BASSI, UGO

UGO BASSI. - Barnabite, born in Cento on 12 August 1801, died in Bologna on 8 August 1849. After completing his early studies in Bologna, he entered the Barnabites in 1819. Ordained a priest in Rome, he was sent to teach in Naples, but his fervent and passionate spirit and natural eloquence led to his assignment to preaching (1828). Warm with sincere religious feeling, learned, and of fine presence, he immediately impressed his listeners. In 1835, having changed his name from Giuseppe to Ugo, he delivered the Lenten sermons in Bologna, arousing public enthusiasm but also the first alarms from ecclesiastical authorities due to the manifest liberalism of his thought. Ardent and generous, during the cholera epidemic of 1837, the preacher became in Palermo a remarkable assistant to the sick and the dying. Back in Bologna, he was suspended from preaching (1840) and forced into temporary exile. He then lived in obscurity for a few years in Naples, composing religious and poetic works of little value there. With the accession of Pius IX, he became an enthusiastic supporter of the Pope’s work, and, with the outbreak of war against Austria, he joined the papal forces as a chaplain. Disillusioned by the allocution of 29 April 1848, but ever faithful to his ideal of religion and country (Bassi never renounced, as others did, his own faith and priestly ministry, nor was he ever, as was falsely claimed, a Freemason), he helped calm the Bolognese with his words. Wounded on 12 May at Treviso, once recovered he devoted himself in hospitals and ambulances in Venice and took part in the sortie at Mestre. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to him, he was secularized (29 July). A few months later in Rome, as chaplain and aide to Garibaldi, he took part in the defence against the French (of whom he was temporarily a prisoner on 30 April) and delivered the funeral oration for Manara. After the fall of the republic, he followed Garibaldi, but on 4 August 1849 at Comacchio he was captured by the Austrians along with Captain Livraghi. Four days later in Bologna, after retracting anything he might have said or done against religion, he was shot, unbeknownst to the higher ecclesiastical and civil authorities of the Papal States.