker—declared him to be Blessed Antonio Rosmini in 2007, saying that Rosmini was “a great priestly figure and illustrious man of culture, inspired by a fervent love for God and the Church. He witnessed the virtue of charity in all its dimensions and at a high level, but what made him most famous was his generous commitment to what he called ‘intellectual charity’, which means the reconciliation of reason with faith.”