BOLGENI, GIOVANNI VINCENZO. – Eminent Italian Jesuit and distinguished theologian, born at Macerata on 22 January 1733, died at Rome on 3 May 1811. Having entered religious life (1747), he taught philosophy and moral theology at Macerata until the suppression of the Society of Jesus (1773). Subsequently he displayed prodigious literary activity, predominantly theological and polemical in character.
His various works against Jansenism in defence of the Holy See led Pius VI to summon him to Rome, where he continued his tireless activity as theologian of the Apostolic Penitentiary (1787).
In the work On Charity or the Love of God (Rome 1788), he endeavours to prove, against the Dominican de Rubeis, that, according to the teaching of Scripture and the Fathers, the formal object of the theological virtue of charity is not the love of benevolence, but the love of concupiscence, whereby God is loved not insofar as he is the supreme good in himself, but
only insofar as he is our supreme good. Attacked by various theologians and by his own confrères (Regono, Cortex, Muzzarelli, Chantre y Herrera, Gentilini), he stubbornly persisted in defending his point of view, but without success. When, in 1798, Napoleon seized Rome, B. had the weakness to uphold the lawfulness of the civic oath of hatred of the monarchy imposed by the Roman Republic. Called to account by the competent authorities, he continued to defend his error in several pamphlets, and only the condemnation of the oath pronounced by Pius VI induced him to retract. Pius VII nevertheless removed him from the office of theologian of the Apostolic Penitentiary, which was entrusted to Muzzarelli. After his disgrace B. continued to write various works, many of which were published after his death. Particularly worthy of mention is the posthumous work The Limits of the Two Ecclesiastical and Civil Powers, published in Florence in 1849 and placed on the Index on 19 December 1850; according to La Civiltà Cattolica, 1st series, 2 (1850, II), pp. 451–58, it would not be entirely authentic.