BALLERINI, ANTONIO. - Jesuit historian and moralist, born at Medicina (Bologna) on 10 Oct. 1805, died at Rome on 27 Nov. 1881. He spent almost his entire life in teaching at the Gregorian University, first as professor of ecclesiastical history (1844-55), then from 1856 until nearly his death as professor of moral theology.
His literary activity was profound and uncommon. It began with *Principi della Scuola rosminiana esposti in lettere famigliari da un Prete bolognese* (2 vols., Milan 1850); the third volume, already in press, was suspended when the Sacred Congregation of the Index took the matter in hand. His *Sylloge Monumentorum ad mysterium conceptionis Immaculatae Virginis Deiparae illustrandum* appeared in 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* by Gury (Rome 1866), enriched with valuable notes that ensured and increasingly expanded its success. But the criticisms contained therein of some doctrines of St Alphonsus provoked a reaction from the opposite camp, whence came from the Redemptorist Fathers 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 without benefit to the ends 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 19th century) was his *Opus theologicum morale in Busembaum medullam*, left unfinished but taken up, completed and annotated by Fr D. Palmieri (7 vols., Prato 1889-1893). A vast and profound text that contributed greatly to the progress of moral theology and to the consolidation of probabilism, even if the author sometimes overreaches himself in casuistry.