Audisio, Guglielmo Andrea

AUDISIO, GUGLIELMO ANDREA. - Priest, educator, scholar and teacher of ecclesiastical disciplines, b. at Bra in 1802, d. at Rome on 28 Sept. 1882. After his early studies in the local seminary and completing them at Turin with degrees in philosophy and theology, he taught sacred eloquence for some time at the same seminary of Bra, until Charles Albert appointed him professor and president of the Royal Ecclesiastical Academy of Superga (1839). Endowed with a vast and multifaceted culture, though not always digested and sifted, he fell under the spell of the new currents of the century, and became a propagandist and champion of the Neo-Guelph ideal, reacting against the Enlightenment and jurisdictionalist tendencies of too many supporters of the Risorgimento; seeking, that is, to reconcile the movement for independence and the political and cultural rebirth of the peninsula with Catholic and national traditions, and with the religious and temporal rights of the papacy. Hence precisely, amid heated passions, amid the incomprehension or the criticisms of the innovative and conservative camps, the bitter struggles and painful conflicts in which the A. found himself from time to time. Thus, having had a preponderant part in the founding and editing of the combative Catholic paper L'Armonia, was to make him so odious first to the royal censorship, then to the interference of the Piedmontese government as to provoke in 1853 the dissolution of the Academy of Superga and to force him to find refuge in Rome. Welcomed there by Pius IX, he soon professed natural and international law at the Sapienza and became a canon of St. Peter's and consultor of the Sacred Congregation of the Index. But even here, frequenting conventicles of liberal-leaning priests, not least Liverani, and continuing to uphold ideas of political reformism, often bold, sometimes mistaken, he ended up putting himself in a bad light and finding himself in difficulties, especially when the line of conduct he followed during the Vatican Council gave rise to accusations of Gallicanism, and when one of his writings was placed on the Index by decree, to which the A. laudably submitted. Thus even his indisputable merits remained obscured.

Among his works we recall: Lezioni di sacra eloquenza (3 vols., Turin 1839-58, last ed. in 1 vol. ibid. 1882); Del governo rappresentativo nel Piemonte e primi fasti di Pio IX (ibid. 1848); Introduzione agli studi ecclesiastici conforme ai bisogni religiosi e civili... (1 vol., Prato 1851), several times translated and also published piratically; Iuris naturae et gentium privati et publici fundamenta (Rome 1852); Educazione morale e fisica del clero (1 vol., Naples 1853), in which appropriate and fitting pedagogical concepts appear; Quistioni politiche (ibid. 1854); Gli ultimi giorni dell'Accademia di Superga e l'ultimo preside... (Turin 1854); Diritto pubblico della Chiesa e delle Nazioni cristiane (3 vols., Rome 1863), rebutted by Parocchi, Nardi and others; Idea storica e razionale della diplomazia ecclesiastica (ibid. 1863); Sistema politico e religioso di Federico II e di Pietro della Vigna (ibid. 1866); Storia religiosa e civile dei Papi (5 vols., ibid. 1865-68) which extends through the entire pontificate of Gregory XVI; Della società politica e religiosa rispetto al sec. XIX (Florence 1876), condemned on 18 Apr. 1877. Besides a Vita di Pio IX, and an essay on La Repubblica Romana del 1849 e suo processo (1st ed. Turin, 7th ed. Naples), besides the didactic tale of a moral and social character Il buon curato (Rome 1858), he also owes us several historical and cultural articles, such as e.g.: Il pontificato di Clemente XIII (Rivista contemporanea, 1 [1853-54]); Il pontificato di Pio IX (Riv. Universale, 24-26 [1877]); L'enciclica del 4 agosto [1879, di Leone XIII] (La Rass. Nazionale, 1 [1879]); I primi anni del pontificato di Pio IX (ibid., 2-3 [1880]); 8-9 [1882]).

Paolo Dalla Torre