HARMONY OF RELIGION WITH CIVILIZATION. - A militant Catholic newspaper, founded in Turin in 1848. Effectively directed by the priest Giacomo Margotti, the paper began publication on July 4, twice a week at first, then three times. Its faithful collaborators included, among others, the Marquis Fabio Invea, Gustavo di Cavour, Rosmini, and the future Cardinal Gaetano Alimonda. Arising as an intransigent safeguard of the high principles and of the rights — including the temporalist ones — of the papacy and of the Church, it soon succeeded in establishing itself as the most respected, and, to its adversaries, feared clerical organ of the peninsula, dealing with all the major religious or political problems of the time, from the laws on religious corporations to the wars of independence, from the discussions on the irremovability of bishops to the Eastern Question, from the Congress of Paris to civil marriage, from the abolition of the ecclesiastical forum to the annexations and the proclamation of the Kingdom, to the whole anticlerical and anti-curial policy of Cavour. Enriched in 1850 with appendices, news items, and excellent weekly press reviews, in 1852 it changed its days of publication, also starting a Sunday supplement, which was followed the next year by issues devoted exclusively to the dissemination of contemporary documents. In 1855 it finally became a daily with a new program, and, from '56, it brought out the Effemeridi libertine, to keep alive the memory of the secularly reformist work of liberalism in Piedmont. Suspended for an indefinite period by Cavour in 1859, and momentarily replaced by another paper, it reappeared in '60 with an increasingly temporalist coloring and an increasingly reactionary tendency; but it slowly and decisively declined, especially when, three years later, at the suggestion of Pius IX, Margotti founded the Unità Cattolica in that same Florence, to which the A. likewise moved on Dec. 4, 1866, ceasing publication within a short time.
Bibliography3 works
Paolo Dalla Torre