BALLERINI, ANTONIO. - Jesuit historian and moralist, b. at Medicina (Bologna) on 10 Oct. 1805, d. at Rome on 27 Nov. 1881. He spent almost his entire life teaching at the Gregorian University, first as professor of ecclesiastical history (1844-55), then from 1856 until almost his death, of moral theology.
He was a man of profound and uncommon literary activity, which began with Principi della Scuola rosminiana esposti in lettere famigliari da un Prete bolognese (2 vols., Milan 1850); vol. III, already in the course of printing, was suspended, because in the meantime the S. Congregazione dell'Indice had taken the case to itself: Sylloge Monumentorum ad mysterium conceptionis Immaculatae Virginis Deiparae illustrandum (2 vols., Rome 1854-56). In the field of moral theology he began with the noted dissertation: De morali systemate s. Alphonsi M. de Ligorio (Rome 1863); and he continued with the publication of the well-known Compendium Theologiae Moralis of Gury (Rome 1866), enriched with valuable notes, which secured and ever increasingly extended its success. But the criticisms of certain doctrines of St. Alphonsus contained therein provoked a reaction in the opposing camp, whence on the part of the Redemptorist Fathers came the Vindiciae Alphonsianae (Rome 1873; 2 vols., Paris 1874), to which Fr. V. de Buck replied with the Vindiciae Ballerinianae (Brussels 1878). A controversy not useless for the purposes of science.
The work, however, that was to exercise a more powerful and effective influence (it is called the most considerable work of moral theology of the 19th century) was his Opus theologicum morale in Busembaum medullam, left unfinished, but taken up again, completed and annotated by Fr. 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 if the author indulges in excessive subtleties in casuistry.
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