BALLERINI, ANTONIO. – Jesuit historian and moralist, born at Medicina (Bologna) on 10 October 1805, died at Rome on 27 November 1881. He spent almost his entire life teaching at the Gregorian University, first as professor of ecclesiastical history (1844–55), then, from 1856 until shortly before his death, of moral theology.
He possessed a profound and uncommon literary activity, which began with Principi della Scuola rosminiana esposti in lettere famigliari da un Prete bolognese (2 vols., Milan 1850); volume III, already in the process of being printed, was suspended because in the meantime the S. Congregation of the Index had taken the matter under its own consideration: Sylloge Monumentorum ad mysterium conceptionis Immaculatae Virginis Deiparae illustrandum (2 vols., Rome 1854–56). In the field of moral theology he began with the well-known dissertation: De morali systemate s. Alphonsi M. de Ligorio (Rome 1863); and continued with the publication of the well-known Compendium Theologiae Moralis of Gury (Rome 1866), enriched with valuable notes, which ensured and continually broadened its success. But the criticisms of certain doctrines of s. Alfonso contained therein provoked a reaction in the opposing camp, resulting in the Vindiciae Alphonsianae by the Redemptorist Fathers (Rome 1873; 2 vols., Paris 1874), to which p. V. de Buck replied with the Vindiciae Ballerinianae (Brussels 1878). A controversy not without value for the purposes of scholarship.
The work, however, that was to exert the most powerful and effective influence (it is called the most considerable work of moral theology of the nineteenth century) was his Opus theologicum morale in Busembaum medullam, left unfinished, but taken up, completed, and annotated by p. D. Palmieri (7 vols., Prato 1889–1893). A vast and profound text, which contributed greatly to the progress of moral theology and to the consolidation of probabilism, even though the author indulges in excessive subtleties in casuistry.
BBL.: Necrologio, in La Civ. Catt., 11th series, 1882, II, pp. 336–42; C. Sommervogel, s. V. in DThC, II, cols. 130–31; Hutter, V, cols. 1793–95; R. Brouillard, s. V. in DHG, VI, cols. 398–99; id., s. V. in Catholicisme, I, cols. 1189–90. Celestino Testore