ITALIAN CATHOLIC ACTION (A. C. I.) — Count Giovanni Acquaderni.
ITALIAN CATHOLIC ACTION (A. C. I.) — The conditions of Catholicism in Italy around the middle of the last century were particularly delicate. In the political sphere the idea of Italian unity was gaining ever more ground, with the consequent elimination of the states into which the peninsula was divided and therefore also of the Papal States. The promoters of this movement, faced with the resistance of the Holy See, launched an anti-clerical campaign whose first objective was to detach the subjects of the Papal States from their sovereign, the Pope, but which, in the intentions of some leaders and in the desire expressed by Freemasons themselves, aimed at the destruction of the papacy. The people remained attached to religion, but more out of traditional piety than enlightened Christian conscience, since the fruits of the “Josephinist” invasion of the previous century had come to maturity, whereby an ignorant clergy and people were most suited to be dominated. To these observations of a national order must be added those more general made in the context of the A. C. I., and one has the picture of the conditions amid which, at a certain moment, the spark that gave rise to the conflagration was struck.
The spark was kindled after the Catholic Congress of Malines in 1863, in which the lawyer G. B. Casoni participated along with several others. On their return they launched the idea of a Catholic association for the freedom of the Church in Italy. Pius IX recognized it in 1866, by a brief of 4 April, but the association lasted barely a month, and its leaders were persecuted with police measures. Not even a year later, in the same Bologna where the previous initiative had been born and died, Count Mario Fani and Giovanni Acquaderni promoted the foundation of the Society of Italian Catholic Youth (v.). Pius IX approved the new society on 2 May 1868; the first central headquarters was in Bologna and Acquaderni its first president. This was like the signal for a manifold flowering of societies and works with diverse particular aims but with a common aspiration: to shake the apathy of Catholics and make of them defenders of the rights of God and of the Church, and of the papacy.
As a result of this stir of life, the Society of Italian Catholic Youth was able to promote a Congress of Italian Catholics, which was indeed held in Venice in 1874. The following year a new Congress was held and in it the wish was expressed that the initiative become stable and organic. Thus arose the Work of the Congresses and Catholic Committees in Italy (v.), which had this organization: a permanent General Committee in Rome, regional, diocesan, and parochial committees.
A twofold crisis in the movement of organized Catholics in Italy occurred when the Work of the Congresses, after twenty years of work, had become powerful in numbers of adherents and in the multiplicity of religious and social initiatives promoted, also as a valid counter to the rising sun of socialism.
The first crisis was brief and from without, namely the dissolution of Catholic works ordered by Minister Hon. Di Rudinì in the turbulent year 1898. Over six thousand such works were the object of the measure, under the accusation of being “subversive associations of the State.” Leo XIII protested with the letter to the bishops of 5 August 1898 against the dissolution and the unjust accusation; public opinion was unfavorable to the government, so that when the state of siege throughout Italy ceased, Catholics were able to resume their suspended activities.
But far more serious was the crisis that the A. C. I. suffered from within, which polarized around the names of Paganuzzi, president of the Work of the Congresses, as the representative of the old guard, and Fr. Romolo Murri, who led the young. These, who formed the left wing of the Italian Catholic movement, aimed above all at the social exigencies of the hour and, fortified by the doctrine of